Tag: vaccines
How do we stop crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe from being used to fund quackery?
GoFundMe and other crowdfunding sites have long been used by desperate patients seeking to fund their use of unproven and downright quacky treatments. How can these sites be changed in order to keep them from being used as a funding supply for unethical quacks?
“Natural health” and the antivaccine movement: The case of Dr. Joseph Mercola
Dr. Joseph Mercola has been selling quackery for over two decades. It turns out that he also promotes antivaccine pseudoscience, as a new report from The Washington Post shows.
Dichotomous thinking and uncertainty in medicine and science
Medicine is by its very nature uncertain. Unfortunately, humans don't deal well with uncertainty, and our tendency towards dichotomous thinking leads us to think that if we're not absolutely certain about something we don't know anything.
Shame on HBO! Bill Maher interviews Dr. Jay Gordon and the antivaccine misinformation flows.
Friday night, an old "friend" of the blog, pediatrician and antivaccine apologist Dr. Jay Gordon, made an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher. In a long segment, the antivaccine misinformation flowed fast and furious in a Gish gallop of pseudoscience. WTF, HBO?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. hosts a trainwreck of an antivaccine forum in Harlem
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. reached out to the African-American Community in Harlem with his antivaccine message. It didn't go so well. First, Rev. Al Sharpton, whose National Action Committee was going to host it, bailed due to negative publicity. Then RFK Jr. was kicked out of his venue during his speech because the event went way over time. RFK Jr.'s efforts do,...
Woo versus Wikipedia
Love it or hate it, Wikipedia is a main go-to rough and ready source of information for millions of people. Although I've had my problems with Wikipedia and used to ask whether it could provide reliable information on medicine and, in particular, alternative medicine and vaccines, given that anyone can edit it, I now conclude that Wikipedia must be doing OK, at...
Vaccines in the News: The Good, the Bad, and the Imminent Loss of Our Measles Elimination Status
A quick recap of vaccine-related news from over the past several weeks.
The long, strange road to passing SB 276 appears to be near its end…finally
In 2015, California passed SB 277, which eliminated religious and personal belief exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Unfortunately, there was a problem; a weakness in the law allowed antivaccine quacks to help parents get around the law by writing medical exemptions not supported by science. The long strange battle to get SB 276, the law designed to close that loophole, reveals a...
The Vaccine Guide: Cherry picked studies and deceptive highlighting in the service of antivaccine pseudoscience
The Vaccine Guide is a website and a book by Ashley Everly, a "toxicology consultant" for Health Freedom Idaho. It's been making the rounds in the antivaccine underbelly of social media lately and basically consists of screenshots of cherry picked studies, articles, and web pages, with Everly's highlighting passages to provide an antivaccine spin. It's clever in a way, but also rather...
Is today’s generation of children “the sickest generation”?
Presidential candidate and New Age self-help guru Marianne Williamson has been repeating a claim that over half of our children have chronic illness and implying that the expansion of the vaccine schedule since the late 1980s is responsible. But is it true? Are over half of our children sick? Is this "the sickest generation"?