Tag: vaccines
Where’s the outrage?
I thank everyone for my warm welcome to the SBM community. Although vaccine myth is of particular interest to me, I promise that my posts wont all be vaccine related. There is, unfortunately, much to discuss. In fact I had a difficult time deciding which vaccine-related issue to write about for my inaugural post. In the end I came up with more of...
Antivaccine hero Andrew Wakefield: Scientific fraud?
Pity poor Andrew Wakefield. Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity at all. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that...
Since when did an apologist for the antivaccination movement, Dr. Jay Gordon, become an “expert” in vaccine law?
I am an alumnus of the University of Michigan twice over. I completed a B.S. in Chemistry with Honors there in 1984 and then I stayed on to do obtain my M.D. in 1988. I look back very fondly on those eight years spent in Ann Arbor, as several of my longtime friendships were forged or solidified during those years. Consequently, I...
The $150,000 Vaccine Challenge
A man named Jock Doubleday has offered $150,000 to any physician who gives vaccines to drink the chemicals in a vaccine. It's a profoundly dishonest challenge, so full of conditions that it's clear it was meant never to be honored, much less paid.
Influenza Deaths
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”- Donald Rumsfeld How do we know what we know? It is said by some anti-vaccine proponents that vaccines...
“I Reject Your Reality” – Germ Theory Denial and Other Curiosities
Note: This article was originally published in Skeptic magazine. Space limitations resulted in omitting some of what I wanted to say. I’m taking advantage of having a blog to publish the entire article as originally submitted. —————— On an episode of Mythbusters, Adam Savage was shown a video clip that contradicted his memory of something he had said. He responded, “I reject...
The (Not-So-)Beautiful (Un)Truth about the Gerson protocol and cancer quackery
Note added by editor: The complete movie is now available on YouTube: Although this blog is about medicine, specifically the scientific basis of medicine and threats to the scientific basis of medicine regardless of the source, several of us also have an interest in other forms of pseudoscience and threats to other branches of science. One branch of science that is, not...
The Infection Schedule versus the Vaccination Schedule
Antivaccination activists have claimed that when it comes to there are "too many, too soon". They apparently do not grasp the number of bacteria and viruses (and fungi and parasites) that we are exposed to every day for our entire life.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., vaccines, the EPA, and the interface with science-based medicine and public policy
This blog is entitled Science-Based Medicine for a reason, and that’s because we here at SBM believe that the best method to result in the most efficacious treatments for the most people is through the application of science to the evaluation of the biology, pathophysiology, and treatment of disease and disorders. I may (or may not) be departing a bit from the...
Dr. Jay Gordon and me: Random encounters with an apologist for the antivaccine movement
Although he doesn’t detest me nearly as much as antivaccine honcho and founder of Generation Rescue J. B. Handley does, Santa Monica celebrity pediatrician Dr. Jay Gordon doesn’t like me very much at all. Actually, I’m not sure whether that’s entirely true or not, but Dr. Gordon sure doesn’t like it when I criticize him for his antivaccine rhetoric. He affects an...