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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Antivaxers on Twitter: Fake news and Twitter bots

A new analysis reveals that there are antivaccine bots on Twitter. Why am I not surprised?

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Torturing more mice in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience: PubPeer versus antivaxers

Last week, I wrote about a truly execrable bit of science by Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic purporting to show that aluminum adjuvants cause brain inflammation, which causes autism. Since then, I’ve learned that, not only is it bad science, but that there are red flags about several of the figures to raise the specter of fraud. This might not be just bad science. It might be fraudulent science. The only way to resolve this would be for the authors to release the original full resolution images of their blots.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Biology Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Torturing more mice in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience, 2017 aluminum edition

Over the last couple of days I noted a disturbance in the antivaccine force, another study claimed to be slam dunk evidence that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause autism. It’s not. Also, a word to antivaxers challenging Orac to look at this study: Be very careful what you wish for…

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Another antivaccine conspiracy theory, flu vaccine edition

An antivaccine blogger is amazed that big pharma has allowed its lackeys in the press to publish negative stories about the flu vaccine. Naturally, she thinks she knows why and sees a conspiracy. Not surprisingly, her conspiracy theory doesn’t make much sense.

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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Medicine

Does the flu vaccine cause miscarriages?

A recent study claims to have found a link between influenza vaccination and miscarriage, and antivaxers are rejoicing. The study itself suffers mightily from post hoc subgroup analyses and small numbers in the subgroup, so much so that even its authors don’t really believe its results.