Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Computers and social media Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery

Another failure of the memory hole, thanks to the Internet

Poor Jeni Barnett. You remember Jeni Barnett, don’t you? She’s the U.K. radio host whose ill-informed rants against vaccines Ben Goldacre exposed so gloriously last week. Unfortunately, the price Ben paid consisted of threats of legal action for “copyright infringement” in the form of his having posted audio of the relevant segment of Barnett’s show. […]

Categories
Anti-Semitism Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine History Holocaust Holocaust denial Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking World War II

Bishop Richard Williamson, Holocaust denial, and the problem of “recantation” by cranks

Because of the fallout from the revelation by Brian Deer that very likely Andrew Wakefield, hero of the antivaccine movement but, alas for his worshipers, one of the most dishonest and incompetent scientists who ever lived, had almost certainly falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that launched a decade-long anti-MMR hysteria that shows […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Autism quackery invades my hometown, part II

Not again. I have no way of knowing if the media in my hometown happen to be more credulous when it comes to pseudoscience than average, but, given the number of stories referred to me emanating from Detroit and its surrounding suburbs, you’ll forgive me if I’m very depressed right now. For instance, we have […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery

Why am I not surprised? It looks as though Andrew Wakefield probably falsified his data

Pity Andrew Wakefield. Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. 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 […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Quackery

Help Ben Goldacre out…he’s being sued again

If I lived in the U.K., I don’t know if I could blog. After all, the U.K. has some of the most plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the world, far more so than here in the U.S., in that in a libel case it is up to the defendant to prove that what he wrote is […]