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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

The “Jenny McCarthy effect”: More credulity towards autism quackery

I was thinking of calling this post Jenny McCarthy and Julie Deardorff: Two crappy tastes that taste crappy together, but I’ve already used that joke with Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey. Besides, Julie Deardorff isn’t nearly as famous as Oprah, although, as I’ve discussed before, she’s probably even more credulous than Oprah towards the lastest […]

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

Using religion to avoid vaccination, revisited

Whatever criticisms I may have had for prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris otherwise, one area that I’m totally down with both of them on is their criticism of the undue respect and consideration we as a society give to religious ideas. This consideration is rarely, if ever, based on the merit of […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

Is Bill Maher really that ignorant?

Work and a conference intervene to prevent a fresh dose of Respectful Insolence today. Fortunately, there’s still classic Insolence from the archives that hasn’t been moved over to the new blog. This one originally appeared on March 7, 2005. The short answer is: Yes. The long answer is below. When I first posted on this […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

On vaccines, immune to reason

It’s rare that one sees an editorial this spot on, but it happened a couple of days ago in The Washington Post: The debate over vaccine litigation has thus shifted from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. While the number of major studies that have failed to find any substantive link between […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Blogging Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The mercury militia silences a voice of reason

Today is a very sad day in the autism blogosphere. The news I am going to discuss saddens me and should sadden anyone concerned with autism, particularly in combating the antivaccination hysteria and the outright quackery that flows from it promulgated by so many these days, from J. B. Handley to Jenny McCarthy, who couldn’t […]