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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The mercury militia go to court

I’ve been a bit remiss when it comes to writing about the lunacy in which it is claimed that vaccines cause autism, allegedly due to the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was in most childhood vaccines until the end of 2002, when it was removed from all but flu vaccines. It turns out that […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine News of the Weird Politics Quackery

Vaccines caused the Virginia Tech rampage?

I hadn’t planned on writing again about the horrific massacre at Virginia Tech. After all, what more could I say that hasn’t been said before in the blogospheric chatter that’s erupted in the five days since the killings? Despicably, everyone’s blaming their favorite cause. Fundamentalists are blaming atheism, secularism, and even Charles Darwin for the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The depths of antivaccination lunacy

I’ve posted many times about the pseudoscience of the mercury militia, that group of parents, bolstered by those Don Quixotes tilting at the mercury windmills in the cause of extracting more money from the government to compensate “vaccine-injured” children with autism, Mark and David Geier. These and other luminaries of the mecury militia blame vaccines […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Ben Goldacre takes on Mark and David Geier

Somehow, in all the blogging about dichloroacetate earlier this week, I somehow missed a mention of a truly annoying thing that the editors of Lancet Neurology did. In essence, they allowed ethically challenged mercury warrior Mark Geier a forum to review Richard Lathe’s book Autism, Brain, and Environment. Egads! How desperate wer the editors of […]

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

Rosie O’Donnell vs. David Kirby on the “causation” issue of autism: Guess who loses?

Pity poor David Kirby. After all, he made his name by hitching his star to a losing hypothesis, namely that the mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. He wrote a book about it, Evidence of Harm, back in 2005 and has milked that sucker dry ever since. Most recently, his appearances culminated in a […]