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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

If you can’t get justice one way, maybe justice will come another way

Actions have consequences, as do beliefs. For example, the widespread erroneous belief among many parents of autistic children that the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was used in most childhood vaccines until 2002 somehow caused autism in their children have led some pseudoscientists and parents who have fallen under their sway to subject their […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Andrew Wakefield: The Galileo Gambit writ large in The Observer

I just don’t understand it. I just don’t understand how anyone can take discredited antivaccination loon Andrew Wakefield seriously anymore. In particular, I don’t understand how any reputable newspaper can actually take him seriously anymore, given how thoroughly he and his “work” have been discredited. First came the news in late December that at the […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

The “just another study” gambit

I wrote about this classic crank gambit a bit about a week and a half ago, emphasizing that no amount of studies will convince a crank. Now, MarkH at denialism.com takes on the same issue in more detail so that I don’t have to bother with David Kirby’s latest spew. Thanks, MarkH! The point is […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

More on the Generation Rescue poll

Yesterday, I did a deconstruction of Generation Rescue’s dubious “study” (in reality an automated telephone poll) that claims to show that vaccines increase the rate of autism and other “neurologic diseases.” Now skeptical blogger extraordinaire Prometheus has posted his own excellent deconstruction at his blog A Photon in the Darkness. I said it before, if […]

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

Fun with phone surveys and vaccines

J. B. Handley never ceases to amaze me how much he is willing to torture me with his abuses of science, never mind his childish attempts to annoy me by cybersquatting domain names that he thinks I want. So there I was, all set to blog about a rather amusing homeopath that I’ve come across, […]