Contrary to the stereotype of antivaccinationists as hippy-dippy left wing granola crunchers, in actuality antivaccine pseudoscience is the pseudoscience is the pseudoscience that knows no political boundaries. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that both parties are equivalent. Unfortunately, thanks to the co-opting of conservative activism by antivaxers, the Republican Party in 2018 has become the antivaccine party.
The Vaccine Choice Empowerment Symposium is coming, full of antivaccine misinformation and dishonest conflation, and it’s coming to Orac’s neck of the woods. Should Orac attend, given that the misinformation will be black hole density?
One of the most popular forms of quackery sold by alternative medicine practitioners such as naturopaths is intravenous vitamin therapy, sometimes also called “intravenous micronutrient therapy” (IVMT). Most are variants of a concoction known as “Myers cocktail,” and there is no good evidence that IVMT is efficacious for any of the indications for which quacks use it. Last week, the FTC issued a proposed consent agreement based on a complaint against the company selling iV Bars for false advertising. Here’s hoping this is the beginning of something good.
Helene Langevin has been named the new director of the National Center for Complemenary and Integrative Health. Given her history of dodgy acupuncture research, my prediction is that the quackery will flow again at NCCIH, the way it did in the 1990s when Tom Harkin zealously protected it from any attempt to impose scientific rigor on it.
A study released yesterday has led to numerous breathless headlines in the media about Russian bots on Twitter sowing discord about vaccines by spreading polarized antivaccine and provaccine messages. The stories imply that this is a huge problem. But is it? There’s no doubt that this study showed some Russian bots Tweeting polarized messages about vaccines, but, contrary to the news stories, it doesn’t support the concept of a widespread Russian effort to stoke conflict about vaccines. It’s unclear whether the Russian effort was opportunistic or experimental, but it wasn’t huge.
