In Houston, a toddler was admitted to the pediatric ICU at Texas Children’s Hospital with a serious case of the measles. Unfortunately, one of the nurses there is antivaccine and blabbed about him on social media. The hospital quite appropriately fired her, but I would go further and say that antivaccine nurses should not be caring for children. Ditto antivaccine doctors.
It seems as though I have to write a post like this every year or two, as measles outbreaks keep raging and children keep getting sick and even dying. I feel obligated to “thank” the primary author of this misery, the man whose scientific fraud and other efforts have fueled antivaxers’ fear of the MMR vaccine. So thanks Andrew Wakefield. Thanks for the measles. Again. In 2018.
Our old friend anti antivaccine activist J. B. Handley invokes the “vaccines didn’t save us” gambit. It doesn’t go well for him. You could say that he fought vaccine science, but, as always, the vaccine science won.
Orac recently came across an antivaccine post called “The Adult Vaccine Pledge.” So he deconstructed it. It did not go well—for the Adult Vaccine Pledge.
Melinda Wenner Moyer published an article in The New York Times arguing that fear of how antivaxers will react to scientific findings is leading scientists to indulge in self-censorship. I’m not convinced that this is the case.
