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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Thanks for the measles yet again, Andy

Yet another population is learning why you shouldn’t trust Andrew Wakefield. There is a large Somali immigrant population in Minnesota, and unfortunately they’ve been targeted by antivaxers. As a result, their MMR uptake has plummeted, and now they’re in the midst of another measles outbreak. Andrew Wakefield screws yet another group.

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

In which antivaccine activist J. B. Handley thinks attacking Andrew Wakefield’s movie “backfired”

Nearly two weeks ago, a story that I had been blogging about almost nonstop for a week reached its conclusion when Robert De Niro decided to pull the antivaccine movie Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the Tribeca Film Festival, of which he was one of the co-founders. Before that, he had revealed that it […]

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Medicine

Torturing more mice in the name of antivaccine pseudoscience

Of all the vaccines out there, it’s hard for me to decide which among them antivaccine activists fear and detest the most. Sure, there’s the MMR vaccine, the original granddaddy bete noire, demonized so successfully by Andrew Wakefield as causing autism based on some of the flimsiest evidence ever, evidence later shown to be fraudulent. […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

#CDCTruth protest 2016: Harassing CDC employees in the service of antivaccine pseudoscience

I noticed the other day that I haven’t been visiting the merry band of antivaccine activists and bloggers over at their very own wretched hive of scum and quackery, Age of Autism, nearly as much as I used to. I have mentioned them in passing a couple of times recently, but nothing caught my attention […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Popular culture

Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree: Privileged white males harming African-Americans with antivaccine propaganda

There’s always been a major thread of distrust of the medical profession in the African-American community, understandably so given the history of abuses such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which the natural progression of untreated syphilis was studied in African-American men for 40 years. It’s not just that experiment that’s responsible, either. During the […]