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Bioethics Biology Medicine Politics Science

Animal rights thugs: Researchers’ children are not off limits

Remember Dario Ringach? He’s the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing primate research. Terrorism and intimidation worked, but […]

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Bioethics Biology Medicine Politics Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Best comments of the day on animal rights bullies

I have to admit, this one made me chuckle. In an earlier post today, in which I expressed my outrage at animal rights terrorists targeting an investigator’s children for harassment at their school, I asked the following question: That reminds me: Where were these animal rights loons when “Andrew Wakefield was torturing baby Macacque monkeys […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Quoth Mark “not a doctor, not a scientist” Blaxill: “Help, help, Andy Wakefield’s being repressed!”

Help! Help! I’m being repressed. Somehow, that is the image I have gotten in the three weeks since the very last shred of Andrew Wakefield’s facade of scientific respectability tumbled. As you may recall, at the end of January, the British General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield, the man whose trial lawyer-funded, breathtakingly incompetent, and […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Jenny McCarthy drives the stupidity to ever higher levels on–where else?–The Huffington Post

Way back on May 25, 2005, I first noticed something about a certain political group blog. It was something unsavory, something vile, something pseudoscientific. It was the fetid stench of quackery, but not just any quackery. It was anti-vaccine quackery, and the blog was Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post, where a mere 16 days after its […]

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

Elsevier to Medical Hypotheses editor Bruce Charlton: Enough is enough

These days, I’m having a love-hate relationship with Elsevier. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to hate Elsevier. For example, Elsevier took payments from Merck, Sharp & Dohme in order to publish in essence a fake journal designed to promote its products, and then got caught doing it again. On the other […]