Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

Representative Dan Burton: Abusing his power to influence the outcome of the Autism Omnibus hearings?

It’s been a while since I mentioned the Autism Omnibus hearings. The Omnibus proceeding is the culmination of all the legal cases brought to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program by nearly 5,000 families who “feel” that their children’s autism was caused by vaccines. Many, but not all, of the plaintiffs blame the mercury in the […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Closing the year on a great note: The mercury militia’s “experts” slapped down

What better way to finish off 2007 than to look at a most amusing judicial ruling on the admissibility of some of the favorite “expert” witnesses trotted out to try to demonstrate a link between mercury in vaccines and autism. It was issued on December 21 in the case of Blackwell v. Sigma Aldrich, Inc. […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The American Academy of Pediatrics versus antivaccinationist hypocrisy

Three weeks ago, I wrote about some truly irresponsible antivaccination propaganda masquerading as entertainment that aired in the form of a television show called Eli Stone. This show, which portrayed its hero taking on the case of an autistic boy whose mother blamed his autism on thimerosal (going under the fictional name “mercuritol”) in vaccines […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Surgery

David Kirby and the government “concession that vaccines cause autism”: The incredible shrinking causation claim

I didn’t want to blog about this. I really didn’t. No, the reason why I didn’t want to blog about this latest screed by mercury militia enabler David Kirby is not because it is about any sort of slam-dunk proof that vaccines do after all cause autism, a mistaken impression that you might get if […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Popular culture Quackery Television

The Hannah Poling case: Autism rebranded again

Damn you, mercury militia. I had had another topic entirely in mind for this week’s post, but, as happens far too often, news events have overtaken me in the form of a story that was widely reported towards the end of last week. It was all over the media on Thursday evening and Friday, showing […]