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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The Woo Boat, part 2: Andrew Wakefield versus the skeptics

About six months ago, I was highly amused to discover something called the Conspira-Sea Cruise, which I referred to at The Woo Boat. As I said at the time, file this one under the category: You can’t make stuff like this up. Certainly, I couldn’t. I’ve never been on a cruise. Quite frankly, the very […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Religion Science

Cranks of a feather: The Nation of Islam and the Church of Scientology team with antivaccine activists to oppose SB 277

The saga of SB 277 just keeps getting stranger and stranger as its end game comes into view. SB 277 is, of course, a big deal. If it’s passed by the California Assembly and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown, it would eliminate nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates, making the largest state in […]

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

The antivaccine movement wins in Oregon: Senate Bill 442 is dead

How quickly things change. If there’s one thing I always feel obligated to warn my fellow pro-science advocates about vaccines and the antivaccine movement, it’s that we can never rest on our laurels or assume that the tide is turning in our direction. The reason is simple: Antivaccinationism is a powerful belief system, every bit […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

It’s official! Brian Hooker’s “reanalysis” of MMR data is retracted.

These things always seem to happen on Friday. Well, not really. It’s probably just confirmation bias, but it seems that a lot of things I’d like to blog about happen on a Friday. That leaves me the choice of either breaking my unofficial rule not to blog on the weekend or waiting until Monday, when […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Brian Hooker proves Andrew Wakefield wrong about vaccines and autism

Here we go again. If there’s anything that ignites the fevered brains (such as they are) of antivaccine activists, it’s a good seeming conspiracy. Indeed, as we’ve seen before, if they can’t find a legitimate one, they’ll either exaggerate one or make one up out of whole cloth. This week, an “alleged” conspiracy has been […]