Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Dr. Jay Gordon: Will you please stop claiming you’re not an antivaccinationist?

I knew it. I just knew it. I just knew that when I finally decided to come back from my absence from this blog that something very unpleasant and sad would be waiting for me. True, there had actually been one very nasty thing that I simply had to deal with a few days ago, […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The beginning of a very, very bad year for antivaccinationists

One thing that’s become apparent to me so far in 2009 is that, while 2008 was the year of the antivaccinationist, 2009 is already shaping up to be a very bad year for antivaccinationists. A very bad year indeed, and this is a very, very good thing–if it can be sustained. But first, let’s take […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Bernadine Healy: Flirting with the anti-vaccine movement

There’s an old saying, so old that it’s devolved into cliché: Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it. I’m sure the vast majority of my readers, if not every last one of them, have heard this saying before. Certainly, it has a lot of truth to it. Sometimes it even applies […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Entertainment/culture Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Melanie Phillips: Crank magnetism in action on evolution and vaccines

A while back, Mark Hoofnagle coined a term that I like very much: Crank magnetism. To boil it down to its essence, crank magnetism is the phenomenon in which a person who is a crank in one area very frequently tends to be attracted to crank ideas in other, often unrelated areas. I had noticed […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

After all this time, Dr. Bob Sears finally tips his hand on vaccines

Yesterday, I wrote a post about what fellow ScienceBlogger Isis would term “hot, hot science.” As much as I love science like that, writing such posts is a lot of work and takes considerably longer than my run-of-the-mill bit of insolent brilliance. Often, after writing an analysis of a peer-reviewed paper like that, I need […]