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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

How antivaxers deceptively don the mantle of “vaccine safety activists”

Antivaxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. bend over backwards to represent themselves as “not antivaccine.” Don’t believe them. They are. It’s how they suck in the clueless, like Robert De Niro and Pratik Chougule.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Movies Politics Quackery

Andrew Wakefield and the Tribeca Film Festival: Criticism of a bad decision ≠ “censorship”

Ever since I mentioned on Tuesday that the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival had taken a massive dump on reality and science by selecting for screening Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccine propaganda “documentary,” Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, dedicated to the so-called “CDC whistleblower,” the topic has taken over, as topics sometimes tend to do here. In response […]

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

Year end award lists you do and don’t want to be on

Christmas and New Years are almost here. As a result, as is always the case this time of year, we’re being flooded with “year end” lists. These lists are a fun distraction that I actually rather look forward to as an amusing (and sometimes annoying) year end tradition. In particular, I’m a sucker for “best […]

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

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Robert De Niro issue a $100,000 vaccine “challenge.” It’s every bit as much as scam as Jock Doubleday’s “vaccine challenge” was a decade ago.

Longtime vaccine advocates will likely remember Jock Doubleday’s “vaccine challenge,” in which he offered up to $150,000 to anyone who would drink a body-weight calibrated dose of the vaccine additives in the childhood vaccine schedule. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Robert De Niro have teamed up to issue a challenge every bit as nonsensical from a scientific standpoint, with the added bonus of its being a scam as well.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 20: “There is no safe vaccine” and excusing the murder of autistic children

One of the most insidious and oft-repeated myths of the antivaccine movement is that vaccines cause autism. Certainly, it is true that there was an antivaccine movement long before anyone thought of linking vaccines to autism. For example, in the the 1980s the DPT (diptheria-whole cell pertussis-tetanus) vaccine was linked to encephalitis and neurological damage, […]