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

A bad day for antivaccinationists: A possible retraction, and the “CDC whistleblower” William W. Thompson issues a statement

They say that truth is stranger than fiction. I never really necessarily believed it, but yesterday was a day that might well serve as anecdotal evidence to support that adage. Indeed, yesterday was perfectly bookended by two major developments in the case of the so-called “CDC whistleblower,” the senior CDC scientist who, if you believe […]

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

Hey, where is everybody? The “CDC whistleblower” manufactroversy continues apace

Here it is, Tuesday already, and the antivaccine underground is still on full mental jacket alert over the biggest story the antivaccine movement has seen in a while. Fortunately, it’s a story that’s been largely ignored by the mainstream media, which tells me that maybe, just maybe, the mainstream media has figured out that it […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Quackery Surgery

An autistic child pays the price for Andrew Wakefield’s antivaccination “research”

Andrew Wakefield is an incompetent “scientist.” Of that, there is no longer any doubt whatsoever, given how poorly he and his collaborators did the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) studies that he did looking for measles RNA sequences in colon biopsy specimens taken from autistic children, studies in which they failed to do even the most […]

Categories
Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery Science

The Guatemala syphilis experiment, human subjects research abuses, and CAM

If there’s one thing that burns me about so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) clinical trials, it’s how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The annals of “I’m not anti-vaccine,” part 4 (End of 2010 edition)

Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. I realize I say these things again and again and again, but they bear repeating because together they are a message that needs to be spread in as clear and unambiguous a form as possible. First, whenever you hear someone say, “I’m not […]