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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The mercury militia go to court

I’ve been a bit remiss when it comes to writing about the lunacy in which it is claimed that vaccines cause autism, allegedly due to the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was in most childhood vaccines until the end of 2002, when it was removed from all but flu vaccines. It turns out that […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Candidate #1 for stupidest attack from a mercury maven ever

Those who still desperately cling to the concept that mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism have been known to write some really stupid stuff trying to justify their position or attack someone else’s rebuttal of the whole “hypothesis.” This week has produced a bumper crop of such fallacy-laden “defenses” of the thimerosal gravy train–I […]

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

Antivaccination crankery on the CBS News website

While I’m back on the topic of vaccines and autism after a long hiatus, thanks to the Atuism Omnibus, don’t know how I missed this article by Sharyl Attkisson, entitled Autism: Why the Debate Rages. I can’t recall the last time I saw so many logical fallacies and doggerel packed into an article on an […]

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

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has declared a crank-off!

Has it really been two years? Amazingly, it has indeed. On June 16, 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deposited the biggest, steamingest, drippiest (not to mention stinkiest) turd I had as yet seen in my then young blogging career, specifically an article published simultaneously by both Salon.com and Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. Along with […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Autism’s False Prophets: Finally, science pushes back against antivaccine lunacy

NOTE: This review of Dr. Offit’s book Autism’s False Prophets originally appeared over at The ScienceBlogs Book Club. However, now that the book club for this particular book has concluded, I am free to repost it here for those who may not have seen it and to archive it as one of my own posts. […]