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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Danish investigator Poul Thorsen: Custom-made for the anti-vaccine movement to distract from inconvenient science

Here we go again. If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement, it’s all about the ad hominem. Failing to win on science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other objective evidence, inevitably anti-vaccine propagandists fall back on attacking the person instead of the evidence. For example, Paul Offit has been the subject of unrelenting attacks from […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

The annals of “I’m not anti-vaccine,” part 6

As I wing my way back home from Orlando, fresh from having imbibed deeply of the latest and greatest in cancer research, I didn’t really have the opportunity to generate a typical Orac-ian post. Fortunately for me (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), a commenter named Erwin Alber popped up in the comments […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Television

The resident anti-vaccine reporter at CBS News strikes again

I’m not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

For the anti-vaccinationists out there: The results of a real “vaxed versus unvaxed” study

In many ways, the anti-vaccine movement is highly mutable. However, this mutability is firmly based around keeping one thing utterly constant, and that one thing is vaccines. No matter what the evidence, no matter what the science, no matter how much observational, scientific, and epidemiological evidence is arrayed against them, to the relentlessly self-confident members […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine Quackery

Deaths from vaccines in Japan?

Confusing correlation with causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. These are two of the most common errors human beings make. Indeed, they’re natural errors that our brains appear hard-wired to make, and, without scientific training, it’s virtually impossible to avoid making the conclusion that, because two occurrences correlate with each other they must be related […]