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

Raging Bullsh*t: Robert De Niro is the latest celebrity antivaccinationist to spew pseudoscientific nonsense to the world

Celebrities who support pseudoscience and quackery are worse than regular, run-of-the-mill believers because they have a much larger soapbox than any of us do. I have a pretty healthy blog traffic for a medical blog, but even I don’t reach more than maybe 10,000 people a day. Even at my not-so-super-secret other blog, we only […]

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

In which antivaccine activist J. B. Handley thinks attacking Andrew Wakefield’s movie “backfired”

Nearly two weeks ago, a story that I had been blogging about almost nonstop for a week reached its conclusion when Robert De Niro decided to pull the antivaccine movie Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe from the Tribeca Film Festival, of which he was one of the co-founders. Before that, he had revealed that it […]

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

Brian Martin again: Criticizing Judy Wilyman’s antivaccine thesis is suppression of dissent

One of the cool things about being a longtime blogger in the skeptical world with a reasonably high profile is that I’ve met, either virtually or in person at various skeptic conferences, a wide variety of people from all over the world. One place in particular that has a vibrant skeptic movement is, of course, […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

Déjà vu all over again: Another Internet survey on vaccinations

It is an article of faith among the antivaccine movement that vaccines are degrading the health of our children, such that vaccines cause autism, asthma, diabetes, and a number of other chronic diseases. You won’t have to look far on most antivaccine websites to find claims that today’s children are the sickest in history and […]

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

Antivaccinationists denying the cult of Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy

Two of the great “icons”—if you can call them “great” given that they’re icons but hardly “great”—of the antivaccine movement are Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. Over the last decade, they have arguably been the most influential people in the antivaccine movement. The reasons are simple. Let’s look at Jenny McCarthy first. In 2007, when […]