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Antivaccine nonsense Entertainment/culture Humor Medicine Movies

I am Bonnie Offit!

I hadn’t planned on beating on that wretched hive of anti-vaccine scum and quackery, Age of Autism, again today so soon after having done so not just once but twice yesterday. I really hadn’t. After all, AoA is the crank gift that keeps on giving (and has kept on giving for three years now), and […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Pumping autistic children full of an industrial chelator (revisited)

Remember Boyd Haley? He’s the Professor and former Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky whose formerly respectable career tanked because he fell into pseudoscience. For whatever reason, a while back he became enamored first of dental amalgam quackery to the point where he became involved in organizations like Consumers for […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

Even more hysterical than Age of Autism?

Remember how I had a little fun with Katie Wright’s overheated rhetoric about Kathleen Sebelius’ request to the press that they not give equal weight to anti-vaccine cranks when they report about issues of vaccines? Her exact words, if you will recall, were: There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

“Censorship.” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

It’s rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, “Help! Help! I’m being repressed!” was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

It’s so cute when anti-vaxers try to discuss epidemiology…

The anti-vaccine movement is nothing if not plastic. It “evolves” very rapidly in response to selective pressures applied to it in the form of science refuting its key beliefs. For instance, when multiple studies looking at the MMR vaccine and autism failed to confirm the myth that the MMR causes autism or “autistic enterocolitis,” most […]