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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Quackery

The Vaccine War?

I haven’t mentioned this before. The reason is not because I don’t find it interesting or potentially blog-worthy, but rather because it slipped my mind and other things caught my interest last week. Given that the show is going to air beginning tomorrow, I thought that a few thoughts were in order. PBS’s Frontline is […]

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

When right wing loons try to “do” science involving vaccines or HIV/AIDS…

If there’s one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it’s ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Medicine

The intellectual dishonesty of the “vaccines didn’t save us” gambit

If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement I’ve learned over the last five or so years, it’s that it’s virtually completely immune to evidence, science, and reason. No matter how much evidence is arrayed against it, it always finds a way to spin, distort, or misrepresent it to combat the evidence. Not that this […]

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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 […]