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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Entertainment/culture Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking Television

How not to report science and medical news, vaccine edition

I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I’m writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield’s being found to have […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The martyrdom of St. Andy, part 2: David Kirby rides to the rescue (sort of)

If I am wrong I will be a bad person because I will have raised this spectre. Andrew Wakefield, March 3, 1998. Interview in The Independent. The martyrdom of brave maverick Saint Andy continues apace, it would appear. As you recall, last week, after an interminable proceeding that stretched out over two and a half […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The martyrdom of St. Andy

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue. Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university’s grant’s office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine News of the Weird Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking Surgery

A pyromaniac in a field of straw man or a black hole of burning stupid incinerating every straw man in the universe? Mike Adams attacks skepticism

Mike Adams is confused. I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn’t have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The Skepchick versus Barbara Loe Fisher

I’ve discussed why Barbara Loe Fisher is a hypocritical coward for trying to silence her opponents using the courts. Now Rebecca Watson, a.k.a., The Skepchick, schools Barbara Loe Fisher for in essence pissing on the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: For some reason, my irony meter didn’t register the point that the Skepchick laid down. […]