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

A manual of spectacularly bad antivaccine arguments

To say that the relationship that antivaccine activists have with science and fact is a tenuous, twisted one is a major understatement. Despite mountains of science that says otherwise, antivaccinationists still cling to the three core tenets of their faith, namely that (1) vaccines are ineffective (or at least nowhere near as effective as health […]

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Biology Medicine Physics Popular culture Science

Did "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" lead to the suicide of a teenage girl?

Blog topics seem to come in waves, where I’ll be stuck on more deeply examining a topic for days, only to have that topic dry up. Sometimes, you, my readers, make me aware of a topic. This is an example of the latter case. It’s something I had been debating about whether to blog about […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Popular culture Quackery Religion Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement

I originally wasn’t going to write about this particular post, but the mass shooting in San Bernardino yesterday led me to change my mind. For those of you who either aren’t in the US or were somehow cut off from media for the last 18 hours or so, yesterday a heavily armed man and woman […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Ben Swann returns, and this time he’s got the CDC whistleblower documents

When it comes to blogging, sometime’s it’s feast or famine. Some days there are more topics and stories that I’d like to blog about than I could ever get to, given that I generally only do one post per weekday, while other days I seriously think about skipping a day because there’s just nothing out […]

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

On vaccines and autism, child pornography, and seeing “bullies” everywhere

Bullying. You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Yes, I do so love to co-opt that famous line from The Princess Bride for my own nefarious purposes, but it’s so perfect for this particular topic, which comes up every so often when I’m writing about the […]