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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

How vaccine litigation distorts the VAERS database

Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction–I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Arrogance: The mercury militia responds to the NEJM article on thimerosal-containing vaccines

Pity the investigators at the CDC studying whether thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative pilloried by the antivaccination movement as the cause of autism and everything that is evil in medicine. Three months ago, they published a high profile article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled Early Thimerosal Exposure and Neuropsychological Outcomes at 7 to […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Mercury and autism: More Huffington Post nonsense

The whole post-Christmas thing left me without time to do anything other than a couple of brief bits. Consequently, given Deirdre Imus’ two recent appearances on the Huffington Post, I thought it would be as good a time as any to resurrect this post from June 27, 2005. For those of you who haven’t been […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Blog housekeeping Humor Medicine

Dumbest comment of the year from an antivaccinationist?

While I’m recharging a bit from the Christmas festivities yesterday to the point where soon I’ll be able to write a substantive post, full of the Respectful Insolence™ and science or medicine that readers have come to expect, here’s something to amuse (I hope). On Sunday, I wrote a not-so-respectfully insolent takedown of a truly […]

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

The Chicago Tribune’s Julie Deardorff and the mercury militia: Do newspapers have a responsibility for policing their blogs?

One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I’m not sure if it’s cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper’s banner and not have […]