Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The anti-vaccine movement strikes back against Amy Wallace using misogyny

The little matter of finding out that the actor who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation appears to have anti-vaccine proclivities sidetracked me from something that I had actually wanted to blog about yesterday. Specifically, it’s something that my blog bud Abel Pharmboy has been hitting hard over the last couple of days. […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

A tale of two news stories: The HPV and flu vaccines and why it’s so easy to confuse correlation with causation

And so it begins. Well, it hasn’t really just begun. In fact, it’s been going on a long time. I’m talking about confusing correlation with causation when it comes to vaccines. For example, the “vaccines cause autism” variety of the anti-vaccine movement blatantly confuses the correlation with the beginning of the increase in autism diagnoses […]

Categories
Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A crazy mixed up kid comes up with a crazy mixed up conspiracy theory about a crazy mixed up blog collective

That Jake Crosby, he’s a crazy mixed-up kid, but I kind of like him. He seems like a nice enough and smart enough kid, but, sadly, he’s fallen in with a bad crowd over at the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog, Age of Autism, so much so that he’s even blogging there, helping, whether he realizes […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Evolution Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

In which Orac defends Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum…

I realize that I’m possibly stepping into proverbial lion’s den with this one, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Back to reality after The Amazing Meeting: Now what?

Rerun time is over. Very early Monday morning, a plane touched down, a car drove along a dark and deserted freeway, and my wife and I found ourselves finally back at home. True, we did have a late night diversion to Denny’s because we were starving, but by 2 AM or so we were back […]