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

Surprise! John Oliver’s vaccine segment has given antivaxers a sad.

On his most recent Sunday show, John Oliver did a tour de force segment on the antivaccine movement. Not surprisingly, antivaxers are not pleased.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The annals of “I’m not antivaccine,” part 24: Antivaxers threaten to dox Boston Herald employees over the newspaper’s use of imagery much less offensive than what antivaxers use on a daily basis

Last week, the Boston Herald published an editorial about how antivaxers deceived a community of Somali immigrants in Minnesota, referring to the spreading of deadly misinformation as a “hanging offense.” Antivaxers took an ill-advised idiom and turned it into a threat of mass lynchings, ignoring their own violent imagery about vaccines and portraying themselves as “pro-vaccine,” and used it as justification to threaten to publish the home addresses and phone numbers of newspaper employees. Yes, they are disingenuous and hypocritical as hell.

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Robert De Niro issue a $100,000 vaccine “challenge.” It’s every bit as much as scam as Jock Doubleday’s “vaccine challenge” was a decade ago.

Longtime vaccine advocates will likely remember Jock Doubleday’s “vaccine challenge,” in which he offered up to $150,000 to anyone who would drink a body-weight calibrated dose of the vaccine additives in the childhood vaccine schedule. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Robert De Niro have teamed up to issue a challenge every bit as nonsensical from a scientific standpoint, with the added bonus of its being a scam as well.

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Bioethics Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pareidolia Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

More atrocious antivaccine science promoted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr

The latest study being promoted as evidence that vaccines cause autism is truly atrocious. Basically, like many epidemiological studies examining putative links between vaccines and adverse health outcomes, it’s mistaking statistical noise for signal. What’s odd about this study is that not a single statistician or epidemiologist appears to have been involved with its design or execution, although a lawyer, a health economist, and an investment banker were.

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Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

No, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is NOT a “vaccine skeptic.” He is antivaccine.

This week hasn’t been a particularly good week for science. It started out on Monday with news of the social media storm from over the weekend over a blatantly antivaccine screed published the Friday before by the director of The Cleveland Clinic Wellness Clinic. Then, towards the middle of the week, we learned that our […]