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

Antivaccinationists denying the cult of Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy

Two of the great “icons”—if you can call them “great” given that they’re icons but hardly “great”—of the antivaccine movement are Andrew Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy. Over the last decade, they have arguably been the most influential people in the antivaccine movement. The reasons are simple. Let’s look at Jenny McCarthy first. In 2007, when […]

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

Autism quackery: Try, try, try, and never give up

Antivaccine quackery is arguably one of the worst forms of quackery. First, the pseudoscientific beliefs undergirding such quackery are based on the fear and demonization of one of the greatest medical advances in the history of the human race, the result of which are children left unprotected against preventable diseases that routinely used to populate […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking Uncategorized

A Dunning-Kruger manifesto about vaccines and autism

I’ve frequently written about the “arrogance of ignorance,” a phenomenon that anyone who’s paid attention to what quacks, cranks, or antivaccine activists (but I repeat myself) write and say beyond a certain period of time will have encountered. Basically, it’s the belief found in such people—and amplified in groups—that somehow they can master a subject […]