Results for: kirby
Autism and Vaccines: Responding to Poling and Kirby
In response to my NeuroLogica blog post on Monday, David Kirby wrote a response in the Huffington Post and Dr. Jon Poling (father of Hannah Poling) wrote an open letter to me, placed in the comment section and posted at Age of Autism. It seems only polite that I respond to their kind attention.The primary focus of my original post (which I...
Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. antivaccine? Judge him by his own words!
Last week, an antivaxxer on Substack—where else?—tried to argue that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not antivaccine by encouraging you to judge him by his own words. I agree. You should judge RFK Jr. by his own words, as they show definitively that he has been antivaccine since at least 2005.
Plandemic: Judy Mikovits and the mother of all COVID-19 conspiracy theories
Judy Mikovits is a disgraced scientist who published a paper claiming that a retrovirus called XMRV causes chronic fatigue syndrome, results that other investigators were unable to replicate. Since then, she's been a regular on the antivaccine circuit, but now she's been reborn as a "Fire Fauci" COVID-19 conspiracy theorist. Sadly, it worked. Her book is #1 on Amazon.
The Vaccine Guide: Cherry picked studies and deceptive highlighting in the service of antivaccine pseudoscience
The Vaccine Guide is a website and a book by Ashley Everly, a "toxicology consultant" for Health Freedom Idaho. It's been making the rounds in the antivaccine underbelly of social media lately and basically consists of screenshots of cherry picked studies, articles, and web pages, with Everly's highlighting passages to provide an antivaccine spin. It's clever in a way, but also rather...
Vaccines Still Don’t Cause Autism
Update: The evidence continues to show no link between vaccines and autism.
The So-Called Vaccine Debate: False Balance in The San Diego Union-Tribune
A recent article in The San Diego Union-Tribune presents a pair of articles that gives a false balance regarding vaccinations. Those who oppose vaccination do so on the basis of ideology rather than science, thus placing the public's health at risk.
Outbreaks among Somali immigrants in Minnesota: Thanks for the measles again, Andy
Andrew Wakefield's antivaccine propaganda film VAXXED claims that MMR vaccination causes autism in African American boys. Unfortunately, this is not the first time Wakefield has targeted people of color with antivaccine misinformation. Before there was VAXXED, Wakefield and antivaxers targeted Somali immigrants in Minnesota. Measles outbreaks have been the result.
To debate or not to debate: The strange bedfellows of Andrew Weil
Those who stand on the wrong side of science love public debates and frequently challenge science advocates to them. The reason, of course, is that public debates are almost never a good venue to argue science, and these debates almost never happen in a truly neutral venue. This time around, I got a bit of ego gratification when Andrew Weil apparently wanted...
Donald Trump and the dangerous vaccine politics of the 2016 Presidential race
At the second Republican debate of the 2016 election cycle, Donald Trump parroted antivaccine pseudoscience, and Ben Carson walked back his previously strong support for vaccine mandates. Earlier in the campaign, Rand Paul blamed vaccines for "neurologic injury," and Chris Christie briefly pandered by questioning vaccine mandates. What's going on here? Is the Republican Party becoming the antivaccine party?
Vaccine Whistleblower: An antivaccine “exposé” full of sound and fury, signifying nothing
Antivaccine lawyer Kevin Barry has published a book containing what are allegedly the transcripts of telephone conversations between "CDC whistleblower" William Thompson and biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine epidemiologist Brian Hooker. Suffice to say, the transcripts do not show evidence of a massive coverup at the CDC of evidence that vaccines cause autism.