Tag: anti-vaccine

Vaccine Wars: the NCCAM Drops the Ball

If you go to the website of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), you’ll find that one of its self-identified roles is to “provide information about CAM.” NCCAM Director Josephine Briggs is proud to assert that the website fulfills this expectation. As many readers will recall, three of your bloggers visited the NCCAM last April, after having received an...

/ November 4, 2010

Steven Higgs: Another antivaccine reporter like Dan Olmsted in the making?

April is National Autism Awareness Month, and as of today April is nearly half over. Do you notice anything different compared to the last couple of years? I do. Can you guess what it is? The anti-vaccine movement’s usual suspects haven’t been all over the mainstream media, as they usually are this time every year, often as early as April 1 or...

/ April 12, 2010

The General Medical Council to Andrew Wakefield: “The panel is satisfied that your conduct was irresponsible and dishonest”

BACKGROUND In my not-so-humble opinion, the very kindest thing that can be said about Andrew Wakefield is that he is utterly incompetent as a scientist. After all, it’s been proven time and time again that his unethical and scientifically incompetent “study” that was published in The Lancet in 1999 claiming to find a correlation between vaccination with MMR and autistic regression in...

/ February 1, 2010

Yet another nail in the coffin of the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism

Another study, another refutation of the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism. The same as it ever was. Antivaccine activists won't listen. Also the same as it ever was.

/ December 7, 2009

The New Plague

I’m taking this opportunity to introduce a new blog to the SBM audience, and to draw yet more attention to the growing and dangerous trend of parental vaccine refusal. So, please take a momentary break from your perusal of this most esteemed font of knowledge, and point your browser to Gotham Skeptic.

/ October 21, 2009

Confusing correlation with causation

These two video explains it better than anything I’ve seen in a long time: That’s right. Vaccines educate the immune system. Use them. I got my flu shot on Thursday.

/ October 3, 2009

The price of anti-vaccine fanaticism: Case histories

One of the major themes of SBM has been to combat one flavor of anti-SBM movement that believes, despite all the evidence otherwise, that vaccines cause autism and that autism can be reversed with all sorts of “biomedical” quackery. Many (but by no means all) of these so-called “biomedical” treatments are based on the false view that vaccines somehow caused autism. I...

/ September 28, 2009

“There must be a reason,” or how we support our own false beliefs

For a change of pace, I want to step back from medicine for this post, although, as you will see (I hope), the study I’m going to discuss has a great deal of relevance to the topics covered regularly on this blog. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a skeptic and championing science-based medicine is just how unyielding belief in...

/ August 31, 2009

The perils and pitfalls of doing a “vaccinated versus unvaccinated” study

The anti-vaccine movement is nothing if not plastic. It “evolves” very rapidly in response to selective pressures applied to it in the form of science refuting its key beliefs. For instance, when multiple studies looking at the MMR vaccine and autism failed to confirm the myth that the MMR causes autism or “autistic enterocolitis,” most recently late last year, it was not...

/ August 24, 2009

Georgia on my mind

My inaugural post was about vaccines, and I promised that I wouldn’t write exclusively on this topic. But something rotten is brewing in the state of Georgia and this story is just too important to ignore. The first successful challenge to the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act (NCVICA) has taken place in Georgia, and we all should be just a little...

/ May 6, 2009