I’ve been in the presence of supervillains only a handful of times in my life. The latest was a few weeks ago when antivaxxers descended on a talk by a well-known pediatrician and vaccine developer. Their leader cannot be described in any other way than as being a supervillain. He’s good with words. He’s charming. And he certainly seems to…
There’s this person, we’ll call her “Ginny,”* who is an ardently anti-vaccine. She has multiple blogs, multiple social media accounts, participates in protests (traveling far and wide, money for the family be damned), and even thinks she leads a political party. Ginny has no medical or scientific training, per se. The closest she’s gotten is a bachelor’s or master’s or…
You have probably heard by now about a documentary spliced together by known anti-vaccine fraud Andrew Wakefield. I write that it was “spliced together” because so much of it is non-linear. There’s no introduction, thesis statement, and supporting facts. It’s all a hodge podge of talking heads, testimonials, spliced sampling of a recorded conversation of a CDC scientist who never…
Remember Dr. Brian S. Hooker? The PhD who published a seriously flawed — and now retracted — study in which he said that the MMR vaccine caused autism in African American male boys? Yeah, that one. Well, it appears that he has been busy trying to form a case for the legal action he has pending in the vaccine court.…
When we last talked about Dr. Brian S. Hooker and his research into autism and the MMR vaccine, I told you about how the journal article published in Translational Neurodegeneration had been removed. Today comes news that the article has been retracted.
A few days ago, a biochemist by the name of Brian S. Hooker, PhD, published a paper in the online journal “Translational Neurodegeneration.” In it, he claimed that a 2004 study by CDC personnel was flawed. The paper had a lot of flaws,which I explained to you in detail in a previous post. Following the publication of that paper, Andrew…
People who don’t know any better like to put people into categories. Usually, the categories are binary, with only two options. Worse yet, the categories are on opposite ends of a spectrum. There are heroes and villains, and nothing in between. This is how I feel that the most outspoken anti-vaccine activists see people who support the proper (and necessary)…
From the video’s description on YouTube:
“From early irrational fears born of outdated medical understanding through to the latest medical research and findings, Professor Gareth Williams traces the history of the anti-vaccination movement and its long tail, reviewing the social settings in which the fears were found and offering a balanced assessment of vaccination as we find it today.”
Looks like we’re in for a long fight…
