LIFE AND EPIDEMICS || LA VIDA Y EPIDEMIAS
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 Today comes news that the article has been retracted.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 [...]
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 [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFauihFXKHk From the video's description on YouTube: "From early irrational fears born of outdated medical understanding through to the latest medical research and findings, Professor Gareth Williams traces the history of the anti-vaccination movement and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 [...]
