Anti-vaccine claims about autism and aluminum
Christopher Exley keeps trying to link aluminum to everything. Now he’s trying to tie aluminum in vaccines to autism spectrum disorder.
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Christopher Shaw
Autism and vaccines – 164 science articles say no link (UPDATED)
There have been 164 peer-reviewed, published science articles that show there is no link between vaccines and autism.
Physicians for Informed Consent — VAERS-loving anti-vaccine group
Physicians for Informed Consent is another one of those science-denying groups trying to pretend to be all about vaccine “informed consent,” but they spread anti-vaccine nonsense, no different than what we hear from the usual suspects like Del Bigtree and Robert F Kennedy Jr.
I’ve written about Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC) a few times, but I wanted to tell you all about the characters that are at the forefront of this anti-vaccine group. Talk about the usual suspects.
Read More »Physicians for Informed Consent — VAERS-loving anti-vaccine group
A list of retracted anti-vaccine papers – bad science and bad research
Retracted anti-vaccine papers are a staple of my articles published here. Usually, they try to create some fake link between vaccines and autism, but these papers try to say anything that casts vaccines in a bad light.
As we know, real science has established that there is no link between vaccines and autism. Anti-vaccine papers generally try to show this link without epidemiological or clinical studies – they just try to make some specious biologically implausible claims trying to link something about vaccines to autism.
Much of the anti-vaccine research is so bad, so poorly designed, that it’s relegated to low-quality, predatory journals which have laughably poor peer-review systems. Even in those locations, we can find the occasional retracted anti-vaccine papers, because they are often so bad that even these predatory publishers are embarrassed.
So, I present to you, the loyal reader, a list of retracted anti-vaccine papers (and I use that term very carefully). It’s not a comprehensive list, it’s just what I’ve seen over the past few years. If you know of a retracted paper that I missed, leave a citation in the comments.
Read More »A list of retracted anti-vaccine papers – bad science and bad research
Aluminum in vaccines is not linked to autism – James Lyons-Weiler is wrong again
Here we go again. Anti-vaccine pseudoscientist, James Lyons-Weiler, publishes a paper that says something about aluminum about vaccines, and the anti-vaccine crowd genuflects in his general direction. The anti-vaccine side has nearly zero evidence supporting their claims, so they have to cling to anything they can get.
The anti-vaccine religion is littered with these false authorities that have few credentials or experience in vaccines, yet, because of a “Ph.D.” after their name, the anti-vaxxers make it appear they speak for millions of scientists. There’s Tetyana Obukhanych, a former immunologist who has published no peer-reviewed articles about vaccines, who has denied all of her scientific education and training, and who makes egregious and simplistic mistakes about vaccines in all of her proclamations.
Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic are multiple-retracted “researchers” who shill for the anti-vaccine religion by publishing weak and easily critiqued research that doesn’t even stand up to the tiniest of criticism. We’ve often speculated as to why the University of British Columbia, where they do their “research,” hasn’t ended their relationship.
Look, I’m not impressed by credentials and degrees. I don’t care if someone is a janitor or a Ph.D. in immunology at Harvard University. If you deny established scientific consensus based on your whims, cherry picking evidence, or rhetoric, you have nothing. You bring nothing to a scientific discussion. If you want to overturn the scientific consensus on vaccines then you better be an expert in the area of vaccines, and you better have a broad, robust body of evidence that shows problems with the scientific consensus.
Now, it’s time to look at this new false authority in the land of vaccines, James Lyons-Weiler and his ideas about aluminum and autism. Is he another false authority and pseudoscientist? Or does his new paper give us something new to examine about vaccines? Yes. No.
Read More »Aluminum in vaccines is not linked to autism – James Lyons-Weiler is wrong again
List of anti-vaccine physicians – beware of false information
Recently, the vaccine deniers have pushed a list of anti-vaccine doctors, which gets copy-pasted from one website to another, and are similar to those lists of “scientists” who deny Darwinian evolution or climate change. But is this really made up of respected physicians and researchers? Does it really contain doctors who are experts or authorities on vaccines?
Well, thanks to Zared Schwartz, a senior at the University of Florida studying microbiology, cell science, and neurobehavioral, who took it upon himself to look up each of these individuals and see if they’ve got anything to offer in the discussions about vaccines. Guess what? It doesn’t appear so.
So if you run across this list of anti-vaccine doctors and researchers, wondering if any of them speak from authority, just check them out on this list.
Read More »List of anti-vaccine physicians – beware of false information
HPV vaccine myths and tropes – all the debunkings and refutations
Recently, I wrote about the overwhelming evidence regarding Gardasil’s safety and effectiveness. Unfortunately, that will never stop the HPV vaccine myths from becoming a thing.
I’ve ripped through the nearly 200 articles on the HPV vaccine I have written to put together some of the best debunkings and refutations of HPV vaccine myths and tropes pushed by our anti-vaccine friends.
So here we go. Read More »HPV vaccine myths and tropes – all the debunkings and refutations
Vaccine adjuvants – another misguided FOIA request from ICAN
This article about an FOIA request for information about vaccine adjuvants was written by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss, Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco, CA), who is a frequent contributor to this and many other blogs, providing in-depth, and intellectually stimulating, articles about vaccines, medical issues, social policy, and the law.
Professor Reiss writes extensively in law journals about the social and legal policies of vaccination. Additionally, Reiss is also a member of the Parent Advisory Board of Voices for Vaccines, a parent-led organization that supports and advocates for on-time vaccination and the reduction of vaccine-preventable disease.
In August 2020, the anti-vaccine organization, the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), posted on their site a letter from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) dated July 19, 2019, under the (misleading) title that “NIH Concedes It Has No Studies Assessing The Safety of Injecting Aluminum Adjuvants.”
As in the past, ICAN’s use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request result is highly misleading, in at least three ways. First, FOIA is not a mechanism for science query, only a way to get existing administrative records, and this is a misuse of FOIA. Second, there are abundant scientific studies on the safety of aluminum vaccine adjuvants, but this request was not a way to get them. And third, even if there were no studies on the safety of aluminum adjuvants in vaccines, vaccines are tested as a whole, and the safety data on them cover all their ingredients.Read More »Vaccine adjuvants – another misguided FOIA request from ICAN
Vaccine settled science – it is not based on faith or belief, just evidence
I decided to write about vaccine settled science, based on comments I saw on Facebook after someone posted an article I wrote about recently polling on American attitudes towards vaccines. The headline of that article said “atheists support vaccines,” but that was not even close to what the article was about.
In fact, the article described how recently polling showed that nearly 90% of Americans thought that the MMR vaccine was safe and effective. In other words, most Americans think that vaccine science is settled.
Anyway, the comments to the post digressed wildly from the point, because anti-vaxxers wanted to claim that science is based on faith and belief, just like a religion. And that evolution is based on faith, and creationism is really a science. And that atheism is a belief.
The forum admins shut down the thread because it began to have nothing to do with vaccines.
Nevertheless, science is not based on faith or belief, it’s based on evidence. Creationism is a pseudoscience with zero supporting evidence.
And atheism was not the point of the article, which convinces me that too many people read headlines and not the article. This saddens the old feathered avian dinosaur who spends several hours researching and writing these articles.
This article will talk about vaccine settled science, but also what constitutes science. And it has nothing to do with faith and belief.Read More »Vaccine settled science – it is not based on faith or belief, just evidence
Tetanus vaccine did not cause mass sterilization in Kenya – anti-vax lies
And here comes another anti-vaccine lie – oft-retracted pseudoscientists are pushing a claim that the tetanus vaccine was used for mass sterilization in Kenya. Yes, you read that right.
This false claim about the tetanus vaccine comes from an anti-vaccine pseudoscience paper foisted onto the world by Christopher Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic. These two University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers in the Department of Ophthalmology (you know, the study of eyes) have no background or training in any area vaccine research, including immunology, epidemiology, microbiology, virology or anything else remotely related to vaccine science.
Along with many others, these two represent the epitome of low-quality anti-vaccine “research” – they are truly false authorities.
Yet, every time these anti-vaccine shills publish anti-vaccine pseudoscience articles in low ranked journals, the anti-vaccine religion jump all over it and try to use those articles as “science” to dismiss the scientific fact of vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Shaw and Tomljenovic have a long record of retracted articles, which were generally published in low impact factor, predatory “pay-to-play” journals, and pushing anti-vaccine pseudoscience that has been hammered by respected scientific organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO).
Read More »Tetanus vaccine did not cause mass sterilization in Kenya – anti-vax lies