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Anti-vaccine religion

Anti-vaccine religion – hateful attacks on Dorit Rubinstein Reiss and others

A few days ago, Professor Dorit Rubinstein Reiss published a heartfelt article on this website about the death of Nick Catone’s son that Catone blamed on vaccine induced sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The death was tragic, as is the death of any child, but there is absolutely no evidence that vaccines were the cause. Of course, within hours, the anti-vaccine religion poured forth in their usual vile, disgusting, racist, grammar and spelling deficient manner.

Mostly, I just delete the most nasty comments, and move on. But today, I’m not in a good mood. I want to point to the anti-vaccine religion for all to see. Like all religions, the anti-vaccine sect must attack others who follow rational thought or simply reject their religion. The religion of anti-vaccine hatred seems to be no different than other religious hatred throughout this world.

Read More »Anti-vaccine religion – hateful attacks on Dorit Rubinstein Reiss and others

Professor Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

Index of articles by Prof. Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

Editor’s note – this index of articles by Dorit Rubinstein Reiss has been updated and published here. The comments here are closed, and you can comment at the new article. 

 

Dorit Rubinstein Reiss – Professor of Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco, CA) – is a frequent contributor to this and many other blogs, providing in-depth, and intellectually stimulating, articles about vaccines (generally, but sometimes moving to other areas of medicine), social policy and the law. Her articles usually unwind the complexities of legal issues with vaccinations and legal policies, such as mandatory vaccination and exemptions, with facts and citations. I know a lot of writers out there will link to one of her articles here as a sort of primary source to tear down a bogus antivaccine message.

Professor Reiss writes extensively in law journals about the social and legal policies of vaccination–she really is a well-published expert in this area of vaccine policy, and doesn’t stand on the pulpit with a veneer of Argument from Authority, but is actually an authority. Additionally, Reiss is also 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.

Below is a list of articles that Dorit Rubinstein Reiss has written for this blog, organized into some arbitrary and somewhat broad categories for easy reference. Of course, she has written articles about vaccines and legal issues in other locations, which I intend to link here at a later date. This article will be updated as new articles from Dorit are added here.

Read More »Index of articles by Prof. Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

Bad for science and academic freedom: harassing Kevin Folta

If you don’t know about the case of anti-GMO activists harassing Dr. Kevin Folta, Professor and Chairman in the Department of Horticultural Sciences at the University of Florida, I’ve written about it extensively over the past few months.

Dr. Folta  is considered to be an expert in plant genetics including genetic modification of plants. He has been studying this field for nearly three decades, published extensively in real peer-reviewed journals, and has trained legions of graduate students. He should be considered a real authority figure in GMO research.

In 2012, Dr. Folta was “targeted” by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from an activist to get all of Dr. Folta’s emails about GMOs. If you are unfamiliar with this particular tactic, it is used frequently by climate change deniers to harass and bully climate change scientists.

This will be a repeating theme of this article – the science deniers who are harassing Kevin Folta are almost exactly the same as the science deniers who attack climate change scientists. They must be proud of this.

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Antivaccine cult resorts to ad hominem attacks

I get a lot of email about this blog. Most of it is nice, many asking questions or recommending future topics. I do enjoy the recommendations, because it sometimes leads to some interesting areas of research.

Occasionally, I get critical emails, some civil, and some not quite as civil. And I got one of those emails, with interesting and not very creative ad hominem attacks – really could some of you do better than this?

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Evidence supports rotavirus vaccine effectiveness – vaccines save lives

The CDC recently published robust evidence that supports rotavirus vaccine effectiveness. There is nothing more powerful than epidemiological studies that show a correlation (and causality) between the drop in the incidence of a vaccine preventable disease immediately after wide introduction of a the vaccine itself in a relatively closed population.

Read More »Evidence supports rotavirus vaccine effectiveness – vaccines save lives

Logical fallacies – debunking pseudoscience

Logical fallacies are essentially errors of reasoning in making an argument – identifying them is an excellent tool in debunking pseudoscience and other junk science. When logically fallacious arguments are used, usually based on bad reasoning to support a position (or to try to convince someone to adopt the same position), it is considered a fallacy.

Most of you didn’t know, because I didn’t promote it much, but I had a link in the menu for a list of logical fallacies. It lay fallow, barely read by me or, apparently, anyone else.

However, I decided to update and improve my list of favorite logical fallacies used by all of the pseudoscience crowd. There are many more logical fallacies than what I list, but this blog is focused on providing evidence, in a snarky way, against anti-science claims made by everyone from the vaccine deniers to creationists.Read More »Logical fallacies – debunking pseudoscience

I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Big Pharma Shill Party

The official Big Pharma Shill t-shirt.

My official Big Pharma Shill® t-shirt. Thanks to the Facebook group, Refutations to Anti-vaxx Memes. https://www.facebook.com/RtAVM

Occasionally, I receive thinly veiled questions about my integrity and ethics in the comments of various posts, in emails, or on social networking sites. Mostly, I laugh about them since they are a form of Ad hominem argument, called the Big Pharma Shill Gambit, where one side of an argument tries to dismiss the scientific evidence of another side by accusing them of being a paid mouthpiece for pharmaceutical companies. My response is generally to state that I am “polishing the gold bars stored in the basements of Big Pharma offices,” and I don’t get paid very much to do that–it’s just about the only answer worthy of the stupidity of these accusations.

The problem with actually trying to dismiss these accusations is that it’s nearly impossible to dismiss the accusations with evidence, because as we know, proving the negative is almost impossible. I could post my investment documents, and you will see that I own many shares of stock and mutual funds that invest in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Companies I might discuss might make up 0.1% of the holdings of the mutual fund, which means I own around 0.000000001% of a single Big Pharma company. Now, I am certainly not arrogant enough to believe that what I write has any effect on some company’s stock price, but if it did, I reap the rewards of ½¢. Woo hoo. 

Of course, even if I did post my stock holdings, someone will accuse me of hiding my 2 million shares of Merck stock in my secret offshore bank account. Which probably is in the same vault as the shiny Big Pharma gold bars. Read More »I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Big Pharma Shill Party