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Bernie Sanders embraces alternative medicine and pseudoscience.

Bernie Sanders embraces alternative medicine – UPDATED

For regular readers of this blog, you know that I’m a progressive plus being a strong supporter of scientific evidence. I don’t spend a lot of time writing about politics, though I am a strong critic of the left when it comes to science. And it’s time call out a presidential candidate, who is not Donald Trump –  Bernie Sanders embraces alternative medicine which is not good for health care.

Senator Sanders is a self-proclaimed “socialist” or social democrat, although I doubt he would compare economically to real socialists or social democrats in Europe. His brother, a Green Party politician in the UK, probably would make a real socialist. He fits the crunchy liberalism of the state he represents, Vermont. These are generally the progressives I criticize the most – generally anti-vaccine, anti-GMO and pro-alternative medicine.

Sanders has promoted GMO labeling, a policy that will lead to increased food costs for those who least deserve to pay more for food.  For those of us who look only at science based evidence for claims, there is little difference between climate change deniers and GMO deniers.

Even though there is absolutely no evidence (unless cherry picking is your thing) that GMO foods are a health risk, individuals like Sanders push that trope to probably pander to his most liberal supporters. Or maybe Sanders embraces pseudoscience, because that’s his core belief. I’m beginning to wonder.

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Donald Trump and vaccines

Hey Donald Trump – vaccines do not cause autism

Let me start with this simple fact based on an enormous amount of scientific evidence – vaccines do not cause autism. Vaccines are unrelated to autism. There is no correlation between vaccines and autism. How many different ways should we parse this?

Annoyingly, there is a broad swath of vaccine deniers who continue to make this claim, despite the overwhelming amount of evidence. If this idea weren’t so dangerous to preventing diseases in children, it would be laughable.

The myth that vaccines are related to autism can be squarely blamed on Mr. Andy Wakefield who fraudulently alleged a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Wakefield published his claims in the Lancet, a mostly respected medical journal who seemed to have forgotten how to do proper peer review. However, it was retracted by the journal, while most of Wakefield’s coauthors disavowed the findings.

Predictably, this lie has had the effect of suppressing vaccination rates in many countries.

Of course, given the dangerous comments about vaccines made by Republican presidential candidates, like Donald Trump, Ben Carson (ironically, a neurosurgeon) and Rand Paul (we’ve laughed at his vaccine denial before), maybe the new data would disabuse them of their science denialism about vaccines?

Probably not, given that the Republican Party is mostly a science denying party. Sadly, there are a lot of science denying Democrats who agree with Trump on vaccines, unconvinced by real scientific evidence and seduced by logical fallacies. This is why we can’t have good things.

Obviously, we need more investment in research that vaccines do not cause autism – maybe a recently published one will convince the vaccine deniers.

Read More »Hey Donald Trump – vaccines do not cause autism