Encyclopedia of American Loons: #1748: Brian Hooker

...But who is Brian Hooker? Hooker has a degree in biochemistry, but has no formal training in statistics, epidemiology, or any field pertinent to the study of vaccines or autism. But he is a hardcore anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. Hooker also has a son with autism and an open case claiming vaccine injury before the Vaccine Court. He is also a board member of an anti-vaccine organization called Focus Autism....

Full lunacy here: Encyclopedia of American Loons: #1748: Brian Hooker

Let me tell you a story…

Spoiler alert: This story does not have a happy ending.

Back in 1932, the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) decided that it would be a good idea to understand the natural history of syphilis infections. They wanted to know what happened to a human body when the infection took place, from beginning to tragic […]



Read more at: Let me tell you a story… by Reuben

The dangerous game played by Hooker and Wakefield

When Brian S. Hooker and Andrew Jeremy Wakefield decided that they were going to play the “CDC Whistleblower” game, they and their minions decided to lie and misinform African Americans with the idea that the MMR vaccine was causing more autism in African American children than in other groups. They have gone so far so as to line themselves up with the Nation of Islam, and so we have these statements from NoI leaders saying that CDC “poisoned” Black and Hispanic children.

This is a very dangerous game that the anti-vaccine high priests are playing […]


Read more at: The dangerous game played by Hooker and Wakefield by Reuben

You never know who is listening or reading

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the anti-vaccine crowd is losing their collective minds over the so-called “CDC Whistleblower.” The CDC Whistleblower is a researcher by the name of William Thompson. Dr. Thompson made the mistake of confiding some of his anti-vaccine unease over some vaccine studies at CDC to BS Hooker, known anti-vaccine […]

Read more at: You never know who is listening or reading by Reuben

Vaccine Whistleblower: An antivaccine “exposé” full of sound and fury, signifying nothing | Science-Based Medicine

I don’t review books that often (...) Today, I’m making an exception for a book hot off the presses. The main reason is curiosity, because the book is about a topic that I’ve blogged about three times here and several times more for my not-so-super-secret other blog, and I really wanted to find out more about what was going on. I didn’t expect to find out what really happened, because I knew from the beginning that the book, Vaccine Whistleblower: Exposing Research Fraud at the CDC by an antivaccine lawyer named Kevin Barry, would be highly biased. However, as I found out a few weeks ago, the book promised four complete transcripts of telephone conversations between the “CDC whistleblower,” a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) psychologist named William W. Thompson who has been a co-investigator on important CDC studies since the late 1990s...

Read the rest here: Vaccine Whistleblower: An antivaccine “exposé” full of sound and fury, signifying nothing | Science-Based Medicine

Someone wasted their time in biostats class

There have been many times when I’m standing before master of public health (MPH) students, giving them a presentation on epidemiology, and I wonder how any of them can even put on their shoes in the morning. Don’t get me wrong; they’re bright students. Don’t get me wrong; they’re bright students. Many of them have graduated from college with impressive grades and great projects. They wouldn’t be in these top-notch universities if they were not bright. (Or if their benefactors didn’t see brightness in them.) Still, I’m not surprised when I see many of those kids getting an MPH in epidemiology and not become epidemiologist...

Read more at: Someone wasted their time in biostats class by Reuben

Harpocrates Speaks: Brian Hooker's Paper on Increased risk of ASD in African American Boys Retracted

Just a very quick post to let my readers know a bit of recent news about that whole Hooker-MMR-CDC coverup nonsense. The journal that originally published Brian Hooker's paper originally issued a statement of concern about the conclusions and possible undeclared conflicts of interest. Yesterday, October 3, 2014, the journal fully retracted Hooker's paper. Here is their statement regarding the retraction...

Read the full post here: Harpocrates Speaks: Brian Hooker's Paper on Increased risk of ASD in African American Boys Retracted

All the CDC’s men (or: McTaggart jumps on a bandwagon just after the wheels have fallen off) @ Guy Chapman's Blahg

The Blessed McTaggart has been appearing in pantomime, and now she’s joined the “debate” about the CDC whistleblower nontroversy, the teapot tempest whipped up by antivaxers who found that the CDC – gasp! – failed to publish a statistical artifact.

At the point just before it all began to unravel, White House chief counsel John Dean, warning his boss about the difficulty of keeping the lid on all these clandestine activities, famously referred to them as a ‘cancer on the presidency’.

One of the striking differences between real conspiracies and the fake ones beloved of cranks, is that real conspiracies leak like sieves. The Watergate conspiracy was blown wide open, the idea of the CDC’s “conspiracy” relies on the idea that data which have been provided to any qualified researcher on request, and which have been published in peer-reviewed journals, are somehow being suppressed.

Read the rest here: All the CDC’s men (or: McTaggart jumps on a bandwagon just after the wheels have fallen off) @ Guy Chapman's Blahg

A Statistician Evaluates DeStefano 2004 and Hooker 2014 - I Speak of Dreams

Here are the summaries of the statistician's findings on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two papers, which evaluated the same dataset. A summary is here.

My Verdict on the DeStefano Study

The criticism that the study discarded data from African American subjects just doesn’t hold water. No data was discarded. For the subjects who were linked to birth certificates, the researchers performed additional analyses. In this light, I see a careful observational study that assessed the role of potential confounders.

The biggest weakness that I see for this study is that the researchers could not compare subjects who were vaccinated for MMR to those who were not vaccinated at all. The authors wrote that they “lacked an unvaccinated comparison group.” The truth is that the vast majority of kids are vaccinated. Consequently, this study compared the distribution of vaccination ages for case and control children to see if the timing impacted the risk of autism. It didn’t.

My Verdict on the Hooker Study...

Read the full post by Liz Ditz at: A Statistician Evaluates DeStefano 2004 and Hooker 2014 - I Speak of Dreams

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield plays video director while African-American Babies die, or something

Let’s say that I have a secret. Well, not that I have the secret but more like I discovered a secret. Let’s say that it is a secret so heinous that telling it to the world may change the world or, at the very least, save a lot of lives. And let’s say that I’ve vetted the information contained in that secret and I have found it to be true. Do I…

Read more at: Andrew Jeremy Wakefield plays video director while African-American Babies die, or something by Reuben