What is fake news? – Lynne McTaggart, Wakefield fan, explains

This was a blog post committed by the Blessed Lynne (Saint & Martyr)™, of WDDTY infamy, back in May of this year. The only reason I’ve left it so long is that I couldn’t stop laughing long enough to excoriate the fuckwittery within, which basically consists of whining, ego, antivax stupidity and defending arch-arsehole Andrew Wakefield. No beating about the bush with witty preamble for once; let us fire up the trusty WTFometer and see what transpires.

Broadcast journalism has landed many low blows before when it comes to alternative views about medicine. 

On the contrary, it tends to be inadvisably tolerant of unproven and unscientific braindribble.

I was eight months pregnant with our first child when we launched WDDTY, and a few moments before I was due to have a live debate with a media doctor, he leaned over and murmured, sotto voce: ‘Did you know that your obstetrician was … 

Read the full story at: What is fake news? – Lynne McTaggart, Wakefield fan, explains

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

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

Working in the quote mine

If you’ve ever watched a politician speak, you might have noticed that they tend to be very, very careful with what they say. Most of them, anyway. They’re very careful with what they say because their opponents are quick to jump on the first little thing that doesn’t quite make sense. Remember John Kerry, our current Secretary of State and former Democratic candidate for President? He said that he voted for something before he voted against it. In the abstract, that sounds like a ludicrous statement. He sounded like a “flip-flopper” and the Republicans let him have it. When you look at what he did, you see that it was a procedural move to kill a bill. He voted for the bill in committee to then vote against it in the full Senate and kill it...

Read more at: Working in the quote mine by Reuben