May 9th, 2011 → 9:55 am @ Seth Mnookin
My latest PLoS blog post went up on Friday; in it I discuss a comment I made back in January at American University in Washington DC. It begins:
If there’s any one thing I’ve stressed in my talks over the past three months, it’s that parents of children who believe that their children have been vaccine injured deserve compassion and understanding. (That doesn’t mean they should be pandered to or be allowed to dictate public health policy.) I’ve also said many times that I can’t pretend to know beyond any doubt how I would react if I was in their shoes.
I do, however, know what it’s like to be a parent who feels uneasy when a doctor asks you to take off your newborn’s pants so your child can be injected with a vaccine. It’s scary. I don’t know anyone in the world who likes needles or likes watching needles pierce their child’s skin. However, the fact that something is scary does not convey a license to blithely deny reality — which is why I find the actions of parents who have simply decided for themselves that vaccines and dangerous and at the same refuse to acknowledge the potential repercussions of not vaccinating on those around them to be morally repugnant. This is not a new position of mine; I wrote about it at length in a chapter of my book titled “Medical NIMBYism and Faith Based Metaphysics”…
Click here for the rest of the post.
May 5th, 2011 → 12:28 pm @ Seth Mnookin
In my haste to get through all of my work yesterday while simultaneously letting folks know about my move over to the PLoS Blog Network, I left off four (geesh!) ScienceOnline 2011’ers who are also on the site, namely…Emily Anthes (Wonderland) , Peter Janiszewski (Obesity Panacea) , Martin Fenner (Gobbledygook), and John Rennie (The Gleaming Retort). They’re all excellent, too…
Post Categories: Announcements & Housekeeping
May 4th, 2011 → 7:49 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Two days after The Panic Virus was released, I traveled to North Carolina’s Research Triangle for ScienceOnline 2011, aka #SciO11. The annual conference, which has been transformed into one of the premier science journalism events in the world, is the brainchild of Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker — and it’s no exaggeration to say that it changed my life. (Thanks again, Rebecca Skloot and Ivan Oransky, for lighting a fire under my ass and making sure I attended.) (more…)
Post Categories: Announcements & Housekeeping
May 4th, 2011 → 7:40 pm @ Seth Mnookin
With the exception of Andrew Wakefield, there are no more infamous anti-vaccine “researchers” than Dr. Mark Geier and his son, David.
(photo by Antonio Perez, Chicago Tribune)
Last week, the Maryland State Board of Physicians suspended Mark Geier’s license to practice medicine. (As far as I can tell, this doesn’t affect Geier’s ability to practice in the other states in which he’s licensed, including California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington.) That this move comes years too late for scores of children does not mean it is not incredibly welcome.
Read more on The Panic Virus PLoS blog…
Post Categories: Autism & excerpt & Media & The Panic Virus & vaccines
May 3rd, 2011 → 12:45 pm @ Seth Mnookin
Almost three months ago, a writer named David Kirby wrote a 3,800-word piece for The Huffington Post titled “The Autism-Vaccine Debate: Why It Won’t Go Away.” It was not an impressive piece of reporting. As I wrote in Scientific American at the time,
By obscuring the difference between anecdotes and evidence, fomenting unfounded fears, and disguising tendentious tracts as objective analyses, he might be influencing public opinion, but he’s not helping the search for verifiable truth. (more…)
Post Categories: Blog post
April 22nd, 2011 → 11:02 am @ Seth Mnookin
On Tuesday, Robert MacNeil was on The Emily Rooney Show, which airs on WGBH in Boston. Rooney asked him about my criticisms of his reporting. This was his response:
Well, he’s entitled to his opinion and to sell his book.
It’s true that I expressed my opinion — but I assume what Rooney was asking him about were facts, like, for instance, the fact that he quoted his daughter saying that she believed her son had gotten autism from vaccines but didn’t quote a single scientist or public health official or epidemiologist or vaccine researcher or spokesperson from the American Medical Association or the American Academy of Pediatrics. (more…)
Post Categories: Blog post
April 21st, 2011 → 9:41 am @ Seth Mnookin
This morning, The New York Times Magazine posted Susan Dominus’s lengthy profile of Andrew Wakefield.
As I told Dominus, I have conflicted feelings about pieces like this. On one level, I think they run the risk of simply giving more oxygen to someone who has already taken significantly more of the media’s attention than he deserves. There’s a sort of bizarro-world nature to the correlation between the attention Wakefield receives and the total scientific bankruptcy of his notions…and in a month when an entire Virginia school had to be shut down because of a whooping cough outbreak spread by non-vaccinated students and ten (and counting) children have been hospitalized in Minnesota because of a measles outbreak started by a deliberately unvaccinated child, I’m not sure the rantings of a disgraced doctor who was caught on tape joking about drawing blood from children at his son’s birthday party needs any more attention. (more…)
Post Categories: & Blog post
