I’m sure there’ll be lots of questions about The Panic Virus, but as the name of the feature indicates, it’ll cover pretty much everything — and some of the questions posted up there so far have to do with the future of print media (a topic I write about in this week’s New York magazine) and the common threads between my books. I’ll be answering some of the most interesting queries via Skype; the video will be posted sometime in the next week.

^ Mahalo is a Hawaiian word that actually means “thank you.” If you haven’t previously checked it out, there’s an explanation of  how the Mahalo Answers work here and the answers to some other Mahalo FAQ over here.

Post: Parents and pediatricians: Do you think a pre-natal discussion about vaccines would help assuage fears? (The Panic Virus Blog, The Public Library of Science.)

So: from now on, those folks interested in The Panic Virus Blog should go here — and for those of you who prefer using RSS readers, you can get my feed here.

I’m also on Twitter, I recently joined Tumblr, and I’m going to be building up The Panic Virus Facebook page over the next few weeks — so there’ll be plenty of ways to keep up with what’s going on.

Today at 1:35 pm PST, I’ll be on KOMO-Newsradio AM 1000/97.7 FM to talk about the ways in which declining vaccination rates have contributing to the situation. If you’re not in the station’s broadcast range, you can also listen online.

Read the rest of this post on The Panic Virus PLoS Blog…

The most amusing post (for my money, anyway), was titled “In which my Seussian name is drafted in service of an Orwellian conspiracy,” and it deserves reprinting in full:

Back in late 2002, when I was a Newsweek media columnist covering the implosion of The New York Times, Mickey Kaus married my name with my employer’s and came up with Mnoosweek. It wasn’t quite a nonce usage — Kaus used it once more in Slate the following spring and Daniel Drezner referenced a Mnoosweek piece that summer — but that was pretty much it. It’s hard enough to spell Mnookin, never mind needing to turn it into a witty aphorism.

But! I needn’t have worried: It turns out I’ve recently been conferred the status of my very own eponymous neologism: the Mnooklear attack, which, according to Urban Dictionary, is:

The type of desperate attack in which public health officials and drug companies engage when trying to hide their causal roles in the the autism epidemic. Usually involves hiring drug addicts. The main goals of Mnooklear Attacks are to protect shareholders and to keep CDC staff out of jail. Ex: Did you see the Mnooklear Attack on universally respected journalist Robert MacNeil?

Occam’s Razor it ain’t…but hey, with a name like mine, I’ll take what I can get.

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.