Radio/review wrap-up

January 11th, 2011 → 12:30 pm @

* This morning, I talked with CNN’s T.J. Holmes on American Morning; here’s the video.

* Also this morning, The Wall Street Journal‘s Katherine Hobson ran a Q&A with me on the paper’s health blog.

* On Sunday, I was on NPR’s Weekend “All Things Considered” with Guy Raz. Raz is exceedingly astute interviewer — but even if you have no interest in hearing me, it’s worth listening to the first several minutes of the segment, in which Raz interviews a remarkable woman named Kelly Lacek, whose story starts out The Panic Virus. (more…)

Post Categories: Media alerts & Reviews

1/11/11: The official release date is finally here

January 10th, 2011 → 10:35 pm @

In 89 minutes, it’ll be the official on-sale date for The Panic Virus. What are you waiting for? Go get yourself a copy.

Also, for those interested, I’ll be on CNN’s American Morning at 8:40 am. Since I’ll already have been awake for three hours, I’m sure I’ll be looking my finest.

Post Categories: Media alerts

The problems with the BMJ’s Wakefield-fraud story

January 6th, 2011 → 11:42 am @

Yesterday, the news broke that the British Medical Journal was running a series of stories that labeled Andrew Wakefield’s infamous 1998 Lancet study that posited a link between the MMR vaccine and autism an “elaborate fraud.” Dr. Fiona Godlee, the BMJ‘s editor-in-chief, compared the MMR scare to the Piltdown man hoax, in which a series of fossilized remains found near East Sussex, England were claimed to be a previously unrecognized early ancestor of humankind. (I’m hoping that has more resonance in the UK than it does in the US, because when I first read that I had absolutely no recollection of the whole Piltdown mess.)

As someone who has spent two years doing nothing but looking into various vaccine scares, I found the way these latest revelations, which were based on reporting by Brian Deer, were packaged to be problematic. (more…)

Post Categories: Blog post