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Anti-Science: You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.
It has become fashionable in the media recently to lament the apparent lack of faith people have in science today. “Anti-vaxxers,” in particular, are often singled out for censure as “anti-science.” Nowhere is this trend better exemplified than in a March 2015 National Geographic cover story written by Joel Achenbach: “Why Do Many Reason
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Top 10 Lies Told During the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases Hearing
Tuesday, February 10, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee held a Hearing on Vaccine-Preventable Diseases. The hearing was one long propaganda session devoted to getting those who are questioning vaccines to stop doing so. During the course of the hearing, an alarming number of false or misleading statements were made. It’s distressing that such statements were allowed to stand in the United States Senate. So in an effort to correct a whole lot of “misinformation,” I decided to do a Top 10 Lies Told During the Hearing post.
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Critical Thinking 201: Vaccine Science
If you’ve been reading our blog for any length of time, you’ll know that we recommend learning everything you can about vaccines, vaccine adverse reactions and their frequency, the means of transmission of each “vaccine-preventable” illness, and the actual likelihood of catching and/or dying from them long before you let anyone come near you or your child with a hypodermic needle.
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Wishy-Washy on Vaccines? Thank You!
To many people, I hold “extreme” views on vaccines. Unlike many who question the safety of the current vaccine program, I cannot say that I am aggressively, or even mildly, “pro-vaccine.” I have pored through what seems like mountains of scientific and historical data, and my overall conclusion is that, while vaccines looked and seemed like a great idea, they have been undermining the overall health of the population from the start. It’s quite possible that individual vaccines may have prevented significant numbers of acute infections in the short-term, but at what cost?
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Independence and Autism: Viva la Revolution!
Independence. It’s a loaded word in the autism community. The word “autism” was coined because the first “from birth” cases that Leo Kanner encountered in the ’40s appeared to be so self-contained that they had little to no knowledge of, or interaction with, others. A sort of “independence gone wild,” if you will.
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Flu Shot Clinic — “Thimerosal Causes Autism-Like Features”
There’s a bite in the air, houses are bright with holiday lights, and the malls are playing Christmas carols incessantly. Yes, it’s that time of year again: flu season. It seems you can’t go anywhere without seeing a sign telling you to get your flu shot right here! Every pharmacy out there just can’t wait to shoot you up.
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The Autism War: Fiction or True Crime?
I recently finished The Autism War, by Louis Conte, a fast-paced thriller in the style of John Grisham or Dan Brown, featuring international intrigue, corporate corruption, and some seriously bad guys. Much as I enjoyed the book on those merits – the pacing is good, the plotting is terrific, and most of the characters are pretty interesting – the thing that really intrigued me about it was the fact that a lot of the material was based on real events.
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Anti-Vaxxers Say “You Vaccinate, So We Don’t Have To!”
The folks who work behind the scenes here at Thinking Moms’ Revolution have noticed a number of odd pingbacks to “An Open Letter to My Facebook Friends,” written by our own B.K. on the subject of her numerous Facebook posts about vaccines and their risks. The pingbacks are linked to the exact same blog translated into a number of languages; so far I’ve counted Slovak, Croatian, Spanish, German, and Italian. Clearly, someone thinks there’s something about this blog that makes it worth the trouble to translate it and post in a number of different countries – someone with a lot more in the way of resources than we have. The…
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Autism Policy Reform Coalition: Be a Part of the Solution
AUTISM: The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) say that 1 in 68 12-year-olds is on the autism spectrum. Given that those numbers represent a 30% increase from just two years ago, with no changes in diagnostic criteria since 1994 and no “official” identification of risk factors that could lead to prevention, and given that similar rises have occurred with every recent count, chances are very good that the numbers are already 30% higher for today’s 10-year-olds (1 in 52, which is close to the overall estimate for childhood incidence in the United States from a 2013 CDC study), and 30% higher than that for today’s 8-year-olds…
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The CDC’s Autism Tracking is Lacking
If you’re not living under a rock you know the CDC came out with new autism numbers yesterday, 1 in 68 children who are currently 12 years old, and 1 in 42 boys. These numbers come from their Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network. You probably already knew that’s an increase from the 1 in 88 we were given for 2012’s 12-year-olds. According to the CDC, we’ve gone from 1.14% of that age group being “on the spectrum” to 1.47% in two years. A 29% increase in two years! And we already knew from a CDC study that came out in 2013 that at least 2% of the children…
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