Musgrave on vaccine denialism 4 Sep 2009 Ian Musgrave has a smackdown of the false claims and, let’s face it, criminal lies by the antivaxxers in Australia here. Since Ian always knows whereof he speaks, it is a useful and educational post. About a decade ago, a medical researcher at the place I worked, who also practised as a general practitioner, said to me that he was seeing babies die painfully from pertussis (whooping cough) for the first time in thirty years, because of the antivaccine movement. They are murderers in my opinion. Australian stuff General Science
General Science Thoughts on the “Shuttle gap” 5 Oct 2008 The two space shuttle disasters were due to political and military interference in the design of the shuttle. On the one hand, the various senators wanted parts of the shuttle manufactured in places like, of all states, Utah, necessitating the solid fuel segment design that failed catastrophically with Challenger, and… Read More
Australian stuff Pundit parody 4 Aug 2010 Australia doesn’t have lunatics of the calibre of the white supremacist Glenn Beck, at least, not on the media, but we have sufficient punditry to fuel a small nation all right. Idiots like Alan Jones, who incited a racial riot, and the entire news teams of the commercial TV stations…. Read More
General Science Oops, a slight error never killed anyone 16 Apr 2008 Or so you might think NASA is saying, after a 13 year old kid showed they’d miscalculated the odds of an asteroid hitting earth by a factor of 3. Read More
I had whooping cough when I was a kid, and I was old enough to remember what that was like. Pretty grim. But it was nothing compared to the measles, which very nearly killed me and permanently weakened my eyesight. There wasn’t an effective vaccine for these diseases then, so one simply had to try to survive. Just because some of these childhood illnesses sound quaint now, doesn’t mean they aren’t a real threat or can’t come back.
It’s very unfortunate that these nuts have gained so much traction in some parts of the world. It’s hard to imagine that one of the great advances in public health is under such assault, but a combination of quacks, crooked lawyers, and yes, a supposed scientist or two, has done some real harm. Jim Harrison makes a good point. All these people live in the post-vaccine world. Their ignorance of just how terrible and destructive these so-called “childhood” diseases can be is at least part of the problem, though as usual, the real enemy is psuedo-scientific and anti-scientific quackery.