The paper has been found to be multiply and fatally flawed, with Wakefield and his work being thoroughly discredited. As the Lancet editorial itself states:

Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.

That’s great news, especially after Wakefield had his head handed to him last week by the GMC over his unethical and irresponsible behavior that led to this horrible paper being published in the first place.

The Lancet statement is a bit bloodless… but they are a professional research journal and not a blog, so it’s not appropriate for them to call out Wakefield in more emotional — and utterly deserved — terms. It’s up to the blogs to call out Wakefield for his tireless efforts in creating of the modern antivaccination movement, which is becoming so successful that measles, mumps, pertussis, and other preventable diseases are on the rise again. And to note that not only was his research wrong, but that he may have faked his data. And to say that he has a huge conflict of interest here, since at the time he was involved in creating an alternative to vaccination that would make him very, very rich if people became scared to vaccinate their kids. And to inform people that Wakefield was in the pocket of lawyers trying to sue the vaccine industry. And to basically call out the entire antivax movement for the incredible damage they have done and continue to do to public health.

All that’s left now is for the GMC to officially sanction Wakefield, disbar him, essentially, to finish this all up officially.

Of course, that won’t even slow Wakefield or the antivaxxers. They don’t care for the real world, based on evidence and fact. They are, for all intents and purposes, religious zealots now, believing in Wakefield, Jenny McCarthy, and the rest with such fervor that there is literally no amount of evidence that can ever sway them. And they will continue to spin, fold, and mutilate the truth, while we watch as diseases rise back from the dead, infecting hundreds of thousands of people, and killing many of them.

Never forget what’s at stake here. Never.

My thanks to the many, many BABloggees who sent me email or tweeted about this. Originally posted on The Bad Astronomy Blog.

The problem is that for a lot of this so-called alternative medicine, there is no evidence it works, and in fact evidence it doesn’t work. Worse, a lot of its biggest purveyors actively try to denigrate real medicine, the stuff that, y’know, works, in an attempt to bolster their alt-med claims. And you have to be a little suspicious when they hawk their wares on their sites, too.

So I question the motivations of some of these people, including one Mike Adams, about whom I wrote a couple of days ago. When called out for what is apparently voter fraud for a Twitter Shorty Award, he threw an epic tantrum that displays a decided lack of grip on reality (assuming he honestly believes what he’s selling). After that fact-free diatribe he followed up with a rant about skeptics that’s so far off the mark that it’s hard to believe anyone could post something like that honestly. Steve Novella takes him down on that one.

And as if these word spasms from Adams weren’t enough, he posted a third article where he completely gets science wrong, claiming water and quantum mechanics are magic, and then a fourth about the Shorty Awards where he once again ramps up the paranoid conspiracy theories.

Sigh. The irony is that he makes my job easy since he’s self-debunking, but also makes it harder because so many people swallow what he says whole without even giving it a moment of critical thought.

Joe Mercola, the other "victim" professing to have the vapors over this Shorty Award nonsense, decided to jump into the fray as well. Instead of using facts — because why start now? — he thought it was a good idea to say that Rachael Dunlop is fat:

An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs.

Rachael is a woman who has tirelessly fought quackery and the dangerous wares of many alt-med purveyors, and of course Adams and Mercola are squarely in her crosshairs. She has called out many an antivaxxer, and was a key player in the travesty involving Dana McCaffery (an infant who died of pertussis) and Meryl Dorey, an antivaxxer who claims no one dies from pertussis anymore.

So when faced with someone like Rachael who has years of experience and who wields science, evidence, and reality, Mercola decided to stick out his tongue and call her fat.

Wow, folks. There’s your alt-med hero.

And yes, I am engaging in an ad hominem, an attack directed at someone instead of their arguments. But it’s not always wrong to do so; in this case Steve Novella, Orac, Rachael, and many others, including me, have already shown that people like Mercola and Adams are full of it. But sometimes that’s not enough. I think it does a lot of good to see how vile these people can be, and something like this is not only warranted, but needed, especially when these alt-medders set themselves up to be victims, claiming to be sympathetic and only wanting to help. They don’t help; they hurt.

Happily, some of Mercola’s followers are starting to see through him.

Look. We’re not talking about goofy nonsense like ghost-hunting or UFOs here. We’re talking about people’s lives. Alt-medders like Adams and Mercola reject treatments that we know to work, that we know can cure illnesses, that we know can relieve pain and suffering on a massive scale, and that we know can save lives. That’s what you’re turning your back on when you listen to them.

And I still endorse Rachael for the Shorty Award in health. Keep fighting the good fight.

Originally posted on the Bad Astronomy Blog

As Randi says,

We at the JREF are very proud to be part of the concerted effort to aid Haiti to recover from this catastrophic event. To my mind, there is nothing more disturbing than hearing the distressed cries of children who are subjected to grief and/or injury, and my personal contribution has already been added to the encouraging total that mounts hour by hour. Please be generous and help us to reach out to Haitians of all ages, of any and all philosophical orientations.

Richard Dawkins will cover $10,000 of PayPal fees, so if you use that method 100% of your donation will go to help.

You can donate here. Please help.

But now, finally, I feel that I have arrived at the Holy Grail of skepticism: a goofball antiscience promoter has quote mined me.

Quote mining is a tradition among the antireality crowd: they find something a scientist has said, and then leave out certain words, or edit out the context, making it look like the quote is the opposite of what the actual intention was. Creationists are notorious for this, but others do it as well.

On a bulletin board site called Christian Forums, there is a user who goes by the name "Agonaces of Susa", and this person has the usual antiscience CV stocked with creationism and such, but also, apparently, is a supporter of Velikovsky’s ridiculous and long-ago-debunked claims about astronomy.

For those of you who are happily unaware, Immanuel Velikovsky wrote a series of books decades ago saying that the events in the Bible were literally true, and caused by various astronomical things like planets careening around the solar system like billiard balls, interacting in impossible ways, and doing many impossible things. He’d have been better off just saying those were all miracles of God, but still, a lot of people swallowed his nonsense whole. It’s mostly dead now, with just a few reality-denying holdouts. I wrote a chapter in my first book, Bad Astronomy, dealing with the Velikovsky affair.

In this post on the forums, AoS says this little gem:

You trust the pseudoscientist Phil Plait that, these are his words, “Magnetism is…a joke in astronomy”?

Wow! That makes it seem like astronomers are idiots, doesn’t it? As if we don’t believe in magnetism at all, and that we think it has no role in astrophysics. But wait! Look at what he wrote. It has the magic wand of quote mining pseudoscience: the ellipsis! That means he left something out of what I said. And so what was it he left out?

Magnetism is a very important topic in astrophysics (despite some pseudoscientists lying and saying this force is ignored), but it’s not well-understood. It’s fiendishly complex, so much so that it’s a joke in astronomy: when giving a colloquium about an astronomical object’s weird features, saying it’s due to magnetism will always get a chuckle out of an audience. And it’s a standard joke that if you want to derail a talk, ask the speaker about the effects of magnetism. In three dimensions, magnetism is ferociously difficult to model.

I bolded the part that was quote mined, and as you can see, AoS completely took out of context what I was saying. He also misinterprets what I said about Velikovsky. While I did say that Velikovsky was wrong about everything, I meant that he was wrong about his science. Sure, he said Venus would be hot, but the reason he said it would be hot was completely wrong (Velikovsky claimed it was ejected whole from Jupiter, which is about the wrongest wrong you can ever wrongly wrongify). Even if you drop a shotgun you might have one pellet hit the target, but that ain’t skill.

That thread on the forum goes on and on, and AoS is joined by others who appear to willfully misunderstand what I’m saying, or at least pick and choose from what I’ve said to make it look like I’m wrong. That might work for the flock (or the Simpsons), but the rest of the world sees right through them.

But will these people listen? Of course not! Because this is their arguing tactic:

Still, it’s an honor to have been quote mined. Thank you, gentlemen, for reminding me just why I fight this fight every single day.

My musings on this have been twisted and distorted by UFO folks — shocker! — even though I’ve been pretty clear about what I would count as evidence. But now we may have a way to cut through the garbage. A new website has been started for professional and amateur astronomers to report Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. I rather like this new UAP acronym, since it avoids the UFO/flying saucer baggage. Anyway, it was set up as part of IYA 2009 to help astronomers report things in the sky they may not immediately understand. Better yet, it has links to handy guides that will help people who might otherwise misidentify normal things like sundogs and other weather phenomena.

The website is the brainchild of Philippe Ailleris:

Despite the controversy surrounding the topic, he believes that it is possible to approach the UAP field from a professional, rational, and scientific angle without any a priori. He considers that UAP studies my increase the scientific understanding of today poorly understood natural phenomenon, and ultimately he even sees the potential for Science to discover new unknown phenomena, therefore making such study invaluable. His research therefore focuses on attempting to raise the interest of the scientific community and to bridge various fields to devise what he believes is the necessary multidisciplinary approach to studying the phenomena.

I agree. As Carl Sagan said, whether UFOs are real and we’re being visited, or they’re a mass social phenomenon due to the way our brains work, either aspect is fascinating and worthy of actual study.

I love this video, for a lot of reasons. First, as should be obvious to anyone who prefers not to set their head on fire, ear candling is dangerous and ineffective. Unless you’re trying to set your head on fire. Then it’s very effective.

Second, Ms. Simpson clearly thinks this is a bad idea as well. She titled the video "Who gives this kind of candle for a christmas gift?", and her reactions to it in the video is pretty clear. I love how one purported benefit of ear candling is relief of vertigo, but Ms. Simpson complains of nausea constantly in the video.

Third, and related to the second, the video shows how painful and awful this procedure is. It may set antiscience "alternative medicine" back a thousand years. Which is where alt-med is anyway. So I guess that’s a wash.

Fourth, it makes me wonder if anyone has sent Ms. Simpson to this website. I’ll refrain from commenting on any potential video of that.

Fifth and finally, it gives me a chance once again to use this drawing, which has been lonely lately:

I have only one comment (especially if you’ve seen my earlier posts on stuff like this): why would God have such terrible penmanship?

The twist? Some of the employees refused vaccinations for religious reasons:

"I am a Christian, and my religion prohibits me from receiving vaccines," said Tyrika Cowlay, who was a lab technician.

First and foremost, this isn’t a religious issue. It’s a safety issue. I mean, c’mon. We know vaccinations prevent the spread of diseases, especially among children, and even more so among those who are too young to be vaccinated themselves — herd immunity is all those infants have.

Second, I’m thinking that if your religion forbids you from vaccinations (and to my knowledge, mainstream Christianity does not preclude them), then maybe a children’s hospital isn’t the best line of work for you (any more than an orthdox Jew should work at a pork rendering factory). That may seem harsh, but let’s replace a few words in the linked article and see how you feel:

Several Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia employees were fired for refusing to wash their hands after using the bathroom.

The people who were let go said this year is the first that the hospital has mandated hand washing.

“I never thought that not washing my hands after I used the toilet would result in the loss of my job,” said [one of the workers who was let go].

Imagine someone at a hospital claiming their religion says they can’t wash their hands! If I saw a hospital employee leave the bathroom without washing, I’d file a complaint instantly. I have no qualms with the hospital making vaccinations a mandatory requirement.

However, one issue raised in the article is that some employees were granted exemption from the vaccinations and some weren’t. If that’s true, it’s unfair. No one should be exempted due to their beliefs.

There. Problem solved.

So while I’m sorry these people had to be let go, I will always choose children’s safety over someone’s religious or personal beliefs. Always.

Tip o’ the syringe to Matt Andrews. Originally posted on the Bad Astronomy Blog.

Anyway, he has gone to the very font of new age nonsense, the Huffington Post, to spew more woo: he’s written an article about why skepticism is bad. It’s almost a bullet-pointed list of logical fallacies.

About the "poison darts" of criticism:

Most of my stinging darts come from skeptics. Over the years I’ve found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can’t abide speculative thinking.

<sarcasm>Yes, because scientists have no imaginations and cannot come up with original thoughts.</sarcasm>

But wait, he’s not done! Pandering to religious people:

Since the skeptics who write venomous blogs trust in nothing, I imagine that God will outlive them.

Oops. He’s confused trust and faith. Not surprising, since he’s confused about a lot of stuff:

No skeptic, to my knowledge, ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others. Typically they sit by the side of the road with a sign that reads “You’re Wrong” so that every passerby, whether an Einstein, Gandhi, Newton, or Darwin, can gain the benefit of their illuminated skepticism.

That first line trembles on the very edge of being a blatant and gross lie. Given that Einstein was a skeptic, Darwin was a skeptic, Sagan was a skeptic, Feynman, Gould, and thousands of other scientists are skeptics, what he said is simply ridiculous. Edward Jenner, I think, could arguably have advanced the welfare of others, having invented the vaccine, which has saved hundreds of millions of lives over the years. How many has Chopra saved? And, in fact, almost all advances in science are done by skeptics; true believers are the ones who don’t have the motivation to innovate.

But the moonbeam spinning continues:

It never occurs to skeptics that a sense of wonder is paramount, even for scientists. Especially for scientists.

Yes, thankfully he informed me of my lack of a sense of wonder. Sheesh. Go to any blog post I’ve written in the "Pretty pictures" category and be stunned by my lack of wonder and awe at the natural universe around us.

And then he makes his biggest mistake, one that is all-too-common by people who think skepticism is the same thing as cynicism:

Skeptics know in advance — or think they know — what right thought is.

Bzzzzt! WRONG. We don’t know necessarily what the right thought is. But we do know when we see a failure in the process of thinking. And in the case of one Deepak Chopra, that failure is lit up like a neon sign and draped in the open for all to see… if they’re willing to think about it.

Originally posted at the Bad Astronomy Blog.