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Face It, You Think You Know Better Than Me
Posted on April 3, 2017 16 Comments
There’s this person, we’ll call her “Ginny,”* who is an ardently anti-vaccine. She has multiple blogs, multiple social media accounts, participates in protests (traveling far and wide, money for the family be damned), and even thinks she leads a political party. Ginny has no medical or scientific training, per se. The closest she’s gotten is […]
Thimerosal Is a Salt, and It’s Pretty Safe
Posted on October 18, 2016 3 Comments
I completely understand why chemicals are scary. From the time that we’re kids, we’re told that there are poisons out there, and that those poisons are chemicals. They usually have really complex-sounding names, names we don’t use everyday. So I also understand when people are skeptical of chemicals included or added in food. Remember the […]
Antivaxxers Trumping CDC
Posted on October 16, 2016 3 Comments
I’ve always been impressed by the cognitive dissonance exhibited by many in the anti-vaccine community. But it wasn’t until this election cycle thatI comes to understand exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. When I see Donald Trump, a sweat stain that just wont come off your favorite country, tell a lie and […]
The Rorschach Test of anti-vaccine beliefs
Posted on June 15, 2016 1 Comment
You have probably heard by now about a documentary spliced together by known anti-vaccine fraud Andrew Wakefield. I write that it was “spliced together” because so much of it is non-linear. There’s no introduction, thesis statement, and supporting facts. It’s all a hodge podge of talking heads, testimonials, spliced sampling of a recorded conversation of […]
The fear a 12 year old Mexican can raise
Posted on June 5, 2016 16 Comments
I think I’ve told you this before once or twice, but let me just repeat the story again. When I was a kid, I was always interested in all things having to do with science and technology. Dad was a car mechanic, his two brothers fixed televisions and radios. They learned their respective trades through […]
Another day, another bad anti-vaccine study
Posted on May 27, 2016 6 Comments
Let’s say that you think food A caused disease B. To test your theory, you get cases of people who got B and controls of people who did not get B. Then you compare the odds of exposure to A. The ratio between the odds is called the odds ratio, and anything significantly different from […]
That pesky English language
Posted on March 9, 2016 5 Comments
My grandmother told me a story about her and my grandfather that made me laugh. There is a word in Spanish that used to be a slur but has changed a bit. The word is “güey“, a derivation of the word “buey” (bull). It used to be used to call someone stupid or a dimwit. […]
EpidemioLogical 