Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • Flu roundup

    This was a really crappy season. The system for developing flu viruses is the best we’ve got, but it’s imperfect. This year, we had significant mismatch between the vaccine and the circulating strains.

    According to the CDC, this season peaked in mid-February, and was “moderately severe”—and the worst season in four years.

    Improving our system of flu prevention will take lots of work, including epidemiology, basic science, and front-line medicine.

    A lousy flu season not only causes suffering and death, but also fuels denialits, who sit at their keyboards drooling at the prospect of pointing out vaccine failures. Most arguments center around the tu quoque fallacy: “maybe my vaccine lunacy is useless, but look, you made a big boo-boo this year.” The problem with this reasoning is that in the final analysis, vaccines always do far more good than harm.

    Some critics (OK, one obsessive-compulsive commenter) bring up outbreaks of vaccine-related polio in Nigeria and India. This is an example of imcomplete knowledge. The response to a vaccine-related polio outbreak is the same as a natural outbreak—mass vaccination.

    As I’ve told you before    , there are two types of polio vaccine: IPV and OPV. Both have certain advantages and disadvantages. The OPV (oral polio vaccine) is a live virus, but usually does not cause disease. The disadvantage is that rarely it can cause human disease. The advantage is that if you give it to several children in a rural village, it will be passed to the rest of the village via contaminated drinking water—the same way that wild-type poliovirus is spread. Kids take the vaccine and poop out the virus. Poor sewerage takes the vaccine to the water supply, and the villagers drink it. Mass vaccination then occurs passively. In the U.S., this has been phased out. One of the reasons for this is the large number of immunosuppressed people in this country—those undergoing chemotherapy, etc. They are the ones most at risk for having problems with the live oral vaccine.

    The other polio vaccine is the IPV, which is an inactivated virus that is injected. This confers immunity, and avoids the problems of the live vaccine. What it doesn’t do is passively immunize others like the OPV.

    The usual effective response to an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease is to create a wide area of vaccination around the center of the outbreak. This has been very effective. The correct response is not to throw your hands in the air and say, “I guess vaccines don’t work, let’s give up.”

    One of the basic problems with the anti-vaccine crowd is that they offer no real solutions. Vaccines have been found in study after study to prevent death and debility from many different illnesses. Since denialists don’t have the data on their side, they like to simply point at the problems with current vaccines, without offering solutions.

    If they really wanted to help, denialists could get an education and join the fight. Help us find ways of improving our methods of developing and delivering flu vaccines.

    But quit yer whining.

  • The latest example of crank magnetism – Ahmadinejad becomes a Troofer!

    Yes, that’s right, the Holocaust denier who brought us the international meeting of Holocaust deniers has slipped naturally into trooferism.

    Earlier Wednesday, Ahmadinejad called the 9/11 attacks a “suspect event” in a speech at a public rally in the holy city of Qom.

    “Four or five years ago a suspect event took place in New York,” Ahmadinejad said, in an address carried live on state television.

    “A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed, whose names were never published.”

    “Under this pretext they (the United States) attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then a million people have been killed,” said the Iranian president.

    This was the third time in just over a week that Ahmadinejad has publicly raised doubts about the September 11 airborne attacks on New York and Washington carried out by Al-Qaeda militants which killed nearly 3,000 people.

    In this you see the natural thought process of the denialist. Ahmadinejad ideologically opposes the state of Israel. He believes the state came to exist and has its allies because of sympathy generated by the Holocaust. Therefore, he must deny the Holocaust, or at least create enough doubt to help rile the people up against the Jews.

    Now Ahmadinejad ideologically opposes the United States and its invasion of Iraq (as do many of us). He believes 9/11 was used as an excuse to invade these countries (it was a poor excuse for Iraq, certainly). Therefore he must create a conspiracy to deny the reality of the terrorist attack (now he’s lost me).

    This is the mindset of the denialist. Reality is secondary to ideology. 9/11 created the political impetus for our invasions of other countries, and rather than just attacking these acts for obvious and legitimate reasons instead he must attack reality itself. Why am I not surprised? A Holocaust denier will believe any nonsense.

  • Authoritah! wars

    There has been a terribly pedantic interesting debate going on around here about the nature of authority in science.

    I won’t bore you with the origins of this debate. OK, maybe I will a little, but I’ll try to make this foray into meta-blogging interesting.

    First, blogging is not scientific writing as such. It isn’t peer reviewed, it isn’t a systematic presentation of research—it’s whatever the author feels like writing about that day. Now for various reasons, many bloggers write under a pseudonym. There are many reasons for this. First, most of us are not professional writers by trade, so we don’t care as much about being identified with our work. Second, given our fields, many of us wish to avoid having our colleagues or patients identified serendipidously. Lastly, some of us are early in our careers and might not wish to be identified with our non-professional writing.

    This leads to some interesting conflicts. In my field (internal medicine), we often revere our older, smarter colleagues for their diagnostic and therapeutic acumen. Their skills may arise from experience, reading, research, or, more likely, all of the above. Many physicians improve with age and experience—diagnosis, in particular, relies on pattern recognition, and experience may improve this. And while we may respect our elders for these abilities, we temper this with the knowledge that most medical decision making must be viewed through the lens of evidence-based medicine—just because Dr. X, said it, that doesn’t make it so—but it may improve the likelihood of it being true. Still, show me the evidence! Of course, when you first see a patient, you form diagnostic impressions without the help of evidence-based diagnostic procedures. These impressions help you decide how to proceed. When you read something by a pseudonymous blogger, you don’t have any clear idea of the level of authority of your source.

    (OK, I said I’d try to make this interesting. Sorry.)

    Experience counts for a lot in medicine. Authority figures mean something. If someone says to me, “I think he might have lupus…that’s what Dr. Random Guy thinks,” I’m less likely to care than if they say, “Dr. Landsberg thinks the guy’s got lupus.” I know that Landsberg has the judgment, experience, and knowledge to make good diagnoses. I know that he wouldn’t just throw a disease name out there.

    But I know this because I knew the man, I read his writings, I saw him work. I knew him to be good based on what he did. I accepted him as an authority, and if I asked his opinion, I’d be willing to believe it.

    In medicine, no one specializes in everything. We rely on our colleagues in various sub-specialties to help us out with our patients. We don’t check up on every decision they make, every bit of data they collect, because we can’t.

    And here is one of the core issues about authority and science on the web. When you write about science, “because I said so” is not useful evidence. But in transmitting these ideas in writing, no one expects to know everything you do. It’s just not possible.

    There is a balance in scientific blogging between giving evidence for every fact we jot down and saying, “hey, I’m a doctor, trust me on this one.” This intersects with some of the principles behind denialism—the reliance of fake experts, and the logical fallacy of “appeal to authority”.

    If you don’t trust your source, no amount of evidence they give may convince you. If you trust your source too much, you may be lulled into a false sense of fact-security. But we all must rely on experts at some point.

    We all must beware of what we read, and judge its content based partly on the source. If the source agrees with other reputable sources, that is a mark in its favor. It it is sitting alone in the woods crying “Conspiracy!”, well, the trust level drops a bit.

    This has nothing to do with qualifications, pseudonyms, or any other blogorrhea. It’s about how to read science. Read as much as you can, from as many reliable sources as you can, and if you are interested in a particular topic, keep up on it, as facts will change.

  • Measles—it's no joke

    A new patient came to see me a few months back. She is in her 60’s or 70’s and not in the best health. She is very nice. And simple—very simple. I spoke to her brother before the appointment. He told me that she was a normal, happy kid until the age of seven.

    Then she got sick. At first it wasn’t much, just a cold. Then there was a rash. Then she got very, very sick. She had measles, and she was one of the about 1-1000 people who develop acute encephalitis as a complication of the disease.

    The rest of the kids in the family are quite bright and successful. My patient came to her appointment with a caregiver who assists her in basically any function that requires thought. She’s quite nice, but she’s not happy. She is anxious, perhaps partly because she can’t understand what is going on around her. And she is completely dependent on others for all but the most basic of her physical needs.

    Denialists point to all kinds of pseudo-evidence (i.e. made-up crap) when it comes to vaccination. The point they always miss, partly because they never see it in real life, is that these diseases have real consequences for real people—not just made up connections with autism and other problems. The statistics are quite clear. Vaccines save lives. People who were around in the pre-vaccine era will tell you about the fear.

    I recently did an oral history with my father. During a whooping cough epidemic, his mother rented a cottage on a lake outside the city to keep her kids from getting pertussis and perhaps ending up dead or brain-damaged from hypoxia. As an intern in the 40s he remembers how summer would bring a flood of polio victims to the hospital.

    The diseases that vaccines prevent are very real and much more dangerous than the vaccines designed to prevent them.

    There have been recent outbreaks of measles associated with reduced vaccination rates. Parents who fail to vaccinate their kids bear a portion of responsibility for this, but it’s the noisy idiots like Jenny McCarthy and Gary Null who are more to blame.

    I enjoyed meeting my new patient, but it was a sad visit. Her parents were dead, her siblings had already finished their careers and become grandparents, and she was left behind, a seven year-old in a 70 year-old’s body.

  • Slate parses some crankery

    Slate has a series of three articles on what editor Daniel Engber refers to as “the paranoid style”. Starting with A crank’s progress, sliding into a review of Doubt is their product, and finishing with a spot-on review of Expelled he runs the guantlet of modern denialism. He also happens to hit upon the major commonalities between all pseudoscientists, which of course I find gratifying. For instance, read his description of Berlinski and how he nails the truisms in detecting the false skeptic:

    Forgive me if I don’t pause here to defend the conventional wisdom on evolution and cosmology. (Click here or here for a more expert appraisal.) That would be beside the point. Berlinski’s radical and often wrong-headed skepticism represents an ascendant style in the popular debate over American science: Like the recent crop of global-warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists, Berlinski uses doubt as a weapon against the academy–he’s more concerned with what we don’t know than what we do. He uses uncertainty to challenge the scientific consensus; he points to the evidence that isn’t there and seeks out the things that can’t be proved. In its extreme and ideological form, this contrarian approach to science can turn into a form of paranoia–a state of permanent suspicion and outrage. But Berlinski is hardly a victim of the style. He’s merely its most methodical practitioner.

    Don’t mistake denialism for debate, it is merely the amplification of doubt using tactics no self-respecting scientist should use.

    His review of Expelled is also worthy of note, in particular I enjoy how expands the type of analysis used by Stein et. al to other denialists like anti-vax denialists and the HIV/AIDS denialism such as that published by Harpers. He correctly points out that Harpers is a crap magazine, and that it rejoices in anti-intellectual attacks on science.

    Expelled extends this contrarian approach with one more question: If God might be right, then why are scientists trying so hard to deny His existence? The suppression of faith starts to look like a concerted effort, and so doubt gives way to paranoid science. A skeptic cites bad evidence and sloppy data; the paranoid finds the books have been cooked. A skeptic frets over thoughtless conformism; the paranoid grows frantic about conspiracy.

    The proponents of intelligent design are far from the only critics of mainstream science whose skepticism has taken on the trappings of conspiracy theory. In a 2005 article for Salon and Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reported on a top-secret meeting in rural Georgia where high-level government officials and pharmaceutical executives worked to cover up the link between children’s vaccines and autism. (No such link has been found.) The public utilities are still accused, as they have been for more than 50 years, of conspiring against America’s youth by fluoridating the water supply. And skeptics of the obesity epidemic point out that the media collude with pharmaceutical companies to feed a booming weight-loss industry. Paranoid science reveals nonmedical conspiracies, too–impenetrable ballistics data form the basis for a theory of the assassination of JFK, and the calculations of structural engineering cast doubt on the official story of 9/11.

    More below the fold

    (more…)

  • The inconsistency of cranks

    One of the most salient features of cranks is their inconsistency. A major difference between someone who is trying to reason scientifically and someone who has a fixed belief they are trying to defend against rational inquiry is the scientific thinker is looking for synthesis. They want things to fit together nicely, to make sense, and incorporate as much of the data as possible into a cohesive picture or theory that is convincing to ones peers so they adopt your view.

    A crank, on the other hand, doesn’t care about internal consistency, presenting a cohesive picture of any kind, or creating a body of knowledge to be adopted and utilized by their peers. If someone has a different theory that is completely different from theirs they don’t care, as long as it remains opposed to the scientific theory that impinges upon their fixed belief.

    Case in point, Jennifer Marohasy’s blog features this post which exclaims with glee that Kerry Emanuel has reversed his position on the role of global warming on hurricanes based on this news piece. In an example of crank magnetism Dave Scot at Uncommon Descent has also picked up this thread only he exclaims that Emanuel has reversed his position on global warming itself (check out the intellectual company you keep when you’re a global warming denialist, sheesh).

    What becomes immediately clear, however, is that this is only evidence of the scientific incompetence of these individual writers, their lack of reading comprehension, and the inconsistency of global warming denialists’ approach to the scientific literature. So, what is it we do, boys and girls, whenever a crank mentions some finding in a scientific paper? Look at the primary source! It’s the first step, and I guarantee you the crank’s didn’t read or comprehend the paper at all. Here it is, free at MIT (PDF). Not only does the paper consistent with an impact of global warming on hurricanes, but the cranks have latched on to a paper that uses computer models *gasp*. You see, the endless refrain from global warming denialists that computer models have no value goes out the window the second they perceive a modicum of support from a paper that uses them.

    As far as Kerry Emanuel reversing his position, they got that wrong too. Here’s what he told me:

    Unfortunately, reports about my paper have been greatly distorted. I am certainly not denying global warming, nor am I denying a link to increasing hurricane power, but I am pointing out that one particular technique suggests less of an increase going forward than we previously feared. Also, the technique, when applied to historical climate data from 1980-2006, strongly re-affirms earlier analyses that show that hurricane power has increased by about 50% over the past 25 years.

    Oops. It’s hard out there for a crank. This paper is consistent with global warming increasing hurricane intensity, it just predicts less of an effect going forward. I’m sure Dave Scot and Marohasy will immediately retract all their bogus claims, distortions and lies about this paper, Kerry Emanuel, and, no doubt, their sudden belief in models. While I’m waiting for that to happen though, let’s keep this in mind as an example of how cranks don’t actually care what kind of evidence they must use to preserve their fixed belief, or that it be consistent with their previous statements, arguments, etc. All that matters is that science they oppose ideologically gets crapped on.
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  • Cult of Scientology update

    There are a few news items worth mentioning.

    The daughter of a Norwegian politician     killed herself after taking a “personality test” at a Scientology cult office near her dormitory. Given the cult’s history, I can see why folks would like to draw a causal connection here, but there aren’t many details in the news reports. I hardly seems likely that one encounter with the cult would be enough to drive someone to suicide—it is more likely that she was already depressed, and was unlucky enough to seek help in the wrong place.

    A not-so-well-known TV actor who used to be a cult member is speaking out against the “church” in a new video. He isn’t the most articulate spokesperson for sanity, but the video is pretty damning. It contains a lot of Scientology jargon, and comes off as the testimony of someone who has recently escaped, is pissed off, and wants everyone to know. There’s more from (erp!) Fox.

    The taxpayers of Boston were nearly duped into paying for a Scientology cult school. The school’s grant application specifically states that the curriculum will be based on the methods of Applied Scholastics, an arm of the cult that claims:

    Based on L. Ron Hubbard’s extensive technology, Applied Scholastics™ programs enable individuals to handle the literacy and education of the children and people in their communities.

    Aside from Establishment Clause problems, this is NUTS! It takes 15 seconds on google to find the Scientology connection here. The folks on the school board (or whomever is responsible) either didn’t know, or worse, did know.

    Then, of course, there is the whole “Anonymous” thing—I bet that pisses them off.

    Scientology is one scary cult, and they hate it when you call them out. In fact, they enjoy trying to intimidate those who speak out. All the more reason to do it, folks.

  • Syphilis!

    Southeast Michigan’s Genesee county is experiencing an outbreak of syphilis. The largest city in the county is Flint, made (in)famous in Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me.

    Syphilis is a nasty sexually transmitted disease with an interesting history. It may have originated in the New World. It was the subject of the infamous “Tuskegee Experiment”. It has enough different symptoms that it is sometimes called “the great imitator”.

    In 2007 there were 15 reported cases in the county; so far in 2008, there are 33. According to the county health department:

    Certain risk behaviors that increase the likelihood of contracting syphilis have been associated with this outbreak. These include having unprotected sex with multiple partners and participating in the exchange of sex for drugs or money. Transmission of syphilis is also being seen among men who have sex with men in Genesee County.

    About 13% of the county’s population is below the poverty line, and in Flint the number is over 26 percent. This is not a coincidence.

    As Michigan’s economy has continued to circle the drain, educational and health care systems have be strained and broken. Without access to information, jobs, and hope, STDs flourish.

    I received the notification in an email with the presumption that the outbreak is headed my way. As Michigan continues to suffer, we’ll see what walks in the door here. I’ll let you know.

  • Mike Adams – Hysterical Luddite of the Natural Food Movement

    Sometimes I just can’t get too angry about some particularly insane rant from a denialist. In this case, HIV/AIDS denialist, scientific medicine denialist and all-around crank Mike Adams rants about the prospect of food sterilization by irradiation:

    Let’s be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don’t want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don’t want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole lot more money than any food ever did).
    …
    The FDA, for its part, has for many decades conducted its natural medicine censorship campaign, whose only purpose is to deny the People access to accurate information about the healing properties of natural medicines found in foods and herbs.
    …
    I believe we must keep our food supply fresh and alive. (Sounds kinda obvious, huh?) And if there’s a little extra bacteria on the spinach, it’s nothing that a healthy body can’t handle anyway. Take some probiotics and avoid antibiotics, and you’ll be just fine. E. Coli is really only a threat to the health of individuals who have had their immune systems (or intestinal flora) destroyed by pharmaceuticals in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with some living organisms in your milk, on your almonds or on your spinach. Wash your food, get plenty of sunlight and avoid using antibiotics.

    The human body is NOT a sterile environment. To try to make our food supply sterile is insane, and anyone who supports the irradiation of the food supply is, in my opinion, supporting a policy of genocide against the American people. To destroy the vitality of the food supply is a criminal act of such immense evil that it stands alongside the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.

    You see, it’s not enough for them to poison our water (fluoride), poison our children (vaccines) and lie to us about the sun (skin cancer scare stories). Now they want to destroy our foods… and thereby take away any natural medicine options that might actually keep people healthy and free. Remember: A diseased population is an enslaved population.

    Now go eat your Big Mac, drink your Pepsi and don’t ask too many questions.

    Wow, talk about some paranoia, conspiracism, denialism, and crankery all rolled into one! I mean we’ve got fluoride paranoia, anti-vaccination denialism, germ theory denialism, skin cancer denialism (a new one!), combined with a completely inane fear about irradiation of food.

    I’ll just mention one thing that has elluded our hysterical little health ranger. Irradiation does not “kill” your food. In fact, if a cell is living a “lethal” dose of radiation doesn’t necessarily make the cell keel over and die. All it does is cause enough DNA damage so that cells can no longer reproduce. The bacteria are still there, which is different than sterilization by washing or autoclaving, they’re just incapable of reproduction, and guess what? Strawberries aren’t particularly mitotically active after they’ve grown and ripened. I have cells in my lab called feeder cells – fibroblasts irradiated so they can no longer divide – that are used to maintain embryonic stem cells in a pluripotent state that stay alive for weeks in culture. Irradiation of humans, for instance, is only lethal when cells that are susceptible to irradiation, like GI and marrow cells, are killed. Maybe too subtle a point for Adams, but I digress.

    This is such a wonderful rant and I can’t get angry over it because it just demonstrates how completely insane this particular denialist is. He doesn’t understand electromagnetic radiation and even has a piece up from a colleague on the the evils of microwaving (read cooking your food). The microwave is an evil Nazi invention that is responsible for everything from obesity to erectile dysfunction! Food irradiation is the greatest crime ever committed in history! The government wants to kill us all using clean cooked food!

    It’s denialism that comes pre-debunked, I love it.
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  • Expelled makes me sick, or it would if I were allowed to see it

    If you haven’t been keeping up, let me give you a quick heads up about this whole Expelled brouhaha.

    A bunch of lying Creationist cultists decided to make a film whining about how oppressed Creationist “scientists” are. Ben Stein got involved somehow. They hoodwinked a bunch of real scientists into talking to them. They excluded any scientists who were religious but accept evolution. They hyped the film to evangelicals, but barred reviewer, journalists, or the scientists who are in the film from seeing it. They expropriated copyrighted material. They lied a lot.

    But really, the part that bothers me the most is that they are trying to link evolutionary biology with the Holocaust, which is bad enough, but they don’t even believe it. It is strictly a scare-tactic. If they believed it, then perhaps they would be less anti-semitic.

    If you want to see the details and haven’t been keeping up, just use Expelled as a search term at ScienceBlogs, but start here.