Oh, great. Orac just has to tell me that the University of Minnesota is going to host an anti-vaccine conference on 24 January.
First, let me say this, though: they get to do that. Presumably they’ve rented out (or possibly obtained student or faculty sponsorship) Cowles Auditorium at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and just about anyone can do that. They may be fraggin’ morons, but they’re part of the public, and it’s a public university.
Still, this is painfully stupid and a disservice to the public trust. It’s a conference in which a train of pseudo-experts will lie, lie, lie in order to sell books — in fact, I suspect it’s a bit of a con to peddle their books, since the $99 admission fee includes dumping a pile of crap, the garbage these guys have written, in your lap. That $99 is also one reason I won’t be attending, much as I’d like to document the dishonesty; of course, another reason I won’t be going is that I doubt this gang of propagandists will be entertaining, much less informative.
I recognized some of the speakers’ names, and others I looked up. It’s largely a hodge-podge of shills from the Age of Autism blog — so right there you know it’s not going to be very good.
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Louis Conte: a policeman who wrote a novel about a conspiracy.
Tony Colletti, a good suburban cop and father, finds himself drawn into the controversy over vaccines and autism when he tries to uncover the truth behind the shadowy Vaccine Court. His dangerous journey forces him to will risk his life and honor while confronting corrupt government officials, the powerful pharmaceutical industry, and disturbing elements of his own past. Colletti and his allies battle spies, Russian gangsters, and sexual predators preying upon disabled children. They go to war against foes who manipulate the media, fabricate scientific research, and viciously attack those who question vaccine safety.
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David Lewis, a retired environmental microbiologist, who has a history of defending Andrew Wakefield (incompetently), and who believes in a “conspiracy with the pharmaceutical industry and government agencies to exact what he calls “retribution” on the purportedly innocent Wakefield.”.
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Kent Heckenlively, a former attorney and a contributor to the Age of Autism blog and notorious nut.
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Judy Mikovits, a scientist whose claim to fame, a paper in Science, was retracted under a cloud, and who was so untrustworthy that she was jailed for stealing lab notebooks…and she was fired.
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Mark Blaxill, a guy with an MBA, and another Age of Autism crank and professional loon. He has no scientific qualifications at all.
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Dan Olmsted, another AoA hack, a journalist with very little knowledge of science, who thinks of himself as a martyr for True Science.
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Wayne Rohde, an attorney and JAQ-off.
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Ann Dachel, an editor at AoA, who doesn’t know any history at all.
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Mary Holland, another lawyer. Orac does not think highly of her.
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Kim Mack Rosenberg, a lawyer, and a contributor to this wonderfully titled book, “Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children”. It’s all a conspiracy!
So of these ten people, two have a science background, and one of them is disgraced and discredited. Four of them are lawyers or ex-lawyers. The others just seem to be lay people obsessed with finding a cause for autism.
I do love the fact that of the 9 slots in the schedule, 3 of them are going to one guy, Conte, whose credentials consist of having written a novel, filed under FICTION. That seems apt, since the rest of them are going to make shit up, too.
I’ll contribute nine dollars to the “Send PZ to a migraine-inducing drooling paranoid idiot bollocksfest” fund. If you really wanna go, that is.
@Hank_Says,
Come on, isn’t he in enough pain already?
I will pay the other $ 90! It would be nice to hear PZ rant against anti-science as a change of pace from the anti misogyny banner he has had to take up lately. Don’t get me wrong, that is important too, but I miss the knight of the zebra fish.
Hmm, is PZ giving his zebra fishlets their vaccines at the proper intervals? *snicker* I’ll have to check what is needed and when. I suspect this will take some time.
Have some grog and swill while you wait.
Hee hee.
I mistakenly saw the word “aliens” in there while I was scanning that paragraph. Would’ve been just as plausible.
Quackery in my back yard; a victory for grifters and quackery in an Ontario court.
I noticed there are also no immunologists or pediatricians or infectious disease specialists.
TIL: PZ is a Shadowrun aficionado.
Rob @ 6, I was wondering when someone would bring that up. It’s heartbreaking. We have open access (albeit with flaws) to health care, especially for children. I like to think it’s part of our growing pains as we confront our horrific past* with regards to First Nations. However, no child, no person, should have to be sacrificed.
And, I’m no expert, but does Conte’s novel sound like those bad Christian novels you see at the grocery checkout? Where the whole world is against the protagonist?
*I’d like to think we’re confronting it, but sadly, we’re not.
/back to the lurk. Will try to come back.
You want conspiracy theorists to be confused by real facts that might show they are wrong? *gasp*
Have a tankard of grog, or a glass of swill on the house.
It’s a homeopathic conference, PZ. The less you attend, the more you learn!
I’ll try again in the right thread…
I don’t understand why this isn’t equivalent to yelling fire in a crowd when there is no fire. This isn’t just expressing a counter opinion in a scientific debate. There is no scientific debate. Promoting these lies endangers the lives and well-being of others, both those who refuse to vaccinate and those who have to live around them. Free speech has its limits, and endangering others should be one of them.
Also, wasn’t there some connection between Wakefield and a group of lawyers who paid for his bogus research?
Absolutely.
The other thing that all these anti-vaccine fans of Wakefield overlook is that his personal interest in the topic was his own vaccine. He didn’t want to discredit all vaccines. He wanted to show that one particular vaccine was faulty because he had his own replacement product not-quite-ready to promote.
All of the alternative-medicine folks keep blatting on about strengthening the immune system. A vaccine informs the immune system.
A vaccine, in basic form, is simply a puncture wound with a dirty stick. What could be more natural than that?
Louis Conte actually participated in an unethical and incompetent study designed—of course!—to prove that vaccines cause autism:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/05/11/another-swing-for-the-fences-and-a-miss/
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/05/24/anti-vaccine-warriors-vs-research-ethics/
Just got my flu shot (highly recommended for my age group). I wonder how many of them have done so?
I wonder if Conte self-published. Not that self-published automatically equals garbage. But traditional publishing implies at least one other person likes your book enough to get it ready for publication, and that person (who works to edit and sell books) thinks it will sell enough copies to be worth it. If Conte has an actual press backing it, it implies that multiple people thought it was a good idea.
(I’m with Trixie; it not only sounds like it doesn’t question that vaccines are a bad idea, but that its appeal strikes me as less for its literary value, but for the smug sensation that you are like the hero, even if you are just telling off people on the Internet, the school nurse, and the doctor who sends her vaccinated kid to your kid’s preschool, rather than battling the Russian Mafia.)
@6 – about that Hippocrates Health Institute, from articles I’ve read it is only licensed as a massage facility by the state of FL. And Clement, the head of HHI, is not recognized by the state of FL as a licensed MD or Naturopath – or any sort of health provider of any sort. My question is, why is FL allowing HHI to continue to ‘treat’ people with quackery at an unlicensed facility? Are FL laws so weak and pathetic it can’t shut down these sorts of facilities?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/aboriginal/doctor-treating-first-nations-girls-says-cancer-patients-can-heal-themselves-1.2832760
Patricia Phillips @18: We’re talking about the United States of Caveat Emptor.
Thread won.
Probably.