Autism News Beat

Tweet We have learned that Rep. Dan Burton (R-Pompous) has been given the go-ahead to hold hearings on vaccines and autism before the House Oversight Committee. Congressional attention, even from someone as unhinged as Burton, gives anti-vaccine groups the vapors. One group, SAFEMINDS, sent out a press release in August claiming “Congressman Darrell Issa, Chair [...]

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Tweet Just in time for World Autism Awareness Day, but too late for April Fools Day, Donald Trump tells us what he knows about vaccines and autism. Speaking by telephone from his underground hair bunker, Donald Trump told the Fox and Friends couch potatoes this morning: “I have a theory, and it’s a theory that [...]

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Tweet One out of every 88 children in the US meets the criteria for an autism diagnosis, according to data released Thursday by the CDC. Two years ago the figure was 1:110. Two years before that 1:150. It’s reasonable to ask what these numbers mean. Are more persons being affected by autism than before, or [...]

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Tweet In Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s dark medical thriller about a viral pandemic, Jude Law plays Alan Krumwiede, a hyperventilating, overexposed anti-science blogger who convinces his 12 million “unique visitors” not to vaccinate. He also makes millions pushing a quack homeopathic remedy, and stalks a CDC scientist, tape recorder in hand. Sound familiar? To those us who [...]

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Tweet Mark Geier, MD, the Maryland man who chemically castrates disabled children, is still licensed to practice medicine in Hawaii, Florida, Missouri, Kentucky, and Illinois. He also has an out-of-state “telemedicine license” in Texas, which expires in November, 2012. California is the latest state to suspend Geier’s medical license. His New Jersey license expired June [...]

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Tweet After sitting through two very boring presentations at this year’s Autism One conference, it was apparent to my colleague and I that writing about the annual anti-vaccine trade fair would be a challenge bordering on pointlessness. What could we say that hasn’t been said before? An hour later we were standing in the lobby [...]

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Tweet America’s oldest anti-vaccine group has fired back at the AAP following its criticism of an anti-vaccine ad placement on the Times Square jumbotron. The misleadingly-named National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) accuses the AAP of “bullying parents instead of being partners in preventing vaccine reactions.” The group was responding to an April 13 letter the [...]

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Tweet The disturbing case of Reginald Cornelius Latson, the autistic young man arrested in Virginia last month, has taken a more disturbing turn. His mother, Lisa Alexander, told an internet-based radio audience Sunday night that Stafford County deputies used racist slurs against her son when they stopped and arrested him May 24. Reginald, whom his [...]

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Tweet The anti-vaccine movement frequently complains that the medical establishment doesn’t spend enough time listening to parents. Sometimes the news and entertainment media take the bait. “It is impossible to overlook the larger and direct dangers inherent in (Jenny McCarthy’s) position on vaccines,” wrote Karl Taro Greenfeld in Time Magazine last winter. “Yet it is [...]

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Tweet Is the anti-vaccine movement looking to Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Nation for inspiration? It seems that way, given that Generation Rescue is calling its May 26 rally in Chicago’s Grant Park “An American Rally for Personal Rights”. In just two years, the movement has gone from Green Our Vaccines to “What Would Thomas Jefferson [...]

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