A couple of days ago we introduced you to Dr. Jack Wolfson, a cartoonishly evil cardiologist working in Arizona who sees nothing the least bit wrong with telling people that he doesn't give a shit if their kids live or die, as long as his kid remains vaccine-free. He said as ...read more
President Obama somehow sparked controversy over the weekend by saying that parents should get their kids vaccinated against measles, while New Jersey Governor and presidential hopeful Chris Christie thinks there ought to be "choice" and "balance" on the issue (well, he thought ...read more
With the anti-vaccine movement rearing its ugly head at the most magical place on Earth last week, President Obama took Sunday's pre-Super Bowl interview to make a stand on the question of whether parents should keep this whole disease eradication thing going, and in the ...read more
We're a nation of scaredy-cats. There are no two ways about that. We're easily susceptible not to disease but to the fear of disease -- something far more virulent -- and the media narrative that both drives it and cynically gloms onto it. When Americans thought Ebola was going ...read more
(Image: Stuart Carlson) It's the year 2015 and Southern California still doesn't qualify as the Third World, regardless of what some Republicans lawmakers in the flyovers might think. Yet you'd never know either of these truths by looking at the latest reports on how quickly ...read more
We've covered the idiocy of anti-vaccinators quite a bit here at the Banter, largely out of the goodness of our own hearts. Not vaccinating your kids puts everyone else in danger, so our relentless mockery of the likes Jenny McCarthy is sort of like a public service (okay, maybe ...read more
People with autism get a relentlessly raw deal in the media, and even from the largest organization supposedly devoted to helping them, so it was refreshing to finally see a popular, influential figure help tell a story about autism that kept the focus where it belonged. In his ...read more
Jenny McCarthy recently tried to put one over on planet Earth. She did this by insisting she's not "anti-vaccine." In an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times a little over a week ago, the person almost universally acknowledged as the celebrity face of the anti-vaccine movement -- a ...read more
Recent pro-vaccine convert and co-host of ABC's The View Jenny McCarthy has taken a long, well-deserved beating in these pages for her dangerous campaign of misinformation about vaccines, but if you needed further proof of just how disconnected McCarthy is from reality, check ...read more
The internet is full of idiots, that much is for certain. But sometimes, when the seasons start to turn and the planets align just right, a Learned comes along to take even just one of these internet idiots to task, and we are left to rejoice that it isn't just us, that we ...read more