The Snake Oil Bulletin: Oh Look, More Mommies Who Know Science Better Than Doctors

Greetings once again, truth warriors! It's your weekly dose of vaccine-damaged idiocy known as the Snake Oil Bulletin!

On this week's agenda, we have a grand slew of folks whose entire belief system can be boiled quite succinctly down to the phrase "Waaaah, needles is scawy!" That may be, Little Suzy, but most adult humans grow out of their fear of getting a shot after they start eating solid foods and stop wearing diapers. We say most because clearly these folks never got to that point developmentally, but of course we also doubt they ever stopped soiling themselves.

Strap on your tinfoil and gird your loins. Let's dive right in to some anti-vaxxer woo.

Mommy of the Year would rather murder her daughter than let her have insulin shots

If you still have even the tiniest vestige of hope for humanity, dear reader, our first story will evaporate that quick as a jab. A mother in Ireland has lost the right to kill her daughter by refusing to give her diabetic insulin injections, actually saying the words -- out loud and in front of human beings -- "I would rather want that my daughter dies at home than to give her insulin." Humans are just the worst.

The unnamed thirteen-year-old girl was rushed to a local hospital two weeks ago after she had gone into such severe diabetic reaction that doctors were afraid for her wellbeing. The teen has type 1 diabetes -- the 'betus what comes from your genes -- and her nasty troll of a mother (who is also unnamed, but for whom we're sure you'll concoct some delightful names in the comments, which are NOT ALLOWED) had decided that a little thing like "dangerously high blood sugar" wasn't a medical condition so much as a state of mind. Take it away, wicked hag:

The court was told the mother was hoping that by not giving the girl insulin injections, the diabetes would “go away,” and was afraid that if insulin was administered, she would become dependent on it for the rest of her life.

The mother's right about one thing: not giving her daughter insulin will mean she'll never be dependent on it in her life, what with her dying and all. The medical doctors at the hospital informed the mother that if her daughter didn't receive insulin injections 4 times daily, she could develop dangerously high blood sugar levels again and probably die. That wasn't enough for our enlightened goblin queen, whose single instance of popping out a baby apparently made her more of an expert on medical conditions than people who actually study this crap.

Doctors at the hospital begged the vile harridan to consent to giving the girl insulin injections, but Mrs. Munchausen refused, even though she knew full well the girl needed the insulin because diabetes runs in her family. After days of fighting, doctors FINALLY received a court order from the Irish High Court giving them authority to administer medication despite parental objection, and have appointed a guardian to watch out for the girl's best interests since that's apparently too tough for Cruella over here.

As the folks at Insulin Nation point out , this isn't the first time parents have decided they can wish away the diabetus with chicken soup and warm feelings. Back in May , a seven-year-old boy in Australia was found dead after his parents took him off his insulin regimen and instead gave him what the papers affectionately called "slap therapy." The boy's parents shelled out $1,800 AUS and forced their kid to fast for three days (spoiler: that is bad for seven-year-old diabetics) so that the parents could take him to a Chinese healer who literally beat their son blue in order to get the "poisons" out of him. And oh dear, what do you know? As soon as the little boy vomited his guts out in his hotel room, passed out, and died on the way to the hospital, the "Chinese therapist," Hongchi Xiao, booked the first flight out of Aussie Land he could find.

Of course, the charlatan Xiao is no stranger to being a murderous monster:

“The greater the pain and bruises while slapping means there is more poison inside the body,” he told a seminar in South Africa last year. “You can be your own doctor. We were all born with a self-­healing power but we simply ignore it and spend millions of dollars paying for medications. Nature heals, doctors are only assistants.”

However, he has been surrounded by controversy before.

In 2011, Taiwanese authorities deported Xiao and fined him $US1600 for violating medical regulations, while Chinese media reports say a liver cancer patient paid him $A40000 for treatment, only to die three months later.

What a saint. We suppose that liver cancer patient just didn't believe in nature hard enough.

Insulin Nation also points us to two Wisconsin peaches who in 2008 decided that their diabetic eleven-year-old daughter didn't need her insulin either, and instead tried to pray the diabetus out of her. God (or Satan) answered their prayers by gifting her with diabetic ketoacidosis, of which she died. Instead of taking her to a hospital or calling the police, her parents prayed over her as she suffocated. They were later convicted of reckless homicide.

If there is any bright side to the awful, horrible death of a small child (and we're really stretching here), it's that the court decision and later upholding by the higher court de facto destroyed the "faith healing exemption" that was written into Wisconsin child abuse law. Jesus Christ on Crutches, why was that ever a thing? What ogre stood up on the floor of the legislature and demanded parents should have the right to beat and starve their kids if they yelled "Jesus!" while they did it? Probably the same kind of people who could deny their daughter insulin because she would prefer she die at home than live a moment longer in a world in which doctors and medicine exist. Nothing says #MomHarder than murder.

The anti-vaxxer fail parade just keeps getting better

Next up in people scared of needles, our old friends the anti-vaxxers are back! When last we spied our precious skidmarks, they were fighting rotted-out-fluoride-free-tooth and nail against California's For The Love of Yahweh Vaccinate Your Kids Already bill SB 277. The law passed, removing the personal belief exemption from California's state mandated vaccine requirements in order to attend public school. If you'll remember, that personal belief exemption led to parts of California having lower vaccination rates than some developing nations and consequently gave Goofy and Princess Tiana the measles. Maybe Elsa can freeze the blisters off.

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The anti-vaxxers were so super sad-faced that they were being forced, FORCED WE SAY, to protect their children from easily preventable diseases because Jerry Brown wants to do a million Holocausts only worserer.

Well too bad so sad for them: anti-vaxxers had a chance to argue their case to California and they failed miserably. All they had to do was get 365,880 signatures on a petition to get the law placed on the ballot for referendum. They couldn't even do that, all in all only scoring about 228,000 signatures. Hell, twice as many people signed a petition to get a screamy face racist douchecanoe back on a show about grown adults playing with Hot Wheels. It's not that difficult is what we're saying. For Wakefield's sake, they didn't even earn enough signatures to kick in the required drive to see if the signatures are even legitimate. They couldn't even fake their way to the ballot box!

Oh and also too, the movement to repeal SB 277 was led by former Assemblyman Tim Donnelly (R-Teabag), because of course it was. We're surprised he had enough time to spread infectious diseases around the state in the midst of his campaign to personally inspect the genitals of every teenager in his son's school.

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And speaking of fakery, guess what the anti-vaxxers' next stop on the Fail Train Express happens to be? Shill Science Junction, everybody off!

Over the course of ten years, an anti-vaccine "autism advocacy" group called SafeMinds sent over $250,000 in research grants to about a half dozen different universities and hospitals in the hopes that their financial contribution would prove that vaccines lead to autism. And would you believe it? All that money spent and the freaking "scientists" wouldn't even fudge their results for them. Ungrateful shills.

Yes, it turns out the anti-vaccine science panel funded by anti-vaxxers meant to prove anti-vaxxers were right came back with definitive proof that anti-vaxxers are full of it. No one could have foreseen this coming except everyone with a pulse and even some without.

Over the course of ten years, scientists examined the growth rate of chimpanzees given different schedules of childhood vaccines and compared their behavior, growth, and brain structure with their unvaccinated control groups. The results came up with nothing. The researchers could find zero difference between the experimental and control groups, even in post-mortem brain analyses (really, the worst part about this charade is that 79 chimpanzees had to be euthanized in order to prove to the anti-vaxxers what everybody knew already; why do you hate chimps, SafeMinds? What did Dunston ever do to you?).

Naturally SafeMinds accepted the results of their study with dignity, gracefully conceded they were wrong on this issue, and vowed to change their organization to one that actually tried to help people with autism rather than one responsible for a resurgence of measles and polio over boogeymen. Lolololololol J/K, they're calling the scientists big dumb fakers because these people are babies with mortgages.

SafeMinds latched onto a preliminary pilot study that showed SOME chimps' brains developed SLIGHTLY differently in the SHORT TERM after a vaccination in a SMALL SAMPLE of chimps. SafeMinds took that to mean that vaccines cause autism forever just because, even though the actual freaking scientists providing that data told them to cool their jets and not jump to conclusions.  But lead researcher on the project, Dr. Laura Hewitson, provided a blistering rebuttal to SafeMinds after they tried to impugn her integrity by suggesting her data was faked or cherry picked:

“The same assessments were performed on a much larger number of primates by a team of behaviorists with decades of experience working with nonhuman primate infants,” Hewitson tells Newsweek . “For example, in the pilot study we examined 13 different neonatal reflexes from birth to 14 days of age in just two groups of animals. In the current study, we examined those same 13 reflexes, plus six others from birth to 21 days of age, in six groups of animals—a much more comprehensive experimental design.” [...]

“The comprehensive nature of the current study underscores why the findings from the pilot study should be interpreted with an abundance of caution, given the small number of animals included.”

So SafeMinds is publically attacking its paid researchers, claiming they cherry picked the results of the study, made up their numbers, and didn't science right because it didn't get the results they wanted. Huh. Those criticisms sound awfully familiar. Maybe because those are the exact criticisms leveled against anti-vaxxers when other scientists have pointed out that they're full of bunkum. Seems the shoe is on the other onion-detoxified foot .

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Thankfully everybody and their mother seem to be calling SafeMinds a bunch of Morans, though obviously stated far more diplomatically than we at Yr Wonkette would do. We have a reputation as a nasty, vile little snark mob to uphold.

Take the words of Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation, a real freaking organization with real freaking credentials instead of a crackpot think tank circle jerk like SafeMinds. When asked about SafeMinds predictable reaction to try and discredit the researchers they were trying to pay off, Halladay provided an excellent takedown and a perfect summary of the moving goalposts fallacy:

First, the proposed association was between the MMR vaccines and autism... Then that was disproven. Then it was the thimerosal components in vaccines; now that has been further disproven in a carefully designed animal model study that aimed to specifically examine that question. It has also been suggested that the association is because of vaccine timing, but that too has been disproven. The target always seems to be moving, and the expectation is that scientific resources will be diverted to address each new modification of this hypothesized link.

Dear SafeMinds, liberally apply coconut oil to reduce swelling of that BURN.

If you'd like to know more about how VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM, feel free to check out this metastudy from 2014 which examined mountains of available evidence on the issue only to come to the exact same conclusion: vaccines don't cause autism, and humans really are the worst. Good night, and God help us.

Flotsam, Jetsam, and Hokum

We'll end our bulletin with a rundown of some of the greatest idiots to grace the pages of Yr Beloved Wonkette just this past week. Thank God idiocy is a renewable resource.

• The Alliance Defending Freedom is defending the freedom of Christianistas to bring their Bibles to school, a thing that has never been illegal and never will be. Time well spent.

• The investigation into that horrible Oregon college massacre is going swimmingly, what with the lead investigator believing that a couple dozen dead elementary schoolers were just faking it .

• Thanks to Texas, children across the state will grow up learning about the excellent working conditions all the African "workers" got to "enjoy" on Southern "happiness farms."

• A Tennessee county is taking the preemptive step of calling "SAFE! NO TAGBACKS!" on God if he ever decides to play Smite the Sodomite during recess. Unfortunately the rampaging Friend of Dorothy hordes ravaged the countryside , forcing the poor oppressed legislators to table the resolution. Forgive them, Lord. They know not what they do after hours on Growlr.

• A group of nice Christian soldiers was just innocently discriminating against an evil witch from Hindustan and suddenly everyone's all up in arms or somethin'. Don't you liberals know how many Hindus are Muslims and/or Jewishes in disguise?

• Hope you had fun at the Semi-Annual End of the World Fire Sale and Barbecue Cookout last Wednesday! It's a good thing you remembered the traditional gifts of wool socks, the blood of a virgin, and a nice fat donation to the ministry of the late Harold Camping. Which they'll need. After the world ends.

• Naughty felon Jim Bakker wants you to know exactly what he's wearing under all these clothes . Our guess is support hose and half a tube of Bengay.

[ The Journal / Insulin Nation / Australian News Service / Journal Sentinel / Huffington Post / Raw Story / Science Direct ]