If science fails you resort to old-fashioned bullying

In the past I have written about the tendency of the scientifically challenged to stifle debate through legal threats. The virus is spreading. Now we have yet another case of criticism, this time about Christopher Maloney, that is disallowed. PZ Myers identifies the genius behind this attempt at censorship:

The Prime Quack has been identified: Andreas Moritz. He has admitted to getting Wordpress to pull Michael Hawkins' blog, and is also threatening me, now.

Here is the way Orac feels about this nonsense.

Seemingly, whenever a quack or a crank encounters serious criticism, the first reaction is almost never to try to argue based on facts, reason, and science, but rather to try to silence the person doing the criticizing. The tactics are many and varied, but the end goal is always the same: Suppress the criticism by any means necessary.

He goes on to list several examples from his own experience to illustrate the point.

Update: Skeptico has discovered this "debating technique" too.

Update II: Apparently WordPress has decided to allow valid criticism once more and the original blog is up and running again. In a new post Michael Hawkins thanks all those that put pressure on WP.

Wakefield leaves Thoughtful House

It appears that following the removal of what was left of his authority, within the scientific community, Wakefield is no longer part of the money making machine called Thoughtful House. Trust Orac to speculate on the reasons behind this move.

The Vaccine Illuminati

It appears the "Vaccine Illuminati" have intervened to stop The Truth from being told. Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, eternal inspiration to the infectious disease promotion movement, have reacted to that vile act of ruling against Andrew Wakefield, and retracting his unscientific article. Orac discusses, and disects, in detail the merites behind their logic and exposes them as fearmongering conspiracy loons.

Update: Of course, they conspicuously ignore those that have died as a result of their appeal to emotion.

Update II: Aggregate of links to the retraction here.

Chris Mooney: Science has to be more unscientific

Chris Mooney, after failing to lower the heat in other topics of science, has proposed his solution to all "controversies." Scientists should play nice and stop invoking facts and reason when confronted with the infectious disease promotion movement. Weird Things notes:

Previously, he’s done this with the evolution/creationism manufactroversy and scientific literacy. Now, after managing not to resolve either problem and missing the fact that blaming scientists for a culture which rejects science and expertise as a manifestation of elitist snobbery doesn’t actually accomplish anything, he’s off to make friends with the anti- vaxers and implore doctors and epidemiologists to build bridges with zealots who demonize their critics as baby-eating monsters.

He concludes:

His suggestions for all those involved in a big public dustup over science to sit around a campfire and sing Kumbaya, are born from a lack of consideration for the psychology of both sides and the environment from which they come, and if they really worked, he wouldn’t even have to write about militant anti-vaxers and creationists in the first place.

Regarding this way of thinking Orac points out that Mooney:

appears utterly unaware that scientists have been trying to reach out and build bridges to leaders of the anti-vaccine movement for years, if not decades. It hasn't worked. It doesn't work. As Mike Stanton pointed out in a comment, public health bodies courted Barbara Loe Fisher of the National Vaccine Information Center (whom I've discussed recently here, here, and here). The only result is that it raised her profile. She hasn't budged an inch; she is still as anti-vaccine as ever. One recent example that stands out in my mind occurred in 2007, when Sallie Bernard of SafeMinds participated as a consultant in the design of a large study designed to ask whether there was a link between thimerosal containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders other than autism. Unfortunately for her, the study failed to find a link. All investigators found were a handful of correlations, both positive and negative, that occurred at a frequency consistent with random chance. In a case of sour grapes, Bernard disowned the study before it was published and then, after it was published, launched attacks against it, even going so far as to write a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine criticizing it.

So, countering a misinformatiion campaign by sitting round a campfire, and holding hands, is the last we need to do. "Every attempt to do so is viewed by them as a sign of weakness or vindication of their crank views, never as an opportunity for compromise." Therefore, science should simply continue to call out the factual errors, and well-known lies, the anti-science groups use to spread their cult. We don't debate the shape of the earth, the aetiology of AIDS, whether our neighbour is in league with Satan, et cetera, either.

Evidence-Based Medicine vs. Science-Based Medicine

The medical profession has adopted Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), and its use of Randomized Controlled Ttrials (RCT's), as principal method to use when looking for the best way to diagnose and treat a certain disorder. Kimball Atwood, for Science-Based Medicine, points out that

several of us [at Science-Based Medicine] consider EBM to be incomplete in its gathering of evidence 

He also observes

that human RCTs, as good as they are at minimizing bias or chance deviations from population parameters, cannot ever be expected to provide, by themselves, objective measures of truth. There is still ample room for erroneous conclusions. Without using broader knowledge (science) to guide our thinking, we will plunge headlong into a thicket of errors—exactly as happened in parapsychology for decades and is now being repeated by its offspring, “CAM” research.

In his view EBM, at present, is a "subset of Science-Based Medicine (SBM), because EBM by itself is incomplete." When it incorporates all the evidence EBM and SBM will be "interchangeable."

Update: Evidence in Medicine discusses EBM and its limitations too.