First she takes down "the Donald" and now Rosie takes humiliates anti-vaccine nut David Kirby. I am becoming a fan:
Rosie O'Donnell vs. David Kirby on the "causation" issue of autism: Guess who loses?
Category: Alternative medicine • Autism • Medicine • Quackery • Skepticism/critical thinking
Posted on: February 5, 2007 9:01 AM, by Orac
Pity poor David Kirby.
After all, he made his name by hitching his star to a losing hypothesis, namely that the mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. He wrote a book about it, Evidence of Harm, back in 2005 and has milked that sucker dry ever since. Most recently, his appearances culminated in a "debate" last month with Arthur Allen, whose book Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver just garnered a very favorable review in the New York Times, during which he did a most amusing dance around the issue by pointing to "other sources" of environmental mercury including forest fires and mercury vapor arising from crematoria when corpses with amalgam fillings are cremated. (Careful, David, or you'll drift into serious anti-amalgam woo. Next you'll be prattling about "toxic teeth.") Of course, what else could he do, given that, as the epidemiological evidence comes in in the years since thimerosal has been removed from vaccines, there hasn't been even a hint of a sustained decrease in the incidence of new cases of autism using multiple sources of data? Heck, there hasn't even been a downtick in the rate of increase. He was defending a loser of a proposition, scientifically and epidemiologically speaking. His only real hope was to be glib (something he is quite good at) and to use the time-honored technique of the crank defending pseudoscience: Try to dazzle 'em with curveballs or baffle 'em with bull, hence the tropes about forest fires, mercury from China, and increased numbers of cremations in California as a way of trying to distract attention from the fact that the subtitle of his book Evidence of Harm was Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy, not Mercury from Crematoria and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy or Mercury from Forest Fires and China and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy.
Yes, you'd think that David Kirby had fallen about as low as he could fall as far as his credibility on the issue of mercury and autism goes, but you'd be wrong. You see, he's now been dissed big time by Rosie O'Donnell and is now reduced to whining about it on The Huffington Post, all because he wasn't allowed to spout off on the coffee klatch cum daytime TV talk show that Rosie recently joined as a regular (The View) about the scientifically discredited claim that mercury in vaccines causes autism:
(Kirby asks when the question of causation will come up)
"We're not doing that," she said, bluntly. "We're focusing on families and their kids."
"Rosie," I replied, "I think a lot of people are wondering about what's causing this."
"We don't know what causes it," she said. "You just want me to ask so you can talk about mercury."
Stung, I explained that her audience members were asking, and that production staff had also asked me about causation privately backstage.
"We're not doing causation," Rosie repeated. "In fact, I told them not to book you."
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/ ... edium=link[/url]
Steve! What's to become of you!