Skepticat UK

Yesterday I sat in an English courtroom and and witnessed a travesty. I was in a public gallery packed with Simon Singh’s supporters for the preliminary hearing of the BCA v Simon Singh at the High Court. The BCA had objected to an article Dr Singh penned for The Guardian newspaper, which appeared during ‘Chiropractic Awareness Week’ in April 2008. The article has since been removed from the newspaper’s website but can currently still be viewed here.

This post is dedicated to the memory of baby Gloria Thomas, who died in May 2002 and whose mother and homeopath father are standing trial in Australia for manslaughter by gross criminal negligence because they failed to get professional help for their child in spite of her “bleeding, crying and malnutrition”.

Given the mountains of crap spewed at us everywhere we look by homeopushing gobshites, it was a refreshing change last week to see Professor Lesley Regan front this BBC TV programme exposing homeopathy for the poppycock it is.

Atheists, by virtue of being atheist, think there’s nothing wrong with deliberately flying light planes into buildings, killing thousands of people. This view was expressed by a a 25-year-old Muslim from East London with a talent for self-advertisement, who hilariously describes himself as an “intellectual activist who has been working in the field of Muslim apologetics for almost a decade”.

American Jenny McCarthy is a self-appointed vaccine expert, having graduated from the University of Google after an earlier successful career as a slapper, the grotesque details of which are described on countless websites less concerned with maintaining high standards of taste and decorum than this one.

Matthias Rath is a German scientist, physician and vitamin pill salesman who went to South Africa — a country where 6.3 million people are HIV positive — and launched a misinformation campaign which claimed, amongst other things, that the life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs used to treat HIV patients were, in fact, poisoning them and they should taking his vitamin pills instead.

I find few things more boring than hearing atheists endlessly whingeing about religion but one of them is journalists whingeing about atheists. Madeleine Bunting in today’s Guardian is a case in point. And Bunting doesn’t just whinge, she has constructed from her fevered imagination a whole scenario in which the “country’s finest minds” are trying hard to have interesting and meaningful discussions about religions but are being “drowned out” by the “foghorn volume” of the so-called New Atheists.

Both of my parents died slow, horrible deaths. I won’t forget what those two strong, vibrant individuals became in old age and sickness: their fragility, their mental confusion, their physical agony and, above all, their unmitigated emotional distress. There are few things worse than seeing a frail old man or woman screaming and crying in pain and longing for death.

No sooner had I completed my previous post about Dr Andrew Wakefield having falsified data for the notorious study that led to the recent measles epidemics and his subsequent complaint to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), than I found on Brian Deer’s website the evidence to confirm Wakefield has totally lost his marbles.

In my previous post I gave an account of all the other charges against Andrew Wakefield who is currently before the General Medical Council on charges of professional misconduct. The main ones are:

• that he published inadequately founded research
• that he failed to obtain ethical committee approval for the work
• that he obtained funding for it improperly
• that he subjected children to “unnecessary and invasive investigations”

Source.

In this post I’ll look at the latest allegations.