Age of Autism

Age of Autism (often abbreviated to AoA) is a site that hosts the blogs of the ableist leaders in the field of anti-vaccination crankery and has little to do with actual autism other than the false claim that vaccines cause autism.[1] Their bloggers include the likes of Mark Blaxill, David Kirby, J.B. Handley, and, of course, Jenny McCarthy. They also peddle "treatments" for autism produced by alternative medicine woo-meister Lee Silsby, which consist of vitamin supplements and other nature woo. Age of Autism, being the cesspool of the craziest of the anti-vaccine movement, has invoked several arguments horrible in both quality and in taste, which, of course, involves the typical PRATTs of the anti-vaccine movement that can probably fill the entire bingo card.

Needles are scary
Anti-vaccination
movement
Pricks against pricks
v - t - e

In a pathetic attempt at being reasonable, they proclaim themselves as "not anti-vaccine, just pro-safe vaccine" even though they have aimed their fear-mongering cannons at Gardasil[2] and the meningitis vaccine,[3] which are irrelevant to autism since they are administered long after when autism is typically diagnosed.

Not surprisingly for an anti-vaccine crank website, Age of Autism views itself as a champion for the so-called "medical rights" including the "right" to refuse the vaccine because they think the misinformed parent can make a decision better than a professional government-sponsored medical organization. They draw depressingly awful analogies of vaccines to things like human trafficking, rape, and, of course, Hitler and nazism. They also push conspiracy theories about Big Pharma (among others) and, interestingly, still believe they're "winning".[4] Like any fringe vaccine conspiracy site, they fear and hate the CDC like Alex Jones does FEMA.[5]

Bottom line, if not implied a hundred times here, they're the to-go site for the lowest parts of the anti-vaccination movement.

AoA Members
  • Mark Blaxill: Also a member of SafeMinds[6], where he pretends to be a doctor and epidemiologist...despite his lack of medical degree.[7] But that's OK; he's self-taught and so not a Pharma Shill! Suffers from massive amounts of Dunning-Kruger, unsurprisingly.[8][9]
gollark: But I have Discord open more so I'm not using that.
gollark: I managed to get my dendrite instance to join the matrix room after several minutes of waiting.
gollark: Isn't that kind of experimental still?
gollark: That looks like it runs its own HTTP server, which is probably not what I want. I can see about making a PR, although I'll have to spend a while looking up the shared memory stuff.
gollark: Yes, hi.

References
  1. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/Autism/Index.html
  2. Age of Autism and Gardasil: What’s that again about not being “anti-vaccine”? Respectful Insolence
  3. Action Alert: NY To Mandate Meningitis Vaccine for 7th Graders Age of Autism
  4. I Will Accept Your Surrender. This is beyond delusional.
  5. http://www.ageofautism.com/cdc-whistleblower/
  6. Safeminds - Resolving The Autism Epidemic. A spin-off of Age of Autism, they try to gather funding for curing "the plague of autism".
  7. Another very bad day for antivaccinationists: Yet another study fails to find a link between thimerosal and autism
  8. Better late than never: The Dunning-Kruger effect meets an incompetent anti-vaccine “analysis”
  9. Mark Blaxill and Dan Olmsted: Merrily confusing correlation with causation for polio
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