Dr. Bob Sears Is an Ignorant Idiot

Being a parent is hard enough. Parents and parents-to-be don't need ignoramuses like Dr. Bob Sears scaring the shit out of them for no reason. Unfortunately, Dr. Bob has written a book that makes suckers of the unwary concerned parent. Fortunately, Orac's on the case:

You may remember a couple of months ago, I took Dr. Bob Sears to task. Dr. Bob, as you may recall, wrote a book that has become the bane of pediatricians everywhere, namely The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child. In this book, Dr. Bob, while oh-so-piously proclaiming that he is "not anti-vaccine," lays down in his discussion of childhood vaccines a credulous treatment of many anti-vaccine canards in a sort of "I don't believe vaccines cause autism, but..." sort of fashion. When last we saw him on this blog, Dr. Sears had decided to let his anti-vaccine freak flag high and utterly destroy any vestige of medical or scientific credibility that he had by actually writing a post for that bastion of anti-vaccine propaganda, that fully owned subsidiary of Generation Rescue, namely Age of Autism.

[snip]

Pediatrician and skeptic Dr. John Snyder has actually read Dr. Sears' book. In response, he's written the most comprehensive takedown of The Vaccine Book that I've ever seen. Read it; learn from it; love it; send it to your pediatrician; send it to any parents who think that Dr. Sears has a clue what he's talking about.

Comprehensive it is. I spent a good portion of this evening reading it, and I would now like to paste copies of it inside every copy of Dr. Bob's noxious little book. Since that's impossible, I figured I'd put this up as a public service announcement for those of you who have young children or have them on the way.

There's a lot of woo out there, folks. And most of it likes to pretend it's got science backing it. Read your Respectful Insolence and your Science-Based Medicine, though, and you shouldn't come down with a terminal case of woo.