Oh, Lou

Yesterday I noted Bill Maher's justification for his anti-vaccination stance (pardon me--his quest for an open conversation on the topic) was too incoherent to bother to unravel.

Well, the internet is a big place, so someone else did it. Over at Collective Imagination, Orac gives Maher the lengthy takedown he deserves.

Here are a couple more takedowns.

PS I wasn't aware the Huffington Post was a hotbed of anti-vac activity, though I might have guessed from some of the comments Maher got.

PPS Maher tells what is certainly a made-up story about Louis Pasteur renouncing germ theory on his deathbed. It's reminiscent of the nonsense about Darwin renouncing evolution on his deathbed. I guess if you're going to make up something, it might as well take place on a deathbed, since it'll look as if it's the subject's final word, and you know you won't find any later writings that contradict it. Mind you, even if Pasteur had denied his earlier claims in his later years, it wouldn't prove anything except maybe he'd gone round the bend.

I can actually name a famous person who shared Maher's crackpot view that it's the body being healthy that counts, not the infectious diseases that attack it--George Bernard Shaw. (He also had trouble with Darwin's natural selection.) But then, Shaw was a vegetarian and a socialist, not a biologist.