At Huffington Post, TV talk show host Bill Maher has a very lengthy article trying to explain his anti-vaccination opinions, but it’s more obfuscation than explanation: Bill Maher: Vaccination: A Conversation Worth Having.

It’s pretty long-winded and a bit whiny, and amounts to a restatement of Maher’s previous positions, which were never really hidden: he has quackish beliefs about science, medicine, and especially vaccines.

Maher’s nemesis at SciBlogs, Orac, has posted an even lengthier but much more readable response to Maher’s apologetics; he lets Maher have it: Bill Maher flames out in a pyre of stupidity over vaccines—again.

First off, Maher is apparently very, very unhappy that he’s been sucked into this debate. More like he’s never actually been called out so publicly for his medical and scientific ignorance before or so clearly revealed to be anti-science when it comes to medicine. He doesn’t like it, not one bit. So he starts out by complaining about how the topic is coming up in every interview he does these days. I also think he was particularly hurt by Michael Shermer’s excellent (but far too polite for the situation) Open Letter to Bill Maher. Never does it cross Maher’s fragile eggshell mind that the reason that the topic of vaccines in general and the flu vaccine in particular are coming up so often in his interviews is because of—oh, maybe, just maybe—his history on the topic. It’s not as though Maher hasn’t been laying down swaths of antivaccine nonsense hither and yon since at least 2005, which was the first time I noticed him. It’s not exactly a secret that Maher’s been an anti-vaccine loon who “doesn’t believe in Western medicine” for many years now. He’s been “questioning” vaccines and “Western medicine” (a code word for science-based medicine among the woo set) for years now, both in his comedy act and on his show. So—surprise! surprise!—when a flu pandemic shows up in 2009 and the government gears up for a mass vaccination program to combat it, why is Maher surprised that the topic comes up a lot on his show or whenever he does interviews? More likely, he’s surprised at the amount of justified criticism he’s taken for his anti-scientific health views. After being given a free pass for at least five years, suddenly people are noticing just how flaky Maher’s medical views are. So now, a month after the most recent season of his show ended, he shows up on that quackfest known as HuffPo to try to defend himself.

The results, predictably, are pathetic.

Read the whole thing…