Category: Internet & social media
COVID vaccine manufacturers should explore legal action against anti-vaxxers spreading disinformation
Perhaps it's time for vaccine manufacturers to consider defamation suits against anti-vaxxers who spread false information about COVID vaccines. Lawsuits by voting technology companies against Fox and others over false "rigged" election claims could serve as a template.
Conspirituality: Where New Age wellness meets right wing conspiracy thinking
Conspiracy theorists and QAnon may sound miles apart from wellness, yoga and GOOP, but they're converging into "conspirituality", the integration of spirituality and conspiracy theories.
The efforts of antivaxxers to portray COVID-19 vaccines as harmful or even deadly continue apace…
As more and more COVID-19 vaccines find their way into more and more arms, there are reports of bad things happening to people after vaccination up to and including even death. As I've been predicting for a long time that they would, antivaxxers are now weaponizing these reports and anecdotes before they have even been investigated in order to spread fear, uncertainty,...
Did the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine cause a fatal case of ITP?
Last week, a post by Heidi Neckelmann, the wife of Miami obstetrician Dr. Gregory Michael describing his death from idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) 16 days after being vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine went viral. Unsurprisingly, in her grief she blamed the vaccine for her husband's death from a rare autoimmune condition that destroys platelets and causes bleeding. Unfortunately, Dr. Michael's tragic...
Germ theory denial in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic
As hard as it is to believe, in the middle of a global pandemic that's claimed so many lives and so thoroughly disrupted society, there are people who still deny germ theory. How can this be?
No, the Moderna and Pfizer RNA vaccines for COVID-19 will not “permanently alter your DNA”
With the new mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna likely to be available soon, antivaxxers have been ramping up the fear mongering. Their latest claim is that mRNA vaccines will "permanently alter your DNA" or even "make you transhuman." Such claims rest on an utter ignorance of the totality of what we know about the biology of DNA, RNA, and how...
There is no COVID-19 “casedemic.” The pandemic is real and deadly.
Antivaccine activists and pandemic minimizers Del Bigtree and Joe Mercola are promoting the myth of the "casedemic" that claims that the massive increase in COVID-19 cases being reported is an artifact of increased PCR testing and false positives due to too sensitive a threshold to the test. As they have done for vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases many times before, they are vastly...
Frozen meat vs. COVID-19 misinformation: The strange case of Steak-umm
Of all the strange things that have happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of a frozen meat company as a source of critical thinking and skepticism regarding COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation is one of the strangest. How did Steak-umm become a champion of critical thinking about the pandemic?
“Masks make you sicker”: The COVID-19 myth that just won’t die.
Masks work to slow the spread of COVID-19, but the "masks make you sicker" narrative, like antivax nonsense, has proven to be unkillable and to be a killer.
The perils and pitfalls of “doing your own research” about COVID-19 (or any other science)
Ethan Siegel at Forbes argues that you "must not 'do your own research.'" While the title grates, Siegel is correct that most of us are not really capable of "doing our own research" about most scientific and medical questions because we lack the necessary background. We must therefore be humble and be very, very careful about "doing our own research."