Category: Science and the Media
The return of marketing hype for “whole body scans”…now with AI!
Two decades ago, I cut my skeptical teeth countering advertising for whole body scans by companies making extravagant promises for their products. This particular medical fad faded for a while, but now it's back with a vengeance...with AI! Looking at these products, what I see is basically the quackery that is functional medicine on steroids and powered by AI.
RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan: Putting the old denialist technique of bad faith “Debate me, bro!” challenges on steroids
Joe Rogan conveyed a challenge by antivax crank turned Presidential candidate RFK Jr. to vaccine scientist Dr. Peter Hotez to "debate me, bro!" In the week since, wealthy right wingers have added money to the inducement, and through an awful op-ed by Ross Douthat this weekend, even the New York Times has amped up the pressure for a "debate" about vaccines with...
Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. antivaccine? Judge him by his own words!
Last week, an antivaxxer on Substack—where else?—tried to argue that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is not antivaccine by encouraging you to judge him by his own words. I agree. You should judge RFK Jr. by his own words, as they show definitively that he has been antivaccine since at least 2005.
“Subscription science”: Physician-influencers, social media, and conflicts of interest
Antivaccine activists and quacks often weaponize legitimate concerns about industry conflicts of interest in medicine into the "shill gambit," in which they accuse critics and defenders of science-based medicine of being in the pay of big pharma. However, the rise of physician-influencers and, in particular, Substack show that not all conflicts of interest are from industry or even financial.
Detransition, Retransition, and What Everyone Gets Wrong
A article published in The Atlantic implored people to take detransitioners seriously but did so by perpetuating non-evidence-based tropes that harm both detransitioners and transgender people
Retracted papers about COVID-19 are more highly cited than they should be
Earlier this month a study showed that papers about COVID-19 that are retracted tend to be cited far more than average and continue to be heavily cited after retraction. Clearly, scientific publishing and the scientific community need to do better.
Why antivaxxers reject the concept of scientific consensus as a “manufactured construct”
Neil deGrasse Tyson invoked the concept of a scientific consensus while supporting vaccines in his debate with Del Bigtree. Why was his statement about how "individual scientists don't matter" compared to scientific consensus so triggering to antivaxxers? Why do antivaxxers reject the very concept of a scientific consensus and promote a hyper-individualistic view of how science should be conducted?
Neil deGrasse Tyson makes the unforced error of “debating” antivax propagandist Del Bigtree on The Highwire
Last week, astrophysicist and famed science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on The Highwire, an antivax video podcast, to "debate" its host, antivax propagandist Del Bigtree. This incident demonstrates quite well why it is almost never a good idea for a scientist to agree to "debate" science deniers.
The Cochrane mask fiasco: How the evidence-based medicine paradigm can produce misleading results
Last week, the Cochrane Collaborative was forced to walk back the conclusions of a review by Tom Jefferson et al that had been spun in the media as proving that "masks don't work." Tom Jefferson himself has been problematic about vaccines for a long time, but the rot goes deeper. What is it about the evidence-based medicine paradigm that results in misleading...
Brownstone Institute admits that the Great Barrington Declaration was wrong (without actually admitting it was wrong)
The Brownstone Institute's Gabrielle Bauer claims vindication for the Great Barrington Declaration, the October 2020 document that advocated a "natural herd immunity" pandemic strategy, with an ill-defined "focused protection" strategy to protect those most at risk of death. In the fine print, however, Bauer tacitly admits that its core assumption was badly mistaken, minimizing it as not getting all the "details" right.