Tag: antivaccine

Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (RFK Jr.)

RFK Jr.’s MAHA manifesto: How not to “make America healthy again”

Shortly after endorsing Donald Trump for President, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed he and Trump will "make America healthy again." His proposals to do that range from semi-reasonable to outright quackery.

/ September 9, 2024
A scattered assortment of US dollar bills in various denominations, including $100, $50, and $20 notes, displaying portraits of historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Ulysses S. Grant. The bills overlap and cover the entire frame.

Hopkins Business School to Platform COVID-19 Contrarians at Health Policy Symposium

Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, and Marty Makary are also set to speak at Stanford next month

/ September 8, 2024
Chart titled "At a Glance" showing estimated new cancer cases in 2024 as 2,001,140 and deaths as 656,870. Graph shows decreasing trends in both cancer incidence and death rates from 1992 to 2022. Mantaring note: the 5-year relative survival rate for 2014-2020 is at an encouraging 69.2%.

Quoth Myrna Mantaring: “US government data” confirms a “143,233% increase in cancer cases due to COVID vaccination”? I answer with a plea for math-based reality checks.

Myrna Mattaring, a retired scientist who worked in diagnostic labs, claims that COVID-19 vaccines caused a 1432% increase in cancer cases, a clearly impossible claim. Here I make a plea for examining such claims, including a much more famous and accepted one, with basic math.

/ September 3, 2024
Stanford: The Usual Suspects

Stanford University will host a conference on pandemic planning featuring the usual (COVID-19) suspects

This week, Stanford University announced a conference on pandemic policy that features several of the usual suspects who spread misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Truly, Stanford has become the "respectable" academic face of efforts to undermine public health.

/ August 26, 2024
Wuhan Institute of Virology, focus of "lab leak"

How conspiracy theories like COVID-19 “lab leak” harm science and public health

Ever since COVID-19 first emerged in 2020, evidence-free claims that it had arisen due to a "lab leak" have proliferated. A recent paper argues that this conspiracy theory has been very harmful to science. I argue that it's more than just lab leak that is harmful.

/ August 5, 2024

Dr. John Ioannidis: Yet Another Doctor Who Treats Theoretical Death From The Vaccine With More Gravity Than Actual Death From COVID

Actual death is worse than theoretical death. This didn't used to be controversial in medicine.

/ July 21, 2024
Aaron Siri

Aaron Siri vs. Stanley Plotkin on post-licensure safety monitoring of vaccines

Vaccine scientist Stanley Plotkin coauthored a commentary on vaccine postlicensure studies. Antivax lawyer Aaron Siri tries to spin it as an "admission" that vaccines aren't safe. Predictable.

/ July 15, 2024

Pandemic Revisionism: Doctors Who Defend Dr. Scott Atlas Are Afraid to Accurately Quote Dr. Scott Atlas. I’m Not.

"There is an ongoing, competitive process of writing the history of the pandemic." This isn't just about the past. It's about the future.

/ July 6, 2024

Did I Lie About My Conference Invitation? How Bad Faith Engagement Functions As A Distraction and Silencing Technique.

It's important to honestly and explicitly call out bad faith engagement for what it is and recognize how it functions as a common, but powerful rhetorical device.

/ June 25, 2024
New York Times

Why is The New York Times now promoting an anti-science agenda?

This essay stems from concerns about two editorials published in The New York Times recently. We felt that they were problematic in that the past is viewed through a blurred prism to produce revisionist history. By John P. Moore and Gregg Gonsalves.

, / June 22, 2024