Tag: antivaccine
Vaccines Don’t Save Lives
Fostering basic critical thinking skills and countering medical misinformation is a vital undertaking.
“Coronaphobia”: How antivaxxers and pandemic minimizers pathologize fear of disease
Over the weekend, Dr. Lucy McBride, a concierge medicine doctor who has become famous as a pandemic minimizer and one of the drivers of "Urgency of Normal", Tweeted an article that she had written over a year ago about "coronaphobia". Whether she understands it or not, this is a very old antivax trope: To pathologize fear of infectious disease as mental illness.
Columbia University finally cuts ties with America’s Quack Dr. Oz
Decades after Dr. Oz pioneered "integrating" quackery into medicine and after many years of promoting diet scams and quackery on a nationally syndicated daily television show, Columbia University appears finally to have had enough and has quietly downgraded his status. What took so long?
Scientific review articles as antivaccine disinformation
Antivaxxers have always written dubious scientific review articles to try to make their wild speculations about vaccine science seem credible. Usually such articles wind up in bottom-feeding journals. Unfortunately a recent pseudo-review article was published by an Elsevier journal, making it seem more credible when it isn't.
Why is anyone surprised that there are so many antivax physicians?
A new survey suggests that a disturbingly high percentage of physicians are either vaccine hesitant or actually antivaccine. Those of us who have been writing about the antivaccine movement know that this is not new, but it seems new to our colleagues who weren't paying attention before the pandemic and assured themselves that the problem was just Andrew Wakefield. The question is:...
Recycling old antivax tropes as “bioethics”-based arguments against COVID-19 vaccination for children
A recently published article in Bioethics makes ethical arguments against vaccinating children against COVID-19. If you change the word "COVID-19" to measles, chickenpox, or rotavirus (or others), this article could have been published on one of the higher-brow antivax websites in 2010. Antivax arguments never change; they're just continually recycled.
COVID and Our Warped Sense of Normal
Children are not supposed to die. This didn't used to be controversial.
Antivaxxers misuse the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database to demonize COVID-19 vaccines
Over the last couple of weeks, a claim that the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) shows that COVID-19 vaccines have caused a massive increase in cancer, neurological, and cardiovascular diseases in military personnel has gone viral. A closer look shows that the increases are almost certainly spurious and due to underreporting in previous years.
“Debate me, bro!”: Debate challenges by science deniers in the age of COVID-19
Quacks, science deniers, and conspiracy theorists love to challenge doctors, scientists, and science communicators to "live public debates" over the science they deny. I just say no, and you should say no too if you are in a position to receive such a challenge.
Jay Bhattacharya: “If It’s True That The Novel Coronavirus Would Kill Millions Without Shelter-In-Place Orders and Quarantines, Then the Extraordinary Measures Being Carried Out in Cities and States Around the Country Are Surely Justified”
Dr. Bhattacharya doesn't take the words of Dr. Bhattacharya seriously. So why should anybody else?