Tag: COVID-19 vaccine

How we got here with political and health misinformation: The case of “Hacker X” and Mike Adams
Ars Technica recently published a story about Hacker X, who helped Mike Adams expand his online empire of health fraud into an empire of fake news and political disinformation, thus intertwining health and political misinformation into the deadly combination we see now.

The Road to Hitler is Paved with… Masks and Vaccines?
The next time a healthcare worker or educator is attacked by a "freedom-loving" anti-vaxxer, it's reasonable to wonder who convinced the assailant that life-saving public health measures are in fact a ruse to pave the way for the next Hitler. Warning: This article contains offensive images about the Holocaust and sexual assault

COVID-19 and Children: More Useless Comparisons
How COVID-19 affects children is independent of how it affects their grandparents.

Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, take 6: Incompetence and fraud everywhere!
Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, a drug repurposed for COVID-19 that almost certainly doesn't work but is still being touted as a "miracle cure" by quacks, grifters, and political ideologues. Are the data supporting it all fraud?

The Trolley Problem and Vaccinating Young People Against COVID-19
The harms we cause often lead to more grief than the harms we fail to prevent. Is this why some doctors are willing to leave young people vulnerable to a deadly virus?

“Natural immunity” versus the vaccine for COVID-19
Antivaxxers have long appealed to "natural immunity" as being somehow inherently superior to vaccine-induced immunity, which is apparently "artificial". This is a trope that comes from alternative medicine concepts about purity and contamination that is now endangering us in the age of the pandemic.

State medical boards vs. COVID-19 misinformation, an update
The disinformation epidemic about COVID-19 has pushed state medical boards to consider disciplining physicians who promote COVID-19 disinformation. How would that work? What are the obstacles? Is it even possible? It should be, but it will be messy and complicated.

The dumpster diving VAERS preprint debacle: How did we get here?
Last week, SBM devoted a lot of digital ink to a poorly done study analyzing the VAERS database for myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination that was widely publicized to imply that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease. Three out of the four authors should have known better, leading me to ask: How did we get here?