Tag: COVID contrarian
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.
How antivaxxers laid the groundwork to blame COVID-19 vaccines for Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest
Right after Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed from a cardiac arrest after a tackle and was resuscitated on the field, antivaxxers immediately pounced, blaming COVID-19 vaccines even as CPR was still continuing. That's because antivaxxers had "primed the pump" over more than a year with stories of young athletes who had supposedly "died suddenly." (Warning: This one's long, even by Gorski...
Was 2022 the “year of the gaslighter” with respect to COVID-19?
"Gaslighting" is a term that refers to the manipulation of someone in order to lead them to question their own reality and even sanity. Last month, a COVID-19 minimizer and antivaxxer, C. J. Hopkins, declared 2022 the "year of the gaslighter," revealing yet again that it's always projection with science denying propagandists. Unfortunately, 2023 looks to hold a lot more of the...
The appeal of being a medical “apostate”
There has long been a huge appeal in medicine that derives from being an "apostate". Since COVID-19 hit, apostasy has become like a drug among too many doctors, and social media has amplified the popularity of "medical apostates" beyond anything I've seen previously.
The making of COVID-19 “contrarian” doctors
In 2009, I tried to answer the question: How do doctors become quacks and antivaxxers? A Twitter encounter suggested to me that an update to that post is massively overdue.
Dr. Vinay Prasad echoes a common antivax trope that portrays concern about a deadly disease as irrational fear
Before the pandemic, antivaxxers likened concern about childhood diseases to mental illness. In the age of COVID-19, Dr. Vinay Prasad accuses medicine of "legitimizing" irrational anxiety and says we should treat COVID like the flu—with one telling omission. In a recent paid Substack, he doubles down and accuses physicians and scientists of anxiety disorders that "interfere with people's lives".
Jay Bhattacharya errs on excess mortality in New Zealand
Jay Bhattacharya claims that New Zealand COVID policy was “a grand failure” based on flawed logic and a misinterpretation of the data. He should retract.
Debating How to Debate Instead of Actually Debating
Every moment spent debating who can say what to whom and how and where they should say it, is time not spent talking about doctors who repeatedly underestimated the virus and successfully campaigned to ensure tens of millions of children and young adults contracted it before they were vaccinated.
Minimizing COVID Via Postmodernism
An exploration of how, under the guise of "reason", doctors who desperate to be different no matter the evidence have embraced the position that there are no aspects of reality that are objective and that feelings matter more than facts.
Moral outrage is not a good guide to pandemic policy reform. Vinay Prasad, please take note.
Vinay Prasad identifies some dubious problems in the government's efforts to protect public health, and offers some questionable solutions.