Tag: COVID contrarian
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.
“New school” COVID-19 antivaxxers are becoming less and less distinguishable from “old school” antivaxxers
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, a new generation of antivaxxers has arisen. Most view themselves as pro-vaccine, just not pro-COVID-19 vaccines. Recent developments, however, have demonstrated that "new school" antivaxxers are increasingly indistinguishable from "old school" antivaxxers and that this fusion is increasingly endangering all public health, not just COVID-19 public health interventions.
“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.
Methodolatry and COVID
Doctors who call for an RCT for everything generally haven't run a single RCT on anything. Why is this?