Tag: COVID contrarian
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?
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:...
Science-based medicine isn’t just for CAM. The case of ivermectin shows that it never was.
Another large randomized controlled trial for ivermectin showed no efficacy for the early treatment of COVID-19. This is not a surprise to science-based medicine advocates. Here's why the story of ivermectin shows that SBM isn't just for "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) —and never was.
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.
Old antivax tropes never die: “COVID theater,” “Urgency of Normal,” and the Great Barrington Declaration
Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis held a roundtable calling to "end COVID-19 theater" that brought together the Great Barrington Declaration and "Urgency of Normal," a movement to end mask mandates and other COVID-19 mitigations in schools. The arguments used long predate the pandemic and echo a dark side of the history of American medicine.
John Ioannidis uses the Kardashian Index to attack critics of the Great Barrington Declaration
This isn't a title that I ever thought I'd use or a post that I ever thought I'd write, but John Ioannidis has really done it. He's incompetently used the Kardashian index to attack John Snow Memorandum signatories and argue that the Great Barrington Declaration signatories, who argue for a "natural herd immunity" approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, are the underdogs who...