Tag: COVID contrarian

SARS CoV2 virus

“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.

/ May 16, 2022

Methodolatry and COVID

Doctors who call for an RCT for everything generally haven't run a single RCT on anything. Why is this?

/ May 12, 2022
Graphical Abstract

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.

/ April 25, 2022
Dr Andrew Wakefield

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:...

/ April 18, 2022
Ivermectin

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.

/ April 4, 2022
Recycling old antivax arguments as "bioethics"

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.

/ March 28, 2022
Florida "COVID theater"

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.

/ March 14, 2022
Kim Kardashian

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...

/ February 14, 2022
How the DMED works

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.

/ February 7, 2022
Amazon Prime

Mercola and Kennedy sue Sen. Elizabeth Warren for combating their COVID misinformation

Quack tycoon Joseph Mercola and anti-vaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have filed a lawsuit against U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren claiming she violated their First Amendment rights when she complained that Amazon was peddling COVID misinformation, citing Mercola’s recent misinformation-filled book on COVID as an example.

/ January 27, 2022