Dr. Rashid Buttar, one of the first quacks I ever wrote about, died suddenly last week. Antivaxxers are contorting reality to blame vaccines.

Dr. Rashid Buttar, one of the first quacks I ever wrote about, died suddenly last week. Antivaxxers are contorting reality to blame vaccines.
Back in the day, I used to refer to something I dubbed “misinformed refusal,” a term that refers to how antivaxxers had weaponized “informed consent” by inverting it to frighten parents against vaccinating. In the age of the pandemic, ProtocolKills.com generalizes misinformed refusal to all COVID-19 treatments.
Antivaccine activist Jennifer Margulis announced last week that she likely has ocular melanoma. She is also seeking “alternative healing,” thus demonstrating how tightly antivax views are intertwined with anti-medicine views.
Quacks claim that medicine, not the disease, kills, with their nostrums as the cure. ProtocolKills.com shows that victims and their families are often their best spokespeople because they are so sympathetic and questioning their testimonials is easily portrayed as attacking very sympathetic victims, just as Stanislaw Burzynski did for decades before the pandemic.
In a turn that should surprise exactly no one, the BIRD Group’s Tess Lawrie effortlessly pivots from promoting ivermectin as a cure for COVID-19 to promoting it as a cure for cancer. It’s another example of how single-issue quacks almost inevitably embrace more diverse quackery.