Earlier this month the Cochrane Collaborative was forced to walk back the conclusions of a review by Tom Jefferson et al that had been spun in the media as proving that “masks don’t work.” Tom Jefferson himself has been problematic about vaccines for a long time, but the rot goes deeper. What is it about the evidence-based medicine paradigm that results in misleading conclusions?
It was 25 years ago last week that Andrew Wakefield launched the modern iteration of the antivaccine movement.In doing so, he laid down a template that antivax quacks today still follow.
Antivaxxers love surveys. This time BMC Infectious Diseases has the dubious “honor” of publishing a truly awful one by an economist named Mark Skidmore that claims that COVID-19 vaccine have killed nearly 300K people.
Projection, thy name is Dr. Vinay Prasad, who complains about “ad hominem” coming from his critics while siding with some nasty COVID-19 minimizers, as he engages in obvious methodolatry about every study of vaccines, masks, and COVID-19.
Four years ago, I wrote about an essentially negative study looking at whether acupuncture could alleviate joint pain caused by aromatase inhibitors, a common treatment for estrogen-sensitive breast cancer. The study’s back, and it doesn’t look any more positive.
