Dr. Ashish Jha has led other scientists into the fray against COVID-19 pseudoscience and deserves a lot of praise for that. However, to be more effective, he and his colleagues need to understand the critical role of conspiracy theories in science denial.
Dr. Jane Orient is Executive Director of the antivax, COVID-19 minimizing, conspiracy mongering fake medical professional association Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Why has she been invited to testify before a Senate committee about COVID-19 vaccines?
Dr. Richard Moskovitz is a “homeopathic physician.” Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t like COVID-19 vaccines, either.
Why have antivaxxers allied themselves with COVID-19 deniers? Simple. Both share an unrelenting hostility to public health interventions.
Antivaccine activists and pandemic minimizers Del Bigtree and Joe Mercola are promoting the myth of the “casedemic” that claims that the massive increase in COVID-19 cases being reported is an artifact of increased PCR testing and false positives due to too sensitive a threshold to the test. As they have done for vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases many times before, they are vastly simplifying and exaggerating a scientific controversy to cast doubt on the scope and deadliness of the pandemic.
