Earlier this month, the Ohio State Medical Board suspended the medical license of Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, a longtime antivax quack. The only question is: What took them so long, and why did it take the pandemic for them to act? Also, is there less to this action than meets the eye?
A recent report in The Washington Post last week reveals just how badly state medical boards have been failing when dealing with physicians spreading COVID-19 misinformation and using quackery to prevent and treat the disease. None of this is anything new, unfortunately. The pandemic has merely stress tested state medical boards, and most have failed because of political choices made long ago.
A couple of weeks ago, RFK Jr. shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory that COVID-19 might have been an :”ethnically targeted” bioweapon that spared the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews, showing how conspiracy theories ultimately devolve into antisemitism. Then he denied it. Same as it ever was.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wonders why people are calling him antivax. All he did was to defend RFK Jr. and amplify old antivax tropes on Twitter.
Thanks to RFK Jr. the deceptive claim that the childhood vaccine schedule has never been tested in a randomized controlled trial with a saline placebo control is making the rounds again.This is an old and deceptive antivax half-truth that ignores both what constitutes a scientifically valid placebo and the ethical requirement that RCTs have clinical equipoise.
