Earlier this month, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a plan to decrease the problem of reputational bias in grant funding. I couldn’t help but contrast how hard the NIH tries to use the most rigorous scientific criteria to decide whose grants to fund with the conspiracy theory that Anthony Fauci personally doles out NIH dollars like a mob boss to scientists who support him.
Orac had thought he’d seen everything from antivaxxers; that is, until he saw Jessica Rose invoke a zebrafish study to claim that the spike protein from COVID-19 vaccines is deadly.
Two new studies published last month strongly support a natural zoonotic origin for COVID-19 centered at the wet market in Wuhan, China. Naturally, lab leak proponents soberly considered this new evidence and thought about changing their minds. Just kidding! They doubled down on the conspiracy mongering, because of course they did.
Jeffery Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, is a far right wing Neo-Confederate hack. What does this say about the confluence of the far right and antivax?
Formerly respectable academics John Ioannidis and Vinay Prasad published a complaint about “obsessive criticism” on social media. Hilarity ensued, and many irony meters were reduced to sparking, smoking, sputtering ruin.
