Those opposed to public health interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19, including masks, “lockdowns,” and vaccine mandates, are hyping “natural” immunity again as somehow “superior” to vaccine-acquired immunity. It’s a deceptive simplification of a complex issue.
Marc Girardot is a tech guy turned COVID-19 contrarian. His analogy to falsely “explain” why mRNA vaccines are deadly shows an astounding lack of understanding of basic chemistry.
I have been critical about John Ioannidis over a number of his statements about the COVID-19 pandemic. Now he’s done it again, producing a poor-quality paper whose unwritten assumptions suggest that the Carl Sagan effect, in which scientists are penalized professionally by their peers for becoming popular science communicators, still holds considerable sway in science and medicine.
Tom Chivers takes Lee McIntyre to task over his book How to Talk to a Science Denier. In the process he shows himself to be a crappy Bayesian and a “reasonable” apologist for science denial.
Ivermectin continues to be the new hydroxychloroquine, an unproven repurposed drug promoted to treat COVID-19. Now the advocates are pointing to the history of the drug’s developers being awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, as though that has anything to do with its effectiveness against COVID-19.
