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Antivaccine nonsense Blogging Holocaust Holocaust denial Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Legal thuggery: A favored technique by disinformation merchants to silence critics

What do Didier Raoult, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Portuguese quacks have in common? They’re using legal thuggery to silence criticism.

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Antivaccine nonsense Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

How antimaskers co-opt techniques of scientific data analysis to generate COVID-19 propaganda

There’s a new paper out analyzing how antimask activists weaponize the tools of data visualization and scientific argumentation to produce convincing antimask propaganda. Antimaskers are claiming that it shows that they are more “scientific” than those supporting the consensus viewpoint with respect to COVID-19 and masks. What it really shows is that they are good at weaponizing the tools of data visualization and scientific arguments to come to the conclusions that they want to come to.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Music Skepticism/critical thinking

About Eric Clapton’s adverse reaction to AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine

Last week Italian architect and film producer Robin Monotti Graziadei posted to his Telegram channel a report from Eric Clapton that he had had a bad reaction to the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Can we tell what really happened? And why is Clapton saying he “should never have gone near the needle”?

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Are any of the COVID-19 vaccines self-spreading, self-propagating, transmissible vaccines?

The short answer to the question in the title of this post is no. The long answer is that antivaxxers are now taking the trope of “shedding” to the new extreme of “self-spreading, self-propagating transmissible vaccines” and applying it to COVID-19 vaccines.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

About that Salk Institute paper on the “deadly” COVID-19 spike protein

Antivaxxers have been working overtime lately to claim that the spike protein used as the antigen in COVID-19 vaccines is deadly, and they’ll cite any old tenuous evidence based on a misunderstood (by them) study to do it.