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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Transmission gambit: An old antivax trope is resurrected

Recently, antivaxxers were all over social media after Tucker Carlson touted a “revelation” that the phase 3 clinical trial used to support licensure of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine didn’t examine its ability to block transmission as meaning that its inability to block transmission had been “covered up”. It wasn’t, and antivaxxers are ignoring everything we’ve learned over the last two years to make the claim that vaccines “don’t prevent transmission”.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience

On “natural immunity” to COVID-19 (and every other vaccine-preventable disease)

Antivaxxers have long appealed to “natural immunity” as being somehow inherently superior to vaccine-induced immunity, which is apparently “artificial”. This is a trope that comes from alternative medicine concepts about purity and contamination that is now endangering us in the age of the pandemic.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Clinical trials Medicine Pseudoscience

Andrew Wakefield 25 years later: Paving the way for FLCCC and COVID quacks

It was 25 years ago last week that Andrew Wakefield launched the modern iteration of the antivaccine movement.In doing so, he laid down a template that antivax quacks today still follow.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience

The Guardian: “Explaining” vaccine hesitancy by amplifying antivax disinformation

Writing in The Guardian, Musa al-Gharbi tries to explain vaccine hesitancy to “the left.” Unfortunately, he parrots antivax conspiracy theories to do it.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Quackery

“Censorship”: The word disinformation artists use when called out

COVID-19 minimizers and antivaxxers at the Brownstone Institute, the “spiritual child of the Great Barrington Declaration,” really don’t like having their disinformation called out.