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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Neil deGrasse Tyson demonstrates why debating cranks is a horrible idea

Astrophysicist and famed science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on The Highwire, an antivax video podcast, to “debate” its host, antivax propagandist Del Bigtree. This incident demonstrates quite well why it is almost never a good idea for a scientist to agree to “debate” science deniers.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Movies Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery

“Died Suddenly”: Resurrecting the old antivax lie of depopulation

Everything old is new again when it comes to antivax tropes. Died Suddenly resurrects the old antivax conspiracy that vaccines kill, the plan being to cause “depopulation” that would allow “global elites” to control the world.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Pseudoscience

Cureus shockingly does the right thing and retracts an antivax review about COVID-19 vaccines

A misinformation-laden review article in Cureus by prominent antivax activists that called for a moratorium on COVID vaccination has been retracted. What took so long, and how could such a paper been published in the peer-reviewed literature in the first place?

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Clinical trials

An antivaxxer is creating his own bogus institutional review board (IRB)

James Lyons-Weiler recently announced that his antivax org, Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge (IPAK), is creating his own IRB. Its real purpose? Most likely to provide cover for unethical antivax studies.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine

Study laundering: Retracted antivax studies resurrected in fake journals

Antivaxxers don’t like it when one of their crappy studies that they somehow managed to sneak into a decent peer-reviewed journal is deservedly retracted, as happened to Mark Skidmore’s paper that estimated that 278K people might have died from COVID-19 vaccines. Fortunately for Skidmore and others, there exist fake journals that will launder their study by republishing it so that antivaxxers can continue to claim the work has been published in a “peer-reviewed journal.”