Economist turned COVID-19 contrarian Emily Oster recently published an article in The Atlantic about offering amnesty and forgiveness over the pandemic. Shorter Oster: “Admit you were wrong!”
In 2008, I tried to answer the question: How do doctors become contrarians, quacks, and antivaxxers? A Twitter encounter suggested to me not just answers but that an update to that post is massively overdue.
I wrote about neurosurgeon Dr. Charlie Teo and his supposedly near-miraculous resections of “inoperable” brain tumors. He’s back, and it turns out that I was likely way too easy on him a decade ago.
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”.
The antivax lie that vaccines are killing lots of people long predates COVID-19, but now the idea of the “vaccine holocaust” has reached the ridiculously implausible proportions of 20 million dead and 2 billion injured. How did antivaxxers do this?