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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Retracted papers never die in the age of COVID-19

Last month, a study showed that papers about COVID-19 that are retracted tend to be cited far more than average and continue to be heavily cited after retraction. Clearly, scientific publishing and the scientific community need to do better.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

Dr. Richard Amerling of AAPS goes full Godwin on COVID-19

Dr. Richard Amerling of the medical John Birch Society known as AAPS thinks medicine is being “Nazified,” because of course he does.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Science

NIH grant funding decisions: Reality vs. antivax conspiracies

Earlier this month, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a plan to decrease the problem of reputational bias in grant funding. I couldn’t help but contrast how hard the NIH tries to use the most rigorous scientific criteria to decide whose grants to fund with the conspiracy theory that Anthony Fauci personally doles out NIH dollars like a mob boss to scientists who support him.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Clinical trials Medicine

Update: An antivax preprint is now antivax propaganda disguised as a peer-reviewed publication in…Vaccine!

In order portray COVID-19 vaccines as dangerous, Peter Doshi has now managed to get poorly designed and performed “reanalyses” of the clinical trial data used by the FDA to grant emergency use approval of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines published in two reputable journals, The BMJ and Vaccine? What happened?

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Norman Fenton: “It’s not p-hacking if you don’t use p-values.”

Defending an awful paper on COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, Prof. Norman Fenton claims that it can’t be p-hacking if you don’t use p-values. Hilarity ensues.