Categories
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.

Categories
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?

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Politics Skepticism/critical thinking

Martin Kulldorff promotes an old antivax narrative about “natural immunity”

Great Barrington Declaration author Martin Kulldorff, who is also the “scientific director” of the Brownstone Institute, a public health science denialist right wing “think tank,” is promoting an antivax narrative about “natural immunity” against COVID-19, because of course he is.

Categories
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.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Religion Skepticism/critical thinking

Why is being an apostate such a big part of COVID-19 contrarian narratives?

There has long been a huge appeal in medicine that derives from being an “apostate”. Since COVID-19 hit, apostasy has become like a drug among too many doctors, and social media has amplified the popularity of “medical apostates” beyond anything I’ve seen previously.