The names change, but the song remains the same. Such is antivax rhetoric during the age of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cue Dr. Lee Hieb from 2015, who very much resembles a familiar figure in 2022.
A surgeon attacks “scientific gatekeeping” over COVID-19 in Reason. It goes so poorly that I might have to resurrect an old shtick that I used to use with creationist surgeons.
A recent article in Bioethics makes ethical arguments against vaccinating children against COVID-19. If you change the word “COVID-19” to measles, chickenpox, or rotavirus (or others), this article could have been published on one of the higher-brow antivax websites in 2010. Antivax arguments never change; they’re just continually recycled.
Yesterday the The New England Journal of Medicine published a high quality clinical trial that found no benefit in treating COVID-19 with ivermectin. Cue attacks on the study.
Every so few years, someone writes in a reputable journal that evidence-based medicine is corrupt or an “illusion.” Here we go again, this time in The BMJ, and antivaxxers are going wild.