Antivaxxers love to claim the mantle of science and that they are more pro-science than vaccine advocates. They aren’t, although it is often true that they appear to “know” more about vaccines. The problem is motivated reasoning based on cherry picked evidence.
Antivaxxers love to claim the mantle of the oppressed, even going so far as to use the Yellow Star of David to liken their “oppression” to that of the Jews under the Nazis. Now they’re trying to top even that by co-opting Juneteenth.
Antivaxxers have long claimed that vaccines can cause female infertility. That claim has been resurrected for COVID-19 vaccines. This time, it’s the lipid nanoparticles attacking the ovaries, echoing very old claims about polysorbate-80. Truly, everything old is new again.
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial claiming that the sequence CGGCGG in SARS-CoV-2 means that the coronavirus must be engineered. It’s utter nonsense.
Scientists have generally concluded that evidence points to a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, as a far more likely explanation for the pandemic than a laboratory origin. Recently, there has been a lot of media chatter about the “lab leak” hypothesis. Is there new evidence? Nope. The “lab leak” hypothesis is fast becoming a conspiracy theory.
