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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine

Study laundering: Retracted antivax studies resurrected in fake journals

Antivaxxers don’t like it when one of their crappy studies that they somehow managed to sneak into a decent peer-reviewed journal is deservedly retracted, as happened to Mark Skidmore’s paper that estimated that 278K people might have died from COVID-19 vaccines. Fortunately for Skidmore and others, there exist fake journals that will launder their study by republishing it so that antivaxxers can continue to claim the work has been published in a “peer-reviewed journal.”

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science

Will COVID-19 vaccines drive an “epidemic of autism”? No, but Byram Bridle thinks so.

Antivax scientist Byram Bridle parties like it’s 2005 and asks if COVID-19 vaccines might cause an “epidemic of autism.” Everything old is new again, sort of.

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Medicine Politics Popular culture Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Airborne transmission of COVID-19: The controversy

Last week, 239 scientists in 32 countries published an open letter to the WHO arguing that airborne transmission of COVID-19 occurs and urging it to change its recommendations. What is behind this controversy?

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Coronaphobia: How COVID-19 minimizers shame the responsible

Dr. Lucy McBride, a concierge medicine doctor who has become famous as a pandemic minimizer and one of the drivers of “Urgency of Normal”, Tweeted an article that she had written over a year ago about “coronaphobia”. Whether she understands it or not, this is a very old antivax trope: To pathologize fear of infectious disease as mental illness.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Martin Kulldorff has joined the Brownstone Institute

Martin Kulldorff was a Harvard epidemiologist who spearheaded the eugenics-embracing Great Barrington Declaration for AIER. Now he’s joined the GBD’s “spiritual offspring,” the Brownstone Institute. Because of course he has.