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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery

Criticism and quality control ≠ “Censorship and defamation”

Minerva published an op-ed disguised as a “study” decrying “censorship and defamation.” It was really just criticism and quality control, but the usual suspects are all over it as evidence of evil.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine

Deluded tech bro Steve Kirsch claims COVID vaccines have killed 3.5X more people than COVID-19

I thought that Prof. Skidmore’s survey, from which he extrapolated an estimate of 278K killed by COVID-19 vaccines was the worst survey ever. I was wrong. Steve Kirsch has Skidmore beat by a country mile.

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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 Clinical trials Medicine

How EBM fundamentalism was weaponized against public health in 2023

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has been a very useful paradigm for assessing evidence in medicine. However, like any other framework, it can be misused, particularly when fundamentalist EBM methodolatry leads to its inappropriate application to questions for which it is ill-suited, a misuse that has been weaponized against public health during the pandemic.

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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.