Antivaccine alternative health tycoon Joe Mercola claims that the unblinding of participants in the clinical trials of Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines was intended to “blow up the trials” and undermine the science, making it impossible ever to identify long term adverse events. What he’s really doing is deceptively oversimplifying complex ethical and scientific issues surrounding these trials in the middle of a deadly pandemic, all in the service of his grift.
Despite a lack of evidence Duke University is all-in on stem cells for autism, thanks to a billionaire benefactor and a Panama stem cell clinic. This is the dark(er) side of quackademic medicine.
Antivaxers frequently object to the use of fetal cell lines to manufacture vaccines on “moral” grounds. Über-quack Joe Mercola lays down some astonishingly bad moral arguments based on pseudoscience.
Kylee Dixon is a 13-year-old girl with undifferentiated embryonal sarcoma of the liver whose mother stopped chemotherapy and has been treating her with CBD oil. The State of Oregon intervened to see that Kylee undergoes appropriate surgery. Where do “parental rights” end and the child’s rights begin?
The ethics of pay-to-play clinical trials are a minefield. Last week the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP) stepped into that minefield. Are “pay-to-play” clinical trials ever ethically acceptable?
