Why have antivaxxers allied themselves with COVID-19 deniers? Simple. Both share an unrelenting hostility to public health interventions.
Tag: COVID-19
Antivaccine activists and pandemic minimizers Del Bigtree and Joe Mercola are promoting the myth of the “casedemic” that claims that the massive increase in COVID-19 cases being reported is an artifact of increased PCR testing and false positives due to too sensitive a threshold to the test. As they have done for vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases many times before, they are vastly simplifying and exaggerating a scientific controversy to cast doubt on the scope and deadliness of the pandemic.
Anti-lockdown ideologues are now falling prey to the ecological fallacy in their bad epidemiological studies in the same way antivaxxers have been doing for years. Cranks gonna crank, I guess.
Sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t stopped antivax “scientists” from publishing crappy antivax studies that don’t show what they claim they show, as Paul Thomas and James Lyons-Weiler’s most recent “vaxxed/unvaxxed” study shows.
Of all the strange things that have happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of a frozen meat company as a source of critical thinking and skepticism regarding COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation is one of the strangest. How did Steak-umm become a champion of critical thinking about the pandemic?