Earlier this week, Mother Jones published an article about Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Dr. Oz’s (a.k.a. America’s Quack) promotion of antivax quack Joe Mercola, who is now a leading source of COVID-19 disinformation. We warned you about this when it happened. Few listened.
Projection is a common defense mechanism used by those spreading health misinformation and disinformation. Last week Dr. Asseem Malhotra published part 2 of a plan to cure “the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine”. Unsurprisingly, it was chock full of antivaccine misinformation. It’s a real “I know you are, but what am I?” exercise in disinformation.
Before the pandemic, antivaxxers likened concern about childhood diseases to mental illness. In the age of COVID-19, Dr. Vinay Prasad accuses medicine of “legitimizing” irrational anxiety and says we should treat COVID like the flu—with one telling omission.
Jeffery Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, is a far right wing Neo-Confederate hack. What does this say about the confluence of the far right and antivax?
Formerly respectable academics John Ioannidis and Vinay Prasad published a complaint about “obsessive criticism” on social media. Hilarity ensued, and many irony meters were reduced to sparking, smoking, sputtering ruin.
