Categories
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.

Categories
Announcements Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

R.I.P. SkepDoc

Orac is greatly saddened to announce that Dr. Harriet Hall, a.k.a. The SkepDoc, passed away unexpectedly on Wednesday night.

Categories
Bad science Medicine Popular culture

A bogus statistic about medical errors rears its ugly head in STAT

The claim that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US is one of those slasher statistics that just won’t die. This time around STAT News gave space to Michael Saks and Stephan Landsman to parrot that claim credulously in the service of selling their book.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine

Bell’s palsy, syncope, and death: The impending antivax tsunami of fake COVID-19 vaccine “adverse reactions”

Reports of Bell’s palsy and syncopy after vaccination with RNA-based COVID-19 vaccines remind us how antivaxxers will weaponize anything bad happening after vaccination. Sadly, I predict an impending tsunami of confusing correlation with causation.

Categories
Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The “only 6%” gambit: The latest viral COVID-19 disinformation

While Orac’s been away, there’s arisen a new bit of COVID-19 disinformation that deceptively claims that “only 6%” of the deaths attributed to COVID-19 were really due to coronavirus. It turns out that this is QAnon disinformation.