Last week, quacks were crowing that the FDA had “lost its war” on ivermectin. Ivermectin still doesn’t work against COVID-19. but by settling a lawsuit the way it did, the FDA did hand quacks and antivaxxers a massive propaganda victory that they will regret for years to come.
Earlier this month, CNN host Kasie Hunt interviewed antivax presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Although she did better than most journalists confronting him for his past antivax statements in that she played a clip of one of his antivax statements, she clearly hadn’t anticipated his response, which should have been very predictable given that he’s been using it for at least 15 years. I guess it’s time for another primer.
The BMJ, once a bastion of evidence-based medicine, has become disturbingly susceptible to publishing biased “investigations” that feed antivax narratives. Its latest report on VAERS by Jennifer Block, who in the past has defended Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop and whose history is not one of supporting science, is just another example of this deterioration.
The latest antivax line is that trace amounts of residual plasmid DNA fragments constitutes “adulteration.” It’s just the “toxins gambit” twisted into a bad legal argument.
Neil deGrasse Tyson invoked the concept of a scientific consensus while supporting vaccines in his debate with Del Bigtree. Why was his statement about how “individual scientists don’t matter” compared to scientific consensus so triggering to antivaxxers? Why do antivaxxers reject the very concept of a scientific consensus and promote a hyper-individualistic view of how science should be conducted?
