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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Quackery

RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary will be a catastrophe for public health and medical research

President-Elect Donald Trump has nominated antivax activist, conspiracy theorist, and all around crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. We are so screwed.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

Antivax ideology: The main influencers are “controlled opposition” and “limited hangouts”

Antivax is more ideology and conspiracy than science. The recent accusation that antivax influencers are running “limited hangouts” as part of “controlled opposition helps illustrate this characteristic, in which the insufficiently radical are portrayed as useful idiots for the enemy or even heretics.

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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Medicine

Myrna Mantaring and the bogus claim that COVID-19 vaccines caused a 1,432.33% increase in cancer

Myrna Mattaring, a retired scientist who worked in diagnostic labs, claims that COVID-19 vaccines caused a 1432% increase in cancer cases, a clearly impossible claim. Here I make a plea for examining such claims, including a much more famous and accepted one, with basic math.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Stanford University promotes disastrous “natural herd immunity” approaches to the pandemic

A week and a half ago, Stanford University announced a conference on pandemic policy that features several of the usual suspects who spread misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Truly, Stanford has become the “respectable” academic face of efforts to undermine public health.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Pseudoscience

Thacker the hack keeps Thacking and hacking

I know I’ve written about Paul Thacker’s attacks on young physician Dr. Allison Neitzel three times now, but he just keeps going lower and demanding more not-so-Respectful Insolence. Orac is happy to oblige.