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.
Shortly after endorsing Donald Trump for President, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed he and Trump will “make America healthy again.” His proposals to do that range from semi-reasonable to outright quackery.
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.
When last I wrote about Elle Macpherson, she was dating Andrew Wakefield. I now learn that she treated her breast cancer with quackery. One more time, antivax and quackery are inseparable, and portraying the choice of quackery as “brave” is irresponsible.
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.
