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Antivaccine nonsense Blogging Holocaust Holocaust denial Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Legal thuggery: A favored technique by disinformation merchants to silence critics

What do Didier Raoult, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Portuguese quacks have in common? They’re using legal thuggery to silence criticism.

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Antivaccine nonsense Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Skepticism/critical thinking

How antimaskers co-opt techniques of scientific data analysis to generate COVID-19 propaganda

There’s a new paper out analyzing how antimask activists weaponize the tools of data visualization and scientific argumentation to produce convincing antimask propaganda. Antimaskers are claiming that it shows that they are more “scientific” than those supporting the consensus viewpoint with respect to COVID-19 and masks. What it really shows is that they are good at weaponizing the tools of data visualization and scientific arguments to come to the conclusions that they want to come to.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Bioethics Medicine

Why is Peter Doshi still an editor at The BMJ? (RFK Jr. and COVID-19 vaccine edition)

BMJ senior editor Peter Doshi has been casting doubt on vaccine safety and efficacy since 2009. Now he’s “just asking questions” about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in a BMJ article reprinted verbatim by antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Why does The BMJ still employ him?

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Are any of the COVID-19 vaccines self-spreading, self-propagating, transmissible vaccines?

The short answer to the question in the title of this post is no. The long answer is that antivaxxers are now taking the trope of “shedding” to the new extreme of “self-spreading, self-propagating transmissible vaccines” and applying it to COVID-19 vaccines.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bioethics Medicine

To unblind or not to unblind COVID-19 vaccine trials?

Antivaccine alternative health tycoon Joe Mercola claims that the unblinding of participants in the clinical trials of Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines was intended to “blow up the trials” and undermine the science, making it impossible ever to identify long term adverse events. What he’s really doing is deceptively oversimplifying complex ethical and scientific issues surrounding these trials in the middle of a deadly pandemic, all in the service of his grift.