Categories
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.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

The latest antivaccine lie about COVID-19 vaccines: “They’re gene therapy!”

There’s a new antivaccine talking point in town, and it’s just as much disinformation as other antivaccine talking points. It’s the claim that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are not really vaccines but “medical devices,” “gene therapy,” or “experimental biologics” and that they were falsely classified as vaccines in order to bypass safety testing. Here, we discuss why this claim is utter nonsense based on the highly deceptive use of terminology.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Pseudoscience Quackery

Antivaxxer Levi Quackenboss vs. reality on COVID-19

Antivaxxer Levi Quackenboss is back, and she’s looking on the bright side of the COVID-19 pandemic for antivaxxers. Hilarity ensues.

Categories
Biology Medicine Politics Popular culture

No, DDT won’t save us from the Zika virus

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last decade-plus of blogging about medicine and alternative medicine, it’s that any time there is an outbreak or pandemic of infectious disease, there will inevitably follow major conspiracy theories about it. It happened during the H1N1 pandemic in the 2009-2010 influenza season, the Ebola outbreak in late […]

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Computers and social media Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

The antivaccine movement on Facebook: Small world networks, conspiracy theories, moral outrage, and paranoia

Facebook has become a hub from which antivaxers spread misinformation. A recent study looks at what they’re saying and how FB pages facilitate the spread of antivaccine misinformation.