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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Popular culture Skepticism/critical thinking

On “reasonable” apologists for the antivaccine movement

There have always been “reasonable” apologists for the antivaccine movement. Thanks to COVID-19 their prominence has increased as they mistakenly conflate “antivaccine” with “vaccine hesitant.”

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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.

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Antivaccine nonsense Politics

The Republican Party is now undeniably the antivaccine party

It’s been several years coming, but President Biden’s issuing of a vaccine mandate for federal employees and large employers has removed all doubt that the Republican Party is not just anti-vaccine mandate. It’s antivaccine.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, antimask COVID-19 update

I’ve long written about the violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement. In the age of COVID-19, it’s gotten much worse, and, increasingly, there has been actual violence. Someone’s going be killed, I fear.

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Antivaccine nonsense Computers and social media Medicine Politics Quackery

Hacker X: How Mike Adams expanded his quack empire to politics

Ars Technica recently published a story about Hacker X, who helped Mike Adams expand his online empire of health fraud into an empire of fake news and political disinformation, thus intertwining health and political misinformation into the deadly combination we see now.