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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Popular culture

In which Orac experiences schadenfreude over Ben Garrison’s COVID-19

Ben Garrison, whose fame comes from his QAnon-invoking and Trump-supporting cartoons, has COVID-19 and is treating it with ivermectin. Because of course he is. Orac’s schadenfreude is tempered by the knowledge that when Garrison recovers he’ll attribute his good fortune to the quackery he’s using.

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Autism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

MMS (a.k.a. bleach) as a “cure” for COVID-19

Bleach…it had to be…bleach. Again. This time around, it’s being used to treat COVID-19, because of course it is. MMS is a slasher quackery. No matter how often it appears to have died, it always returns for another installment in its quackery franchise.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Coronaphobia: How COVID-19 minimizers shame the responsible

Dr. Lucy McBride, a concierge medicine doctor who has become famous as a pandemic minimizer and one of the drivers of “Urgency of Normal”, Tweeted an article that she had written over a year ago about “coronaphobia”. Whether she understands it or not, this is a very old antivax trope: To pathologize fear of infectious disease as mental illness.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Florida Sen. Manny Diaz wants to “review” all vaccine mandates

Florida State Senator Manny Diaz wants to “review” all vaccine mandates in Florida, not just COVID-19 mandates. This was always the endgame for the antivaccine movement, and COVID-19 might just make it happen in some states, thanks to the embrace of antivaccine and antimask “freedumb” by Republican politicians

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

“CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory, resurrected by “new school” antivaxxers

In 2014, Andrew Wakefield unveiled Brian Hooker’s “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory featuring William Thompson, a CDC scientist who claimed that a vaccine-autism link was being covered up. Now, Steve Kirsch and other COVID-19 antivaxxers are resurrecting it.