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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Medicine

WTF happened to The BMJ?

The BMJ recently published an “exposé” by Paul Thacker alleging patient unblinding, data falsification, and other wrongdoing by a subcontractor. It was a highly biased story embraced by antivaxxers, with a deceptively framed narrative and claims not placed into proper context, leading me to look into the broader question: WTF happened to The BMJ? (Updated and revised from a week ago.)

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Antivaccine nonsense History Holocaust

The “Nuremberg Code” gambit

Antivaxxers love to claim that vaccine mandates (especially COVID-19 vaccine mandates) violate the Nuremberg Code. As usual, they have no idea what they are talking about.

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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 Medicine Politics Skepticism/critical thinking

Antivaccine organizations got $850,000 in COVID-19 bailout money from the Paycheck Protection Program

The Washington Post reported yesterday that antivaccine groups got $850,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program under the CARES Act. How could this happen?

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Anti-lockdown ideologues’ “science” is now as bad as antivaccine “science”

Anti-lockdown ideologues are now falling prey to the ecological fallacy in their bad epidemiological studies in the same way antivaxxers have been doing for years. Cranks gonna crank, I guess.