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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Bioethics Medicine Politics

Gov. Ron DeSantis further embraces the Great Barrington Declaration by appointing Dr. Joseph Ladapo as Florida Surgeon General

Yesterday, Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, an apostle of the Great Barrington Declaration’s eugenics lite “focused protection” approach to COVID-19, as Florida Surgeon General. If you want to see the harm caused by the GBD and crank “COVID contrarian” physicians, look no further.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Astroturf and think tanks manufacturing doubt about COVID-19 public health interventions

The embrace of antimask and antivaccine views by the right wing is due to more than just clever reaching out by antivaxxers. There’s a big money astroturf machine encompassing various “think tanks” behind it.

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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 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 Bad science Medicine

Geert Vanden Bossche is back and still blaming vaccines for COVID-19 variants

Geert Vanden Bossche is back, and this time he’s blaming COVID-19 vaccines for driving the evolution of more dangerous “escape variants” of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, that are capable of evading vaccine-induced immunity. As antivaxxers making this argument always do, unfortunately, he ignores the much larger problem in which free circulation of the virus is a far more powerful driver of evolution than the relatively small proportion of the world population that has as yet been vaccinated.