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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.

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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 Politics

Antivaxxers invoke segregation and Jim Crow to attack COVID-19 vaccination requirements

Before the pandemic, antivaxxers tried to don the mantle of the “new civil rights movement.” Now they’re invoking segregation and Jim Crow over COVID-19 vaccination requirements.

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Bad science Medicine Politics Quackery

“America’s Frontline Doctors” sue over deaths from COVID-19 vaccines. Hilarity ensues.

This week, “America’s Frontline Doctors” (who are doctors, but hardly “frontline”) announced a lawsuit over 45,000 “covered up deaths” due to COVID-19 vaccines. Hilarity ensued, as the bad science and conspiracy theories were epic, as has been the grift.