Categories
Cancer Medicine Quackery

Google reviews for “alternative cancer clinics”: A marketing tool?

I’ve long been writing about “alternative cancer clinics” (i.e., quack clinics) that sell false hope in the form of very expensive but ineffective treatments to desperate cancer patients. A recent study demonstrates how they use Google to do this.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Politics Popular culture

“Lab leak” is now very much like antivax in its harms to public health

Ever since COVID-19 first emerged in 2020, evidence-free claims that it had arisen due to a “lab leak” have proliferated and caused as much harm as antivax. A recent paper argues that this conspiracy theory has been very harmful to science. I argue that it’s more than just lab leak that is harmful.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Dr. Pierre Kory has gone all-in on anti-statin quackery

COVID contrarian turned antivax crank Dr. Pierre Kory has now embraced statin denial quackery. His evolution from COVID contrarian to all-purpose quack is now complete.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Popular culture

John Ioannidis attacks The BMJ as “biased” about COVID-19 in a preprint. Irony meters everywhere explode

Kasper Kepp and John Ioannidis have published a preprint accusing The BMJ of “COVID advocacy” bias in its publications. Although The BMJ has been bad on COVID-19 and vaccines, in this case the “bias” is the rejection of COVID-19 minimization and “natural herd immunity.”

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine

The antivax bizarro world view of vaccine safety studies, revisited

A few months ago, I wrote about how antivaxxers misrepresent vaccine safety studies to portray vaccines as dangerous, using a large study of outcomes in adults as an example.. They’re doing it again, but this time it’s a large study of COVID-19 vaccines in children.