Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience

To Nuremberg or not to Nuremberg? That is the antivax question.

Punishing public health officials for their “crimes” has long been an antivax fantasy. The Brownstone Institute has a question and can’t decide if it agrees, even as it echoes the same rhetoric.

Categories
Medicine Politics Quackery Television

America’s Quack Dr. Oz and the failure of medical academia, revisited

It’s Election Day. Worse, it’s quite possible that America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz could be Senator-Elect Oz by tomorrow. He was helped by a profound failure of medical academia in general and Columbia University in particular.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Quackery

The accelerating war on science-based medical regulation

Last week, it was reported how increasingly there is a war on the science-based regulation of medicine and physicians. It’s an old story, but unfortunately the forces arrayed against science-based policy have been emboldened by the pandemic and an stronger alliance with political groups that are against government regulation in general.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery

Criticism and quality control ≠ “Censorship and defamation”

Minerva published an op-ed disguised as a “study” decrying “censorship and defamation.” It was really just criticism and quality control, but the usual suspects are all over it as evidence of evil.

Categories
Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

What makes a COVID-19 “contrarian” doctor—or any quack?

In 2008, I tried to answer the question: How do doctors become contrarians, quacks, and antivaxxers? A Twitter encounter suggested to me not just answers but that an update to that post is massively overdue.