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Antivaccine nonsense Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Antivaxxers attack scientific consensus as a “manufactured construct”

Neil deGrasse Tyson invoked the concept of a scientific consensus while supporting vaccines in his debate with Del Bigtree. Why was his statement about how “individual scientists don’t matter” compared to scientific consensus so triggering to antivaxxers? Why do antivaxxers reject the very concept of a scientific consensus and promote a hyper-individualistic view of how science should be conducted?

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics Popular culture Pseudoscience

No one should be surprised at the number of antivax doctors in a new survey

A recent survey suggests that a disturbingly high percentage of physicians are either vaccine hesitant or actually antivaccine. Those of us who have been writing about the antivaccine movement know that this is not new, but it seems new to our colleagues who weren’t paying attention before the pandemic.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience

Scientific review articles as disinformation

Antivaxxers have always written dubious scientific review articles to try to make their wild speculations about vaccine science seem credible. Usually such articles wind up in bottom-feeding journals. Unfortunately a recent pseudo-review article was published by an Elsevier journal, making it seem more credible when it isn’t.

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring: The J&J vaccine and blood clots

Yesterday, the FDA paused use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 due to a rare association with a very uncommon type of blood clot. Detecting one-in-a-million potential adverse events shows that our monitoring is working, but predictably antivaxxers are weaponizing this development to spread fear of COVID vaccines.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Politics Popular culture

After FDA approval of Comirnaty, antivaxxers claim it’s still “experimental”

On Monday the FDA granted full approval to Comirnaty, the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. By Tuesday, antivaxxers had a propaganda line that the vaccine is still “experimental.”