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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience

Vaccines cause female infertility: Another antivax lie resurrected and repackaged for COVID-19

Antivaxxers have been claiming that vaccines cause female infertility for as long as I can remember. So it’s not surprising that they are now claiming that COVID-19 vaccines will make women infertile. Their assertion is based on a highly speculative and incredibly unlikely immunologic mechanism. Same as it ever was.

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Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Quacks misuse Koch’s postulates to deny that SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19

Science denialists and quacks love abusing Koch’s postulates to deny that various microorganisms are the true cause of disease; so it was inevitable that they’d do it for COVID-19.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Politics Popular culture

Antivaxxers aren’t just antivaccine. They’re anti-public health.

Why have antivaxxers allied themselves with COVID-19 deniers? Simple. Both share an unrelenting hostility to public health interventions.

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Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Casedemic: The latest COVID-19 conspiracy theory to downplay the severity of the pandemic

Antivaccine activists and pandemic minimizers Del Bigtree and Joe Mercola are promoting the myth of the “casedemic” that claims that the massive increase in COVID-19 cases being reported is an artifact of increased PCR testing and false positives due to too sensitive a threshold to the test. As they have done for vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases many times before, they are vastly simplifying and exaggerating a scientific controversy to cast doubt on the scope and deadliness of the pandemic.

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Bad science Computers and social media Medicine Popular culture Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Steak-umm vs. COVID-19 misinformation

Of all the strange things that have happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of a frozen meat company as a source of critical thinking and skepticism regarding COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation is one of the strangest. How did Steak-umm become a champion of critical thinking about the pandemic?