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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine

VAERS and plasmid DNA “contamination” of COVID-19 vaccines: The nonsense continues

This week, a new preprint made the social media rounds falsely claiming a correlation between “contamination” of COVID-19 vaccines with plasmid DNA and VAERS reports of adverse events. How does its methodology stink? Let me count the ways.

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Antivaccine nonsense Biology Medicine

Fear mongering about mRNA from COVID-19 vaccines in breast milk

Orac returns from his hiatus to be greeted with overblown fear mongering about mRNA from COVID-19 vaccines in breast milk based on a study that found trace amounts of it there. Let’s just say that there’s less there than meets they eye.

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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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Antivaccine nonsense Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

No, childhood vaccines will not be “made from human tumors”

Every so often there’s an article that starts making the rounds on social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, that cries out for a treatment by yours truly. Actually, there are more such articles that are constantly circulating on social media that I could work full time blogging and still not cover them all. So […]

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Medicine Pseudoscience Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Dr. Sin Hang Lee is at it again with his usual Gardasil fearmongering

Remember Dr. Sin Hang Lee? If you don’t remember Lee, maybe you remember a while back, when the antivaccine group SaneVax touted findings that it claimed were devastating to Gardasil. Specifically, they claimed that there was vaccine-derived human papilloma virus DNA in Gardasi. Ring any bells yet? And it turns out that the guy who […]