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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Politics

Transmission gambit: An old antivax trope is resurrected

Recently, antivaxxers were all over social media after Tucker Carlson touted a “revelation” that the phase 3 clinical trial used to support licensure of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine didn’t examine its ability to block transmission as meaning that its inability to block transmission had been “covered up”. It wasn’t, and antivaxxers are ignoring everything we’ve learned over the last two years to make the claim that vaccines “don’t prevent transmission”.

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Antivaccine nonsense Clinical trials Religion

Thacker parrots an old antivax trope: “Vaccines are magic!”

Paul Thacker proclaims, “Vaccines are magic!” and likens them to religion that you can’t criticize. This is an old antivax narrative that he’s now parroting.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Medicine Skepticism/critical thinking

Norman Fenton: “It’s not p-hacking if you don’t use p-values.”

Defending an awful paper on COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, Prof. Norman Fenton claims that it can’t be p-hacking if you don’t use p-values. Hilarity ensues.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Clinical trials Medicine

Peter Doshi vs. COVID-19 vaccines, the latest round

BMJ Senior Editor Peter Doshi published a preprint misleadingly “reanalyzing” phase 3 clinical trials to falsely conclude that mRNA vaccines to cause more harm than good. I sense…p-hacking. That, and comparing apples to oranges.

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Antivaccine nonsense Bad science Pseudoscience

An antivaccine slasher myth originated in The BMJ

Recently, a claim that Pfizer’s own documents demonstrate that the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine was only 12% went viral. This is a slasher stat, so-named because like the killers in slasher movie series, even when it appears to be dead it always reappears to kill again. This particular myth originated in The BMJ in 2021.

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