Why Giving Anti-Vaxxers No Quarter Matters.

Pushback

Ville


Some of you all have likely become a little tired of me going on and on (and on) about how scurrilous and, frankly, gutless anti-vaxxers immediately began to use weasel words, sans evidence, to infer that the Covid vaccine had something to do with the sudden cardiac arrest that a professional football suffered on the field on Monday night.

After all, you are probably muttering to yourself, why not just ignore these loons until they go away?

Well, there are serious consequences for public health when their codswallop is wurlitzered around the web, not to mention the wider world, as Mike Wending and Rachel Schraer explain in their piece for the BBC:

...Research by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit campaign group based in London and Washington, found that mentions of an anti-vaccine film quadrupled after the player's collapse.

CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed said activists were "cynically exploiting tragedy to baselessly connect any injury or death of a notable person to vaccinations".

The day after the match the documentary Died Suddenly, which was released in November last year, was mentioned nearly 17,000 times, the CCDH says. The BBC previously looked into the claims in the film and found little or no evidence behind many of them.

Caroline Orr Bueno, a researcher on misinformation who has spent a decade looking at the anti-vaccination movement, says the film gave rise to communities of people across several social media platforms primed to hunt for news events to back up their views.

"They believe the anti-vaccine rhetoric that they are seeing," she says, "and they are joining in out of genuine concern without necessarily knowing that they're being misled."...

But, still, you may be starting to shout...This, too, is just a bunch of loons and the mis-led lemmings who follow them, right?

Well, where large flocks of loons and massive slices of lemmings congregate the political hucksters and their stooges soon swoop in and, in the worst case scenario, enact truly harmful policies to capitalize on the lunacy.

Jack Stripling has that story in the Washington Post:

...Joseph A. Ladapo, a professor of medicine at the University of Florida and the state’s surgeon general (appointed by governor Ron De Santis), relied upon a flawed analysis and may have violated university research integrity rules when he issued guidance last fall discouraging young men from receiving common coronavirus vaccines, according to a report from a medical school faculty task force. But the university says it has no plans to investigate the matter.

Ladapo recommended in October that men younger than 40 not take mRNA vaccinations for Covid, pointing to an “abnormally high risk of cardiac-related death.” Doctors and public health officials swiftly pounced, dismissing the underlying research for its small sample size, lack of detail and shaky methodology.

In its new report, a task force of the University of Florida College of Medicine’s Faculty Council cites numerous deficiencies in the analysis Ladapo used to justify his vaccine recommendation. A summary said the work was “seriously flawed.” The report’s authors say Ladapo engaged in “careless, irregular, or contentious research practices.”

OK?

.