Category: Politics and Regulation
COVID-19 vaccines versus “purity of essence,” revisited
Antivaxxers frequently make the false claim that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines "permanently alter your DNA". These claims are really a concern about "impurifying" their "purity of essence" and have now gone into some truly disturbing territory, such as antivaxxers calling themselves "purebloods".
The “Natural Immunity is Real Act”: Real or an act?
Republican legislators have proposed a law requiring federal agencies to acknowledge, accept, truthfully present and incorporate "consideration of natural immunity" in their COVID regulations. It's just political theatrics based on a flawed understanding of infection-induced "natural" immunity.
Those Joe Namath Medicare Commercials
Joe Namath is promoting Medicare Advantage Plans on TV. Some of what he says is misleading. Here's the rest of the story.
Too many lab tests still escape FDA review, threatening patient safety
Even as the lab testing market grows, too many tests escape FDA review based on a meaningless categorization that has nothing to do with patient safety. Congress should pass the VALID Act of 2021, allowing the FDA to adequately regulate direct-to-consumer and other lab tests with the potential to harm the public.
How we got here with political and health misinformation: The case of “Hacker X” and Mike Adams
Ars Technica recently published a story about Hacker X, who helped Mike Adams expand his online empire of health fraud into an empire of fake news and political disinformation, thus intertwining health and political misinformation into the deadly combination we see now.
Legislative Alchemy: Naturopathic licensing bill now before Wisconsin Senate Committee
Naturopaths are pushing for licensing in Wisconsin with a bill allowing them to practice as primary care doctors, prescribe drugs, and employ quack diagnostic testing and remedies. A powerful regulatory board controlled by naturopaths could expand their scope of practice at will.
Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, take 6: Incompetence and fraud everywhere!
Ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine, a drug repurposed for COVID-19 that almost certainly doesn't work but is still being touted as a "miracle cure" by quacks, grifters, and political ideologues. Are the data supporting it all fraud?
State medical boards vs. COVID-19 misinformation, an update
The disinformation epidemic about COVID-19 has pushed state medical boards to consider disciplining physicians who promote COVID-19 disinformation. How would that work? What are the obstacles? Is it even possible? It should be, but it will be messy and complicated.
About those “19 errors,” part one
Journalist Jesse Singal took issue with Dr. Rose Lovell and Dr. AJ Eckert's guest posts about Abigail Shrier's book on transgender teens, Dr. Harriet Hall's review of the book, and the medical care of these teens, claiming that the posts contained "19 errors." In this post, Dr. Lovell responds to her share of these "19 errors," most of which are not errors.
Yes, the FDA really HAS given full approval to the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine
After the FDA announcement a week ago that Comirnaty, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine developed by BioNTech and Pfizer, had been approved, it took less than a day for antivaxxers to spin a conspiracy theory claiming that the FDA hadn't really approved the Pfizer vaccine at all and that Comirnaty wasn't available, all to protect Pfizer from liability. It's a superficially plausible conspiracy...