Indeed, even the numbers involved are very similar, ~1,200 children dead of #COVID19 over two years compared to a toll of around ~500 children/year killed by measles before the measles vaccine was introduced.
No, I'm not saying that @BallouxFrancois. I am, however, pointing out that he is definitely parroting antivaccine rhetoric, probably unknowingly.
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As always, with #COVID19 minimizers/deniers/antivaxxers, it's "civility for thee, but not for me." When called on it, predictably, they always retreat to, "It was tongue-in-cheek," a version of "I was only joking."🙄
I wonder if she'd mind if I started referring to her as part of "Team COVID." After all, it's just "tongue-in-cheek."😉
Again, *they* are free use *any* "tongue-in-cheek" term that they like to dismiss and demonize us, but *perish forbid* that we have the temerity "label" them with *any* term that's the *least* bit derogatory!
Vaccine mandates had *already* been politicized by the right BEFORE the pandemic, and that politicization has only been super turbocharged since #COVID19. It's not as though I wasn't writing about this five years ago and earlier... 1/
So I was thinking. Anyone want to start a betting pool to predict the next time @RobertKennedyJr compares vaccines (or #COVID19 public health measures) to the #Holocaust?
There should also be some sort of bonus if the winner predicts an incident where @RobertKennedyJr is forced to issue another insincere apology after an uproar over his bogus #Holocaust analogy.
Mr. Chu is doing *more* than just *sounding* like an antivaxxer here. He’s parroting a common antivax trope, the Nirvana fallacy, which involves conflating imperfection with uselessness. #CovidVaccine decreases, but does not eliminate, transmission. 1/
Antivaxxers have been doing this for decades about, for example, the flu vaccine and pertussis vaccine. Just because a vaccine isn’t 100% effective in preventing transmission does NOT make it useless, but that’s the dishonest argument antivaxxers make. 2/
Mr. Chu really does appear to be antivax, doesn’t he? He makes the same bogus arguments antivaxxers make, and then this.
If you want to know the damage that a Nobel laureate who's gone full quack can do, look no further than this @WSJ op-ed by Luc Montagnier and and Jed Rubenfeld trotting out this nonsense about mandates. 1/
One wonders if @WSJopinion knew when it accepted this op-ed that Luc Montagnier is a thoroughly disgraced quack now. He'd gone full antivax, for instance, years before the pandemic. 2/ respectfulinsolence.com/2017/11/28/the…
Indeed, when Montagnier embraced The One Quackery To Rule Them All, homeopathy, a decade ago, I coined the term "Nobel disease," to describe Nobel laureates who became quacks, cranks, and pseudoscientists in their later years. 3/ respectfulinsolence.com/2010/11/23/luc…
I wonder if @brownstoneinst is aware that this article is parroting a longstanding antivaccine talking point going back to even earlier than the two decades since I've been writing about antivaxxers? 1/
Absent the reference to #COVID19 and #CovidVaccine, this article by Jared McBrady could be mistaken for any number of articles about the "horror" of vaccine mandates published on antivax blogs circa 2005. 2/
Likening vaccine mandates to slavery, Nazi persecution of Jews, Jim Crow, totalitarianism, and the Rwandan genocide, as McBrady does, is classic antivax. Absolutely classic! All that's lacking is for McBrady to liken vaccine mandates to rape. 3/