Tag Archives: evaluating evidence

COVID vaccines are safer than COVID itself

Some of the most persistent myths and misconceptions around COVID19 vaccines concern the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis, particularly in young people. A massive new study has obliterated these myths using a very clever study design, and it’s worth diving … Continue reading

Posted in Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Anti-vaccers are fundamentally wrong about placebo-controlled trials

Anti-vaxxers love to demand placebo-controlled trials and insist that nothing else will suffice for demonstrating vaccine safety. This approach to medical research is flawed for a number of reasons. First, as I’ve explained previously, new vaccines are, in fact, tested … Continue reading

Posted in Nature of Science, Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Understanding analogies in logical arguments

Yesterday, on this blog’s Facebook page, I posted the stick figure comic on the right, lightly making fun of anti-vaccers and using analogies to demonstrate why they are wrong that 100% effectiveness is needed for vaccines to be useful. I … Continue reading

Posted in Rules of Logic, Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Big pharma is not buying favorable peer-reviews

Science-deniers have a long history of blindly assuming that any research they don’t like must have been corrupted by “big whatever,” and I constantly see people assume a study had conflicts of interest rather than actually checking for conflicts. Lately, … Continue reading

Posted in Nature of Science, Vaccines/Alternative Medicine | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Is the “backfire effect” real?

The “backfire effect” is a psychological phenomenon in which correcting misinformation actually reinforces the false view rather than causing someone to reject it (Nyhan and Reifler 2010). This topic comes a lot in the comments on this and other pro-science … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 6 Comments