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We at ACSH never write articles about TikTok fashion celebrities or the benefits of sticking metal rods in your urethra because we have no interest in or knowledge of those topics. If you want to learn more about "People Who Stick Things Down Their Pee Hole," the fearless journalists at Vice News have the gritty details. Vice contributors will also pontificate about pesticides, though I encourage you to stay here if you want accurate information.

I mention our varying spheres of expertise because Vice recently published...

After recognizing SARS-COV-2 as a global threat last spring, the pandemic response quickly devolved into an ideological war. Most people lined up on either side of an oversimplified debate and filtered every new piece of evidence through their preexisting beliefs. Neither side tolerated dissent. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel ghoulishly illustrated the problem with this mindset during a now-infamous bit about refusing treatment to the unvaccinated:

Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in. We'll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo [ivermectin]? Rest in peace, wheezy.

In contrast to Kimmel on one side and the ivermectin warriors on the other, the...

Study after study (after study after study) has shown that the available COVID-19 vaccines prevent death and severe disease. The shots continue to stop the majority of infections, even when up against a nastier virus in the delta variant. This conclusion was nicely summed up by a team of researchers writing this week in The...

COVID-19 vaccination has been linked to a collection of severe side effects. Many cases of anaphylaxis, myocarditis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, blood-clotting disorders and even Bell's palsy have been reported to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) since the first shot was approved last December. Predictably, these self-reported incidents have provided ample fodder to activist groups and skeptics working to scare people away from effective and very safe immunizations for COVID-19.

The skeptical take now seems to be that mass vaccination is injuring and killing untold numbers of people as well as driving the evolution of SARS-COV-2...

The suggestion that children should be vaccinated against SARS-COV-2 has triggered outrage and anxiety across the internet. The former president has warned parents against immunizing their kids, and the media has called him a “human parasite” for doing so. Meanwhile, anti-vaccine groups have continued to track every reported adverse reaction to the vaccines in hopes of fueling more panic. Here's a recent headline from our friends at Children's Health Defense, for instance: "CDC Admits Teens Vaccinated With Pfizer or Moderna at Higher Risk of Heart Inflammation."

Overheated rhetoric aside, there are two issues we need to address before we can answer the question in the headline....

Americans don't appreciate their government telling them what to do. Especially when it comes to health care, millions of people across the political spectrum react with hostility when the state tries to interfere in their personal affairs.

The anti-vaccine movement has successfully used this visceral distrust of government to battle immunization mandates, such as New Jersey's recent attempt (S2173) to eliminate religious exemptions for vaccines for students entering schools and daycare centers. Such laws, the anti-vax crowd proclaims, rob parents of the right to choose and give...

A desire to stop the spread of COVID-19 misinformation has fueled increasingly intense efforts to restrict speech on social media platforms. Major news outlets, communications researchers, and even some public health experts have jumped on this bandwagon, calling for a variety of policies designed to stem the proliferation of anti-vaccine messaging and other scientifically dubious content.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this campaign is its propensity to silence trustworthy sources of information right alongside nonsense pushers like Joe Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The British Medical Journal has...

Convincing a parent that vaccines won't harm their children can be a near-possible task these days. As pediatric infectious disease specialist Paul Offit told me during a recent interview, no amount of scientific evidence is likely to sway someone who has read horror stories about other children reacting badly to a shot.

Anti-vaccine groups amplify the problem by abusing the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a database jointly maintained by the CDC and FDA. The system serves an important purpose: helping the two public health agencies ...

Conspiracy theories are dangerous, especially in the hearts of anti-vaxxers – but their beliefs extend beyond true believers- infecting social media and tainting the general public in ways hard to address and requires special (and time-intensive) efforts at defusing them.

“Even if most people dismiss conspiracy theories...

Any time I see the phrase "according to fact-checkers" in a headline, I can't help but roll my eyes. That's because what follows the headline probably isn't a "fact-check" but an opinion piece authored by someone pretending to be a journalist. This isn't a new phenomenon. As my predecessor Dr. Alex Berezow argued several years ago,

Ultimately, fact-checking is a much more subjective enterprise than we would like it to be. Truth is real but sometimes difficult to ascertain, particularly when political ideologies and...