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News on COVID-19
In the past week, we’ve seen the CDC pause distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and new cases among the vaccinated in Michigan — coming together to paint a somewhat bleak picture of the state-of-our-vaccines. Or so it might seem. In the latest edition of our Breaking News Consumer’s Handbooks, we examine the fuzzy math […]
By Sahar BaharlooCatherine didn’t have much to do with mainstream medicine. Social media pushed her down a rabbit hole – but also dragged her back out again. Catherine’s family believed in alternative medicine and she grew up in relatively poor, fringe communities that didn’t have much to do with mainstream science or Britain’s national health system. And […]
By BBC World ServiceIn March, Twitter put its foot down: users who repeatedly spread false information about COVID-19 vaccines will have their accounts suspended or shut down. It was a new front in a high-stakes battle over misinformation that could help to determine how many people get vaccinated, and how swiftly the pandemic ends. The battle is also […]
By Jeff TollefsonThe exponential increase in demand for and dissemination of information about COVID‐19 means the pandemic has been accompanied by an ‘infodemic’. This overabundance of accurate and inaccurate information is not limited to scientific or policy publications but threatens to overwhelm news and social media outlets. As noted by Eysenbach, the price of freedom of speech […]
By Jan ScottThe conference of Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) will take place virtually during the week of August 19-13, 2021. Panels will take place between 11 am-3 pm ET. We invite submissions from all fields and industries. Please email politics.css@gmail.com with any questions. **Submissions are due by Friday, May 21** For the full call, see: […]
By Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS)Early yesterday, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that the US pause distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine following reports of blood clotting in six recipients, all of them women aged between eighteen and forty-eight, one of whom has died and another of whom is critically […]
By Jason AllsopThe girl with the loudspeaker doesn’t look much older than 15. “I’ve spoken at these demonstrations [before],” she says, before launching into a tirade against the German government’s lockdown restrictions and vaccination programme. “They say, ‘We have to lock them up! Have them vaccinated! Only then will they be allowed out again!’” she bellows, adding […]
By BBC TrendingIn early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic created an urgent demand, not just for scientific information and advice, but also for policy proposals that helped curb the spread of the virus while minimizing economic and other collateral societal effects. The research response has been unprecedented. After just 1 year, PubMed returns more than 100,000 publications, 10 […]
By Dietram A. Scheufele, Andrew J. Hoffman, Liz Neeley, and Czerne M. ReidThis report is part of an ongoing series examining COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on Facebook in countries and regions across the world. This edition, focusing on Arabic-language communities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) throughout January and February 2021, represents a landmark report in the series. By tracing a handful of anti-vaccination pages on […]
By Ciaran O’Connor and Moustafa Ayad
United States internet searches for “infertility” following COVID-19 vaccine misinformation | PubMed
On December 1, 2020, Drs. Wolfgang Wodarg and Micheal Yeadon petitioned to withhold emergency use authorization of the BNT162b2 messenger ribonucleic acid vaccine for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) manufactured by BioNTech and Pfizer, raising concern for female infertility risks but acknowledging the lack of evidence. The European Medicines Agency and the US Food and Drug […]
By Nicholas B Sajjadi, William Nowlin, Ross Nowlin, David Wenger, John Martin Beal, Matt Vassar, Micah HartwellHe has been pushed off Facebook and banned from Twitter, but Larry Cook battles on at StopMandatoryVaccination.com, where the Los Angeles man tries to explain why COVID-19 vaccines are evil and why President Donald Trump — who he insists will return to power — got one anyway. Some evangelical Christians tie the vaccines to Satan, […]
By Teri Sforza