Is there anything positive coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Before there were safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use, such as the vaccines by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson here in the US, as well as AstraZeneca in Europe and elsewhere, those of us who have been countering the antivaccine movement for many years now were warning about the sorts of disinformation that antivaxxers would spread about them. We were largely correct, too, but I cant really say that it took any particular brilliance or foresight to have been so correct. We simply knew that there is no truly new trope, pseudoscience, or disinformation in the antivaccine narratives and conspiracy theories; so all we did was to predict the repurposing of tried-and-not-true antivax lies. ); blaming every death reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database on vaccines, when VAERS is not designed to determine causation and we would expect a large baseline number of deaths in the time periods covered by random chance alone; claiming that vaccines cause Alzheimers and prion disease; blaming the vaccines for cancer; resurrecting the favorite old trope of shedding from the vaccinated in the most risible manner possible; invoking evolution to predict the selection of more deadly coronavirus variants that could wipe out humanity; warning that the vaccines can permanently alter your DNA; and that they make females infertile. I will admit that there were a couple of new ones, albeit variations on a theme. For instance, because of the new mRNA- and adenovirus-based technologies used to develop the current crop of vaccines, antivaxxers have falsely referred to them as experimental gene therapy rather than vaccines, and, because vaccination in the shoulder can lead to transient inflammation of the lymph nodes under the arm, which has led to some unnecessary biopsies after mammography for breast cancer screening, antivaxxers have tried to claim that the vaccines cause breast cancer. So I guess I should say that theres almost nothing new under the sun.