Anna Merlan is a journalist specialising in politics, crime, religion, subcultures, and women's lives. She is a reporter at the Special Projects Desk, the investigative division of Gizmodo Media Group. She was previously a senior reporter at Jezebel and staff writer at the Village Voice and the Dallas Observer

It's not just Trump—lawmakers and heads of state all over the world are touting unproven, dodgy, and potentially fatal “cures” for COVID-19.

Anna Merlan - 8.13.20

Across the globe, the story is the same: Federal and municipal governments, along with individual lawmakers, are promoting a variety of bogus cures and treatments for COVID-19. The New York Times reported in July that the problem is severe in much of Latin America, where chlorine dioxide and ivermectin, which treats some intestinal parasites and head lice, have been promoted as COVID treatments.

The World Health Organization said that in June that three studies which claimed to show that ivermectin was effective as a coronavirus treatment were all highly flawed. “None of these studies was peer-reviewed nor formally published and one study was later retracted,” the agency said, adding that their review of the studied showed they were “found to have a high risk of bias, very low certainty of the evidence, and that the existing evidence is insufficient to draw a conclusion on benefits and harms.” The agency recommended awaiting the outcome of several randomized, clinical trials currently underway before using the drug as a COVID treatment.)¹⁾

Anna Merlan - 11.15.19

During the talk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s been promoting vaccine misinformation for years, promoted false and misleading claims about vaccine safety and COVID-19.

In a public health development that one can safely characterize as “not great,” actor Alec Baldwin appeared on Instagram Live on Thursday with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a formerly respected environmentalist who’s been best known in recent years for promoting severe vaccine misinformation.

As Baldwin listened obligingly, Kennedy promoted a variety of wildly false claims about vaccine safety, and speculative concerns about the quarantine measures being taken to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Baldwin’s Instagram account has 1.8 million followers, and the video, in less than two hours, garnered more than 43,000 views. This is not precisely what we need right now.  

At the outset of their talk, Baldwin told Kennedy that he’s been watching Kennedy’s videos on vaccines for “years,” which is also, on its face, not great. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the son of assassinated U.S. senator Bobby Kennedy, spent years doing important work advocating for issues like water safety with the Waterkeeper Alliance and with the organization Riverkeeper. He and Baldwin have previously discussed fracking on WNYC.  Health

Beginning in 2005, however, with the publication of a now-infamous story called “Deadly Immunity,” Kennedy began promoting “egregious” misinformation about vaccines, as science writer Seth Mnookin put it in one story outlining his long history of misleading claims. 

During the conversation with Baldwin, Kennedy repeated several of his greatest hits, including claiming that vaccines historically contained unsafe levels of mercury, and that the flu shot is still full of mercury. (The respected physician and vaccine researcher Paul Offitt is one of dozens of people who have outlined that Kennedy is conflating two kinds of mercury.

Ethylmercury is what the body produces when it metabolizes thimerosal, a preservative used in some vaccines, and leaves the body quickly. It is quite, quite different from methylmercury, which can be toxic to human beings at high levels of exposure.) Kennedy rejects the difference between the different kinds of mercury, and told Baldwin, “There’s no good kind of mercury.” 

“Why is it there in the first place?” Baldwin asked, apparently horrified. (The real answer is that thimerosal is only used today in multi-dose flu vaccines, and was removed from all childhood vaccines out of an abundance of caution in 2001.) 

Kennedy went on to claim that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe,” a common canard in the anti-vax movement. (The law professor and vaccine policy expert Dorit Rubinsten Reiss²⁾ has written about how vaccine skeptics frequently misconstrue what that term means; “Unavoidably unsafe” products are products that are so valuable—that have so many benefits—that the risk associated with their use is justified.”) He also claimed that vaccines “are the only medical product that aren’t safety tested,” which is an outrageous lie. Vaccines are among the most tested medical products on the planet, and are tested in thousands of volunteers before being licensed.³⁾ Anna Merlan - 8.6.20

Judy Mikovits spent years offering expert testimony in vaccine court cases, accidentally creating a window into how the anti-vaccine world tries to weaponize bad science. Anna Merlan - 7.23.20

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