FSM News and Articles
Brisbane naturopath’s ‘outrageous, dangerous’ Covid vax claims: “Immunologist and emeritus professor of medicine at UNSW Professor John Dwyer said the proliferation of pseudoscience published by natural health professionals posed an even greater threat than the usual anti-vax types because they were given greater credibility. Prof Dwyer, who is a co-founder of the Friends of Science in Medicine, pointed to one particularly ‘outrageous example of dangerous, false information’ being provided by a Queensland naturopath and nutritionist.”
FSM Friends’ News and Articles
Experts abused for talking to the public: “One of the manifestations of the new political and social world we are living in is the so-called ‘death of expertise’. This refers not to the loss of actual expertise, but rather the loss of a baseline of public respect for the concept of expertise and for experts themselves. A recent Nature survey highlights a disturbing marker of this trend – experts (in this case mostly doctors) facing threats of physical harm for expressing their opinions about COVID-19 in public.”
Legislative Alchemy – Naturopathic licensing bill now before Wisconsin Senate Committee: Despite all the rhetoric about “natural” remedies, naturopaths in the United States have repeatedly campaigned for full drug prescription rights. The desired outcome seems to be to have all the rights of doctors, without ever having to go through medical school or spend close to a decade of work and training in the hospital system.
Why is it is that homeopathy correlates so clearly to anti-vaccine attitudes? In a 2020 survey, 41% of homeopath-users said that they would “certainly not” use a covid vaccine, compared to 15% for non-homeopathy users.
General
Your unvaccinated friend is roughly 20 times more likely to give you COVID-19: Vaccination against COVID-19 makes someone ten times less likely to have COVID-19 in the first place, and about half as likely to pass that infection on to someone else – which means your vaccinated friends pose much less risk of passing on COVID-19 to you than your unvaccinated friends.
COVID tests have made pathology companies big profits, but rapid tests are set to shake up the market: Rapid antigen tests require regular testing to achieve a similar accuracy to PCR tests, but are 1/10th the cost and are simple enough to be self administered at home. This has the potential to ‘shake up the market’, reducing the profits of current test providers. However, there are also concerns about how data can be reliably collected to guide public health decisions, leading the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia to caution against over reliance on rapid testing. “The government has said rapid antigen tests will play a role in Australia’s COVID response going forward, but we’re yet to see exactly how this will work, who will have access, and at what cost. But it’s clear we need more transparency about how these decisions are made.”