Free Republic

A Detroit News station’s Facebook query about COVID-19 got an unexpected response when users swamped their comment section with stories that directly contradicted their desired narrative.“After the vaccines were available to everyone, did you lose an unvaccinated loved one to COVID-19?” WXYZ-TV inquired in the Sept. 10 post. “If you’re willing to share your family’s story, please DM us your contact information. We may reach out for a story we’re working on.”After WXYZ-TV posted its appeal for stories about unvaccinated loved ones dying of COVID, something remarkable happened.Thousands of Facebook users shared stories describing alarming vaccine side effects, or posted...

While watching the scientific community grapple with long COVID, I have thought a lot about a scene in The Lord of the Rings. Faced with impending doom, the hobbits Merry and Pippin ask the powerful treelike ents for help. But despite the urgency of the situation, the ents are slow. They meet for hours, and after a lot of deliberation, they announce that they’ve agreed that the hobbits are not orcs. The hobbits, who already knew that, are shocked. They were hoping for more.In June 2020, when I started reporting on long COVID, few scientists or physicians knew that it...

AbstractOne cannot spend >5 min on social media at the moment without finding a link to some conspiracy theory or other regarding the origin of SARS-CoV2, the coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. From the virus being deliberately released as a bioweapon to pharmaceutical companies blocking the trials of natural remedies to boost their dangerous drugs and vaccines, the Internet is rife with far-fetched rumors. And predictably, now that the first immunization trials have started, the antivaccine lobby has latched on to most of them. In the last week, the trailer for a new “bombshell documentary” Plandemic has been doing...