Quickly following after that were a raft of articles on Mercola’s site falsely claiming that COVID-19 vaccines cause miscarriages and make women infertile, were not really “vaccines” but “medical devices” or “ experimental gene therapy” that was “ hacking the software of life“, or even cause mass death resulting in “ depopulation“. For example, as the mRNA-based vaccines were being considered for EUA, Mercola promoted the false idea that these vaccines can “ permanently alter your DNA“, even going so far as to publish an article titled “ Will New COVID Vaccine Make You Transhuman?” (which, by the way, was published in September 2020). Kennedy, Jr., become one of the most prolific and widely read sources of misinformation and fear mongering about the vaccines. Since even before COVID-19 vaccines were granted emergency use authorizations (EUAs) by the FDA in December, Mercola has turned his sights on them and, with Robert F. (I guess that consistency is not a requirement for the claims of quacks and antivaxxers.) It rather made me wonder why he would be concerned if the flu vaccine really did increase the risk of COVID-19 if COVID-19 is just a “harmless” disease. In retrospect, this amuses me, because it wasn’t long before Mercola embraced the “casedemic” conspiracy theory that claimed that PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19) is overly sensitive, making most positive tests false positive tests-and, also, according to him COVID-19 is not deadly, except to the elderly. Indeed, last fall Mercola spread the false claim that the influenza vaccine increases one’s risk of falling ill with COVID-19, all in order to spread fear of the flu vaccine. Indeed, early in the pandemic, we noted his role in spreading COVID-19 conspiracy theories and how, by even May 2020 he had made a name as one of the “superspreaders” of COVID-19 misinformation and false claims about COVID-19. Indeed, I can’t help but note that, since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Mercola has unfortunately been a frequent topic of this blog because he has been one of the most prolific sources (if not the most prolific source) of COVID-19 misinformation, antimask conspiracy theories, and antivaccine fear mongering. I bring this bit of history up for a simple reason, to remind our readers that my SBM colleagues and I have been writing about this particular quack for a long time. A superspreader of medical misinformation It seems that every couple of years the mainstream media notices what an influential quack Mercola is so I thought I’d take a look at the article with the benefit of a long history of having observed Mercola’s activities. Sadly, Mercola hasn’t been ignored, as The New York Times reported over the weekend in an article by Sheera Frenkel titled “ The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online“. Joe Albietz was the first to make Mercola’s antivaccine misinformation the main topic of an SBM post back in 2009, later providing nine good reasons to completely ignore him, even as he and Barbara Loe Fisher were starting “Vaccine Awareness Week” in 2010 to spread misinformation about “vaccine injury”. (It’s almost as though he was embarrassed by his use of the analogy, although it was useful to be reminded that the misuse and abuse of Holocaust was commonplace among antivaxxers even 19 years ago, years before my post.) As for this blog, I was interested to note that Harriet Hall has the honor of being the first SBM blogger to have mentioned Mercola, back in 2008, although past contributor Dr. Interestingly, the link to the original article that I discussed then now forwards to an article from 2009 that includes no mention of the Holocaust, and when I tried to find the original article at, it turns out that the original link has been excluded from the almighty Wayback Machine. At the time, Mercola was-surprise! surprise!-comparing school vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. It turns out that it was quite long ago in 2005, at a point when my very first blog was just over six months old. Out of curiosity, as I was writing this post I tried to identify the first time I ever wrote about Mercola. I’ve written about Joseph Mercola, DO on a number of occasions over the years, dating back to before I ever joined this blog, first as a contributor and then as an editor.
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