What’s up with that iron-fisted grip?

Flavio Bartmann asked what I think of this article by Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff, “America needs a rebirth in science.”

My reply:

1. It’s hard to disagree with their general point about risk-taking in science.

2. I don’t see any support for their specific claims, for example that the covid epidemic is “the biggest public-health fiasco in history” (what about public promotion and subsidy of cigarettes, meat, sugar, etc.?) or “the marginalization and censoring of dissident scientists” (I’d like to see some specific examples) or their claim that scientists seeking NIAID funding will be concerned about the views of the institute’s director (I expect that funding decisions are happening at a much lower level) or “the iron-fisted grip over the funding and publication of new scientific findings” (I don’t even know what this means!).

Bartmann responded:

It is a bit worse than that. Three guys draft a very ambitious declaration, claiming the policies implemented are terrible, propose an alternative based on a vague concept of “Focused Protection,” get virtually no support either among scientists or policymakers, and start talking about “marginalization and censoring” and about a “longstanding slowdown in support for challenging paradigms,” going to claim “this is a recipe for prolonged stagnation that could jeopardize the societal wellbeing, economic health and security of the United States” (!!!) and saying that “we are partnering with Hillsdale College to help return science to its proper form.”

That does seem over the top. But maybe part of this is that we’re used to seeing scientific writing, and this is more like a political speech where some candidate sings the virtues of Mom, apple pie, baseball, good jobs for all, and balanced budgets as far as the eye can see.

125 thoughts on “What’s up with that iron-fisted grip?

  1. The Hillsdale College reference got my attention. There is at least some truth that control is exerted over publication and funding of research by those in power. But the authors seem to be concerned only about a particular paradigm that they perceive to be in control – represented by Fauci, those that believe lockdowns (and other forms of control) are necessary due to COVID, and probably what they would call “woke” ideas (though I didn’t see them use that term). I may even feel inclined to agree with them. But I certainly get the feeling that they would not be concerned if a different group had power over research publication and funding. For example, in a post by the president of Hillsdale College (https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/education-as-a-battleground/), he speaks glowingly of the actions of DeSantis (and others) in taking on the educational bureaucracy – I’m no fan of that bureaucracy but I’m no fan of supplanting it with a DeSantis bureaucracy.

    The “iron-fisted grip” that the authors object to appears to be the prevalence of ideas they don’t like. I think they want to keep an iron-fisted grip but just put it in different hands. In the article they say “It’s increasingly hard for ideas that challenge orthodoxy to break through.” I wonder if that is true – it would be interesting to try to get evidence to test that. I do lament the power of orthodoxy, but I suspect it has always had power. In some ways, it has never been easier to express non-orthodox views, regardless of how wacky they are or how little evidence supports them. Certainly the examples where these non-orthodox views have been successful (e.g. Florida’s educational system) don’t strike me as freeing science (as well as nonscientific inquiry, whatever that may be) from the influence of power – they just shift the power to a different group.

  2. The current scientific consensus, i.e. the paradigms, are created by human beings and are certain to contain some, maybe many, mistakes. AI has come along at a astounding pace. Some prominent people like Musk and Wozniak have called for a pause in AI development, but I doubt that will happen. I don’t know enough to have an opinion whether it should. In 2020 the US government under Mr. Trump started Operation Warp Speed. Certainly there was a sense of real urgency, and it is inevitable that mistakes were made. No one could have created an approach to that problem under the conditions of urgency that didn’t have mistakes. I think that a cool dispassionate look back at that program would be good, but I don’t think that our current political atmosphere would allow that to happen. Operation Warp Speed was ended by Pres. Biden, but I have heard little praise for him by opponents of the OWS policies.
    Paradigms that I don’t like include dark matter, but I have no useful replacement ideas.

  3. Evidence-based medicine is not science. It is brute force trial and error that ignores all prior information as a stated policy.

    That is how you get these public health organizations claiming “no evidence” for things everyone knows that millions of papers have been published about. Eg, whether antibodies confer immunity, or if clean water is good for children (apparently there is no RCT showing it lowers childhood mortality).

    This can’t be stressed enough. Even if they abandoned NHST for some valid method of drawing conclusions, it still wouldn’t be science without accepting cumulative knowledge.

    And covid was a fiasco but not really exceptional. We are still living with the gigantic obesity and skin cancer pandemics caused by diet (low fat, high carb) and sunscreen (blocking only UV-B until the 2010s) advice generated via the same methods.

  4. Andrew wrote:

    “I don’t see any support for their specific claims, for example that the covid epidemic is ‘the biggest public-health fiasco in history'”

    You just have to read more Scott Atlas. For example, we can learn that the lockdowns alone led to corpses being stacked like cordwood:

    “The harms from closing schools, which were known just a few months after the first spring school closures, were enormous. They included 1 in 4 college students considering killing themselves, an explosion of mental illness, suicides, drug abuse, and self-harm visits from slashing wrists or self-burning with cigarettes. Moreover, there were hundreds of thousands of unreported child abuse cases during the spring school closures alone (as schools are the number one reporting agency).”

    • Well, There are many papers showing how harmful school closures were. In Europe schools were mostly open because they followed the science. There was a large German study that failed to document a single case of a student infecting a teacher. The IFR of covid (even the early variety) is perhaps 0.002% and that is allowing for children who are already serious ill with cancer or other serious health issues.

      Whether the specific numbers from Atlas are right are largely irrelevant. In the US, we denied the science and kept schools closed.

      • > Well, There are many papers showing how harmful school closures were.

        Classic lack of scientific understanding of how to establish causality.

        Neither surprising to see it from you, nor from Scott.

        Amazing that you’re still commenting here given this:

        dpy6629 | April 19, 2020 at 11:29 pm |
        Josh, This Gelman is a nothingburger.

        And

        dpy6629 | April 20, 2020 at 5:15 pm |
        Gelman looks like someone who likes to hold forth on subjects he is ignorant of such as serologic testing. He then tries to shame other scientists who know much much more than he does. Typical blog thrill seeker whose conclusions can’t be trusted..

        • Josh, Your comment is classic deflection to irrelevancies. You can cite nothing of relevance so you restate something I apologized for. Why do you engage in such sophist tricks? Because you have nothing else to say?

        • You can’t apologize for being stupid and making ridiculous comments with total confidence that yiyrwvrugt , when actually the comments make it obvious that you don’t know what you’re taking about.

          Your stupid insukts of Andrew make it obvious, the quality of your thinking. You were totallt confident in your opinion even though that opinion was firmly rooted in nothing other than ignorance and hostility towards anything that’s inconvenient for you politically.

          I could just as easily have posted your ignorant comments from some of the many, many times you were totally confident despite being ignorant on covid-related topics. Such as in the summer of 2020 when you confidently dismissed a surge in cases as being nothing other than an insignificant trend of cases among young people not at risk, or a result only of increased testing. Or when you insisted that claims of “herd immunity” in the spring of 2020 in Sweden were accurate.

          It’s funny that you’re trying to defend early comments about the pandemic being “over,” given that you also made ignorant, similar comments.

          Anyway, I’ll leave it alone now. Andrew doesn’t like sniping back and forth. I just wanted to make sure readers knew the demonstrated quality of your thinking.

        • dpy6629 wrote:

          “Josh, Your comment is classic deflection to irrelevancies.”

          Let’s parse some irrelevancies:

          “The IFR of covid (even the early variety) is perhaps 0.002% and that is allowing for children who are already serious ill with cancer or other serious health issues.”

          This had nothing to do with the decision to close schools, full stop. Right from the beginning it was pointed out that children were in little danger. In fact, you can always tell when someone is arguing disingenuously on this topic when they deflect this way. Schools were closed because there is no way to systematically improve the hygiene of young children and spread through schools posed a serious danger to older folks living at home. Of course closing schools reduced the spread and saved lives, but they were old people you don’t care about.

          Furthermore, the popular opinion in far right circles that children were permanently scarred by school closure is ridiculous. I suspect that many children now do better with unstructured time than they did before the pandemic, because they had a little practice. If children really were systematically harmed, we need to take a long hard look at how we can better equip children to make their own decisions about good ways to spend their time, because what we have been doing is not working.

        • Dyp6629:

          I agree with Joshua. Calling me a “nothingburger” is pretty rude. Rude is ok if you have something to back it up, but the backing up in this case seems to be further insults, for example calling me a “thrill seeker.”

          If you think that blogging is a form of thrill seeking, you really need to get out more.

        • Andrew, What I said about your blog was not correct. The fact that I’m commenting here shows that I do read your blog and consider it an important forum. I’ve done a lot of research on these issues and think I have something to add.

          Joshua does this often. He dredges up out of context quotes and then uses them to discredit, a classic propagandistic tactic common in the schoolyard. Joshua has a massive footprint of disinformation and sophist comments at Climate Etc. for example. I’m not going to get down in the gutter, but I’ve saved a dozen of the most childish of them.

        • Matt –

          > Furthermore, the popular opinion in far right circles that children were permanently scarred by school closure is ridiculous. I suspect that many children now do better with unstructured time than they did before the pandemic, because they had a little practice. If children really were systematically harmed, we need to take a long hard look at how we can better equip children to make their own decisions about good ways to spend their time, because what we have been doing is not working.

          I think it’s perfectly reasonable to speculate that schools closing had some material negative impact on kids. It’s also reasonable to speculate about whether there was, or the size of, any net benefit in terms of reduction of spread; there were knowledgeable modelers who were talking early on about a counter-intuitive, lack of impact in previous scenarios beyond a few weeks out, from closing schools – an outcome that they didn’t fully understand.

          The problem, imo, is when people pushing political agendas speak with great certainty about “lockdown deaths,” or harms from closing schools, where they’re essentially doing nothing other than conflating correlation with causation.

          It gets even worse, imo, when the arguments are based on facile assumptions about the counterfactual of what would have happened had NPI X, Y, Z not been implemented. Those arguments are little other than confirmation bias and it’s disturbing to see people with so much influence engaging so regularly in such piss poor analyses so often on such important issues. For all the importance of truly careful analyses on these topics, public health policy is being held hostage by grifters pushing an agenda, imo.

          Here’s a paper I liked that discusses the problem with facile countefactual assumptions. Interestingly, Sander Greenland, a friend of this blog, gets a shout out by the author:

          https://jech.bmj.com/content/75/11/1031

        • Generally, there is no good evidence that school closures were beneficial and a lot of good studies showing it had not effect. You can easily find the German study if you are really interested.

          In our neighborhood, there was a big outbreak a year ago in school kids. No adults got covid from them, even though some households took some precautions.

        • David –

          OK – one more then that’s it, I promise.

          > Andrew, What I said about your blog was not correct.

          IMO, the problem isn’t really that what you said was wrong. The problem is that what you said was so confidently expressed, even though it was asinine and ill-informed.

          The problem is that such comments potentially reflect a (poor) habit of mind, a tendency towards weak analysis when triggered.

          While it’s good that you now acknowledge that your comments were wrong, it’s not a good sign that you similarly express yourself with great certainty in other areas where you paper over complexity and uncertainty to formulate obviously ideologically-biased, overly confident conclusions.

          Blaming me for your ill placed self-confidence, in comments which reflect a poor habit of mind, isn’t going to do you any favors. You’d be better off, imo, reflecting on why you so proudly made asinine and ill-informed comments. Some accountability might help.

          And of course, your Covid-related comments here are of the same ilk. You take the very complex issue of the causality related to outcomes from school closures (as just one example) to selectively characterize the literature on that topic, and make a pronouncement as if you have a clear understanding of the net effects in all directions. But it’s clear from your comments that you don’t have a clear understanding. Not that really anyone should be expected to – it’s a tough subject. But your self-confidence on this topic mirrors your self-confidence in your comments about Andrew, and indeed on so many other topics as well.

        • Joshua’s response is fact free as usual and focuses on a long ago forgotten single sentence taken out of context. You are just lying about my “habit of mind.” You have also baselessly attacked Judith Curry and Nic Lewis with similar smears and that’s what they are, baseless smears. That puts me in good company.

          If you wanted to contribute you could respond to my lengthy comment below with references. The evidence is quite strong for what I am saying.

          You have nothing concrete to offer on schools either, you’re just too lazy to look up the evidence. European countries kept schools open for a reason, or perhaps European public health officials also have a “bad habit of mind.” Look in the mirror Josh.

      • “In Europe schools were mostly open because they followed the science.” Not really accurate. This claim depends on country, date, and what you mean by “mostly open.” Also you are implying they were more open than in U.S. which isn’t supported by evidence.
        https://www.worldbank.org/en/data/interactive/2020/03/24/world-bank-education-and-covid-19
        At a given point in time (early 2020), this map reports US schools open with limitations, but wholly closed in Denmark UK, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Ukraine.

        Even in Sweden schools were very often closed, such as when they closed all high schools nationally to stem rising infections:
        https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_sweden-closes-high-schools-until-early-january-stem-covid-19-infections/6199141.html
        Infection rate was double in teachers in open elementary schools and spilled over to partners.
        https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2020834118
        Many times even Swedish elementary schools were closed d/t outbreaks and lack of staffing:
        https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/yes-schools-were-closed-in-sweden/

        You would do well to critically assess your claims.

  5. The worst part was the normalization of elder abuse:

    Emotional abuse, sometimes called psychological abuse, can include a caregiver saying hurtful words, yelling, threatening, or repeatedly ignoring the older adult. Keeping that person from seeing close friends and relatives is another form of emotional abuse.

    https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/elder-abuse

    And all those people, elder or not, who were denied their family and friends while in the hospitals. No one was there to watch over them and advocate for them.

    Of course, there is “no evidence” such practices are deadly (because it is so obvious any study would be unethical) so chalk all those deaths up to the virus.

  6. Quite reminiscent of the Ioannidis one on here a few weeks back. Like that one it seems an exercise in posturing and it rails against the same demon (Dr. Fauci)!

    I suspect that the absence of specifics hides a poverty of “argument” which actually seems like expanding personal slights into a generalized attack on science. Though they rail against all of science, their focus is really infectious disease, which is why they include the UK Wellcome Trust (and its ex-director Jeremy Farrer, a researcher in tropical diseases) in their generalized critique. Never mind that the Wellcome Trust specifically encourages the things that the authors assert are lacking: e.g. supporting young scientists that have innovative ideas (generous Wellcome Early-Career Awards; Wellcome Discovery Awards; Wellcome Career Development Awards) – some of the same incentives apply in US science funding though there’s no doubt that new researchers are obtaining their first major grants at later stages of their career than in the past and that’s not too good.

    Never too impressed with the notion that people can’t get their ideas published (the authors say, again without evidence, that “peer review itself has shifted from controlling quality to controlling ideas”). But anything can get published and there is zero impediment to someone publishing their stuff. They may not get it in the journal they’d like but that’s a tedious reality we all have to bear.

    There’s been some pretty impressive innovations and advances in biomolecular science, molecular medicine (for example) in recent years but I suspect the authors aren’t interested in that – they don’t like that their ideas around addressing the pandemic weren’t followed and so want all of science to be reorganized (“return”ed “to its proper form”).

    I like the “masthead” of the journal that published their thoughts: “All Our Opinion in Your Inbox”. Nuff said!

    • Only those living under a rock would be unaware of the serious structural problems in modern science. Below I have a long comment (in moderation) with some citations.

  7. For more on Scott Atlas and Stanford, return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, early 2021,
    https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/01/29/team-stanford/
    ————————————————————————
    “Its scientific advisory board includes Scott Atlas, the former U.S. government advisor described on the website as a “world renowned physician.” He’s now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

    Atlas most recently appeared on Fox News to say, “It is a sick, vicious lie for anyone to say or imply that I ever gave the president of the United States false information.”

    The board also includes, among others, Stanford medical school professor Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford biology professor Michael Levitt, and Michael Yeadon, a retired pharmacologist and drug company executive who, according to the website, “believes the pandemic was over in the summer”?
    ———————————————————————————-
    Andrew continued with

    “Wha??? He believes the pandemic was over in the summer?

    B-b-b-b-ut . . . I can’t even.

    I mean, why didn’t he just go all-in and say he believes the pandemic was over last February? Or that it never existed at all?”

    • Paul, Whether the pandemic was over in the summer (which summer), no one was good at predicting the course of this pandemic including the best modelers. Viral epidemics are a badly posed problem so all models will be badly wrong. Most use hopelessly simplified and idealized models anyway.

      In point of fact the pandemic is over. There are still sites tracking covid “deaths” but its vanished from the media and people no longer care. You see a few poor souls wearing cloth masks and following the pseudo-science, but that’s about it.

      • dpy6629: Those were comments of Andrew and not necessarily mine. I have just been to my clinic for an eye exam and also to my dentist’s office for a cleaning, and I can assure you that the staff was wearing masks and while waiting, patients were requested to as well.
        As to the statement, “There are still sites tracking covid “deaths” but its vanished from the media and people no longer care,” note this elaborate NYT display regarding Covid cases, from last April to this April:

        https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html

        There were 1327 Covid deaths in the time period April 6 to 12, 2023. Certainly, a smaller weekly number than the year before, but still concerning. Especially, in my age bracket, “70+”. Moreover, the graph shows that the number of deaths of the unvaccinated is much higher than those who have completed the primary series.

        • Paul, Looking at the Worldometer chart, the 7 day moving average on April 22 was 446 daily deaths world wide. On January 26, 2021 it was 14,874. For the US, the comparable numbers are 63 and 3,502.

          In the US, roughly 2.8 to 2.9 people die annually. 63*365. = 22,995. Less than 1% of all deaths are “covid” deaths even given the flawed counting of anyone who has tested positive and then dies (perhaps from something else like cancer) as a “covid” death.

          The pandemic is over for any reasonable and non-paranoid person. Any healthy person really has a very small chance of getting seriously ill from covid.

          The New York Times is not a good source of information and likely to just parrot the CDC line. In many European countries vaccination is only recommended for the very old or the very ill. You know its over because the uptake for the new bivalent vaccine is very low. The public is smarter than the NYT.

        • Covid data is so obviously flawed it is amazing the NYT publishes some of it. For example, how is the vaccination status of someone who dies or is hospitalized for covid determined. People are terrible at remembering their health history and quite a few states rely on various incomplete databases from pharmacies and clinics.
          But its really hard to cover all doctor’s offices for example. It seems likely that quite a few vaccinated individuals slip through the net here and are counted as unvaccinated.

          British statistics are more accurate but they stopped breaking down admissions and deaths by vaccination status as I recall last summer, just when they were showing that a large majority of admissions and deaths were in vaccinated people.

          The original 2 dose vaccinations did help a lot of elderly or seriously ill people. Healthy young people did not benefit much.

        • Moreover, the graph shows that the number of deaths of the unvaccinated is much higher than those who have completed the primary series.

          It shows cases are 3x higher in unvaccinated, so this reflects testing and other behavioral differences. Also, the cdc released that paper reporting unvaccinated had 3x higher baseline (non-covid) mortality rate. And in the RCTs mortality was 10-15% higher in the vaccinated. If they correctly attributed covid deaths, the non-covid rate was more like 40% higher in vaccinated.

          So watch out when making health decisions based off such numbers.

        • The pandemic phase of the COVID virus in the US ended around April 2022, that’s when deaths per day hit a relatively constant level and hasn’t changed more than a factor of 2 from that level or so since. Now we are in an endemic phase. But to pretend that there’s no danger anymore is also wrong. My neighbor just got COVID, and a kid on my kids soccer team, and etc. The relatively constant level of COVID deaths is more or less similar in order of magnitude to the top few killers in the US, stuff like heart disease and cancer. Most of those will continue to be people who are in their 60s to 90s and people who have immunocompromise. Also the levels of long term disability are noticeable and certainly matter. It still makes sense to use KN95 or better masks when around other people indoors if you don’t want to get sick.

        • Daniel, I have no idea where you get your flawed numbers. The current covid death rate translates into about 23,000 per year. I believe something like 650,000 die of heart disease every year and cancer is not far behind.

        • ourworldindata.org shows that the average death rate in the US over the last year has been around 1 death per million people per day. There are about 334M in the US, so that’s 334*365 deaths per year = 122000, as you say around 700k died of heart disease, so one is 5.7 times the other which is “a similar order of magnitude” (ie. “hundreds of thousands”) as compared with say, fatal drownings ~ 4000 / yr

        • Worldometer shows daily deaths with 7 day smoothing at 63. 63*365 is about 23,000, less than 1% of expected total deaths. It’s over and everyone knows its over. I still don’t know how you are calculating your numbers but it looks wrong to me unless I am missing something.

        • We are using different methodologies, I’m assuming recent data is incomplete and that the average over the last 12 months is a better estimate of the average over the next twelve months than the current instantaneous 7 day avg which will likely be revised upwards with additional data.

          In any case I agreed the pandemic phase ended a year ago. The disease is now endemic phase which means that its danger is fairly constant. However that danger is not zero, it’s about as bad as other major illnesses, and each person should take the precautions they prefer. Since I have pollen allergies and this is the worst pollen year in 4 decades in socal I’ll be wearing masks anyway regardless of viruses. My kids will be wearing masks indoors in school until the end of this school year and then likely won’t after this summer. Several of their teachers have had COVID in the last month or two. It’s not gone just no longer booming.

        • > I’m assuming recent data is incomplete and that the average over the last 12 months is a better estimate of the average over the next twelve months than the current instantaneous 7 day avg which will likely be revised upwards with additional data.

          I wonder whether waning immunity (whether infection- or vaccination-induced) might have a material impact going forward.

          As for reaching the endemic stage… I get that’s usually considered to be the case when rates have more or less stabilized….but seems to me that infection rate is the more relevant metric (over death rate) and either way, (as you suggest) it all seems kind of subjective or arbitrary to me to assign a label here.

          “Endemic” meaning a low but stable infection and/or death rate doesn’t really seem tome to be meaningfully comparable to “endemic” at a high infection and/or death rate. The same term would apply, but would be used to label very different states.

          Plus, I think the value of the term “endemic” also varies by context. I just read about a recent spike of infections in hospitals in SF. In such a situation, you’d likely vary policy response in ways that you wouldn’t if you considered the virus endemic, and indeed, they changed their masking policies accordingly.

          Anyway keep in mind, your interlocutor said the pandemic was over about three years ago.

        • Joshua, yes, I expect a certain amount of seasonality, and I expect periodic mutations that cause COVID to spread in a pandemic type phase, not sure how often but maybe every few years to maybe every decade. Influenza has been around for at least over a century and maybe millenia, and yet right now the world’s birds are being decimated by a major influenza pandemic.

  8. If you rely on the New York Times, Andrew its easy to be unaware of the Censorship Industrial Complex documented in the Twitter Files. Basically, there were weekly telecons between the US security state (FBI, CIA, DHS) and twitter executives often involving Facebook and Google as well. The government generated lists of thousands of posts and tweets that they requested be taken down. Also there were lists of those who should be banned. Battacharia was one of them. The range of this collusion covered almost any topic including information that might reduce “faith in our institutions.” There is a Twitter files thread on covid too. There is a great paper out there in which they interviewed scientists who had suffered persecution over their covid views. The suppression efforts extended to journals, preprint servers, and places like LinkedIN. The paper documents how unprecedented these efforts were.

    Yaffa Shir-Raz, Ety Elisha, Brian Martin, Natti Ronel, and Josh Guetzkow,
    “Censorship and suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and
    Counter-Tactics, Minerva (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4.

    Another aspect of this is the creation of the fake category of “disinformation expert.” There are many NGO’s mostly at Universities partly funded by the government, that also participate and also comb through social media to generate lists for the government to request be taken down.

    The amount of material is huge. Go to substack and look at Matt Taibbi’s stuff, Michael Shellenberger, even Glenn Greenwald has been very good on this. These people are mostly lefties. Tulsi Gabbard is another notable moderate who is alarmed. In the corporate media, there has been a smear campaign against these people but its mostly a refusal to report any of this.

    Even before Covid19 science was in trouble and I have perhaps a hundred bookmarks of articles (some in leading scientific journals) about the poor quality of the scientific literature and the structural problems with the soft money culture in academia. This started perhaps 12 years ago in earnest. The lancet had a particularly good editorial about a secret meeting in Britain dealing with the crisis.

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext

    If you want I can link a few of the better ones. The meeting in Britain was “secret” in the sense that no presentation material left the room.

    Perhaps the most convincing case is a BMJ article about preregistration of trials. One large funder in the US started this perhaps 20 years ago. Positive findings plummeted from as I recall 65% to 14%. The paper says that cannot be explained except by the previous studies being biased by selection bias.

    Chris Woolston, “Registered clinical trials make positive findings vanish,”
    {\em Nature}, Vol. 524, Issue 7565, 13 October 2015.

    Here’s another paper documenting how bad things have gotten.
    J. P. A. Ioannidis, “Hundreds of thousands of zombie randomised trials circulate among us,” Anaesthesia, Vol. 76, Issue 4, April 2021.

    I could write much much more and have a blog post at Climate Etc. on Computational Fluid Dynamics where I go into this in greater detail with a lot of citations from the literature. It appears last December.

    • I don’t find your approach at all convincing – it seems like conspiracy theorising to me, and your assertions based on selective interpretations and citation are pretty uninteresting.

      Of the papers you referred to:

      The Israeli “censorship” paper in Minerva relates subjective accounts of 13 anonymised doctors or research scientists about their perceived or actual censorship/”persecution” based apparently on their Covid views. However without knowing the particular stories (what did this small number of individuals do/say to elicit the responses they report) we can’t learn anything about whether the issues they experienced might or might not have been justified.

      Your Ioannidis editorial referring to the paper by Carlisle in Anaesthesiology: Carlisle found that there are loads of junk (“zombie”) clinical trial submissions to Anaesthesiology and this number has increased in the period March 2019-March 2020 compared to Feb 2017-March 2019. However virtually all of these were from a small selection of countries, notably China, India, Egypt, Iran.

      Since the number of “zombie” trials from the USA was zero (zero also for Canada, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark etc.) this provides zero support for your assertion of “serious structural problems in modern science”. (There are some more useful conclusions we can draw tho).

      and so on (I got bored looking at these).

      The problem with taking a political/conspiracy theorising approach to this issue is that you don’t learn anything since you’ve already decided you know all the answers. However, there are lots of things we don’t know. We don’t have a good way yet of assessing the true negative/positive balance in consequences of mask wearing or school lockdowns in particular contexts, for example, and so we should try to address this by careful analysis rather than choosing interpretations based on political pursuasions or hero worship.

      • As I said, these links are just a few of hundreds. You can find more in my CFD post at Climate Etc.

        I notice you weren’t able to raise cavils about the Nature article of the Lancet editorial. So you selected what you wanted to discredit without trying to honestly evaluate the information.

        Where did the weird “hero worship” mind reading revelations come to you?

        • hmmm….you really think I should read everything you dump here? I read a selection, “honestly evaluated the information” and found it didn’t support your assertions so I stopped. I know the Horton editorial – some scientists had a secret meeting using Chatham rules. That’s ideal fodder for conspiracy theorising! The Nature paper on clinical trials is perfectly fine. It’s definitely a good idea that trials should be pre-registered. Good that contemporary scientific practice enforces this in quality journals.

          “Hero worship” is from this in relation to your unevidenced assertion that the pandemic was a fiasco: “Some of our best scientists are saying so including Prof. Ioannidis who has perhaps the most cited paper of this century. He is not an idealogue and is apolitical.”

          does his opinions (somewhat political in recent years I would say) carry weight with you because he has “perhaps the most cited paper of the century”?

          Incidentally, your Ioannidis editorial link is quite interesting in highlighting again what does seem to be a flaw of logic in his (Ioannidis) approach to data, namely a tendency to astonishing extrapolation.

          So, whereas Carlisle in the paper Ioannidis editorialises about found around 70 zombie clinical trial submissions to the journal, Ioannidis extrapolates this to “hundreds of thousands of zombie randomized trials”. Just like in his quite ludicrous “most cited paper of the century” in which he does some rather monumental extrapolations. And in his widely critiqued California covid case study.

          Anyway I admit to doing a tiny bit of extrapolation too. I read a few of the papers and found that they don’t support your assertions and so I’m going to assume that any other papers you dump are likely not to be worth a look.

        • Well you didn’t read the two strongest ones I linked to and your objections to the other two are weak.

          The point of the zombie trials paper is to show just how terribly weak peer review has become. That’s not a problem limited to a few 3rd world countries as you seemed to imply so you really are biased in your analysis.

          I don’t worship Ioannidis. There is strong evidence that his work is ground breaking and that his reputations in the field is excellent. You of course presented nothing to contradict this, perhaps because it doesn’t exist.

          Do you deny that the most findings are wrong paper is cited thousands of times? You probably don’t have the expertise to evaluate it but it also squares with my experience in CFD. There is a lot of selection and positive results bias in the literature and it really gives an incorrect picture of where the methods work and where they fail.

        • I’ll stop now since your posts are becoming quite trollish. I did comment on all four of the papers you cited – you certainly have a very high opinion of yourself if you think we should spend hours evaluating a bunch of papers you refer to – especially after finding that the papers looked at don’t support your assertions.

          Otherwise you’re last post is bluster. You’re quite wrong in asserting that “the point of the zombie trials paper is to show just how terribly weak peer review has become.” I would have thought it shows a rather heroic effort at peer review by Dr Carlisle.

          In any case you miss the point again by considering that the point of a paper is to support some dreary ideological position (something about peer review being flawed methinks). But the Carlisle paper is way more interesting than that and has real world significance. Carlisle highlights something that we all, as scientists, have becoming aware of; that there are incentives in some places to attempt to flood the literature with junk papers. This is a recent phenomenon (Carlisle shows this by comparing two adjacent two-ish year periods of controlled trial submissions to his journal). His paper is really helpful in alerting editors of journals that publish trials to this problem, reminding them that it might be appropriate to assume that a trial submission (from some quarters especially) has a significant chance of being flawed, how one might deal with this and also how the communication between journals might be promoted to alert about a rejected “zombie” trial being submitted elsewhere.

          This seems to me to be an example of high standards in editorial policy… at least in quality journals.

          That the vast majority of these “zombie” papers were from China, India, Egypt, Iran (Carlisle says that specifically and it’s obvious from his data) and that none are from the US or the UK or Canada etc. is simply a fact of which I have no control over!

          That’s not to say that there aren’t signficant issues with contemporary scientific publishing (the likes of ChatGPT are a concern!) but it’s best to recognise issues and try to deal with them constructively rather than recruit them in support of conspiracy theories.

        • Chris, You aren’t responding to the content of what I said so this interaction is no longer useful. Glad to see that you finally admitted that there were serious problems with modern science, after a massive effort at obfuscation of the main point via nit picking. Have a good day.

  9. As to whether covid was a worse public health failure than say cigarettes, one could argue that in the case of cigarettes, when the data was well established the surgeon general pretty quickly issued and publicized his report pointing out the dangers.

    One might argue that the saturated fats cause heart disease we as bad as covid. It lasted 50 years and public health authorities were putting out pseudo-science. There were papers and studies showing that it was pseudo-science. Food companies even got in on the act by producing “low fat” foods that were loaded with carbohydrates. These foods probably caused a lot of heart disease and diabetes.

    But that’s the only one I can think of that comes close. In addition in covid there was an element of hysteria, censorship, and public smearing that was unprecedented in my opinion. There is by not a vast body of work showing this. Once again, the New York Times has studiously swept this under the rug.

  10. They didn’t explain how it was a public health fiasco?

    These are the same knuckleheads who tried to explain how everyone in Santa Clara was infected with COVID in 2020 and co-signers of the Great Barrington Declaration. Were they upset that the pandemic ended up being taken seriously–was that the public health crisis?

    Andrew, you’re too charitable. These guys aren’t arguing in good faith. They’re idealogues and should be called out as such.

    • I think most would agree that the pandemic was a fiasco. Some of our best scientists are saying so including Prof. Ioannidis who has perhaps the most cited paper of this century. He is not an idealogue and is apolitical. You are smearing good scientists. Read the citations in my long comment above and get back to me.

      • You claim (in another post) that you read this blog regularly. How can you make such glowing claims about Ioannidis, given how much attention his COVID work has gotten over the past 2 years on this blog? You make it sound like his being “not an idealogue and is apolitical” is not controversial – but even a casual reading of the numerous posts on this blog about his COVID work should have tempered your statement.

        And your statement that “the pandemic was a fiasco” smears many public servants. I may not have like many of the policies or how they were implemented, but many public health officials were trying to save lives under very difficult and uncertain conditions (and please spare me a retort claiming they are all political hacks). Do you mean the pandemic was a disaster, that the response was a fiasco, or something else? Few would claim that the pandemic + response was a shining moment in history.

      • Ioannidis has many hundreds of publications so its not surprising that a few may not be airtight. That means nothing as I’m sure you know. He also has hundreds of co-authors. Most of his papers seem to have perhaps half a dozen collaborators from all over the world That tells me that his reputation in the scientific community is excellent.

        I probably should have said the governmental response to the pandemic was a fiasco. Many public health officials were trying to do the right thing, but got caught up in trying to get the public to comply by shading the truth for example on masks. The CDC as of last summer still had on their site two very flawed mask studies that appeared in their internal and not peer reviewed journal. That is unacceptable of course. Also the insistence that the vaccinated couldn’t get or spread covid was a serious failure. A large Swedish study in 2021 or 2022 I think showed that effectiveness against infection actually declined to -20% after 9 months even though the confidence interval included zero. Even the vaulted effectiveness against serious covid declined pretty rapidly.

        • I’ll leave you to your delusions – it is a waste of my time to engage with you. But one thing you said is very much in keeping with this blog and I can’t let it go by. You say Ioannidis “has hundreds of publications so its not surprising that a few may not be airtight.” On this blog we’ve seen a load of famous researchers with hundreds of publications, some of which were flawed seriously, some were actually fraudulent, and most of which did not prompt the authors to tarnish their reputations by acknowledging their errors – or they use their trusted, “but the results are unchanged after correcting” excuse. I’m not suggesting that any of this is true for Ioannidis, just that your logic is something I soundly reject. I don’t care how many hundreds of publications someone has – if they make an error, it is not excused by the quantity of what they have done.

  11. dpy6629
    Your entire diatribe is analogous to one of the major problems with NHST. Yes, the COVID data is bad – therefore you feel confident to conclude whatever it is you believe. It is just like rejecting a null and feeling confident concluding that your particular theory for a significant relationship is the correct one. If you are waiting for perfect data before you pay any attention to any analysis, you will be waiting a long time.

    • I’m not waiting for perfect data, that’s your statement. Just saying that the pandemic is obviously over for the vast majority of the public. I also don’t trust the NYT a sentiment shared by the majority of the public. They won a Pulitzer for a false story about “Russian collusion and interference.” No correction or apology.

      • Is there any source that is trusted by a majority of the public?
        Is the pandemic over for the vast majority of the public because it is really a minor threat or because they’ve grown tired of sacrifices which may have been (or not) unnecessary?

        I’m tired of rehashing the debate over whether COVID was or was not a public health emergency that required the drastic actions that were taken. I never liked the herd reactions that so many politicians (and people) adopted, nor did I like the denial that others expressed. I know sufficiently little about the science involved that I think there was (and still is, to some extent) sufficient uncertainty that the proper course of action was not clear. Relitigating those responses now only makes sense if the uncertainty plays a key role – otherwise it is simply Monday morning quarterbacking. I think your posts have been guilty of this, as well as guilty of using flawed data as a justification for your beliefs that the threat was overblown and the responses overly severe.

        • I have only mentioned school closures. There is a lot of uncertainty on many of the other measures adopted.

          I am only relitigating this because of the much broader issues regarding freedom on speech and thought and the government getting involved on a massive scale to control what appears on social media. Read the references in my longer comment above and get back to me.

        • Wow! I’m beginning to think that you are an AI that was trained on conspiracy theories. There are many things about politics, the media, and academia that bother me (greatly), but I don’t buy these massive conspiracies. I simply don’t think there is enough competence to pull these off even if there is a concerted effort to do so. I do believe that the Russian government has been quite successful controlling what is on social media, but I don’t believe that to be true in the US (though I’m willing to believe they try). I’d say the proof is how much trash of all stripes is prevalent in social media.

        • Dale, You should read the Twitter Files. The evidence is absolutely conclusive that there is and was a vast collusion. Conspiracy is the wrong word because the players were not particularly trying to hide what they were doing. They are very open about it in fact with NGO’s springing up to identify and educate about “disinformation.” They have “disinformation experts” a made up category with no formal credentials.

          I doubt that anyone can exercise much control on what appears on the internet. The US security state is doing a pretty good job though on Google, Facebook, and Twitter (pre Musk).

        • You can find the Twitter files and commentary on them at Matt Taibbi’s sub stack. I think a lot of it is free or you could pay a few bucks for a month’s access to everything

        • dpy6629
          I did familiarize myself with the Twitter Files (I didn’t recognize the term at first, but was aware of those files). I guess I’m not sure what your point is. I fully accept that there are people at Twitter who are not “objective” and have beliefs that align themselves with what we might call liberal or leftist thought. I’m also fully aware that the opposite is true at Fox News. I’m also willing to believe that there are government officials who are not objective and pushing a left wing agenda – but I’m also well are that there are many government officials who are pushing a right wing agenda (just think of Florida and Texas for examples, or many federal agencies while Trump was president). All of these alliances, and the potential influence they have over the public and voters does indeed bother me. But I don’t see this as favoring one side (of our now bifurcated reality) or the other. It also bothers me greatly that the public has become so susceptible to influences from social media, regardless of the ultimate quality of the material.

          So, we might actually agree on many of the horrible acts undertaken by the media, by government officials, and by academic researchers. Where I believe we differ is that you appear to see this as a one-sided state of affairs and I do not. Similarly, I believe most universities exhibit left-leaning beliefs more than the reverse views – but I don’t see this as relevant (I am deviating from your main arguments here, but this is directly relevant to the original post about the state of science and the link to Hillsdale College). There is no such thing as an objective human being – we all have opinions and if one set of opinions seems to be dominant that is not conspiracy, but simply a reflection of their beliefs. I find some beliefs more credible than others – and I don’t find your conspiracy beliefs particularly credible.

          Let me use the Hillsdale video as an example (because it continues to bother me greatly). In the video, the interviewer makes a big deal out of the “theater” he accuses the NY district attorney of by charging Trump and having the charges sealed (at that time, they had been sealed). I agree completely it was theater. But Trump’s entire political career is theater – it isn’t sufficient to claim that the DA was engaged in theater when the Trump theater was so much larger (and more influential). And, he then asked the Hillsdale administrator he was interviewing “Do you agree?” (I don’t have the exact quote, but he used several tirades during the interview, following each with a variation on “do you agree?”). The response was an awkward “yes” followed by some kind of restatement or redirection of the question. The response should have been “yes, but theater is what American politics has become on all sides of all issues.” This strikes me as the same one-sided view that you keep expressing. The “conspiracy” lies only with those that called for lockdowns (or school closures, if you prefer), or only with those that opposed Trump. How very one-sided of you.

        • The Feds pushing Twitter, Facebook etc to censor people is blatantly illegal. That’s the difference. Both sideerism is not applicable here. The media give a biased picture. They also are involved in the Censorship Industrial Complex and have become the public relations arm of the state. They eagerly publicize leaks that are designed to further the state’s agenda.

        • Your obsession with Hillsdale College is weird. They are a small private college in Michigan and are not very influential compared to the partly state run corporate media and big tech.

      • Sorry for staying a bit on topic – the original post referred to a connection of the authors to Hillsdale College. And while that college is small compared with social media companies, it has be connected to the Governor of Florida “transforming” New College (over the beliefs of most of its faculty and students). And, a number of states (Florida and Texas to name 2) have been silencing public officials that don’t follow their Governor’s particular views (possibly illegal). As for the “blatantly illegal” government pressure on the media, I think the case is not so clear-cut. Also, since no conviction has occurred, I think it is premature to convict on the basis of your beliefs.

  12. For those not familiar with Hillsdale College (and I am far less familiar than I should be), listen to this conversation: https://blog.hillsdale.edu/dialogues/education-reform-in-florida-with-dr.-matthew-spalding-03-31-23. It is simply breathtaking. These are smart people and they make a number of insightful points, many of which I actually agree with. But on another level the display of tribalism took my breath away. I’ve been too sheltered – things have deteriorated so far that civil discourse seems dead to me. The “conversation” is the definition of an echo chamber. It is a reaction to what they perceive (and accurately to a great extent) as an echo chamber on the other side of these issues. But I don’t see how competing echo chambers is a step forward. Perhaps I don’t understand how it is an essential step towards progress, but I fear that guns, AI, and statistics (how’s that for a triumvirate?) are the weapons of mass destruction in this tribal warfare.

    Sorry for the digression, but I had to vent after listening to the “conversation” linked above.

  13. Recent Ioannidis “Stem Talk” with Ioannidis:

    https://www.ihmc.us/stemtalk/episode-151/

    Just began listening, and I may just find it too depressing to listen very long…

    But right off the bat he and the interviewers weirdly, grossly mischaracterize his early take on COVID fatality.

    It’s just weird, imo: You don’t need to be biased and dishonest and self-serving and self-promoting to advocate for better science in public health. In fact, I don’t see how doing so can do anything other than make things worse.

    I’m not familiar with the organization conducting the interview, but it’s also weird that they make no attempt (at least so far in what I’ve listened to) to actually interrogate his science.

    Under the circumstances, it’s off the charts ironic that they make such a converted effort together to leverage biased analyses whole advocating for better science.

    • A sample from the interviewer:

      “If a topic is deemed important, and it’s not just COVID, NO dissent or difference of opinion no matter how well defended is tolerated. Punishment is certain, and swift.”

      So Ioannidis hears that with zero suggestion that maybe it was a tad overstated

      He goes on to describe death threats and self-censoring and the like… certainly and absolutely legitimate concerns.

      But there’s zero consideration of how, maybe, such hyperbole might have a contributing effect for the problems.

      The approach is so unscientific – it’s kind of stunning.

      • Actually, I thought Ioannidis was mostly reasonable in the interview – I agree with many of his sentiments about the tragedy of the state of (lack of) civility and loss of faith in science. You may not like his reinterpretation of history, but he was fairly level in his assessment of uncertainties and need to admit errors. I found the interviewer (Ken Ford, the director of the research institute) far more offensive. These days it is hard to overlook the fact that this research institute is affiliated with the University of Florida and we know how pervasive politics has been there. We also know how the state of Florida has dealt with the science of vaccinations. So, the interviewer bothered me much more than the interviewee.

        • Dale –

          I think the broader issues they discuss are legit and critical. And Ioannidis is right to discuss them.

          But imo, Ioannidis has an obligation to push to be thorough and precise and to dig into the polemics and agenda-driven narratives.

          It’s worse, imo, that he doesn’t push back than it is that the interviewers push an agenda.

          I just find it incredibly frustrating when people leverage agenda-driven science to decry the damage done by agenda-driven science.

        • Ioannidis seems naïve about crossover from debates in the scientific arena to directly engaging the public and gov’t with an unorthodox take in the middle of a public health crisis. Also “NO dissent or difference of opinion no matter how well defended is tolerated. Punishment is certain, and swift.” is an unusual way to characterize criticism. Has he not criticized others scientific work? He has been free to express and publish his dissent and difference of opinions in many forums.

        • I’ll agree about the lack of pushback from Ioannidis. It reminded me of the Hillsdale College interview I linked to. I do think it is an obligation of a person being interviewed to not passively allow interviewers to push their extreme and biased views without pointing these out. Silence is a form of agreement with those views.

        • MadisonMD said:

          “Ioannidis seems naïve about crossover from debates in the scientific arena to directly engaging the public and gov’t with an unorthodox take in the middle of a public health crisis.”

          Who decides what’s “orthodox”? Up in the Puget Sound area in March 2020 “public health” officials established the new orthodoxy: everything about COVID that affected any non-white person was caused by white anti-minority discrimination and all policy was set according to this…er…”science.”

          Yeah, Dr. Madison, whoa, we really owe it to “public health” officials for their focus on the science!!!!! Yeah, right on, there, Dr. Madison, that Ioannidis – terrible to make such claims in the middle of a public health crises, especially when the rest of public officialdom is taking the opportunity to shove their their quack political beliefs down the population’s throat with claims so half-baked they don’t even deserve to be called “bad science”.

          Spare me MadisonMD. MDs and Public health officials have gotten the bucket dumped on their head because they asked for it in a big way.

        • Chipmunk –

          > “public health” officials established… everything about COVID that affected any non-white person was caused by white anti-minority discrimination and all policy was set according to this…er…”science.”

          I know you’re in to baiting people – but do you really think this is an accurate portrayal of what public health officials established?

        • chipmunk says: “Who decides what’s “orthodox”?

          When there is broad agreement on public health policy among authorities not only in the US. among public officials at the CDC, FDA, NIH, but also internationally with the WHO, British Chief Scientific Advisor, Canada’s National Task Force as well as many, many, many other public health officials and agencies, it feels very defensible and rational to characterize that position as “orthodox.”

        • Chipmunk is right of course. Public health authorities in the Northwest said all kinds of absurd things.

          Very little about covid was agreed upon by all the public health agencies in the developed world. Each scientist had their own version of the truth but all tried to stay within the rapidly developing orthodoxy in their public utterances. There was little reliable data to go on but that didn’t stop them.

          What is so disturbing about this new authoritarianism is that the Orthodoxy was so religiously adhered to when it had almost no scientific basis.

      • Later, an interview says the Imperial College “predicted” 40 million deaths.

        And Ioannidis (although actually rephrases with “projection”) just accepts that characterization without any sense of obligation to discuss the conditionality of the modeling.

        Again, it’s absolutely fine and necessary to talk about the problems underlying the processes of modeling, but how does anyone thing that’s a way to do it?

        Interviewer:

        I didn’t think much of the response had anything whatsoever to do with medicine or science. When you see organizations like Lancet and lots prominent scientists saying there’s no no such thing as natural immunity in the case of covid, on the basis of no evidence…

        Ioannidis hears that with no pushback at all, to talk about himself as a “champion of mistakes.”

        • Josh, have you been hiding under a rock? Of course there was an effort to downplay and deny natural immunity in order to get people to comply with the ridiculous vaccine mandates. There is strong evidence that for children and young adults, the harms of vaccination outweigh the good.

          The modeling was crap from the beginning and that’s the point here. You are focusing on minutiae and ignoring the important part.

        • There was a specific claim made. Here’s what ChatGPT had to say:

          One early article published in The Lancet in May 2020 discussed the possibility of immunity to COVID-19 after infection..

          The article noted that while it was not yet known how long immunity to COVID-19 would last after infection, early evidence suggested that people who had recovered from the virus had developed antibodies that could provide some protection against reinfection. However, the article also cautioned that it was still unclear how long this protection would last and whether it would be enough to prevent future infections.

          and

          …a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases in July 2020 examined the immune response to COVID-19 in a group of patients in Germany, and found evidence of both T-cell and antibody responses in most patients.

          It is entirely reasonable and actually I think reasonably important to interrogate how the Lancet, or specific scientists, or the scientific community more generally communicated about infection-induced immunity. I think there are valid criticisms to be made. In fact, Walensky is on record talking about mistakes made by the CDC with respect to messaging on that topic.

          But I think it’s a problem when agenda-driven grifters mislead on the topic, to push their agenda, as the interviewer did and with which Ioannidis just went along as if the hyperbole was accurate.

          > There is strong evidence that for children and young adults, the harms of vaccination outweigh the good.

          That, of course, is again an agenda-driven framing. It’s reasonable to ask, IMO, contingent on when during the pandemic you’re referencing (and the levels of infection-induced immunity), about the benefit/risk ration of vaccinating young people (across the board). However, it’s not reasonable or scientific to characterize the evidence as you did, and the fact that you did so goes a long way to make obvious how your approach is agenda, probably more so than science, driven.

          That you responded to a straight-up incorrect characterization by the interviewer, and a lack of scientific rigor on the part of Ionannidis in response to that interviewer, by a ham-handed and motive-impugning reference to “an effort to downplay and deny natural immunity” only adds more evidence of the unscientific nature of your approach (and why you don’t expect better science from Ioannidis).

        • Makary and a long list of co-authors have a paper from last winter analyzing the data on covid hospitalizations and vaccine induced hospitalizations in young people, as I recall college age. They conclude that there were 7 times more (adjusted for population size) injury than covid hospitalizations.

          That is not political framing at all. You know, it is easy to find the paper and read it so you can write fact based comments.

          Look, Joshua, not every one is as sensitive to perceived, often fictitious “bias” as you are. It is indeed true that there was a culture of censorship and cancellation regarding covid that was pervasive and very harmful to science. Quibbling about how you characterize this is not important or interesting. I document this at Climate Etc. It’s genuinely frightening.

        • I also notice Josh that you are a good example of shallow thinking and analysis. You take anything you don’t like and find some small and incidental detail and show its questionable and then refuse to see the bigger issues and address them. I’m just glad you are not an airplane pilot or a medical doctor.

        • Clearly, and not surprisingly, throughout the pandemic people have found their way to very different characterizations of the data.

          I’m sure there’s no benefit for me to insist on a particular interpretation of the data, but I’ve looked around quite a bit and my understanding is that while at this point with high levels of background immunity, continued widespread vaccination of all children could reasonably be considered as not a slam dunk (and perhaps there’s legit criticism along those lines of some of the messaging of some public health officials), neither does it come close to your summary of “there is strong evidence” that for young adults, let alone children “the harms of vaccination outweigh the good.” And at any rate, to make such a broad characterization as if the background levels of infection are critically relevant to an assessment, seems me to be just evidence of being uninformed.

          For what it’s worth, here’s what ChatGPT had to say:

          No, there is no strong evidence to suggest that the harms of COVID-19 vaccination outweigh the benefits for children and young adults.

          While children and young adults may be less likely to experience severe illness or death from COVID-19 compared to older adults, they are still susceptible to the virus and can experience serious complications, such as multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C). Vaccination can help to prevent such complications and reduce the spread of the virus in the community, thereby protecting vulnerable populations who may be at higher risk of severe illness.

          Moreover, COVID-19 vaccines have undergone rigorous testing and have been shown to be safe and effective in clinical trials involving tens of thousands of participants, including children and young adults. Serious side effects are rare, and the most common side effects are mild and temporary, such as a sore arm, fatigue, or a fever.

          Public health organizations, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), strongly recommend COVID-19 vaccination for eligible individuals, including children and young adults. The benefits of vaccination in preventing COVID-19 and its complications are likely to outweigh the potential harms.

          Of course, I would never consider what ChatGPT has to say as dispositive, and recommendations from public health organizations are shifting, but It’s an interesting response in that it says both that “there is no strong evidence” that the harms outweigh the good AND that vaccination “is likely” to outweigh the potential harms. At one level it might look inconsistent, but actually I think it’s spot on. There’s uncertainty at some level, but that’s a far cry from saying that “there is strong evidence that the harms outweigh the benefit.”

          The fact that there is uncertainty, and that some evidence might suggest a potential net negative ratio of good to harm (in some circumstances, with some children) is not equivalent to saying that “There is strong evidence that the harms outweigh the good.” Such a sloppy leap from the one to the other is exactly what I mean when I talk about the facile approach you are bringing to the science.

          And again, this reflects what I find so disappointing in Ioannidis. His interviewer made flat out ridiculous statements that clearly mischaracterized the situation w/r/t the Lancet and others on infection-induced immunity. His interviewer made the exact kind of sloppy and facile imitation of science as you have done over and over. And Ioannidis just let it slide right by. It’s sad that someone who has certainly done a lot to advance the cause improving scientific analysis has lowered his standards to that level.

          And that is something you consider to be minutiae. It’s perfect.

          OK. I promised to stop and didn’t keep my promise. Bad Joshua. It’s that whole “There’s someone wrong on the Internet” thingy. But hopefully I’ll resist responding further as there’s little doubt that you’ll pile more nonsense on top of the mountain you’ve already built.

          Sorry Andrew.

        • I guess some people must rely on artificial intelligence to make up for the lack of real intelligence. You didn’t read the paper obviously so you said nothing of any substance and didn’t help us understand anything. No citations from the literature. Makary et al is peer reviewed and easy to find. Do the adult thing and read it or at least the abstract.

        • The interviewer was inexact about the source of the narrative that natural immunity offered only minimal protection that was propagated by the CDC among others. You are still nit picking. The question is a good one and a striking example of misinformation. This in no way detracts from the interview except for those who are so biased that they search for and take out of context anything that can be seen as questionable.

    • This is a weird focus on minutiae in a good interview by Ioannidis. The elephant in the room of course is the mainstream media who have become little more than purveyors of leaks from the US security state and cheer leaders for that state. Jason Seigel has a great Tablet article about understanding the “hoax of the century” and how the media and big tech have become curated by our government. He did 3 years of research and its very well sourced and thought our. Let’s focus on the real issue here rather than someone’s obsession with nitpicking one of the most influential and famous scientists of this century.

      You could also read my new Climate Etc. post on this topic.

      • > This is a weird focus on minutiae in a good interview by Ioannidis.

        Classic.

        Expecting rigor and accuracy from a prominent scientist on a critically important topic becomes “a weird focus on minutiae.”

        Nothing could better summarize your approach to science.

      • No Josh, What you are doing is classic nitpicking. You are like the Eye of Sauron, constantly scanning the world for the good and the righteous so you can find a single out of context sentence that “bothers” you and then trumpet it and make it out to discredit everything they say.

        Don’t lecture me about science, a subject about you know next to nothing.

        • David –

          I hope that you can recall the same sloppy approach to these issues that led you to dismiss the spike in infections in summer of 2020 as merely an artifact of more testing, and as not significant because it only indicated that more young people (who wouldn’t be harmed) were getting infected.

          Or think about your insistence that modelers who said that Sweden reached “herd immunity” in the Spring of 2020 were certainly correct. I could list so many other errors that you made but they should suffice to give you some pause.

          Think about those absurdly wrong opinions you espoused, when you pat yourself on the back about how you approach these issues.

          Haha. Who am I kidding, right?

        • Josh, You prove me right again. You are the Eye of Sauron.

          You were wrong about herd immunity then and now. Herd immunity is not a fixed constant but varies depending on the time of year. Your fundamentalist and simple minded view of it is completely pseudo-scientific.

          The thing is you specialize in the own goal. You would feel better if you stopped.

        • Thanks, David, for insisting that it is accurate to say that Sweden reached “herd immunity” in the spring of 2020.

          Spectacular.

          Lest anyone read your other comments, and still thought you had any credibility.

        • For the tenth time, herd immunity is reached when the reproduction number falls below 1.0. That threshold can vary all over the place, for example, its strongly seasonal. That’s real science, perhaps something you are not very familiar with Josh. You have really to look in the mirror and ask why you have spent so much time rehashing something that is obvious.

        • David –

          Herd immunity was not reached in Sweden in the Spring of 2020. Period.

          Of course a given population can, such as when people are avoiding contact with others, not gathering in groups l, closing schools, not visiting nursing homes, etc., for a short period of time enter a stage temporarily where the rate of spread isn’t exponential, but that doesn’t mean that it has reached a state of herd immunity.

          In Sweden in May of 2020, it is obvious that there wasn’t sufficiently widespread rate of population infection to establish a “herd immunity.”

          By your definition, on an island with a population of 10,000 people, if just one person had been infected and then everyone isolated from everyone else until the infected person died or recovered, the entire 10k population would have reached “herd immunity”at just 0.1% population infection –a competely absurd contention.

          All you need to do is look at this graph…

          https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

          … and see that that Sweden didn’t reach “herd immunity” in May 2020, with such massive spikes of infections and deaths to follow immediately thereafter. Just look at those spikes extending from the Fall of 2020 through the wonder of 2021, and again even in the Spring of 2022!

          And those spikes occurred because obviously not a sufficient number of people had reached immunity to resist the spread, if exposed to the virus.

          But it’s perfect that you confidently assert over and over that your superior understand of the science justifies your assertion that Sweden reached “herd immunity” in May of 3020.

          Really, it’s just perfect. There cooks be no better window into how proud you are of a poor habit of mind.

        • Yes, Sweden certainly didn’t achieve herd immunity in Spring 2020. There’s a useful study of Sweden in the context of late summer 2020 by the UK Independent SAGE group:

          https://www.independentsage.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Sweden_case-study-v2.pdf

          Worth highlighting IMO because it considers an aspect of response to Covid that is not often discussed; i.e. the level of trust within the population. This is high in Nordic countries (and so people generally happy to follow good advice). That unfortunately contrasts with, for example, the US where misrepresentation and creation of misinformation has led at least in part to the low vaccine take up in sectors of the US society and high mortality especially in the third Covid death wave that wasn’t experienced in countries with high vaccine take-up:

          https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=earliest..2023-02-18&facet=none&country=SWE~USA~GBR&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=false&Color+by+test+positivity=false

          An obvious problem with asserting high levels of seropositivity where this is clearly not established, and premature announcement of herd immunity (even where seropositivity levels are high), is the likelihood of false confidence that an endemic state has been reached. Manuas in Brazil provides a chastening example where apparent levels of population infection (76%) were reportedly close to the level required for herd immunity in summer 2020. This was used to further support a relaxation of lockdown, travel, social distancing restrictions. Unfortunately, the subsequent second wave of Covid following this apparent period of “herd immunity” was horrendous.

          There’s lots of published research on Manuas obviously. For a more nicely readable general description of “herd immunity” this short article is good. Hope it’s open access:

          https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2107692118

          BTW, this blog thread reminds me of something I keep encountering, especially on blogs: Amongst other ways of categorising people (Warning, stereotype ahead!) – it seems to me that individuals might broadly be divided into those that feel a need for certainty and those that are comfortable with uncertainty. Scientists by definition inhabit uncertainty – it’s where they ply their trade. Individuals that feel uncomfortable with uncertainty seem rather more susceptible to adopting the comforting certainties of conspiracy theories.

          It’s really important that we recognise the uncertainty in scientific arenas that intersect with vital human concerns such as Covid and we to respond to this. Asserting certainty where this doesn’t exist means that we limit possibilities to learn that might help us next time.

        • Repeating a falsehood doesn’t make it true. Especially given your sterling credentials as an anonymous internet non-scientist with no mathematics or scientific credentials.

        • Chris, I agree about uncertainty and wrote a long technically deep post for Climate Etc. documenting how uncertainty was underestimated in my field. There is also rife positive results and selection bias.

          This went on steroids during the pandemic with the CDC for example keeping badly flawed mask studies on their site for years. My current post at Judith’s documents this quite carefully with a lot of citations and offers convincing proof.

          I think your reasoning on vaccines is not informed by careful study of the data and is biased.

          1. I note that Israel had 4 waves but was among the most heavily
          vaccinated countries.
          2. There could be a number of reasons why the US had a bad 3rd wave, including that we are an unhealthy country with huge obesity rates, I think approaching 45% in adults. In Sweden its around 12% if memory serves. There are also anomolies with the data especially in how a “covid death” is defined.
          As Josh is fond of pointing out, comparing states or countries is highly subject to confounding factors. It is clear I think in the US however that covid death rates correlate better with obesity rates than with how harsh the mitigation measures were.
          3. Vaccination simply does not offer long lasting protection either against infection or hospitalization. There was a large Swedish study I discussed above. Effectiveness against infection declined from (round numbers) 85% to -15% (yes it was negative) 9 months after vaccination. Effectiveness against hospitalization was also around 85% 2 weeks after vaccination but declined to 25% at 9 months even though the uncertainty bars were larger. Sweden’s public health data is vastly better than that in the US. This is all from memory from the preprint but you can look it up.
          4. There is the problem with tracking vaccination status in the US because of people forgetting and very incomplete data gathering.
          5. There is zero evidence that vaccination significantly benefits healthy people under 50 years of age. It did benefit many people who were already quite aged or in bad health. But the CDC to this day refuses to follow the science and adjust their recommendations.
          6. These facts were well known pretty early and yet US public health authorities deliberately misled the public to try to induce compliance. The flipflops on masks, the closure of schools, the failure to recognize acquired immunity all had an effect. People in the US value honesty so this backfired. Bivalent uptake is very low, because most people realize that by the numbers, the pandemic is over.

          I actually think that in the last 6 years or so, it is in fact the corporate media, the deep state leakers, and the Disinformation Industrial Complex that is peddling conspiracy theories and false overconfidence. Anyone who thinks they can confidently diagnose “misinformation” on complex subjects is by definition overconfident. There is a revolving door between the deep state and big tech and corporate media that ensures they are all on the same team.

          I know in the NY Times bubble, this is not well known because this Complex of course treats coverage of this (their own dishonesty and narrative promotion) as anathema and demonizes the honest reporters doing the reporting, such as Matt Taibbi. Taibbi has a hilarious video up today documenting 279 times when on MSNBC they spread the false narrative about Russians and Russian bots based on the fraudulent Hamilton 68 dashboard. There are also some interspersed shots of Joe McCarthy holding up his famous lists of Communists. You will laugh, guaranteed.

          The big issue here with trying to comment on herd immunity is that like most epidemeological theory, its vague and makes incredibly simplified assumptions that are wildly wrong. The only really useful definition I could come up with independent of this rubbish theory was that when R dropped below 1.0, then herd immunity had been reached for the current conditions (season of the year, level of population fear, etc.). When winter arrived, the herd immunity threshold also rose a lot and there was another wave. Populations in the US are very heterogenous and behavior patterns are all over the place, so this rubbish theory is simply not applicable.

          But also, lets face it, the US has a tradition of distrust of authority. It’s a function of the Bill of Rights and a fierce independence that is part of the American culture. That’s why this current authoritarian attempt by virtually all the elites to control the flow of information will fail, the only question is how soon it will fail.

          It is quite surprising for example the large percentage of the public that has been successfully kept in ignorance (by the DIC) of the Twitter Files and their tremendous significance or the fact that the Russian interference and collusion narrative was a nearly total fabrication.

        • “1. I note that Israel had 4 waves but was among the most heavily vaccinated countries.”

          Yup, high vaccination status leads on average to lower Covid deaths (overall Covid mortality burden in US more than 2.5 times that of Israel).

          The 4th wave (some call it the 5th wave) of Covid mortality in Israel seems somewhat anomalous. However official Israeli Health Ministry data indicates it’s due to a pool of unfortunately susceptible, elderly and unvaccinated individuals.

          According to reporting by Sam Sokol in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Feb 7th 2022 (right at the peak of the 4th wave), official Israeli Health Ministry figures shows that on Jan 31st “the death rate per 100,000 people for the over 60s stood at 16.3 for unvaccinated individuals, as opposed to 0.9 for the fully vaccinated”; although only 12% of that age cohort are unvaccinated or partically vacinated they make up 43% of deaths.

          On your point 2. I find the evidence for a protective effect of vaccines against severe morbidity and death (as in the 4th/5th wave Israeli data above) to be far more convincing than your assertion of an association with obesity, even if there’s no question that socioeconomic status is rolled into both susceptibility to bad outcomes in any scenario and levels of vaccine take-up. An example is this observational evidence for an association between low vaccine take-up and higher infection and death by US county:

          https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj-2021-069317

          Your point 3 is illogical IMO and not really relevant to the well-established efficacy of vaccination in attenuating severe responses to Covid and reducing mortality. Of course knowledge of the periods over which protective effects of specific vaccines wane is important for establishing appropriate vaccination regimes and these data have already been used to adjust these regimes.

          Concerning the late waves of Covid morbidity and mortality, my gut feeling is that (like the situation in Manuas referred to in my post above but much less severe generally), once protective measures are relaxed later in the pandemic (or as countries appear to enter what might be something approaching an endemic stage), that the resulting spread of the virus through the population and the release of some suscepible population from the protective effects of mitigations results in another spike

      • “You could also read my new Climate Etc. post on this topic.”

        I did skim it but could not actually force myself to read it after the first two paragraphs. Following up on Dale Lehman’s question, is there a word for that feeling you get when you feel terribly embarrassed for someone else?

        • The post is heavily sourced and there is lots of proof that it’s correct. If you inhabit the New York Times bubble, you will be unaware of this proof because the Times itself is not reporting on this proof.

    • Wow! That’s all I can say. Yes, it is possible that the excess deaths are caused by vaccines. Or it could be extraterrestrials. Unlike you, I am willing to admit that I really don’t know, and the possibility that vaccines account for excess deaths is not a completely ridiculous idea (though I suspect it is, after closer examination). What floors me about your comment is that you read this stuff and report it as if it contributes to our understanding. There is so much garbage out there (as you yourself seem to suggest) that how you can pay attention to everything you read is beyond me. Of course, the historian (one of the authors of that piece) probably has hundreds of publications so he must know what he is talking about.

    • You know Dale it’s not good look to lie about my comments and views. I don’t know how accurate the piece is but the Euromomo dataset is quite reliable and that’s a primary source for the piece. I personally don’t know the cause either.

      I don’t think they really tried to say vaccines were the cause, just that overloaded UK health system was not the cause. You might try to provide something of value instead of lying about my thoughts. You might feel better about yourself and feel less hostile.

      • Anybody – does this practice have a name?
        You cite something and then say that you aren’t really saying its true, you just heard it and it is possible. Perhaps even many people believe it. Or somebody famous believes it. But, of course, you aren’t saying it is true. A page right out of the Trump book.

        Personally, I don’t find that practice contributes to anything other than a shouting match and building echo chambers. But it is becoming so common that I think we should give it a name.

        • The technique could be more general than the JAQ as one may “just” do more than ask question, e.g.:

          – “Just my opinion”
          – “I’m just gonna put this here”
          – “Just speculating but”

          The crucial ingredient is the lack of commitment.

          Usually David Young from the Boeing Company is more direct than that.

        • I consider it to be a form of gish gallop, where arguments are merely a string of non-sequiturs.

          For example:

          J: Sweden clearly did not achieve herd immunity in Spring of 2020, as there wasn’t enough population immunity at that point to sufficiently reduce the likelihood that an exposed person would be immune. This is made obvious by the massive a spikes in infections subsequent to the Spring of 2020

          D: Sweden reached herd immunity in the spring of 2020 because populations can go over and back across an infection rate parameter (of R 1) due to seasonality.

          David regularly employs such non-sequiturs endlessly. Of course populations can cross over threshold rates of transmission, including R1. That doesn’t mean that Sweden had sufficient levels of population immunity in spring of 2020 to acquire a herd immunity status.

          The back story of this is that Nic Lewis reported in Spring of 2020 that his modeling of COVID was likely validated by Sweden reaching a status of herd immunity. His erroneous modeling and conclusions led Nic to make predictions of future infections and deaths in Sweden that were off by huge margins.

          Those erroneous predictions were based on Sweden achieving herd immunity. That Sweden blew past his predictions showed that Nic’s conclusion that Sweden reached herd immunity was just wrong.

          Nic acknowdged that his finding of herd immunity at that stage was wrong.

          But David is so agenda-driven on these issues he can’t brng himself to acknowledge even whats overwhelmingly obvious.

          So he will construct endless lists of non-sequitirs and present them as arguments.

      • Dale, You are being dishonest. You lie about what the article says and what I said. There is an unexplained rise in mortality. Are you denying this or are you just lying to yourself?

    • It could be the rate of covid deaths without the hysteria. In the US, testing and NPIs largely ended in Feb-March 2022, and since then the all cause mortality has remained at an elevated but much reduced rate. Most likely outcome is that almost everyone gets covid every few years, and if theres an outbreak in a nursing home ~20% of residents pass away. That is what we see for the other coronaviruses.

      One thing is for sure though, the methods used for tracking safety of vaccines are absolutely worthless. I mean there was a 1000x (or whatever it was) increase in VAERS reports that got dismissed. What is the point of collecting that data if it can just be written off as increased reporting?

      • > One thing is for sure though, the methods used for tracking safety of vaccines are absolutely worthless.

        I don’t know how public health data scientists use VAERS data generally but I would guess that above a background rate of post hoc propter hoc confounding, there might be signals that surface as useful at some level. I believe there are examples of such, where VAERS data signaled problems.

        Of course, with a situation like we’ve seen with COVID, when there are large – scale, agenda-driven mis- and/or dis-information campaigns, at some point I’d imagine that any useful signal would be swamped by a signal of the large-scale, agenda-driven mis- and dis-information campaigns.

      • The real problem here is that the FDA allowed Pfizer to effectively terminate the safety trial after 90 days and offer vaccination to everyone. I would have to dig into the Makary paper to determine how they calculated prevalence of side effects. If some industrious commenter here would do that I would be grateful. Probably references to the primary data sources there too.

        https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?fbclid=IwAR2QFPii849mUSF9kdQV2gy-sbQbBit_LOFzaNtPhGv31_1rhSXiNcijsKc

        It is indeed another example of gross incompetence that children are being recommended to get these vaccines. From the very beginning it was obvious that virtual all children got very mild cases and were not infecting people like teachers.

        • > The real problem here

          “The real problem here” is often a way to inject another talking point in the exchange. Since David P Young from The Boeing Company has more than half of the comments on this page, it could amount to galloping. Under that light, Joshua has the right of it.

          But notice how “the real problem here” is not the same as “I’m just putting it here.” One could gallop using both. Which means that we need to distinguish the tropes from the tactics.

          Well done, David!

        • So far Dale is a liar, I’m stupid, Chris doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and Matt lives in a NY Times bubble.

        • Joshie, The truth hurts. And you are not being truthful. I don’t think I’ve said you are stupid, just that you can’t even define the term you’ve spent hundreds of words trying to discuss.

        • OK, all. The comment thread has reached what Phil so memorably described as “garbage time.” Some of this discussion has been helpful, but no more on this one, thank you! Lots of other topics on this blog to discuss.

        • I agree Andrew that whenever Willard shows up the quality goes downhill rapidly.

          One thing needs to be clarified because Willard is not being truthful about me and Boeing. I am not “from Boeing.” I am retired and working hard on CFD (trying to publish the negative results I and many others have found) and science issues, including publishing some blog posts at Climate Etc. Willard dislikes Boeing and has in a few cases slandered the company elsewhere. I think this may be because Boeing is a defense contractor.

          Boeing’s products are fantastic and safe. Air travel is safer than almost any other human activity. I can’t remember the last fatal US commercial scheduled airliner crash.

          Boeing is a great company and my career was fantastic and the team I was on had some very brilliant mathematicians. We published 50 papers, many of them peer reviewed and invented some new mathematics for example on transpiration boundary conditions. We built the code that designed the wings on most recent Boeing commercial planes and is still the workhorse code for designing nacelles, wings, winglets, etc. I have a paper in press demonstrating and explaining the tendency for Navier-Stokes codes to show spurious separation. I think it is important to respond the Willard’s disinformation.

          This is all for me. I did learn some things about covid from all this, which is the purpose of blogs for me.

  14. Just saw this:

    The Petition’s assertion that there is a “widespread (but inaccurate) notion that efficacy against infection and transmission have been established by substantial evidence” is supported only by references to selected statements by U.S government officials suggesting that vaccination against COVID-19 may prevent infection or transmission, as well as one statement from Pfizer and one 13 from Moderna. Your Petition also does not account for countervailing statements made by some of these officials. For example, Dr. Fauci has stated that the vaccines were not developed to protect against infection,55 and Dr. Walensky has stated that high viral loads in vaccinated individuals “suggest an increased risk of transmission[.]”56 In responding to your Petition, we are not agreeing or disagreeing with any of the statements that are selected in the Petition. Rather, we are observing that the statements referenced by the Petition do not demonstrate a commonly held belief that the clinical trials provided substantial evidence of efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 transmission. We are not convinced that there is any widespread misconception about this.

    https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23786932-fda-letter-on-covid-19-vaccine-labeling

    According to the FDA, there is no widespread belief the vaccines prevented infection/transmission.

    • Hopefully some people can shed more light on this – preferably without the hysterical posturing that happens too often. I read the petition and response and don’t understand enough about the details to have a judgement myself. But I understand legal and regulatory processes sufficiently to know that you have to look carefully at what the ruling is about. Shortly after the section you quoted is the following:
      “There are many reasons why a vaccine clinical trial might study a disease endpoint, but not a transmission endpoint. For example, a disease endpoint may in some cases be more feasible to assess, compared to a transmission endpoint. Furthermore, the applicable statutory standards for licensure and authorization of vaccines do not require that the primary objective of efficacy trials be a demonstration of reduction in person-to-person transmission. The Petition points to no statutory or regulatory requirement for labeling to state that a clinical trial did not address an endpoint that is not included in the labeled indication.”

      My reading is that the FDA’s approval was based on evidence concerning incidence of COVID, not a demonstration that it prevents transmission. This seems like a legal issue of what kind of evidence is required, and I can imagine reasons why it makes more sense to look at incidence rather than transmission. I’m sure the general public can easily be confused about this – I think I know a bit more than the average person, but I’m still somewhat confused. But I think the paragraph you quote is taken out of context. What I’d like to understand is exactly what is the difference between incidence and transmission, how these are measured, and what the evidence that was collected says about each of these.

      I would also note that the quoted statement comes from the FDA’s rejection of the petition (on almost all of its claims). The initial petition was dated in 2021 although the FDA response was to a petition dated January 2023. Does anyone know whether the January 2023 petition was the same as the initial petition from 2021 (i.e. is this just the slowness of the regulatory process or did the concerns expressed in the petition change in substantive ways).

      I do believe the authors of the petition were expressing important concerns with the FDA process. I also believe the public (myself included) may have many incorrect beliefs about what we know about the vaccines. But I also believe that your selected paragraph from the FDA response will be easily misinterpreted. Can we get some clarity without the political posturing?

      • Pretty sure “incidence” means “number of people in the study who got covid” and “transmission” would be “number of people *not* in the study who got covid from someone in the study”

        It’s pretty hard to figure out transmission because you have to study all the people in contact with the people in the study. Even knowing who they are is virtually impossible… someone in the study gets covid and rides a bus… you have to identify and follow up each of those people. Forget it.

        • All they had to do is test people once per week. They didn’t because it was known since the 1960s that IM injections dont trigger mucosal immunity, then it was verified in the animal trials where even at expected time of peak effectiveness the virus was still multiplying in the respiratory tract.

          I can find my own comments here explaining it in 2020.

          What they measured was people with certain symptoms who contacted someone and discussed whether they were a probable case. If it was decided they were, they got tested.

          Then there were the other issues with even symptomatic incidence:

          1) Blinding was likely ineffective due to the prominent side effect profile. There was no exit poll performed.

          2) Lymphocytopenia after the first shot which lead to increased rates of infection before they were considered “fully vaccinated”. So part of how the vaccine “worked” by increasing the chance you got natural immunity.

          3) The study was ended early, before selection pressure for escape mutations and waning showed up.

  15. The characterization of the Covid response below does not quite describe a fiasco—but it is close.

    An article in next Sunday’s NYT Magazine (available on their website now) by David Wallace-Wells attributes that statement to Dr. Fauci.

    Then you look at what we didn’t do so well. What we didn’t do so well was in the infrastructure and communication and transparency — all the things that go on with public health. We also had a public-health system that we thought was really, really good. But it was really, really antiquated. We didn’t even know what was going on at a given time. Now, I don’t want to be criticizing the C.D.C. In fairness to them, they recognize themselves that they need to bring their public-health data collection into the 21st century. And they had a culture that was an academic culture, in which we don’t say anything until we’ve essentially written the manuscript and it goes out and it’s being published — as opposed to, we need to know today what’s going on. As a result, in trying to gather information during the pandemic, we had to rely on conference calls in the middle of the night or early in the morning with Israel, with South Africa, with the European Union, with our colleagues in the U.K. We have to change that.

    Bob76

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