Especially with COVID related topics, I have found very often that scrutiny of the data will contradict the obligatory nod to orthodoxy in the beginning of the abstract (to get the article past the dilletante purse-string holders).
Papers that start with the line "vaccines are likely the greatest health care intervention in modern history" or similar paean very often end up providing a counterexample to that dogma in the Results section. The whole papers must be read, with a calculator handy.
I just posted the following, then saw your comment:
Dear Señor Gato, some words just leap off the page like a feline pouncing on prey:
"Bayesian issues ..... that may *inject* serious bias" ROFLMAO!
Have you noticed that one of the earlier and more blatant examples of torturing the summary until it says what the patrons want, is the series of communiqués from the UN IPCC continuing to claim CO2 induced warming in the face of a solar minimum induced incipient mini ice age?
Spot on Mike. Can't help noticing the similarities in the corrupt science around COVID and AGW. The journals are a tissue of lies to support the narratives. I love to follow the Steve Kirsch/el gato malo of climate science: https://realclimatescience.com/
We need term like "Gel-Mann amnesia" (although one that takes hold better) (which is when you read an article in the paper in your area of expertise and recognize how extremely backward/incorrect/false/corrupt the reporting is, then turn the page and simply believe at face value what you read there).
We have a similar thing (a similar amnesia) going on, even with people like Bret Weinstein, John Ioannidis, and others who know very well the corruption of "science" and scientific studies in the their own and/or related fields, but imagine that the really pressing issues needing real solutions are the issues (presented as emergencies) in climate "science."
Knowing the corruption in their own areas of focus, they somehow forget to apply the necessary skepticism in other "scientific" domains.
It's why Weinstein comes off as being essentially so disingenuous to many people over the age of 25 that have experienced his MO a number of times before... it's that smug Lib/Prog affinity for selective consciousness. They don't recognize anything outside of their comfortable bubbles until it personally bites them in the ass. Then they isolate that bite from everything else and carry on down the garden path.
What infuriates me about Bret Weinstein is his painful insistence on steelmanning every proposition. He should know by now that the people he opposes operate exclusively in bad faith and have no compunction about issuing the most obvious lies.
I'm a little heartened by his last few podcasts, though. It feels like he and Heather have moved past "we can't believe people are being this stupid" to "we're mad as hell".
It’s not disingenuous if it’s not in conscious awareness. You are criticising him for an aspect of human nature - cognitive dissonance (assuming you are correct - I have not done enough climate science research to know either way). And yes, liberals are probably more accomplished at compartmentalising their brains - necessary when your self image is of a really good person, but you are also human with a shadow aspect that is at odds with the notion of you as a really good person. Again these are subconscious processes though. Weinstein acts in good faith.
The real problem in the dependency on fossil fuels is that they are a non-renewable and finite resource, and the usage of that resource is undergoing exponential growth, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4, "Exponential Growth Arithmetic, Population and Energy", Dr. Albert A. Bartlett. Depletion of that resource will get to the point where it takes as much energy to extract a unit of fossil-fuel energy as can be gotten from that unit of energy, and the way things are going, that point will come sooner rather than later. And at that point, mechanized agriculture is going to become impossible, not only for ag fuels but also fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, all of which are dependent on fossil fuels as feedstocks. And that point will come very much quicker than we see real effects from global warming - which may be the result of natural processes (see figures 2 and 3 of http://www.spirasolaris.ca/sbb4g1bv.html).
"We're reaching peak oil" has been a rallying cry of the anti fossil fuel doomsayers for at least forty years. There's also a simple answer to the problem. It's called the market.
If coal, oil, and gas become to expensive to extract for use as fuel, the shift to alternate fuel transportation will take off naturally, whereas no amount of subsidies can force it.
Domestic energy use can mostly shift to electricity, as long as loony policies do not make it so unreliable that everybody stocks up on wood and oil for self-preservation. Electricity can, of course be generated by whatever is cheapest and most efficient, whether coal, oil, gas, hydro, or nuclear.
That leaves hydrocarbons as feedstocks - as is always the case, scarcity drives efficiency - do you really think it is government's wise regulations which gave us 25-30MPG cars instead of 8-12 MPG cars? No. It was temporary scarcity, and then competition to make economical cars fun (or vice versa).
In short, I'm long enough in the tooth not to buy "Peak Oil is here!"
With finite resources, and exponential growth, there's going to be a limit - which is why investing in fossil fuel energy is a good idea - you have to do your due diligence of course - it's a depleting resource with growing demand, and there's no move away from dependency on it.
It's also worth bearing in mind that those declaiming about "peak oil" are often also opposed to nuclear power, which gives them away as not being serious in their claims. Anyone who is truly concerned about fossil fuel depletion would be pushing to move as much power generation to nuclear as humanly possible, to preserve the hydrocarbons for other uses.
But from what I've read posted by geologists, we're not likely to actually run out any time soon; there are a bunch of fields that are not economic at current prices but would provide a lot of oil if the price rose significantly.
People who make generalizations like this tend to be reactionary and stupid. You don't know me, and you don't know what I think about nuclear power. How about just asking - "Well then, what about nuclear power? How about wind and solar?". The fact is, is that fossil fuels are in finite supply, and the market can't create new supplies ex nihilo, as Thomas Gold has suggested. And since most of my investing activity is in the area of fossil fuels - scarce, depleting resource, exponentially-expanding demand, I might know a hell of a lot more about this than you might think. And there's a reason why methods of tertiary recovery like hydrofracturing are so popular, as is using tar sands to get at the 5% of heavy, sour gasoline they contain, as compared to the light, sweet crude West Texas Intermediate which has about 50% gasoline in it. As for nuclear, I'm all for it, we should have all of our domestic electricity production from nuclear. Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy is a damned good idea, thorium reactors are a good idea too - and thorium is a lot more plentiful than uranium and doesn't need to be mined or converted to uranium hexafluoride, either. Both wind and solar are fossil fuel dependent, because both require lithium batteries, as intermittent sources. Lithium itself is, as a rare earth element, in finite supply, once made into batteries, it has about a ten-year usable lifetime, and there's no way to recycle it - and mining and processing are fossil-fuel dependent. The vanes on wind chargers are made from petroleum resin and have a finite life, and then there's the fossil-fuel powered infrastructure required for transport, construction, and maintenance...
What has enough energy density to be an alternative? The EROEI on ethanol is about 1 to 1, same case for most biofuels - they take as much fossil fuel energy to produce as you get out of them, actually a bit less - there's that pesky Second Law of Thermodynamics screwing everything up. They end up as a carrier of energy, not a source. Same case for hydrogen, it's an energy carrier if you use fossil fuels to make it, and the EROEI is a lot worse. The only kind of high density fuel is nuclear - thorium sands, Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy idea - and figure out a way to store the energy other than lithium, because that's a rare earth metal in finite supply. Graphene is an interesting idea for storing energy, and as it comes from carbon, there's a lot of it around - https://www.motortrend.com/features/one-word-for-todays-graduate-graphene-technologue/ and https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2021/05/05/tech-metals/graphene-aluminum-battery-may-be-here/551.html
I don't like ethanol because it's a waste of agricultural output, and it's corrosive.
I do get your point about many alternative power sources for transportation essentially being energy transport (storage), not primary sources.
Which comes back to nuclear for primary electricity generation, and the market eventually causing a switch to stored energy sourced from nuclear power.
Thorium reactors have been talked about for at least a couple of decades, and while I'm inclined to be suspicious of Bill Gates' motives, more *power* to him in that venture.
And look at https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2016/EE/C6EE00862C. Necessity has long been the impetus for creativity. Whether we can scavenge CO2 and energy to make fuel is unknown. The assertion that human engineers created an issue (fuel engines) means engineers can develop solutions. At least I have faith we will continue proving Malthusian theory is obsolete.
Making hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 is probably less efficient than making them by fermenting plant sugars. And then algae can be used as well - https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/47886... You just have to look at the EROEI. For feedstocks, you'd probably be better off by growing plants which produce vegetable oils, like hemp - which also produce fiber. Look back at the research done in World War II on oil alternatives, there's actually a lot of interesting stuff there.
That's a good point. From what I've read, it's entirely possible to create hydrocarbon fuels directly from carbon/CO2, it just takes so much energy that it's more expensive than pumping them out of the ground - for now. If that's the case, then even if we completely ran out of every single reservoir of buried oil, we could still create fuel for non-electric vehicles (and oils for chemical use) via nuclear or thorium power. (Or heck, even solar/wind, if it could be done without excessive amounts of rare earths etc.)
No one denies that conventional fuels are a limited supply. But it's all too easy for popular opinion to over-simplify the implications. It's not like we are, say, going to run out of gasoline all of a sudden and without any notice. Economics would suggest a more likely outcome. A resource (oil) gradually becomes scarcer and thus more expensive. This spurs the search for alternatives of equal or cheaper cost. Perhaps they exist. Perhaps they will be invented or discovered. Perhaps not. Absent alternatives, what would happen? Oil and the products derived from it would get more expensive -- but gradually over long time periods -- until it literally became irrational to use for some purposes. The idea that we will some day pump the last barrel of oil is ridiculous. Long before that point it would literally have become unprofitable to pump it. The world would have, perhaps, returned to the horse and buggy.
None of the above is to deny that resource limits aren't a real world problem. Of course they are. My point in typing all this is that, absent unknowable events or shocks to the system, these changes occur incrementally over very long time periods and, generally, are quite foreseeable and predictable at least by those informed more by science and common sense than by ideology. The popular imagination of a sudden crisis is usually as ludicrous as many of the proposed "solutions."
I deny it. There is unlimited gas in the Permian basin (a squidgy little bit of TX). There is no plausible or implausible scenario where humans can use it all. Finite does not mean small!
Gasoline is made *from* crude oil, OK? And different kinds of crude oil have differing amounts of gasoline of different quality. So we're running out of light sweet crude which has about 50% gasoline with low or no sulfur content, and falling back on heavy sour crudes like from Venezuela and tar sands from Canada. They have between 5% to 10% gasoline, and it has high sulfur content, which is a problem. Yeah, oil isn't like natural gas, which runs out pretty much immediately, there are secondary and tertiary recovery methods for oil, so that could make things tail off slower.
"Social Science" for the win. I'm no racist, but without performative laden abstracts we would have never been able to know how much science proves white people really are bad. At this point all Science is social science, until proven otherwise. But within the layman's arbiter of Poe's law, social science and climate science are heavyweights.
I've been aware for decades that the "executive summary" of the IPCC reports isn't even close to what the actual report says, but I wasn't aware it had spread into general science as well.
I haven't trusted "peer review" for years since the East Anglia scandal when it became apparent that the 10 or 12 big names in "climate" "science" were all reviewing each other's papers -- and even if it's a "blind" review you know the writing styles of all the other machers and what they're working on.
Even when it's not a circle jerk, I suspect that "peer review" is a lot like how I do code reviews at work: style, syntax, presentation, an occasional best-practices tip, and watching for only the most obvious red flags. I don't have time to learn everything about every application other developers are working on, so I just have to assume that their approach is legitimate.
Funny in the above I didn't see anything about what I'd think would be the most important factor: Does the code do what it was supposed to do? Are a paper's (experiment's) results reproducible? Etc. I'm not saying secondary considerations (e.g. style or clarity) aren't important -- but they ARE secondary.
As for code, I literally can't tell most of the time. Does changing lines 356-72 in file X so that it calls function A instead of function B on what looks like alternate Tuesdays solve the bug in the ticket, and was that the best way to do it? I have no idea, I'm not the tech lead for that team nor do I have a conceptual map in my head for the other 30,000 lines of code in that app. The time that I *was* tech lead and *was* involved in the app design from the beginning, then yeah, I had opinions on the primary considerations (and other developers usually came to me much earlier before code review stage). But in my experience, that's rare in a large organization.
You would think that scientific review would be more robust, but "science" is so hyper-specialized these days that I can see that if you're not literally on the same team as the authors then maybe "some aspects of the effect of Thing A on certain biological processes in Species B" might be out of your wheelhouse even if you're a slightly different thingo-specieso biologist. So you look over their approach and methods and kinda go "yeah, nothing's *obviously* wrong here".
I have read some of what this one guy has tweeted -- he's on @hansmahncke a lot but I can't remember his name -- vaccine senility in progress -- about how world climate data is impossible to obtain, even though it is paid for by taxpayers, even with an FOIA request. They simply will not provide the background data that was used to arrive at their (almost certainly erroneous) conclusions.
In my opinion, this article and the comments make a case that neither a virus nor a climate catastrophe are humanities greatest concerns. What then are? Think bigger and longer. Go ahead and postulate, there is no need to be afraid of conspiracy theories any longer.
Wiser men have postulated. Problem is, they're ignored. In my opinion, I would submit that long-term, it is in fact man's overpopulation vs. needed resources for a desired standard of life, or indeed, of any life at all. This isn't even rocket science. Any study of biology shows that there is always competition for resources and limits to the growth of a population dictated by those resources.
Reading some of this man's writings gives some background ("Lifeboat Ethics" perhaps his most famous):
All the optimists love to crow that Malthus was wrong. But was he? To me, the optimists are whistling past the graveyard, where the Ghost of Malthus is relaxing in his easy chair, biding his time.
We've got to get off of this rock, eventually, because as you and others have pointed out, resources here are finite. But purposefully killing millions or billions of people with a virus or through climate based economic tragedies because rich/aware people want to live here is not acceptable.
If you still peruse newspapers you might notice this prevailing throughout most publications. The headline, subhead, and lead paragraph shout one thing, conclusions drawn in article are often very different. How many “regular Joes and Janes” read to conclusions?
It's not just this vaccine but any vaccine in which the study results can be construed as remotely negative. It's required to genuflect before the altar first. It's public policy that any concerns, even if valid, must be downplayed to protect confidence in vaccines as a public health measure. Take a look at older studies, this long predates the mRNA shots.
I think you can make a fairly decent statement that smallpox, polio, yellow fever, and typhoid vaccines really do fit that description. Most of the rest are just tagging along on their coattails -- "flu vaccine"? Meh.
Regarding this: " because non-specific vaccine effects can last for years or in some cases even decades"... The specific effects can be very long-lasting, too. Every time I go in for my travel pharmacy interview when I'm heading to Equatorial Africa (twice in the last decade) they tell me I don't need a yellow fever vaccination or booster because they keep upping the estimate of how long it's effective. (I got mine in 1980!)
You can see the same effect in certain mainstream media. Here's a link to a WSJ article that seems to extol the promise of mRNA. Or does it? There are clear misgivings in at least two places. See if you can spot them. (Paywalled sometimes, but you can listen to audio version.)
Great essay. What an incredibly dishonest, corrupt world we inhabit.
Pontius Pilate, standing in for secular leaders ever since, asks Jesus, "What is truth?" In a culture where a man can become a woman by thinking/feeling himself to be one (transubstantiation for the non-religious?), the answer is whatever you want it to be.
Even Science (!!!) no longer seeks truth, but prostitutes itself for a pat on the head by those footing the bill. A lack of integrity is our real crisis.
Certainly government money corrupts, but the problem is far wider. "Follow the money." "The love of money is the root of all evil." Maybe not all, but certainly one should always inquire into what is motivating people. People really do sometimes act from altruism or some other noble motive, but that's not the way I bet. 😑 There are reasons that (some) judges are appointed for life,, that (some) periodicals accept no advertising, that (a very few) organizations eschew outside funding and subsist solely on donations by their own members, that (some) advisory committees are peopled by retired professionals no longer beholden to hidden interests, etc.
It's not money that is the root of all evil, it's the insatiable appetite for something for nothing that is the root of all evil. In a free market money or wealth is merely a measure of value added, but government money is a measure of coercive force added in the quest of something for nothing.
If there is one simple truism that everybody needs to understand it's that people respond to incentives. When those incentives are perverse as with the government promise of something for nothing, you get perverse outcomes. When those incentives are virtuous, as with free and voluntary exchange for mutual benefit, you get virtuous outcomes. Government inextricably corrupts markets because it has a monopoly on force and when it coopts things like the market in science the science inevitably becomes a means to sustaining and growing that power, not a means to the truth.
It's a problem of long standing - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDbQNBla6aU - Marcia Angell, MD, ex-editor, New England Journal of Medicine, 2012; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ - Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, John P. A. Ioannidis, MD, Stanford U School of Medicine, 2005. 35 years ago when I was doing my PhD (physical/organic chem, U Florida 1987), I got told to find something which wasn't there, argument ensued - for two months. Nearly cost me the PhD but I held my ground, and was proven right. In the real world, trying stuff like that is the sort of thing that gets you denied funding and positions and tenure - and very few people once they get tenure are psychologically able to break the conditioning of compliance. That's the trouble - money talks and it buys "research"...
Thanks for the links. I always suspected that science was corrupted to some degree (all human institutions/endeavors are) but am surprised at the extent. Disheartening.
Integrity is easily bought. Doesn't take much to corner someone into playing along, especially if everything is all pretty on top. You'd have to be Jesus or something to resist.
Integrity is not easily purchased, at least for those who truly possess it. It's an apparently small minority, but these people are the salt of the earth.
Giving the devil (er, the Gentile) his due: in the narrated story, Pilate realized that Jesus was an innocent. He tried to release the man. It was the Pharisees who condemned and wanted him dead. Yes, it was the Romans (directed by Pilate) that actually executed Jesus, but it happened at the behest of the Jews.
I worked in University level scientific research for 16 years, and I have to say, el gato absolutely *NAILS IT* with this piece. Prior to my gig in research I was a working senior scientist in the environmental field (contaminant investigations, feasibility studies, remediation systems, risk assessment). What el gato describes is an extraordinarily COMMON phenomenon, and it is very challenging to explain this to laymen and why it matters.
My personal favorite comes from my career as a practicing scientist in the environmental field (THIS IS A LONG STORY SO PLEASE BEAR WITH ME, I THINK IT IS WORTH YOUR TIME). We were working as consultants to the State in a case involving a 60 acre pile of cement kiln dust (CKD) - a waste byproduct of the manufacture of Portland Cement. This stuff was blowing all over the place and had filled-in major portions of the bottom-lands of one of the Great Lakes.
The State scientist asked me to review a report that had been produced by a research scientist for a prominent and well-respected University. This report stated in the Executive Summary that wind-blown CKD had caused elevated blood lead levels in the residents of a nearby city. The State scientist specifically told me he was not going to give me his analysis of the report so as to not bias me, but he wanted my expert opinion. The findings of the report had made it into the media, and the community was understandly alarmed and demanding help from the State.
As I went through the document contents, I saw where a "background" area had been used for comparison purposes - that it is, they had collected blood samples from people in an area nearby to the site, but in a location that was not impacted by CKD deposition. They then collected blood samples from residents of the study area and tested them for lead. Sample points (people) were selected based on a statistical sampling method designed to yield an adequate number of sample points and at a distribution that would be appropriate to yield a "representative sample" of the population.
In short, the study methods appeared sound. Then as I dove into the results I noticed a couple of very interesting things.
1. Of the people tested in the study area, only 1 person had a blood-lead level that was concerning as to health. But this person made fishing-lures as a side-gig and had his own lead smelter. All other results were well within normal safe ranges.
2. Mean, standard deviation and variance of blood-lead levels were computed for the study area as well as the background population. When comparisons were made, there was NO STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE between the study and background populations!
3. There was NO analysis or discussion of results presented that explained WHY the author concluded blood-lead levels were impacted by CKD in the study area - NONE.
I performed various comparisons between the background and study area datasets on my own, examined all of the tables, raw data, and statistics. In no manner did I see any case for what was written in the Executive Summary. I re-read this report no fewer than 4 TIMES thinking I'd missed something. I even looked at all the page numbers and compared to the TOC thinking perhaps pages or sections had been omitted. NOTHING.
Finally I contacted the Professor that wrote this report. I got a hold of him and explained I was working as a scientific consultant to the State and would like to ask some questions about his report - did he have some time? "Sure!". OK great. As I started to hit the pertinent disconnect between the Executive Summary and the results he "suddenly realized" he had forgotten he had a class. Could he call me back? Sure. I want to emphasize I was non-confrontational, and tried to approach this from the standpoint of: "I must be missing something, could you please help me understand?"
I never heard from him again, although I tried to contact him several times, and left voicemail messages stating the importance of this paper to our work and the community.
I finally contacted the State scientist and told him my conclusion was the report was not credible based upon my assessment and the apparent refusal of the author to respond to reasonable (or any) questions. The State scientist then told me he had come to the same conclusion, and had also tried to reach out to the Professor to no avail. We decided to disregard the report for the purposes of our investigation, but were left dealing with the public fear it generated.
This is one of MANY stories I could tell, but it is one of the best examples of what el gato describes in practice. If you read all of this, I hope you found it enlightening.
El gato, you continually amaze me. Just when I think you are the best and most sarcastic cat to ever comment, and your light but pointed articles make me laugh and I think you are such a great entertainer, you go and show me that you are so much MORE...a cat capable of diving into studies and pointing out the serious problems with people not being able to READ a scientific study, and your absolute mastery of statistics and numbers......Well, I am in AWE. Thank you for spelling out a major problem with most peer reviewed studies that people take as GOSPEL...when they show nothing of the kind.
That's the other issue these days - "peer-reviewed". Which peers reviewed the paper? What are their credentials? Is there confirmation bias? Is scientific "truth" a matter of popular opinion? Peer-review can be a good thing of, as senor gato pointed out, it is approached with the intent of poking holes, not just affirming a conclusion. Unfortunately, this seems rare anymore, and "peer-review"has simply become argumentum ad populum.
Good point. "Peer-reviewed" is just one more word appropriated by The Left, turned to ignoble purposes and as a result, it's become close to meaningless. Perhaps even a red flag. Many of these hijacked words once had "brand recognition," like "vaccine". Others once had perhaps a negative connotation but similarly were misapplied to the extent that their meaning is diluted because the usage is clearly nonsensical ("Racist.")
And now, official U.S. government "advisories" (propaganda) equate free speech ("misinformation" etc.) as equal to terrorism.
I was a science geek in high school. I loved it! I didn't get great grades, but it (science class) always kept me interested and engaged. Unfortunately, over the last 15 days to flatten the curve, Scientists have been added to my list of people to never trust. Along with Mainstream Doctors, Corporate Media, 3 letter agencies and so on. At this point I would trust someone practicing voodoo more...
This really is the most tragic aspect of Covid and AGW. Science is a "tool" not a "crystal ball". Scientists are human beings, not Gods. People will now understandably reject the utility of science due to the perversion of science into the religion of "Scientism". The government has used Scientism to control the narrative and paid the scientists to give them the results that bolster their predetermined policy initiatives. The media is more than happy to accommodate in the spreading of true disinformation - especially since they are not only ideologically driven, but singularly UNQUALIFIED to to assess what these studies mean, let alone to properly evaluate the veracity of "scientific" claims.
The only data we need now on boosters is the fact that Israel slammed the brakes on the 4th booster campaign and is packing up the vaccine passport circus as quickly as possible.
Exactly. All you have to do is know that Israel is almost completely vaccinated and they have incredibly high infection and hospitalization rates. That big picture is enough to help me stop obsessing about data details so much, and start having a life again.
This experiement, which they haven't even bothered in the US to track the data on, is a massive massive failure. Didn't stop Wuhan, Delta or Omnicron. Instead, we have non covid excess deaths through the roof. EVERY WESTERN DEMOCRACY CURRENT LEADERSHIP NEEDS TO BE REPLACED. TOMORROW.
Exactly. When it was "4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident" we could laugh because when shilling product all bets are off.
The problem is most people don't understand that once we went post-fact it's all about shilling product and aggregating power. Economic grift meets control over the consumer's mind and social standing.
The Ministry of Truth has run some amazing campaigns. "97% of scientists...climate change is real." "safe and effective". "Systemic racism" When the Nobel Prize winning Minister himself says "The Science is Settled" and gets a standing O, it's Scientism.
Will people apply the lessons of Covid to the rest of the leftist orthodoxy? What else have bad people peddling their conspiracy theories and dangerous misinformation - or just some unfortunate guy who leans out the Overton after a few beers, been unable to talk about in polite society for the past 10 or 20 years? Hmm.
Not one of Ozzy Osbourne's better known songs, "Rock 'N Roll Rebel" has some good allusions to "1984". For those who'd rather not listen to a singer with a voice like nails raking across a chalkboard 😁, instead I offer you a link to the lyrics alone:
Perhaps 30 years ago, there was a recognition among the major medical journals that article abstracts often did not accurately reflect the actual data and analysis within the manuscript body. There was an effort to correct this. I thought at the time it was an issue of sloppiness or literary incompetence. But it was important, because busy doctors often just skimmed journal issues by reading the abstracts and skipping the actual paper.
Now, it’s clearly a whole different ballgame, as you point out. It’s quite obvious that any significant paper—especially about SARS-CoV-2 2019 Wuhan and it’s variants—absolutely must have a sound byte or two that can be used to support the Narrative and pummel heretics with. But this goes beyond COVID.
I just reviewed a manuscript on an unrelated topic and it was clear the authors specifically forced a social justice statement about race in the concluding comments that did not flow from their study data at all. It was an unsupported conclusory statement that would have been quoted far and wide for purposes that had nothing to do with the science of the study.
Several years ago, I was waiting in our conference room for the start of our weekly meeting. The Chair of the Physics department was having a sidebar conversation with a mathematician who was trying to put together a grant proposal. The Chair said to the researcher "what you really need is a Global Warming angle. Get that, and you'll probably be funded". The researcher was trying to wrack his brain to come up with an angle he could use (don't know if he ever came up with anything). So say (for example) someone wants to study patterns in domestic violence in economically deprived areas, but needs a Global Warming "angle" to increase their chances of getting funded. When the paper is published, one of the conclusions might be: "Global Warming causes wife beating". And there you go.....
After my master’s in Physics, I went to med school. I always wondered if I made the wrong decision to leave Physics. I guess it wouldn’t have made any difference today. They’re everywhere!
How about this as an abstract: they don’t work; they are a known health hazard.
If we accept the Less Serious™️ branding, then they are a treatment not an immunising agent therefore not a vaccine.
Their sole purpose is to fulfil a political power/control objective, they provide no public health benefit and are a placebo for the uninformed, frightened masses.
If we want a prophylactic which deserves the "less serious" label, let us turn our eyes to parts of the world where HCQ and IVM are used routinely, and COVID is subsequently less deadly.
But no profit in these for the big pharmas, and they don’t qualify as the magic bullet that politicians can claim shows their competent handling of this extinction event plague - how we saved the Human Race before supper. It is a first in medical history where public health policy was to forbid treatment and for obliging doctors to decline to treat a disease and to tell patients to go home, wait for it to get serious and then call an ambulance. The other part of public health policy was to deny patients other than CoVid patients and emergencies, hospital care so the by now serious CoVid patients could be hospitalised.
Medical treatment is not always a top priority. Within living memory, it was a court-martial offense for a military "member" 😈 to contract a venereal disease. Eventually wiser heads prevailed; they noted that such a policy did not exactly lead to afflicted soldiers coming forward for treatment for what could be a very serious disease. It was decided that perhaps it would be better to offer them treatment instead.
Except they're not even a treatment - they behave like a virus to cause your body to flood itself with the same toxin the supposedly targeted virus would.
They don't need to go that far, P-hacking has become an art form of sorts. They can make A and B "correlate" with a few statistical parlor tricks and still make it seem "legitimate".
In my advanced research seminar, I spend considerable time on conclusion validity, a totally neglected form of validity. When you are a professional researcher, it is startling to see how often authors distort the findings to suit a preferred narrative.
Buen Trabajo Gatito Malo Malo!!!! This is an excellent essay. The willingness of researchers to qualify, or outright refute their own data in the study summary is frustrating, to say the least. Mask efficacy is a prime example. They needed "studies" to support forcing face diapers on everyone, and compromised researchers were happy to oblige. It was interesting to see the politicization of mask studies in 2020. The CDC published two studies it funded in 2019, and both refuted mask efficacy. Both studies were released at the height of the mask mania. Around that time, we began to see the phrase "data suggest that use may reduce." Those words "suggest" and "may" would be included in study summaries for the next year and a half. These people must have special mirrors at home that allow them to not look themselves in the eye. Sheesh, this was a rambling mess, huh?
I've become sensitized to conditionals in science news. I go through an article and count all the "suggest", "may", "could", "might", etc. At about four in a short article I generally stop reading.
The worst one is "linked to". You see that all over the place, especially in articles clearly written by non-scientists intended to generate scare clicks: "Invisible dust particles IN YOUR HOME RIGHT NOW linked to brain cancer!!!!" and so forth.
The New England Journal of Medicine may be a classic example of this phenomenon, starting way back in April 2020 with respect to masks.
This is their take on masks:
"We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic."
Ok, got that? "...offers little, IF ANY, protection from infection." (CAPS emphasis mine)
Then people started citing the NEJM to argue against masks, and in July 2020 the NEJM appended this to the TOP of their earlier report:
"We understand that some people are citing our Perspective article (published on April 1 at NEJM.org)1 as support for discrediting widespread masking. In truth, the intent of our article was to push for more masking, not less." (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2020836)
Got that? OUR INTENT!!!
So their intent was NOT science- or research-based. It was POLITICAL. It was POLICY-driven. They didn't GAFF about simply reporting science.
No, their admitted INTENT was to impact and influence POLICY DECISIONS.
What absolute fothermuckers. Absolute. They can ESAD, for all I care.
"...are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does."
That is EXACTLY what I had to do, over and over and over, every time I cited the NEJM study on masks and some idiot in the "google and spam" crowd would reply, "Nuh-UH! Look at this. They say they want MORE masking!"
And I'm not even a study reader. I'm just someone who has (at least) halfway-decent reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
"We understand that some people are citing our Perspective article (published on April 1 at NEJM.org)1 as support for discrediting widespread masking."
They missed the obvious out: they could've claimed it was simply an April fools joke.
I started reading scientific studies about 12 years ago, mainly nutritional studies (which are almost uniformly abysmal), so am familiar with all these concepts, and more. I figured out the abuse of relative risk for myself by reading the data from the big statin study, rather than reading the conclusions or even the graphs.
"those who can and do really read studies are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does." I think it's even worse than that — the Google and spam crowd just forwards links of journalistic articles about those studies. And many "science" writers either don't understand the science involved, have any knowledge or interest in deciphering the data, or just parrot the press release provided by the researchers or university or pharmaceutical company or whatever. Not to mention they like to put clickbait exaggerations in their headlines, which is why we get these articles saying just about every food causes cancer.
For a really good (and entertaining) take on how to recognize the myriad ways data are misrepresented, I highly recommend the book Doctoring Data by Malcolm Kendrick. As a doctor skeptical of the cholesterol theory of heart disease, he's intimately familiar with a lot of the tactics used to suppress those going against the flow.
When doing such a study here in Sweden, you must first get approval from a board of ethics, often even before applying for funding. This board is not just scientists in the relevant field(s) but also seats politically appointed persons whose explicit function is to ensure studies are made inside politically mandated codes of ethics.
Or in plain english: political commissars are arbiters of science.
That's the reason for hiding the counter-narrative findings, such as they are and that's also the reason for why abstract and summary and actual figures doesn't really match: the "board of ethics" looks for two things in the main; that political correctness is adhered to, and that no findings running counter to political truth are presented.
If you have a professional interest about the situation here in Sweden regarding academic freedom, I suggest you contact Academics Rights Watch.
As an example of how things are, let me tell you that when Huntington's "The Clash of Civilisations" was new, you could be put on report for reading it in public. I was. I had to defend myself before the dean regarding why I was flaunting "racist books". No such hearing when I was using the S.C.U.M Manifesto as material. "The Bell-Curve" was dismissed as "paranoid neo-nazi propaganda" when it came out.
I'm all for scientific debate, especially in the humanities/social sciences and arts - but an argument is not proof, and proving that a situation is just that is neither condemnation nor advocacy for anything, and yet... If you stray, no matter if you are a tutor or a student - bam! You're blacklisted. For ever. That includes the private sector (all higher education is wholly or mainly governement funded which extends to research).
And now you know why they wrote up that report the way they did.
PS Had to add this: I am envious of how effortlessly you mix memetics with heavy-duty academic pieces. DS
Especially with COVID related topics, I have found very often that scrutiny of the data will contradict the obligatory nod to orthodoxy in the beginning of the abstract (to get the article past the dilletante purse-string holders).
Papers that start with the line "vaccines are likely the greatest health care intervention in modern history" or similar paean very often end up providing a counterexample to that dogma in the Results section. The whole papers must be read, with a calculator handy.
wait until you read some climate studies...
the covidians are pikers in comparison.
I just posted the following, then saw your comment:
Dear Señor Gato, some words just leap off the page like a feline pouncing on prey:
"Bayesian issues ..... that may *inject* serious bias" ROFLMAO!
Have you noticed that one of the earlier and more blatant examples of torturing the summary until it says what the patrons want, is the series of communiqués from the UN IPCC continuing to claim CO2 induced warming in the face of a solar minimum induced incipient mini ice age?
Spot on Mike. Can't help noticing the similarities in the corrupt science around COVID and AGW. The journals are a tissue of lies to support the narratives. I love to follow the Steve Kirsch/el gato malo of climate science: https://realclimatescience.com/
We need term like "Gel-Mann amnesia" (although one that takes hold better) (which is when you read an article in the paper in your area of expertise and recognize how extremely backward/incorrect/false/corrupt the reporting is, then turn the page and simply believe at face value what you read there).
We have a similar thing (a similar amnesia) going on, even with people like Bret Weinstein, John Ioannidis, and others who know very well the corruption of "science" and scientific studies in the their own and/or related fields, but imagine that the really pressing issues needing real solutions are the issues (presented as emergencies) in climate "science."
Knowing the corruption in their own areas of focus, they somehow forget to apply the necessary skepticism in other "scientific" domains.
It's why Weinstein comes off as being essentially so disingenuous to many people over the age of 25 that have experienced his MO a number of times before... it's that smug Lib/Prog affinity for selective consciousness. They don't recognize anything outside of their comfortable bubbles until it personally bites them in the ass. Then they isolate that bite from everything else and carry on down the garden path.
What infuriates me about Bret Weinstein is his painful insistence on steelmanning every proposition. He should know by now that the people he opposes operate exclusively in bad faith and have no compunction about issuing the most obvious lies.
I'm a little heartened by his last few podcasts, though. It feels like he and Heather have moved past "we can't believe people are being this stupid" to "we're mad as hell".
It’s not disingenuous if it’s not in conscious awareness. You are criticising him for an aspect of human nature - cognitive dissonance (assuming you are correct - I have not done enough climate science research to know either way). And yes, liberals are probably more accomplished at compartmentalising their brains - necessary when your self image is of a really good person, but you are also human with a shadow aspect that is at odds with the notion of you as a really good person. Again these are subconscious processes though. Weinstein acts in good faith.
Gell-Mann (not Gel-Mann).
Big fan of Tony Heller
The real problem in the dependency on fossil fuels is that they are a non-renewable and finite resource, and the usage of that resource is undergoing exponential growth, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4, "Exponential Growth Arithmetic, Population and Energy", Dr. Albert A. Bartlett. Depletion of that resource will get to the point where it takes as much energy to extract a unit of fossil-fuel energy as can be gotten from that unit of energy, and the way things are going, that point will come sooner rather than later. And at that point, mechanized agriculture is going to become impossible, not only for ag fuels but also fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, all of which are dependent on fossil fuels as feedstocks. And that point will come very much quicker than we see real effects from global warming - which may be the result of natural processes (see figures 2 and 3 of http://www.spirasolaris.ca/sbb4g1bv.html).
"We're reaching peak oil" has been a rallying cry of the anti fossil fuel doomsayers for at least forty years. There's also a simple answer to the problem. It's called the market.
If coal, oil, and gas become to expensive to extract for use as fuel, the shift to alternate fuel transportation will take off naturally, whereas no amount of subsidies can force it.
Domestic energy use can mostly shift to electricity, as long as loony policies do not make it so unreliable that everybody stocks up on wood and oil for self-preservation. Electricity can, of course be generated by whatever is cheapest and most efficient, whether coal, oil, gas, hydro, or nuclear.
That leaves hydrocarbons as feedstocks - as is always the case, scarcity drives efficiency - do you really think it is government's wise regulations which gave us 25-30MPG cars instead of 8-12 MPG cars? No. It was temporary scarcity, and then competition to make economical cars fun (or vice versa).
In short, I'm long enough in the tooth not to buy "Peak Oil is here!"
Also look up the Simon vs Erlichman bet.
exactly this.
we never run out of anything because markets adjust.
we did not stop using whale oil because of peak whale.
these malthusian arguments are batting 0.000 historically.
With finite resources, and exponential growth, there's going to be a limit - which is why investing in fossil fuel energy is a good idea - you have to do your due diligence of course - it's a depleting resource with growing demand, and there's no move away from dependency on it.
It's also worth bearing in mind that those declaiming about "peak oil" are often also opposed to nuclear power, which gives them away as not being serious in their claims. Anyone who is truly concerned about fossil fuel depletion would be pushing to move as much power generation to nuclear as humanly possible, to preserve the hydrocarbons for other uses.
But from what I've read posted by geologists, we're not likely to actually run out any time soon; there are a bunch of fields that are not economic at current prices but would provide a lot of oil if the price rose significantly.
People who make generalizations like this tend to be reactionary and stupid. You don't know me, and you don't know what I think about nuclear power. How about just asking - "Well then, what about nuclear power? How about wind and solar?". The fact is, is that fossil fuels are in finite supply, and the market can't create new supplies ex nihilo, as Thomas Gold has suggested. And since most of my investing activity is in the area of fossil fuels - scarce, depleting resource, exponentially-expanding demand, I might know a hell of a lot more about this than you might think. And there's a reason why methods of tertiary recovery like hydrofracturing are so popular, as is using tar sands to get at the 5% of heavy, sour gasoline they contain, as compared to the light, sweet crude West Texas Intermediate which has about 50% gasoline in it. As for nuclear, I'm all for it, we should have all of our domestic electricity production from nuclear. Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy is a damned good idea, thorium reactors are a good idea too - and thorium is a lot more plentiful than uranium and doesn't need to be mined or converted to uranium hexafluoride, either. Both wind and solar are fossil fuel dependent, because both require lithium batteries, as intermittent sources. Lithium itself is, as a rare earth element, in finite supply, once made into batteries, it has about a ten-year usable lifetime, and there's no way to recycle it - and mining and processing are fossil-fuel dependent. The vanes on wind chargers are made from petroleum resin and have a finite life, and then there's the fossil-fuel powered infrastructure required for transport, construction, and maintenance...
What has enough energy density to be an alternative? The EROEI on ethanol is about 1 to 1, same case for most biofuels - they take as much fossil fuel energy to produce as you get out of them, actually a bit less - there's that pesky Second Law of Thermodynamics screwing everything up. They end up as a carrier of energy, not a source. Same case for hydrogen, it's an energy carrier if you use fossil fuels to make it, and the EROEI is a lot worse. The only kind of high density fuel is nuclear - thorium sands, Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy idea - and figure out a way to store the energy other than lithium, because that's a rare earth metal in finite supply. Graphene is an interesting idea for storing energy, and as it comes from carbon, there's a lot of it around - https://www.motortrend.com/features/one-word-for-todays-graduate-graphene-technologue/ and https://www.metaltechnews.com/story/2021/05/05/tech-metals/graphene-aluminum-battery-may-be-here/551.html
for thorium sand as nuclear fuel, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080560335000525
I don't like ethanol because it's a waste of agricultural output, and it's corrosive.
I do get your point about many alternative power sources for transportation essentially being energy transport (storage), not primary sources.
Which comes back to nuclear for primary electricity generation, and the market eventually causing a switch to stored energy sourced from nuclear power.
Thorium reactors have been talked about for at least a couple of decades, and while I'm inclined to be suspicious of Bill Gates' motives, more *power* to him in that venture.
And look at https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2016/EE/C6EE00862C. Necessity has long been the impetus for creativity. Whether we can scavenge CO2 and energy to make fuel is unknown. The assertion that human engineers created an issue (fuel engines) means engineers can develop solutions. At least I have faith we will continue proving Malthusian theory is obsolete.
Making hydrocarbon fuels from CO2 is probably less efficient than making them by fermenting plant sugars. And then algae can be used as well - https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/47886... You just have to look at the EROEI. For feedstocks, you'd probably be better off by growing plants which produce vegetable oils, like hemp - which also produce fiber. Look back at the research done in World War II on oil alternatives, there's actually a lot of interesting stuff there.
That's a good point. From what I've read, it's entirely possible to create hydrocarbon fuels directly from carbon/CO2, it just takes so much energy that it's more expensive than pumping them out of the ground - for now. If that's the case, then even if we completely ran out of every single reservoir of buried oil, we could still create fuel for non-electric vehicles (and oils for chemical use) via nuclear or thorium power. (Or heck, even solar/wind, if it could be done without excessive amounts of rare earths etc.)
No one denies that conventional fuels are a limited supply. But it's all too easy for popular opinion to over-simplify the implications. It's not like we are, say, going to run out of gasoline all of a sudden and without any notice. Economics would suggest a more likely outcome. A resource (oil) gradually becomes scarcer and thus more expensive. This spurs the search for alternatives of equal or cheaper cost. Perhaps they exist. Perhaps they will be invented or discovered. Perhaps not. Absent alternatives, what would happen? Oil and the products derived from it would get more expensive -- but gradually over long time periods -- until it literally became irrational to use for some purposes. The idea that we will some day pump the last barrel of oil is ridiculous. Long before that point it would literally have become unprofitable to pump it. The world would have, perhaps, returned to the horse and buggy.
None of the above is to deny that resource limits aren't a real world problem. Of course they are. My point in typing all this is that, absent unknowable events or shocks to the system, these changes occur incrementally over very long time periods and, generally, are quite foreseeable and predictable at least by those informed more by science and common sense than by ideology. The popular imagination of a sudden crisis is usually as ludicrous as many of the proposed "solutions."
I deny it. There is unlimited gas in the Permian basin (a squidgy little bit of TX). There is no plausible or implausible scenario where humans can use it all. Finite does not mean small!
Gasoline is made *from* crude oil, OK? And different kinds of crude oil have differing amounts of gasoline of different quality. So we're running out of light sweet crude which has about 50% gasoline with low or no sulfur content, and falling back on heavy sour crudes like from Venezuela and tar sands from Canada. They have between 5% to 10% gasoline, and it has high sulfur content, which is a problem. Yeah, oil isn't like natural gas, which runs out pretty much immediately, there are secondary and tertiary recovery methods for oil, so that could make things tail off slower.
"Social Science" for the win. I'm no racist, but without performative laden abstracts we would have never been able to know how much science proves white people really are bad. At this point all Science is social science, until proven otherwise. But within the layman's arbiter of Poe's law, social science and climate science are heavyweights.
For sure; climate change is caused by white people. All that white skin reflecting the sun's rays back into the atmosphere. Any fool could see that.
Oh dear, I must be responsible for a fairly hefty portion then! I live in Australia and it hurts to look at me when I sunbathe!
LOL!!
Well, they have had decades to hone their skills.
And billions and billions of more grant money thrown at them everyday.
I've been aware for decades that the "executive summary" of the IPCC reports isn't even close to what the actual report says, but I wasn't aware it had spread into general science as well.
I haven't trusted "peer review" for years since the East Anglia scandal when it became apparent that the 10 or 12 big names in "climate" "science" were all reviewing each other's papers -- and even if it's a "blind" review you know the writing styles of all the other machers and what they're working on.
Even when it's not a circle jerk, I suspect that "peer review" is a lot like how I do code reviews at work: style, syntax, presentation, an occasional best-practices tip, and watching for only the most obvious red flags. I don't have time to learn everything about every application other developers are working on, so I just have to assume that their approach is legitimate.
Funny in the above I didn't see anything about what I'd think would be the most important factor: Does the code do what it was supposed to do? Are a paper's (experiment's) results reproducible? Etc. I'm not saying secondary considerations (e.g. style or clarity) aren't important -- but they ARE secondary.
As for code, I literally can't tell most of the time. Does changing lines 356-72 in file X so that it calls function A instead of function B on what looks like alternate Tuesdays solve the bug in the ticket, and was that the best way to do it? I have no idea, I'm not the tech lead for that team nor do I have a conceptual map in my head for the other 30,000 lines of code in that app. The time that I *was* tech lead and *was* involved in the app design from the beginning, then yeah, I had opinions on the primary considerations (and other developers usually came to me much earlier before code review stage). But in my experience, that's rare in a large organization.
You would think that scientific review would be more robust, but "science" is so hyper-specialized these days that I can see that if you're not literally on the same team as the authors then maybe "some aspects of the effect of Thing A on certain biological processes in Species B" might be out of your wheelhouse even if you're a slightly different thingo-specieso biologist. So you look over their approach and methods and kinda go "yeah, nothing's *obviously* wrong here".
That's why funding studies that are just replication needs to be an actual priority. No one wants to pay for anything that isn't cutting edge.
I have read some of what this one guy has tweeted -- he's on @hansmahncke a lot but I can't remember his name -- vaccine senility in progress -- about how world climate data is impossible to obtain, even though it is paid for by taxpayers, even with an FOIA request. They simply will not provide the background data that was used to arrive at their (almost certainly erroneous) conclusions.
In my opinion, this article and the comments make a case that neither a virus nor a climate catastrophe are humanities greatest concerns. What then are? Think bigger and longer. Go ahead and postulate, there is no need to be afraid of conspiracy theories any longer.
Wiser men have postulated. Problem is, they're ignored. In my opinion, I would submit that long-term, it is in fact man's overpopulation vs. needed resources for a desired standard of life, or indeed, of any life at all. This isn't even rocket science. Any study of biology shows that there is always competition for resources and limits to the growth of a population dictated by those resources.
Reading some of this man's writings gives some background ("Lifeboat Ethics" perhaps his most famous):
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/articles.html
All the optimists love to crow that Malthus was wrong. But was he? To me, the optimists are whistling past the graveyard, where the Ghost of Malthus is relaxing in his easy chair, biding his time.
We've got to get off of this rock, eventually, because as you and others have pointed out, resources here are finite. But purposefully killing millions or billions of people with a virus or through climate based economic tragedies because rich/aware people want to live here is not acceptable.
There is another way or ways. Let's find them.
If you still peruse newspapers you might notice this prevailing throughout most publications. The headline, subhead, and lead paragraph shout one thing, conclusions drawn in article are often very different. How many “regular Joes and Janes” read to conclusions?
It's not just this vaccine but any vaccine in which the study results can be construed as remotely negative. It's required to genuflect before the altar first. It's public policy that any concerns, even if valid, must be downplayed to protect confidence in vaccines as a public health measure. Take a look at older studies, this long predates the mRNA shots.
Because grant money. Funding to assure their continued existence. Can't bite the hand.
There are multiple settled lawsuits proving outright fraud.
ICAN and CHD won , good reading
I think you can make a fairly decent statement that smallpox, polio, yellow fever, and typhoid vaccines really do fit that description. Most of the rest are just tagging along on their coattails -- "flu vaccine"? Meh.
Kirsch had an interesting post on smallpox vax history yesterday.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/what-we-can-learn-from-the-smallpox
you might like this interview "Non-specific vaccine effects, with Dr. Christine Stabell Benn" where she talks about all-cause mortality stats vs types of vaccines https://sebastianrushworth.com/2022/02/12/non-specific-vaccine-effects-with-dr-christine-stabell-benn/
Interesting interview!
Regarding this: " because non-specific vaccine effects can last for years or in some cases even decades"... The specific effects can be very long-lasting, too. Every time I go in for my travel pharmacy interview when I'm heading to Equatorial Africa (twice in the last decade) they tell me I don't need a yellow fever vaccination or booster because they keep upping the estimate of how long it's effective. (I got mine in 1980!)
You can see the same effect in certain mainstream media. Here's a link to a WSJ article that seems to extol the promise of mRNA. Or does it? There are clear misgivings in at least two places. See if you can spot them. (Paywalled sometimes, but you can listen to audio version.)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-the-technology-behind-covid-vaccines-cure-other-diseases-11643990913
Great essay. What an incredibly dishonest, corrupt world we inhabit.
Pontius Pilate, standing in for secular leaders ever since, asks Jesus, "What is truth?" In a culture where a man can become a woman by thinking/feeling himself to be one (transubstantiation for the non-religious?), the answer is whatever you want it to be.
Even Science (!!!) no longer seeks truth, but prostitutes itself for a pat on the head by those footing the bill. A lack of integrity is our real crisis.
This has always been the moral hazard with everything government funded. You get the results you pay for.
Certainly government money corrupts, but the problem is far wider. "Follow the money." "The love of money is the root of all evil." Maybe not all, but certainly one should always inquire into what is motivating people. People really do sometimes act from altruism or some other noble motive, but that's not the way I bet. 😑 There are reasons that (some) judges are appointed for life,, that (some) periodicals accept no advertising, that (a very few) organizations eschew outside funding and subsist solely on donations by their own members, that (some) advisory committees are peopled by retired professionals no longer beholden to hidden interests, etc.
It's not money that is the root of all evil, it's the insatiable appetite for something for nothing that is the root of all evil. In a free market money or wealth is merely a measure of value added, but government money is a measure of coercive force added in the quest of something for nothing.
If there is one simple truism that everybody needs to understand it's that people respond to incentives. When those incentives are perverse as with the government promise of something for nothing, you get perverse outcomes. When those incentives are virtuous, as with free and voluntary exchange for mutual benefit, you get virtuous outcomes. Government inextricably corrupts markets because it has a monopoly on force and when it coopts things like the market in science the science inevitably becomes a means to sustaining and growing that power, not a means to the truth.
It's a problem of long standing - see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDbQNBla6aU - Marcia Angell, MD, ex-editor, New England Journal of Medicine, 2012; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ - Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, John P. A. Ioannidis, MD, Stanford U School of Medicine, 2005. 35 years ago when I was doing my PhD (physical/organic chem, U Florida 1987), I got told to find something which wasn't there, argument ensued - for two months. Nearly cost me the PhD but I held my ground, and was proven right. In the real world, trying stuff like that is the sort of thing that gets you denied funding and positions and tenure - and very few people once they get tenure are psychologically able to break the conditioning of compliance. That's the trouble - money talks and it buys "research"...
Thanks for the links. I always suspected that science was corrupted to some degree (all human institutions/endeavors are) but am surprised at the extent. Disheartening.
Integrity is easily bought. Doesn't take much to corner someone into playing along, especially if everything is all pretty on top. You'd have to be Jesus or something to resist.
Integrity is not easily purchased, at least for those who truly possess it. It's an apparently small minority, but these people are the salt of the earth.
Giving the devil (er, the Gentile) his due: in the narrated story, Pilate realized that Jesus was an innocent. He tried to release the man. It was the Pharisees who condemned and wanted him dead. Yes, it was the Romans (directed by Pilate) that actually executed Jesus, but it happened at the behest of the Jews.
I worked in University level scientific research for 16 years, and I have to say, el gato absolutely *NAILS IT* with this piece. Prior to my gig in research I was a working senior scientist in the environmental field (contaminant investigations, feasibility studies, remediation systems, risk assessment). What el gato describes is an extraordinarily COMMON phenomenon, and it is very challenging to explain this to laymen and why it matters.
My personal favorite comes from my career as a practicing scientist in the environmental field (THIS IS A LONG STORY SO PLEASE BEAR WITH ME, I THINK IT IS WORTH YOUR TIME). We were working as consultants to the State in a case involving a 60 acre pile of cement kiln dust (CKD) - a waste byproduct of the manufacture of Portland Cement. This stuff was blowing all over the place and had filled-in major portions of the bottom-lands of one of the Great Lakes.
The State scientist asked me to review a report that had been produced by a research scientist for a prominent and well-respected University. This report stated in the Executive Summary that wind-blown CKD had caused elevated blood lead levels in the residents of a nearby city. The State scientist specifically told me he was not going to give me his analysis of the report so as to not bias me, but he wanted my expert opinion. The findings of the report had made it into the media, and the community was understandly alarmed and demanding help from the State.
As I went through the document contents, I saw where a "background" area had been used for comparison purposes - that it is, they had collected blood samples from people in an area nearby to the site, but in a location that was not impacted by CKD deposition. They then collected blood samples from residents of the study area and tested them for lead. Sample points (people) were selected based on a statistical sampling method designed to yield an adequate number of sample points and at a distribution that would be appropriate to yield a "representative sample" of the population.
In short, the study methods appeared sound. Then as I dove into the results I noticed a couple of very interesting things.
1. Of the people tested in the study area, only 1 person had a blood-lead level that was concerning as to health. But this person made fishing-lures as a side-gig and had his own lead smelter. All other results were well within normal safe ranges.
2. Mean, standard deviation and variance of blood-lead levels were computed for the study area as well as the background population. When comparisons were made, there was NO STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE between the study and background populations!
3. There was NO analysis or discussion of results presented that explained WHY the author concluded blood-lead levels were impacted by CKD in the study area - NONE.
I performed various comparisons between the background and study area datasets on my own, examined all of the tables, raw data, and statistics. In no manner did I see any case for what was written in the Executive Summary. I re-read this report no fewer than 4 TIMES thinking I'd missed something. I even looked at all the page numbers and compared to the TOC thinking perhaps pages or sections had been omitted. NOTHING.
Finally I contacted the Professor that wrote this report. I got a hold of him and explained I was working as a scientific consultant to the State and would like to ask some questions about his report - did he have some time? "Sure!". OK great. As I started to hit the pertinent disconnect between the Executive Summary and the results he "suddenly realized" he had forgotten he had a class. Could he call me back? Sure. I want to emphasize I was non-confrontational, and tried to approach this from the standpoint of: "I must be missing something, could you please help me understand?"
I never heard from him again, although I tried to contact him several times, and left voicemail messages stating the importance of this paper to our work and the community.
I finally contacted the State scientist and told him my conclusion was the report was not credible based upon my assessment and the apparent refusal of the author to respond to reasonable (or any) questions. The State scientist then told me he had come to the same conclusion, and had also tried to reach out to the Professor to no avail. We decided to disregard the report for the purposes of our investigation, but were left dealing with the public fear it generated.
This is one of MANY stories I could tell, but it is one of the best examples of what el gato describes in practice. If you read all of this, I hope you found it enlightening.
This kind of stuff is all too common... PhD, physical/organic chem, Florida, 1987, JD 2000...
enlightening indeed. thank you for sharing.
El gato, you continually amaze me. Just when I think you are the best and most sarcastic cat to ever comment, and your light but pointed articles make me laugh and I think you are such a great entertainer, you go and show me that you are so much MORE...a cat capable of diving into studies and pointing out the serious problems with people not being able to READ a scientific study, and your absolute mastery of statistics and numbers......Well, I am in AWE. Thank you for spelling out a major problem with most peer reviewed studies that people take as GOSPEL...when they show nothing of the kind.
That's the other issue these days - "peer-reviewed". Which peers reviewed the paper? What are their credentials? Is there confirmation bias? Is scientific "truth" a matter of popular opinion? Peer-review can be a good thing of, as senor gato pointed out, it is approached with the intent of poking holes, not just affirming a conclusion. Unfortunately, this seems rare anymore, and "peer-review"has simply become argumentum ad populum.
Good point. "Peer-reviewed" is just one more word appropriated by The Left, turned to ignoble purposes and as a result, it's become close to meaningless. Perhaps even a red flag. Many of these hijacked words once had "brand recognition," like "vaccine". Others once had perhaps a negative connotation but similarly were misapplied to the extent that their meaning is diluted because the usage is clearly nonsensical ("Racist.")
And now, official U.S. government "advisories" (propaganda) equate free speech ("misinformation" etc.) as equal to terrorism.
Yes! I am so grateful to you, el gato, for keeping the stream of truth flowing. You are doing all of us and the world a huge service. Thank you!
Indeed. I feel quite a lot smarter for having read El gato's post.
I feel dumber, but grateful for the opportunity for enlightenment.
Me too. He always puts things in terms you can understand and re-tell. It sticks.
I was a science geek in high school. I loved it! I didn't get great grades, but it (science class) always kept me interested and engaged. Unfortunately, over the last 15 days to flatten the curve, Scientists have been added to my list of people to never trust. Along with Mainstream Doctors, Corporate Media, 3 letter agencies and so on. At this point I would trust someone practicing voodoo more...
I am also a science nerd, that's exactly why I cannot take this junk peer-reviewed (lmao) science seriously.
This really is the most tragic aspect of Covid and AGW. Science is a "tool" not a "crystal ball". Scientists are human beings, not Gods. People will now understandably reject the utility of science due to the perversion of science into the religion of "Scientism". The government has used Scientism to control the narrative and paid the scientists to give them the results that bolster their predetermined policy initiatives. The media is more than happy to accommodate in the spreading of true disinformation - especially since they are not only ideologically driven, but singularly UNQUALIFIED to to assess what these studies mean, let alone to properly evaluate the veracity of "scientific" claims.
The only data we need now on boosters is the fact that Israel slammed the brakes on the 4th booster campaign and is packing up the vaccine passport circus as quickly as possible.
“Bill, something is amiss at the Circle K.”
Do you think they finally woke to to the error of letting Germans experiment on Jews, AGAIN?
The entire nation has been used as lab rats by Pfizer, and the results are in - they are not good.
It makes me so sad...this is exactly what they did, and of all the world, these people should have KNOWN BETTER.
"The only data we need now on boosters"
Exactly. All you have to do is know that Israel is almost completely vaccinated and they have incredibly high infection and hospitalization rates. That big picture is enough to help me stop obsessing about data details so much, and start having a life again.
This experiement, which they haven't even bothered in the US to track the data on, is a massive massive failure. Didn't stop Wuhan, Delta or Omnicron. Instead, we have non covid excess deaths through the roof. EVERY WESTERN DEMOCRACY CURRENT LEADERSHIP NEEDS TO BE REPLACED. TOMORROW.
Do you think the Israeli's are waking up? Wonder if they will "take steps" .....if there are still any of them leftover from Entebbe?
First I've heard of it, which is surprising given the Substack authors I read!
cognitive dissonance, virtue signaling and mass herd pychosis is afflicts progressives, hate trumpers, covidiots and climate fanatics......
remember this when biden want to invest 500 billion is virtue signalled climate toys which do not replace energy and cost too much to try to operate.
if it needs mandates or subsidies it is wrong!
Exactly. When it was "4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident" we could laugh because when shilling product all bets are off.
The problem is most people don't understand that once we went post-fact it's all about shilling product and aggregating power. Economic grift meets control over the consumer's mind and social standing.
The Ministry of Truth has run some amazing campaigns. "97% of scientists...climate change is real." "safe and effective". "Systemic racism" When the Nobel Prize winning Minister himself says "The Science is Settled" and gets a standing O, it's Scientism.
Will people apply the lessons of Covid to the rest of the leftist orthodoxy? What else have bad people peddling their conspiracy theories and dangerous misinformation - or just some unfortunate guy who leans out the Overton after a few beers, been unable to talk about in polite society for the past 10 or 20 years? Hmm.
Not one of Ozzy Osbourne's better known songs, "Rock 'N Roll Rebel" has some good allusions to "1984". For those who'd rather not listen to a singer with a voice like nails raking across a chalkboard 😁, instead I offer you a link to the lyrics alone:
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ozzyosbourne/rocknrollrebel.html
"Study Shows mRNA Vaccines 95% Effective" (32 paragraphs later) "At killing you...only 5% survived one week after the second dose."
Perhaps 30 years ago, there was a recognition among the major medical journals that article abstracts often did not accurately reflect the actual data and analysis within the manuscript body. There was an effort to correct this. I thought at the time it was an issue of sloppiness or literary incompetence. But it was important, because busy doctors often just skimmed journal issues by reading the abstracts and skipping the actual paper.
Now, it’s clearly a whole different ballgame, as you point out. It’s quite obvious that any significant paper—especially about SARS-CoV-2 2019 Wuhan and it’s variants—absolutely must have a sound byte or two that can be used to support the Narrative and pummel heretics with. But this goes beyond COVID.
I just reviewed a manuscript on an unrelated topic and it was clear the authors specifically forced a social justice statement about race in the concluding comments that did not flow from their study data at all. It was an unsupported conclusory statement that would have been quoted far and wide for purposes that had nothing to do with the science of the study.
Lesson? Read the data yourself (or read El Gato)!
Several years ago, I was waiting in our conference room for the start of our weekly meeting. The Chair of the Physics department was having a sidebar conversation with a mathematician who was trying to put together a grant proposal. The Chair said to the researcher "what you really need is a Global Warming angle. Get that, and you'll probably be funded". The researcher was trying to wrack his brain to come up with an angle he could use (don't know if he ever came up with anything). So say (for example) someone wants to study patterns in domestic violence in economically deprived areas, but needs a Global Warming "angle" to increase their chances of getting funded. When the paper is published, one of the conclusions might be: "Global Warming causes wife beating". And there you go.....
After my master’s in Physics, I went to med school. I always wondered if I made the wrong decision to leave Physics. I guess it wouldn’t have made any difference today. They’re everywhere!
How about this as an abstract: they don’t work; they are a known health hazard.
If we accept the Less Serious™️ branding, then they are a treatment not an immunising agent therefore not a vaccine.
Their sole purpose is to fulfil a political power/control objective, they provide no public health benefit and are a placebo for the uninformed, frightened masses.
If we want a prophylactic which deserves the "less serious" label, let us turn our eyes to parts of the world where HCQ and IVM are used routinely, and COVID is subsequently less deadly.
But no profit in these for the big pharmas, and they don’t qualify as the magic bullet that politicians can claim shows their competent handling of this extinction event plague - how we saved the Human Race before supper. It is a first in medical history where public health policy was to forbid treatment and for obliging doctors to decline to treat a disease and to tell patients to go home, wait for it to get serious and then call an ambulance. The other part of public health policy was to deny patients other than CoVid patients and emergencies, hospital care so the by now serious CoVid patients could be hospitalised.
Medical treatment is not always a top priority. Within living memory, it was a court-martial offense for a military "member" 😈 to contract a venereal disease. Eventually wiser heads prevailed; they noted that such a policy did not exactly lead to afflicted soldiers coming forward for treatment for what could be a very serious disease. It was decided that perhaps it would be better to offer them treatment instead.
Not condom mandates then? And everyone must wear one otherwise they don’t work.
please wait, you will be cancelled shortly!
Pre-emotive strike! I have cancelled myself.
Except they're not even a treatment - they behave like a virus to cause your body to flood itself with the same toxin the supposedly targeted virus would.
They *do* work - just not as vaccines, they reduce population by causing premature death and inducing sterility.
Let's use the confidence interval of (-∞, +∞), so all our abstracts would be technically within the realm of possibility! sCieNcE
They don't need to go that far, P-hacking has become an art form of sorts. They can make A and B "correlate" with a few statistical parlor tricks and still make it seem "legitimate".
In my advanced research seminar, I spend considerable time on conclusion validity, a totally neglected form of validity. When you are a professional researcher, it is startling to see how often authors distort the findings to suit a preferred narrative.
absolutely.
Buen Trabajo Gatito Malo Malo!!!! This is an excellent essay. The willingness of researchers to qualify, or outright refute their own data in the study summary is frustrating, to say the least. Mask efficacy is a prime example. They needed "studies" to support forcing face diapers on everyone, and compromised researchers were happy to oblige. It was interesting to see the politicization of mask studies in 2020. The CDC published two studies it funded in 2019, and both refuted mask efficacy. Both studies were released at the height of the mask mania. Around that time, we began to see the phrase "data suggest that use may reduce." Those words "suggest" and "may" would be included in study summaries for the next year and a half. These people must have special mirrors at home that allow them to not look themselves in the eye. Sheesh, this was a rambling mess, huh?
I've become sensitized to conditionals in science news. I go through an article and count all the "suggest", "may", "could", "might", etc. At about four in a short article I generally stop reading.
The worst one is "linked to". You see that all over the place, especially in articles clearly written by non-scientists intended to generate scare clicks: "Invisible dust particles IN YOUR HOME RIGHT NOW linked to brain cancer!!!!" and so forth.
The New England Journal of Medicine may be a classic example of this phenomenon, starting way back in April 2020 with respect to masks.
This is their take on masks:
"We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic."
(https://bit.ly/2Dra0Aj)
Ok, got that? "...offers little, IF ANY, protection from infection." (CAPS emphasis mine)
Then people started citing the NEJM to argue against masks, and in July 2020 the NEJM appended this to the TOP of their earlier report:
"We understand that some people are citing our Perspective article (published on April 1 at NEJM.org)1 as support for discrediting widespread masking. In truth, the intent of our article was to push for more masking, not less." (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2020836)
Got that? OUR INTENT!!!
So their intent was NOT science- or research-based. It was POLITICAL. It was POLICY-driven. They didn't GAFF about simply reporting science.
No, their admitted INTENT was to impact and influence POLICY DECISIONS.
What absolute fothermuckers. Absolute. They can ESAD, for all I care.
"...are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does."
That is EXACTLY what I had to do, over and over and over, every time I cited the NEJM study on masks and some idiot in the "google and spam" crowd would reply, "Nuh-UH! Look at this. They say they want MORE masking!"
And I'm not even a study reader. I'm just someone who has (at least) halfway-decent reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
The one good thing is that they are getting so much more ham-handed at this that it's harder for people to not see their blatant lies.
But a whole hell of a lot are going to give it the good old college try.
"We understand that some people are citing our Perspective article (published on April 1 at NEJM.org)1 as support for discrediting widespread masking."
They missed the obvious out: they could've claimed it was simply an April fools joke.
Peer Review = Dogma Enforcement
I started reading scientific studies about 12 years ago, mainly nutritional studies (which are almost uniformly abysmal), so am familiar with all these concepts, and more. I figured out the abuse of relative risk for myself by reading the data from the big statin study, rather than reading the conclusions or even the graphs.
"those who can and do really read studies are constantly having to pick them apart and explain to the “google and spam” crowd who just selectively confirm their biases and skim the lead paragraph of a study why the study they just cited does not, in fact, say what they are claiming it does." I think it's even worse than that — the Google and spam crowd just forwards links of journalistic articles about those studies. And many "science" writers either don't understand the science involved, have any knowledge or interest in deciphering the data, or just parrot the press release provided by the researchers or university or pharmaceutical company or whatever. Not to mention they like to put clickbait exaggerations in their headlines, which is why we get these articles saying just about every food causes cancer.
For a really good (and entertaining) take on how to recognize the myriad ways data are misrepresented, I highly recommend the book Doctoring Data by Malcolm Kendrick. As a doctor skeptical of the cholesterol theory of heart disease, he's intimately familiar with a lot of the tactics used to suppress those going against the flow.
If you're interested, also check out anything by John Ioannidis. Also https://www.statnews.com/2015/12/13/clinical-trials-investigation/
When doing such a study here in Sweden, you must first get approval from a board of ethics, often even before applying for funding. This board is not just scientists in the relevant field(s) but also seats politically appointed persons whose explicit function is to ensure studies are made inside politically mandated codes of ethics.
Or in plain english: political commissars are arbiters of science.
That's the reason for hiding the counter-narrative findings, such as they are and that's also the reason for why abstract and summary and actual figures doesn't really match: the "board of ethics" looks for two things in the main; that political correctness is adhered to, and that no findings running counter to political truth are presented.
If you have a professional interest about the situation here in Sweden regarding academic freedom, I suggest you contact Academics Rights Watch.
[https://academicrightswatch.se/]
As an example of how things are, let me tell you that when Huntington's "The Clash of Civilisations" was new, you could be put on report for reading it in public. I was. I had to defend myself before the dean regarding why I was flaunting "racist books". No such hearing when I was using the S.C.U.M Manifesto as material. "The Bell-Curve" was dismissed as "paranoid neo-nazi propaganda" when it came out.
I'm all for scientific debate, especially in the humanities/social sciences and arts - but an argument is not proof, and proving that a situation is just that is neither condemnation nor advocacy for anything, and yet... If you stray, no matter if you are a tutor or a student - bam! You're blacklisted. For ever. That includes the private sector (all higher education is wholly or mainly governement funded which extends to research).
And now you know why they wrote up that report the way they did.
PS Had to add this: I am envious of how effortlessly you mix memetics with heavy-duty academic pieces. DS