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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.”

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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!

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"Study Shows mRNA Vaccines 95% Effective" (32 paragraphs later) "At killing you...only 5% survived one week after the second dose."

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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)!

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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.

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Feb 13, 2022·edited Feb 13, 2022

You have to look no further than nutrition science (which is less a science than economics) to see that this is true. Fifty years of studies claiming saturated animal fats cause heart disease. That elevated cholesterol leads to CHD. Never proven. Data usually saying the opposite. And yet that particular Overton window has barely budged in half a century.

Then consider the way CHD has traditionally been treated. Initially the narrative was “cut fat to lower your risk of CHD” but now is “we have his lovely statin we’d like you to take.” T2 diabetes followed the same path, but they didn’t even bother to suggest anything but Metformin.

Covid is no different. Not a word about metabolic health, losing weight, vit D. The only thing their narrative supports is taking their drug.

The next “emergency“ will follow the same pattern.

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Let's use the confidence interval of (-∞, +∞), so all our abstracts would be technically within the realm of possibility! sCieNcE

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Feb 13, 2022·edited Feb 13, 2022

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/

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