Hotez and his ilk are not scientists by my definition. They are not practicing science but instead practicing scientism; a faith-based religious perspective that hews to anointed narratives rather than the requisite absolute skepticism and openness to ALL possibilities that real science requires.
Hotez has far more in common with a priest or a bishop than he does with a real scientist. Unfortunately scientism is today far more common than true science, both inside the halls of what is called science and also in the public perception thereof. It's tragic all around.
I published my own little piece of "disinformation" defining and criticizing the practice of scientism and the imposition of COVID vaccine mandates on my substack: https://iamascientist.substack.com/p/epistemrna
I just testified as an expert witness for a vaccine mandate case where the plaintiffs were granted exemptions but fired anyway. I presented data on the inability of the vaccine to block transmission, on secondary attack rates being equal in vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, on equal viral load among vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, on hybrid immunity and what could have been done to keep the exempt workers working. On cross examination they showed editorials and essays I wrote about how the data does not support mandates. They never challenged the data I presented only me personally. That’s science!
Sadly, that doesn’t surprise me that they would use politics or editorials to try to undermine your expert testimony. They do the same thing with me when they try to delegitimize me as a “libertarian” (which I’m not, but nor is that a disqualification for science), or by my own lamenting the serious moral consequences of public health policy that causes harm or scientific accidents that kill 20 million. Some people seem to lack the kind of civic integrity we strive for, and I feel sorry for them. Let’s keep being amazing at science and brilliant in our perspectives, and create space for more nuance-loving people like us.
While generally a very good article, ironically it spreads disinformation about disinformation. Specifically you state "History of Disinformation: Record a true history of disinformation, especially concerning scientific issues like oil & gas companies sowing doubt about climate change (while privately acknowledging it’s true)”. The first information debunking. It is not “climate change”, a nebulous propaganda phrase meaning virtually nothing and everything. It is forecasting the estimated impact of man’s CO2 production on a made up Global Average long term temperature variable. It is global warming modeling, not climate change. Our current understanding of our current climate is so poor, to think we could predict what an estimated 1 degree temperature change would do to the climate in 80 years is absurd. Secondly, even though the entire “climate change” business is based on temperature predictions, even the IPCC admits you can’t forecast long term temperature trends. From the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report: "The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” In other words, we can’t predict the weather long term. Something we all knew. From something I recently had published states that "it is not that long term temperature models are wrong, it's that they can't be right. (https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/the_blunt_truth_about_global_warming_models.html)
The reason I get a little bit into the weeds about forecasting is Oil & Gas (O&G) companies have no better weather crystal balls than anyone else, but they know a lot about forecasting. That is their core business. Forecasting the correctness of what they model. Whether gasoline demand, oil prices, or exploration potential, O&G companies see a lot of forecasts. They also know virtually all forecasts are wrong. A great explorationist is right maybe 1 out of 3 times. To think O&G people would blindly believe a 80 year weather forecast is “true” is both foolish and lacks understanding of the O&G business. Al Gore and some other global warming activists have used the "O&G industry knew and hide it" propaganda because a lot of their audience is emotional, not rational, and there is no better boogeyman for them than Big Oil. I suggest you look into the background of this disinformation and find out the real truth. Back to your statement "History of Disinformation: Record a true history of disinformation, especially concerning scientific issues like oil & gas companies sowing doubt about climate change (while privately acknowledging it’s true).” Since global warming is a future temperature prediction, how exactly can O&G companies "privately acknowledging” a future prediction is “true”? Until the future occurs, no one knows the truth. O&G companies know that. So do you. If any company, O&G or otherwise, were to claim its forecasts were "true", the SEC would be on them like a ton of bricks for fraud and misrepresentation. There are large disclaimers in any filed company documents that document the uncertainties in any future "forward looking" statement. No company would ever claim its forecasts were "true". So even if your statement was true, what exactly were O&G companies supposed to do? It is one thing for academic and government forecasters to claim to know the truth. Private Corporations have to follow SEC laws.
Excellent analysis, Alex. I wrote a book review on Amazon for Peter Hotez's book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science in which I take a different but somewhat parallel slant. It bothers me to see on Amazon so many reviews with lauding praise or spitting criticism, but little reason or nuance to them.
Peter Hotez (and Tony Fauci, of similar smallness in both physical stature and viewpoint) misses the essence of science. In science we learn from experiments in the real world, not from abstract analysis. Experiments are trial and error, and science progresses most rapidly when errors are made and learned from. Science is bottom-up process, not top-down.
Instead of arrogantly lecturing us, Peter Hotez should be humbly admitting his mistakes. Or since humility doesn't come easily to his ilk, at least acknowledging his mistakes. Instead, he goes on the attack. It's a shame that he has been personally attacked, but that's no excuse for him to claim that the attacks are on science.
People like Rochelle Walensky and Mandy Cohen do a similar thing in a different way. They admit that mistakes were made, but to them the mistakes came because they didn't have enough funding, didn't do enough testing and didn't gather enough data, and they didn't communicate well enough. They didn't do enough, they say, and next time they will do more.
But not doing enough wasn't the problem. The problem was that they did too much. They took (and take) the stance that the CDC can find out what to do and impose their views on the country. They demand that we trust them, instead of earning our trust. That's an authoritarian stance, and it's like raising a middle finger to science.
Science has solved all the simple problems already, so what is left are the complex, messy problems. We can't use the reductionist tools that got us so far with physics and chemistry. We can't rely on formula, we have no laws, and math and models only help a little. We have to use new approaches, using bottom-up trial and error rather than top-down dictates.
We can see this in economics. Top-down socialist economies work when things are simple and unchanging (but not well even then). But when shocks occur and things are in flux, as always happens in our modern world, a bottom-up market economy performs much better. The government has a role in either case, but in the former it's running the whole production and in the latter it does better playing only a bit part.
Just like with science regarding the pandemic, and also problems like climate change. Many scientists and government officials take a top-down authoritarian stance on climate change, saying that the solutions to this complex problem are simple, and forcing them on us. Anyone who disagrees with their dictates is labeled a denier. We should, instead, be keeping an open mind to reach solutions from the bottom up.
Intellectual and professional siloing, misapplied paradigms, too much bureaucracy, too much centralized governmental control which has extended to control of the western MSM and an alarming willingness to overturn the First Amendment. Add in a generally scientifically illiterate population, corruption, greed, hubris, fear, tribalism and too much "free money" sloshing around and you get...Fauci, Hotez et al. Fortunately we also have Substack and intrepid souls like Alex Washburne and many others. So there is hope.
I'm very much in agreement with your analysis. I do however find one unfortunate item (which has already been mentioned in comments above). That is your apparent unquestioning acceptance of the "climate consensus". I would suggest that your following statement would apply in this case: "It would be like me pontificating about string theory or quantum gravity - that’s why I have the humility to not do it, and instead enter rooms as a student with unbounded curiosity, no matter how old or prestigious I become." I predict that the authoritarian Covid measures supported by the scientists you rightly criticize here will be dwarfed by climate emergency measures to come and will have their own raft of authoritarian "scientist" promoters.
Alex - Once again you provide an antidote to the absolutely astounding failures of neuro-cerebral coordination presently dominant in our public sphere. THANK YOU!
You must understand that this is not normal science, but a science that has been placed under the authority of the US military. This is the case of infectious diseases and the risks of radiation.
Alex- You start off on an important though slightly cartoonish description of the slide into authoritarian science-establishmentarianism. It would have helped to note that there really has been a small consistently and explicitly anti-science streak among groups scattered around the political spectrum.
Then you unfortunately take a terrible turn into uncritical acceptance of the atrocious genuinely unscientific claims of Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, Kulldorf, and Gupta. Ioannidis came to my attention early with a STAT article torturing data to claim the 10k would be a high-end estimate of the US fatalities. (He combined two opposite incompatible limits to minimize IFR and minimize net infections.) He and Bhattacharya went on to publish the dishonest Santa Clara study, off by a factor of infinity in its nominal 95% error bars, with grossly biased data going into its point estimate, and giving a result that history has shown was just wrong. Gupta repeatedly said starting very early on that the pandemic in the UK was almost over and there would be essentially no more fatalities. Of course almost all the fatalities have occurred since she started that chant. Kulldorf just picked a fight with Nate Silver over whether mortality stats by regional politics showed vaccine effectiveness, with Kulldorf using cheap formal quibbles against Silver's massive evidence.
If I had to choose between these horrible alternatives, I'd probably go with Hotez. At least he's not an open sadist.
You seem to have misread the argument and misunderstood the assignment. I’m not saying you should believe X or be loyal to persons A, B, or C, but rather that it is was reason to discuss X yet it was misclassified as misinformation and that people A, B, and C are full human beings just like you who are trying to be good to the best of their ability and consistent with their permissible value system. It is not within the scope of science nor the constitutional delegation of powers for you or any scientist to decide these things, and the intolerance you present here, the inability to see this anthropological and political nuance, does indeed put you closer in your behaviors and abuse of scientific authority to the likes of Hotez than to the brave scientists who spoke their views even when they were considered minority views or inconvenient truths in the eyes of those in power.
I think you misstate Alex's argument. One can certainly disagree with the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors, and with people like John Ioannidis. That's what scientists do -- give their views and their evidence in support and let people respond. That's a bottom-up process, as in a democratic government. It leads to progress.
The problem with Peter Hotez, Tony Fauci, and Frances Collins is that they use their power to impose their views on others. They say, "I am science", and if you disagree with them, or challenge their views, you are disagreeing with science -- anti-science. That's a top-down process, as in an authoritarian government. It stifles progress.
As to who got the pandemic right, I don't think there's much of a question that the Great Barrington Declaration got it (mostly) right. The lockdowns did more harm than good. Protect the vulnerable but don't force people to take measures that have not been shown to work (masks, vaccines, etc.). That's what the data shows.
Science is messy. Scientists too often make mistakes, and stubbornly cling to them. Scientific consensus means little, but scientific evidence means everything. Authority and credentials and reputation and expertise mean nothing in science. Science is, as Richard Feynman insisted, the belief in the ignorance of experts.
The pandemic should have taught us these lessons, but the lessons don't seem to have been learned. If you read Peter Hotez's book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, you'll see that he hasn't learned a thing.
On re-reading: You just said that masks and vaccines don't work? And you tried to lecture me about how science operates? I'm not sure it's worth continuing with this.
The effect size of their safety and efficacy for various epidemiological benchmarks, such as preventing outbreaks, reducing medical demand, slowing transmission, and preventing infection have always been debatable, and even some of the most reputable meta-analyses of e.g. masks (Cochrane, Hoeg et al in CDC’s MMWR, etc) cast doubt on the significance of their effects at reducing transmission at the population scale.
It’s these nuances and metrics and discussions in the literature that you don’t seem to be aware of which reveals a disconcerting potential to jump to conclusions, to assert a belief when one’s profound ignorance is well known to those more familiar with the topic. It would be like me pontificating about string theory or quantum gravity - that’s why I have the humility to not do it, and instead enter rooms as a student with unbounded curiosity, no matter how old or prestigious I become.
Zeynep Tufekci is a journalist and a social scientist, and her views show she doesn't know even the basic tenets of causal inference. I have posed questions to her about her "devastating critique" and she offered no answers.
Tom Jefferson and the other authors of the Cochrane review stand by their paper and haven't apologized for anything in it. The person who apologized is (as far as I can tell) a woke woman bureaucratic type in the loose Cochrane collaboration who knows nothing about the study.
If you have your own refutation of the Cochrane study after your study of it, please tell me the gist of your refutation. I'd like to hear it. I've spent years developing some expertise in causal inference, but am always looking to learn more.
LOL, this phrase " Tufekci's devastating critique of it" just undermined what little credibility you had. Thanks for the laugh. Though, since you're so sure about the efficacy of masks, please volunteer for a human challenge study. You can be in whichever unsealed mask group you'd like for as long as you want in a room full of airborne aerosolized virions.
I'm not sure if you're serious or just pulling my leg, but intentionally or not you provide a perfect example of the attitude we are decrying. You pick one sentence out of what I say and accuse me of being anti-science.
Read more carefully. I didn't say masks and vaccines don't work. I said that the government should protect the vulnerable but should not force people to take measures that have not been shown to work.
Both before the pandemic, during and now after, the evidence shows no correlation between the use of masks and the spread of respiratory viruses, and no correlation between the use of vaccines and the spread of respiratory viruses. Without correlation, there can be no causation. Thus, there was (and is) no science to support mask or vaccine mandates.
But I'm not dogmatic about it -- I'm open to evidence to the contrary. Do you have any?
The errors that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, Gupta, et al. made were not subtle judgment calls but blatant obvious contradictions of logic and evidence, all tending toward a desired ideological conclusion. As for which measures should or shouldn't have been taken when, it's hard to retrace those counterfactuals. There has been a tendency of GBDers to compare the actual disease burden in the presence of measures with the social cost, without considering what the disease burden would have been with fewer measures. E.g. they made no allowance for severe overload of medical facilities with resulting IFR increases, as happened initially before any NPIs were used in NYC and northern Italy.
You're right, it's hard to tell cause and effect in a complex system. They are not simple to analyze, and that's why we call them complex. But we do have some tools. Modern epidemiology is based on causal inference, and through the efforts of people like Judea Pearl, that scientific tool has become more and more useful.
Nothing about the pandemic can be reduced to simplified models. That doesn't mean that models don't help us understand. But too many people take an arrogant, know-it-all attitude like Peter Hotez and Tony Fauci when they don't know it all. Not looking at the evidence and considering opposing views is the mark of an authoritarian. And that ought to be called out for what it is.
Excellent analysis.
Hotez and his ilk are not scientists by my definition. They are not practicing science but instead practicing scientism; a faith-based religious perspective that hews to anointed narratives rather than the requisite absolute skepticism and openness to ALL possibilities that real science requires.
Hotez has far more in common with a priest or a bishop than he does with a real scientist. Unfortunately scientism is today far more common than true science, both inside the halls of what is called science and also in the public perception thereof. It's tragic all around.
I published my own little piece of "disinformation" defining and criticizing the practice of scientism and the imposition of COVID vaccine mandates on my substack: https://iamascientist.substack.com/p/epistemrna
I just testified as an expert witness for a vaccine mandate case where the plaintiffs were granted exemptions but fired anyway. I presented data on the inability of the vaccine to block transmission, on secondary attack rates being equal in vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, on equal viral load among vaccinated and unvaccinated cases, on hybrid immunity and what could have been done to keep the exempt workers working. On cross examination they showed editorials and essays I wrote about how the data does not support mandates. They never challenged the data I presented only me personally. That’s science!
Sadly, that doesn’t surprise me that they would use politics or editorials to try to undermine your expert testimony. They do the same thing with me when they try to delegitimize me as a “libertarian” (which I’m not, but nor is that a disqualification for science), or by my own lamenting the serious moral consequences of public health policy that causes harm or scientific accidents that kill 20 million. Some people seem to lack the kind of civic integrity we strive for, and I feel sorry for them. Let’s keep being amazing at science and brilliant in our perspectives, and create space for more nuance-loving people like us.
Tremendous Essay! Absolutely Tremendous! That gets Anthologized in the Masterpieces of Riposte! Wow! Roman Senate would be moved!
Timely and well written thesis. Thank you.
Really well written essay
While generally a very good article, ironically it spreads disinformation about disinformation. Specifically you state "History of Disinformation: Record a true history of disinformation, especially concerning scientific issues like oil & gas companies sowing doubt about climate change (while privately acknowledging it’s true)”. The first information debunking. It is not “climate change”, a nebulous propaganda phrase meaning virtually nothing and everything. It is forecasting the estimated impact of man’s CO2 production on a made up Global Average long term temperature variable. It is global warming modeling, not climate change. Our current understanding of our current climate is so poor, to think we could predict what an estimated 1 degree temperature change would do to the climate in 80 years is absurd. Secondly, even though the entire “climate change” business is based on temperature predictions, even the IPCC admits you can’t forecast long term temperature trends. From the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report: "The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” In other words, we can’t predict the weather long term. Something we all knew. From something I recently had published states that "it is not that long term temperature models are wrong, it's that they can't be right. (https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/the_blunt_truth_about_global_warming_models.html)
The reason I get a little bit into the weeds about forecasting is Oil & Gas (O&G) companies have no better weather crystal balls than anyone else, but they know a lot about forecasting. That is their core business. Forecasting the correctness of what they model. Whether gasoline demand, oil prices, or exploration potential, O&G companies see a lot of forecasts. They also know virtually all forecasts are wrong. A great explorationist is right maybe 1 out of 3 times. To think O&G people would blindly believe a 80 year weather forecast is “true” is both foolish and lacks understanding of the O&G business. Al Gore and some other global warming activists have used the "O&G industry knew and hide it" propaganda because a lot of their audience is emotional, not rational, and there is no better boogeyman for them than Big Oil. I suggest you look into the background of this disinformation and find out the real truth. Back to your statement "History of Disinformation: Record a true history of disinformation, especially concerning scientific issues like oil & gas companies sowing doubt about climate change (while privately acknowledging it’s true).” Since global warming is a future temperature prediction, how exactly can O&G companies "privately acknowledging” a future prediction is “true”? Until the future occurs, no one knows the truth. O&G companies know that. So do you. If any company, O&G or otherwise, were to claim its forecasts were "true", the SEC would be on them like a ton of bricks for fraud and misrepresentation. There are large disclaimers in any filed company documents that document the uncertainties in any future "forward looking" statement. No company would ever claim its forecasts were "true". So even if your statement was true, what exactly were O&G companies supposed to do? It is one thing for academic and government forecasters to claim to know the truth. Private Corporations have to follow SEC laws.
Excellent analysis, Alex. I wrote a book review on Amazon for Peter Hotez's book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science in which I take a different but somewhat parallel slant. It bothers me to see on Amazon so many reviews with lauding praise or spitting criticism, but little reason or nuance to them.
Peter Hotez (and Tony Fauci, of similar smallness in both physical stature and viewpoint) misses the essence of science. In science we learn from experiments in the real world, not from abstract analysis. Experiments are trial and error, and science progresses most rapidly when errors are made and learned from. Science is bottom-up process, not top-down.
Instead of arrogantly lecturing us, Peter Hotez should be humbly admitting his mistakes. Or since humility doesn't come easily to his ilk, at least acknowledging his mistakes. Instead, he goes on the attack. It's a shame that he has been personally attacked, but that's no excuse for him to claim that the attacks are on science.
People like Rochelle Walensky and Mandy Cohen do a similar thing in a different way. They admit that mistakes were made, but to them the mistakes came because they didn't have enough funding, didn't do enough testing and didn't gather enough data, and they didn't communicate well enough. They didn't do enough, they say, and next time they will do more.
But not doing enough wasn't the problem. The problem was that they did too much. They took (and take) the stance that the CDC can find out what to do and impose their views on the country. They demand that we trust them, instead of earning our trust. That's an authoritarian stance, and it's like raising a middle finger to science.
Science has solved all the simple problems already, so what is left are the complex, messy problems. We can't use the reductionist tools that got us so far with physics and chemistry. We can't rely on formula, we have no laws, and math and models only help a little. We have to use new approaches, using bottom-up trial and error rather than top-down dictates.
We can see this in economics. Top-down socialist economies work when things are simple and unchanging (but not well even then). But when shocks occur and things are in flux, as always happens in our modern world, a bottom-up market economy performs much better. The government has a role in either case, but in the former it's running the whole production and in the latter it does better playing only a bit part.
Just like with science regarding the pandemic, and also problems like climate change. Many scientists and government officials take a top-down authoritarian stance on climate change, saying that the solutions to this complex problem are simple, and forcing them on us. Anyone who disagrees with their dictates is labeled a denier. We should, instead, be keeping an open mind to reach solutions from the bottom up.
Intellectual and professional siloing, misapplied paradigms, too much bureaucracy, too much centralized governmental control which has extended to control of the western MSM and an alarming willingness to overturn the First Amendment. Add in a generally scientifically illiterate population, corruption, greed, hubris, fear, tribalism and too much "free money" sloshing around and you get...Fauci, Hotez et al. Fortunately we also have Substack and intrepid souls like Alex Washburne and many others. So there is hope.
I'm very much in agreement with your analysis. I do however find one unfortunate item (which has already been mentioned in comments above). That is your apparent unquestioning acceptance of the "climate consensus". I would suggest that your following statement would apply in this case: "It would be like me pontificating about string theory or quantum gravity - that’s why I have the humility to not do it, and instead enter rooms as a student with unbounded curiosity, no matter how old or prestigious I become." I predict that the authoritarian Covid measures supported by the scientists you rightly criticize here will be dwarfed by climate emergency measures to come and will have their own raft of authoritarian "scientist" promoters.
Alex - Once again you provide an antidote to the absolutely astounding failures of neuro-cerebral coordination presently dominant in our public sphere. THANK YOU!
You must understand that this is not normal science, but a science that has been placed under the authority of the US military. This is the case of infectious diseases and the risks of radiation.
https://danielcorcos.substack.com/p/bca
Alex
I’m reminded of Comte’s era of ‘positive knowledge’.
Twelve ‘scientists’ directing the whole world.
Well . . . looks like he has won over modernity.
Think also, C S Lewis and N.I.C.E.
Philosophy and religion can’t be subsumed, reduced to ‘science’.
In fact, there is physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc., etc..
Where is ‘science’. The use of ‘scientist’ instead of physicist, chemist, biologist indicates the problem.
Science is appeal to philosophy not observation or results.
As the famous religious teacher taught . . .
“Wisdom proved righteous by its works.’’
Thanks for your essay
Clay
Alex- You start off on an important though slightly cartoonish description of the slide into authoritarian science-establishmentarianism. It would have helped to note that there really has been a small consistently and explicitly anti-science streak among groups scattered around the political spectrum.
Then you unfortunately take a terrible turn into uncritical acceptance of the atrocious genuinely unscientific claims of Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, Kulldorf, and Gupta. Ioannidis came to my attention early with a STAT article torturing data to claim the 10k would be a high-end estimate of the US fatalities. (He combined two opposite incompatible limits to minimize IFR and minimize net infections.) He and Bhattacharya went on to publish the dishonest Santa Clara study, off by a factor of infinity in its nominal 95% error bars, with grossly biased data going into its point estimate, and giving a result that history has shown was just wrong. Gupta repeatedly said starting very early on that the pandemic in the UK was almost over and there would be essentially no more fatalities. Of course almost all the fatalities have occurred since she started that chant. Kulldorf just picked a fight with Nate Silver over whether mortality stats by regional politics showed vaccine effectiveness, with Kulldorf using cheap formal quibbles against Silver's massive evidence.
If I had to choose between these horrible alternatives, I'd probably go with Hotez. At least he's not an open sadist.
You seem to have misread the argument and misunderstood the assignment. I’m not saying you should believe X or be loyal to persons A, B, or C, but rather that it is was reason to discuss X yet it was misclassified as misinformation and that people A, B, and C are full human beings just like you who are trying to be good to the best of their ability and consistent with their permissible value system. It is not within the scope of science nor the constitutional delegation of powers for you or any scientist to decide these things, and the intolerance you present here, the inability to see this anthropological and political nuance, does indeed put you closer in your behaviors and abuse of scientific authority to the likes of Hotez than to the brave scientists who spoke their views even when they were considered minority views or inconvenient truths in the eyes of those in power.
I think you misstate Alex's argument. One can certainly disagree with the Great Barrington Declaration and its authors, and with people like John Ioannidis. That's what scientists do -- give their views and their evidence in support and let people respond. That's a bottom-up process, as in a democratic government. It leads to progress.
The problem with Peter Hotez, Tony Fauci, and Frances Collins is that they use their power to impose their views on others. They say, "I am science", and if you disagree with them, or challenge their views, you are disagreeing with science -- anti-science. That's a top-down process, as in an authoritarian government. It stifles progress.
As to who got the pandemic right, I don't think there's much of a question that the Great Barrington Declaration got it (mostly) right. The lockdowns did more harm than good. Protect the vulnerable but don't force people to take measures that have not been shown to work (masks, vaccines, etc.). That's what the data shows.
Science is messy. Scientists too often make mistakes, and stubbornly cling to them. Scientific consensus means little, but scientific evidence means everything. Authority and credentials and reputation and expertise mean nothing in science. Science is, as Richard Feynman insisted, the belief in the ignorance of experts.
The pandemic should have taught us these lessons, but the lessons don't seem to have been learned. If you read Peter Hotez's book The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, you'll see that he hasn't learned a thing.
On re-reading: You just said that masks and vaccines don't work? And you tried to lecture me about how science operates? I'm not sure it's worth continuing with this.
The effect size of their safety and efficacy for various epidemiological benchmarks, such as preventing outbreaks, reducing medical demand, slowing transmission, and preventing infection have always been debatable, and even some of the most reputable meta-analyses of e.g. masks (Cochrane, Hoeg et al in CDC’s MMWR, etc) cast doubt on the significance of their effects at reducing transmission at the population scale.
It’s these nuances and metrics and discussions in the literature that you don’t seem to be aware of which reveals a disconcerting potential to jump to conclusions, to assert a belief when one’s profound ignorance is well known to those more familiar with the topic. It would be like me pontificating about string theory or quantum gravity - that’s why I have the humility to not do it, and instead enter rooms as a student with unbounded curiosity, no matter how old or prestigious I become.
I'm very aware of the Cochrane mask review and of Tufekci's devastating critique of it, and that Cochrane has apologized for its lead author's claim.
Zeynep Tufekci is a journalist and a social scientist, and her views show she doesn't know even the basic tenets of causal inference. I have posed questions to her about her "devastating critique" and she offered no answers.
Tom Jefferson and the other authors of the Cochrane review stand by their paper and haven't apologized for anything in it. The person who apologized is (as far as I can tell) a woke woman bureaucratic type in the loose Cochrane collaboration who knows nothing about the study.
If you have your own refutation of the Cochrane study after your study of it, please tell me the gist of your refutation. I'd like to hear it. I've spent years developing some expertise in causal inference, but am always looking to learn more.
LOL, this phrase " Tufekci's devastating critique of it" just undermined what little credibility you had. Thanks for the laugh. Though, since you're so sure about the efficacy of masks, please volunteer for a human challenge study. You can be in whichever unsealed mask group you'd like for as long as you want in a room full of airborne aerosolized virions.
He ain't too bright. As Bugs Bunny would say, "What a maroon."
I'm not sure if you're serious or just pulling my leg, but intentionally or not you provide a perfect example of the attitude we are decrying. You pick one sentence out of what I say and accuse me of being anti-science.
Read more carefully. I didn't say masks and vaccines don't work. I said that the government should protect the vulnerable but should not force people to take measures that have not been shown to work.
Both before the pandemic, during and now after, the evidence shows no correlation between the use of masks and the spread of respiratory viruses, and no correlation between the use of vaccines and the spread of respiratory viruses. Without correlation, there can be no causation. Thus, there was (and is) no science to support mask or vaccine mandates.
But I'm not dogmatic about it -- I'm open to evidence to the contrary. Do you have any?
They don't. They harm. And anyone still claiming they work in a helpful way isn't worth listening to. About anything.
The errors that Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, Gupta, et al. made were not subtle judgment calls but blatant obvious contradictions of logic and evidence, all tending toward a desired ideological conclusion. As for which measures should or shouldn't have been taken when, it's hard to retrace those counterfactuals. There has been a tendency of GBDers to compare the actual disease burden in the presence of measures with the social cost, without considering what the disease burden would have been with fewer measures. E.g. they made no allowance for severe overload of medical facilities with resulting IFR increases, as happened initially before any NPIs were used in NYC and northern Italy.
You're right, it's hard to tell cause and effect in a complex system. They are not simple to analyze, and that's why we call them complex. But we do have some tools. Modern epidemiology is based on causal inference, and through the efforts of people like Judea Pearl, that scientific tool has become more and more useful.
Nothing about the pandemic can be reduced to simplified models. That doesn't mean that models don't help us understand. But too many people take an arrogant, know-it-all attitude like Peter Hotez and Tony Fauci when they don't know it all. Not looking at the evidence and considering opposing views is the mark of an authoritarian. And that ought to be called out for what it is.
EXCELLENT !!!