by Judith Curry
With the new media, it’s astonishing how much trouble a mild-mannered grandmother speaking common sense about climate change can cause without leaving her home.
I’m at a bit of an inflection point.
After my resignation from Georgia Tech in 2017, I was very busy building up my company Climate Forecast Applications Network. Not to mention busy with several very active Atlantic hurricane seasons.
In 2020, I entered into a contract with Anthem Press to write a book Climate Uncertainty and Risk. The era of Covid isolation seemed like the perfect time to write a book. I submitted the book to Anthem in August 2022; it is still undergoing peer review, which is proceeding very slooooowly. Writing the book was a head exploding experience (I will write more on the book soon, once it actually goes to press).
Now I’m trying to figure out what’s next (in addition to continuing to build my company), and I’m experimenting with several new media options. One might ask what I’m trying to accomplish here?
I like doing wicked science: where complex problems and politics intersect, and public communication of the same. I am appalled at the state of both the scientific and policy debates surrounding climate change. I am hoping that my little voice can help bring some common sense to this situation. The work of my company and also my personal interests are moving me in the direction of energy, agriculture and adaptation to weather extremes. Now that I’ve left academia, I can be 100% my own person; I want to flex my wings a bit, and I want to help people. And last but not least, I need to hone my interview and public writing skills in anticipation of publication of my book next summer.
Blog
Starting ~2018, this blog entered somewhat of a snooze mode, for reasons mentioned above. Posts were mainly by guest experts or Week in Review posts. The Week in Review posts served the important function of archiving articles that might be relevant to my book. Now that the book is submitted, I have been writing more blog posts (no more Week in Review posts).
For awhile, blogs became unfashionable, as podcasts and twitter became ascendant. WUWT remains the only heritage climate blog with a substantial following. Substack.com has been a game changer, providing an organizing framework for long form writing on blogs (where writers can also get paid). I am a paid subscriber to about half dozen Substack blogs, and subscribe unpaid to about another half dozen.
In the climate space, Roger Pielke Jr (paid) and Andy Revkin (unpaid) have moved to Substack. At this point, I plan to keep Climate Etc. as is and completely under my own control, thus avoiding any possible censorship or institutional pressure.
Bottom line: I will be ramping up the number of blog posts. I very much enjoy the community at Climate Etc. and very much appreciate your participation through comments and direct emails to me. I am especially appreciative of the experts contributing guest posts. I feel like I have a community of e-friends from all over the world.
Videos/Podcasts
I am not very good at sound bite interviews, either written or audio interviews. I almost never respond to such requests any more. However, I do like the long-form podcast interview (30+ minutes). I’m being invited to do more of these; I have been putting many of these off to the new year, when the timing will be better to talk about my new book.
In recent weeks I have done two long-form interviews:
- European Institute of Science and Management (EISM)
- BizNews (Africa)
Both are interesting and different from each other. I expect there will be a follow up to the EISM interview; post interview we both realized that we had missed the most relevant topic for our interaction – risk governance.
If you only have time to watch one, watch BizNews, where the interviewer gave me pretty free reign. This interview went viral on youtube, with 500,000 views in 7 days. Intimations of trouble ahead were a “Context” statement on climate change from the UN attached to my interview, designed to tell people the “truth” about climate change (when in fact the statement describes the “truth” of UN climate politics). On day 7, when the video hit 500,000 views, it apparently disappeared from YouTube. Searching for “Judith Curry”, “Judith Curry climate”, “Judith Curry BizNews” did not show the video. Now, you can only find it by searching for “BizNews TV”, and then you can find it on the channel under “Popular Videos”. (note: you can also find it from a google search of “Judith Curry BizNews”)
My BizNews interview was shadow banned by YouTube. They didn’t completely ban it, but made it impossible to find. If the interview had been titled “Climate Change Common Sense” instead of “Dissident Climate Scientist Judith Curry . . .” it probably wouldn’t have been banned (but it probably wouldn’t have gotten 500K views, either)
One lesson learned from these interviews is that I need to make sure these interviews actually make it onto my calendar (I expect an e-calendar invite; problems arise when the invite arrives 10 mins before the interview and I have forgotten all about it). With at least a little advance notice, I can avoid doing the interview in a ratty t-shirt and can lose the eyeglasses with the reflective plastic lenses.
Also, in reading the BizNews comments (about 8K, nearly all positive), seems I need to lose my ‘cackling’ laugh. Also there is irritating rubbing of my nose (noted esp in WUWT comments). Hopefully that will get better as I (hopefully) recover from shingles. I have postherpetic trigeminal neuralgia (bad nerve pain on the left side of my face that is focused on my nose), which has been going on since August (lightweight plastic glasses are more comfortable).
The problem with some of these interviews is that they go on for 60+ minutes. No one has that much time to listen, when they can read the text much faster (which is why I rarely listen to podcasts myself). I guess multi-tasking (listening while driving, walking or at the gym) can work. I’m not a podcast listener myself, other than when driving on long road trips.
I signed up for twitter in 2009, but didn’t really “get it.” I didn’t use my account actively until about 2012. I mostly used twitter as a source of information and links to articles (this is where nearly all of the items for Week in Review came from). I tweeted the CE blog posts, and occasionally retweeted something. Over the years, my account attracted 30K followers. About 2 years ago, I noticed that my number of followers stalled and my account rarely received any notifications of people liking or retweeting or responding to my posts. Oh well.
So around Nov 1, Elon Musk bought and took over twitter. A week later, my follower #s, likes and retweets started growing by leaps and bounds. BishopHill tweeted “First tweet from @curryja that I’ve spotted in ages.” So what happened? Seems like my twitter account was “shadow banned” so no one would see my tweets unless they really went looking. Shadow banning is not as severe as outright banning. Many physicians and epidemiologists were outright banned from twitter for questioning the “party line” on Covid. Tom Nelson (climate science) is now back on twitter after being banned. And what is going on in climate and Covid space is NOTHING compared to what has been going on in sex/gender space.
Elon Musk is having journalists dig into all the old twitter files and emails to understand all of the underhanded censorship that twitter had engaged in. The first installment of the findings can be read here [LINK]; it seems like this effort is being sabotaged internally at twitter [LINK] Despite huge number of twitter employees fired by Musk, it seems like he didn’t fire enough. Here is Part II of the twitter files. Apparently numerous further installments are forthcoming. Us tweeps are just riveted by all this. p.s. things are starting to break fast; here is Part III on Jan 6.
No question that Musk is introducing chaos into twitter, but it badly needed shaking up. Musk’s strategy of break things, try new things, abandon them if they don’t work, and then repeat has made many advertising clients nervous.
A number of celebrities and scientists have left twitter; apparently the idea of Musk and free speech uncensored by left wingers does great “violence” to their souls. Many climate scientists have left, although ones with large # of twitter followers such as Mann and Hayhoe have stayed. The climate scientists leaving twitter have joined Mastodon, which is open source microblogging software, with individuals hosting topical microblogs. I took a look; crazy complicated and heavily siloed.
The brilliant thing about twitter is that it is impossible to keep yourself totally siloed, no matter how many people you block. Close minded, groupthinking, whiny climate scientists are not doing themselves a favor by siloing themselves at Mastodon. But the twitterverse doesn’t seem to be missing them; I hope they are having fun talking to each other.
I am an enthusiastic supporter of what Musk is trying to do, and mostly I am very grateful to no longer be shadow banned by twitter. I look forward to the next installments of the twitter files, which will hopefully explain shadow banning among other things.
Twitter is the indispensable tool for wicked scientists.
The Musk/twitter saga is raising important issues about free speech and censorship, particularly in context of social media. This is not a simple issue. No sane person wants to participate or advertise on a platform with hate speech, threats of harm, violent or pornographic images. But where to you draw the line? This topic is worthy of its own thread; it will be interesting to see how this evolves.
Op-eds
I have been asked previously to write (and have done so occasionally) op-eds by WSJ, Financial Times, Fox News on specific topics. I haven’t been all that enthusiastic about doing these. They are difficult to write, with stringent word limits, and not always on the topic that I would most like to write about at that particular time. Invariably the editor picks a different title, sometimes one that grates and doesn’t really reflect the actual article IMO.
I’ve been asked by SkyNews in Australia to contribute an occasional (once per month) column/op-ed on climate and energy topics of relevance to Australia. The environment in the US is so toxic and noisy on this topic, so writing outside the U.S. makes sense to me. Trust is a big issue for me, I feel comfortable working with SkyNews.
The articles are supposed to be 500-600 words; difficult for me since I’m a long-form writer. I am getting around this by writing a longer essay and then breaking it into parts that are individually coherent but part of a larger theme and longer series. The style of writing is also a challenge, need to use words very economically with simple sentence structures (this is good discipline for me anyways).
My first article was published this week, I should probably do separate threads on these articles.
The faux urgency of the climate crisis is giving us no time or space build a secure energy future
Conclusion
Well lets see how all this goes. At least right now, this is fun and interesting, and I have some small hope of making a difference. More importantly I expect my 2023 to focus on marketing my new book, which is a unique and I hope important contribution to the literature and dialog on climate change.
As always, your take on these matters is most welcome and worth following.
Thanks for all of your good work,
w.
The world needs more Judith!
Amen.
“more Judith”?
That sounds like you want Judith to put on weight!
We all love Judith articles, but we also like good articles by other people selected for us by Judith after she reads them.
I wrote a financial newsletter for 43 years and ran out of steam for more writing in 2020. But I spread the word about climate change and Nut Zero by reading lots of articles and publishing links to the ones I recommend every day. 17 climate science and energy articles were recommended today (I read a lot).
http://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/
Wasn’t it here that Judith used to post links to articles she recommended? I found that list to be very useful.
I just watched your Biznews interview and an old Power Hungry podcast. You have a new fan. I have so many questions and am excited to read your book in 2023!
Your sky news post has been moved to this link https://www.skynews.com.au/insights-and-analysis/the-faux-urgency-of-the-climate-crisis-is-giving-us-no-time-or-space-to-build-a-secure-energy-future/news-story/b860d3358b65027049b148921f038db6
I just clicked on the link above your conclusion and got an error message. Are you being censored or is this just a bad link?
I think i fixed the sky news link
Yes, you did.
From Melbourne Aust, I have now tried 3 times and failed to properly open the link under blogger David. First time was Sky News, but a dfifferent topic. Second time was Sky News, a firther topic, niether with mention of Dr Curry. Third time was a commercial, seeminly unrelated. It is unusual to fail to find matter that i want to view, so I would conclude possible interference. Geoff S
Your blog and rational approach to the climate issue are so greatly appreciated. So pleased that you will be continuing and expanding your efforts.
Social media has become, or actually has been revealed to be, as curated as the old three networks and a few newspapers. It was possible to bypass curation some thirty years ago, and it is easier now, but curation (cooking content, to be impolite) is still the norm.
“ But the twitterverse doesn’t seem to be missing them; I hope they are having fun talking to each other.”
But the twitterverse doesn’t seem to be missing them; I hope they are having fun talking to themselves.
The world needs your voice. You need some interns, or perhaps better, a “Kitchen Cabinet” of Denizens to quickly knock off some of the Op-Eds.
Judith, You might try using Rumble for you interviews. It’s steadily gaining in popularity and is a free speech platform. You can probably just take the video and post it.
Good suggestion I’ll look into Rumble
“The cloud services business [Rumble] is known for hosting Truth Social and the video platform is popular among American right, and far-right users…”
Yes, I would think it’s a perfect fit for you.
“far-right users”
I guessed right that you were quoting Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_(website)
The far left has taken over many of the institutions that disseminate information (because many of them don’t do actual work during the daytime.)
But when the truth is brought to the surface it becomes mainstream. On equal footing truth always wins.
See here how Matt Taibbi and Douglas Murry handed the NYT their butts in the recent Munk debate on whether we should trust MSM.
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Here is the link.
JMurphy relies on garbage sources like Wikipaedia and the New York Times. These outlets are little better than state run media and perveyors of cultural Marxist memes and narratives. You need to read Barri Weiss’ resignation letter from the Times. It tells the story of an institution that no longer cares about facts and the news.
Judith
I watched your excellent interview on BizNews. Your common sense and credibility was evident. Those attributes can’t be manufactured.
Somehow I also came up with a video presentation by Michael Schellenberger on why renewables aren’t going to save the planet, which reinforced your concerns expressed in the interview about making a premature transition to renewables.
I’m not sure how someone who espouses such wise positions on the devastating effects of premature transitions can be characterized as far right, but then some leftwing extremists probably believe Mother Theresa would have attended Proud Boys rallies.
dpy6629, Barry Weiss set up Common Sense on Substack and has recently created a larger body, The Free Press, which you can access via e-mail. Worth a look. My niece who used to run the UK’s ITN is a Weiss friend and fan.
Joe Rogan would be an excellent venue.
Thanks for the link, Ron. I tried to find this elsewhere on my own. However, the problem with the format of this debate is not whether we can “trust” the mainstream media; it is whether there is any source (the Gateway Pundit? Social Truth? Fox News?) that is more reliable. You need to read a variety of sources.
On March 28, 2020 (a few days after COVID lockdowns began, the WSJ published an op-ed calculating that the pandemic could be over after 20,000 deaths. Their nonsense has persisted through the GBD (which had no practical plan for protecting the vulnerable and clinical trials for vaccines that could do this were underway at the time). A February 2021 article predicted that herd immunity would arrive by March. (Cases rose and peaked in mid April.) Now Florida has a Surgeon General who wrote for the WSJ who APPEARS to be an anti-vaxxer who believes in ivermectin!. Last week the WSJ celebrated the end of China ZERO COVID policy without mentioning the cost: projections of 1.5 million deaths, 200 million detected infections and overflowing hospitals, all in a few months. While the Chinese may not follow the plan assumed by these modelers, the WSJ had always ignored the cost/benefits that accompany every decision to reduce restrictions. There is no “free lunch”. There is also little benefit to lockdowns that merely postpone the death of a percentage of the population doomed to die by the pandemic.
My take home message is that there is no one you can trust with complete confidence, especially with a new generation of reporters raised to be activists in university cancel cultures. The only thing worse is the Right. Run from anyone who tells you (as Limbaugh did) that they or their side are the only one you can trust. And Trump was wrong about the MSM publishing corrections: Corrections are proof that a newspaper still cares about what is TRUE and recognizes the even the best reporters working under a deadline are not infallible. And sometimes they need to be fired.
Hi Frank, I enjoyed your post the other week. On your above comment I agree on most. One must look at multiple sources of information, both friendly and hostile to one’s political home.
“There is also little benefit to lockdowns that merely postpone the death of a percentage of the population doomed to die by the pandemic.” I think hindsight is on the side of Sweden and Florida. I agree. Scott Atlas and Jayanta Bhattacharya were correct from the start, which is no surprise since this was their area of expertise. It was not Fauci’s. According to Atlas’s book it was Birx that was the really mistaken one and most responsible.
On Covid origin, the strongest physical evidence of lab origin was the novel furin cleavage site, which was known to be a dangerous sequence increasing virulence and ability to cross species. If the non-bat typical codons were not enough of a smoking gun then it was the fact that Peter Daszak was shopping the idea of inserting a FCS into SARS in 2018 to DARPA (US advanced weapons research). And he was going to use the Wuhan lab and Dr. Zhengli Shi’s team. The only thing more insane that the US taxpayers and academic institutions giving China GOF technology (ex. chimeric viruses, humanized mice for serial passage and gene splicing) is that Daszak thought it was a win-win for him to pitch outsourcing bioweapons research to China.
Ron wrote: “Scott Atlas and Jayanta Bhattacharya were correct from the start, which is no surprise since this was their area of expertise.” Clearly Jayanta Bhattacharya was NOT correct from the start. On March 24, 2020, he predicted herd immunity after 20,000 US deaths. We reached 20,000 deaths on April 9, 2020! This has to be the worst projection in history and made during the worst public health crisis in a century. He made his estimate by extrapolating from non-representative samples that only 1 in 100 cases of COVID was being detected. However, IF that many cases were being missed, then we never would have discovered that COVID was a communicable disease. If an average infected person transmitted to only 4 others, we would only trace the path of transmission in 4% of the cases. At the Washington Choir Superspreader event on March 10, 2020, 53 of 61 choir member became sick. Bhattacharya (and friends) almost certainly wouldn’t have made such a gross mistake they weren’t strongly philosophically opposed to lock-downs and isolated in the Hoover Institution. In my dreams, I’d like to hang Bhattacharya’s 20,000 deaths prediction from the top of Hoover Tower, just like some of my peers hung IMPEACH NIXON from a similar landmark a “few” years ago. I stupidly believed Nixon when he said, “I’m not at crook”. If you don’t confront your mistakes, you are doomed to repeat them. It sickens me to think that someone so wrong has become an idol – but most people want their deepest beliefs confirmed, not the truth.
The Left encouraged us to “Follow the Science” and ignore the cost to our children and our economy. That was equally bad.
In this case, Bhattacharya and the GBD crowd continued to grossly over-estimate the number of people who were immune following a mild or asymptomatic undetected infection. Early in a pandemic, a few percent false positives in seropositivity assays can cause you to grossly over-estimate the percentage of people who are immune. In the spring of 2020, Bhattacharya’s study of seropositivity found about 10 undetected infections for each infection confirmed by PCR, but by the fall of 2020, surveys showed only 2-3. Ioannidis made somewhat the same mistake calculating IFR and ended up claiming COVID was no more deadly per infection than ordinary seasonal influenza (which kills an average of 37,000 per year. COVID was killing about 15 times as many – despite lockdowns totally eliminated the normal seasonal flu epidemic in the 20-21 winter. In the case of the GBD, the further we were from herd immunity, the higher the cost in deaths we would suffer before reaching herd immunity. I clearly remember Nic Lewis struggling in one post here at Climate Etc with data showing that the percentage of seropositive people in Sweden hadn’t changed in two months, while the number of cases confirmed by PCR had doubled. Nic’s analyses failed mostly because he had bad data. However, in discussions Nic provided me with the latest changing estimates for undetected cases.
As final proof that some people never learn, around February 20, 2020, the WSJ published another op-ed calculating the pandemic would be over “by March” based on 6.7 undetected cases per case confirmed by PCR. However, cases then ROSE modestly until mid-April even though most Americans were being vaccinated during this period! Since about 50% of the population here and in Israel required vaccination before the alpha variant began its final decline towards extinction, in the spring of 2021 we were roughly halfway to herd immunity and another half million would need to die if we followed the GBD strategy (assuming no effective way to protect the vulnerable). Today, there are projections that 1.5 million Chinese could die from the GBD strategy (ending Zero-COVID).
Both Ron and Frank discussed: “There is also little benefit to lockdowns that merely postpone the death of a percentage of the population doomed to die by the pandemic.”
There are many over-simplifications in this statement: 1) When hospitals overflow, people die unnecessarily. That adds to the toll. We doubled hospital capacity between spring and fall of 2020, which is why you rarely heard about this problem in late 2020. 2) In reality, we developed vaccines that prevented about 50% of the deaths would have occurred reaching herd immunity with the alpha variant. 3) What happens if the public panics as the death toll increases? The shelfs in the grocery stores were already half-empty. What happens if truckers or meat packers stay home in fear, like our teachers unions did? (Fear of death was somewhat irrational for those under about 55.) By keeping “essential workers” on the job, other workers at home and the pandemic therefore under control, modern society didn’t break down. To be honest, I’m not aware of any place where THIS pandemic caused a breakdown in society, but if a deadly disease like Ebola or SARS1 were out of control, society likely would break down (IMO). You can be philosophically opposed to all lockdowns (our unenumerated right to “pursue happiness”), in which case a SARS2 as deadly as SARS1 or smallpox would be “destined to kill” 100 million without lockdowns. You can be philosophically opposed to mandatory vaccination, but that means you accept a world with smallpox, polio and a half-dozen nasty childhood diseases. Our founders were wiser than this and our governments have long been given the power to quarantine and require vaccination. I think we have been spoiled by successes we take for granted today. 4) No leader in the real world is likely to every stand by and watch millions “inevitably” die, if there is some hope of doing something about it – even at great cost to the economy.
IMO, China’s Zero-COVID policy was a tremendous success. If other nations had been as successful, may be the whole planet could have contained SARS2 as we did with SARS1, MERS and Ebola. The Chinese mistake was not using the time they bought by “flattening the curve”: to prepare as rapidly as possible for the end of lockdowns, and not buying more effective mRNA vaccines and protecting the vulnerable. The more transmissible Omicron variant is proving harder and costly to contain, but it is much less deadly. After vaccination, this summer South Korea and Taiwan relaxed their extremely successful test, quarantine and trace policies and suffered from an enormous number of cases, but few deaths. They got things right, but it required quarantine of those only suspected of being infected, which may not be constitutional here. (I thought paying people $1,000 to quarantine (under the supervision of a small phone app like the ones used by South Korea) might work here.
Ron wrote: I think hindsight is on the side of Sweden and Florida. I agree.”
I disagree. DeSantis should have waited a few more weeks and removed restriction after any vulnerable person had the opportunity to receive at least one dose of vaccine. That would be the “protect the vulnerable” strategy in action. Of course, those who advocated protecting the vulnerable didn’t mean it, they just wanted lockdowns ended as soon as possible!
Compared with its similar neighbors, Sweden arguably didn’t “get it right”. However, what made Sweden different than almost everywhere else was that the number of new cases in March 2020 was not doubling every 2-3 days, as it did in almost every other developed country. Our reproduction rate was 3.5 (new cases from each infected case) and theirs was 1.7. Look it up at ourworldindata.org. They didn’t have to lockdown NOW or face 8-fold more cases in a week and 50-fold in two weeks. I don’t know why this was (bad data? different behavior?), but it is a fact that makes Sweden totally irrelevant to the US (IMO).
Atlas was hanging out in the fantasyland of a maximum of 20,000 deaths, while Birx was “getting it wrong”. IIRC, Atlas didn’t come to DC until fall.
One final comment about “protecting the vulnerable”: We couldn’t even protect the vulnerable American President. Without experimental therapeutic antibodies – which weren’t yet available to the public – he likely would have died.
Finally Ron wrote: “On Covid origin, the strongest physical evidence of lab origin was the novel furin cleavage site, which was known to be a dangerous sequence increasing virulence and ability to cross species. If the non-bat typical codons were not enough of a smoking gun then it was the fact that Peter Daszak was shopping the idea of inserting a FCS into SARS in 2018 to DARPA (US advanced weapons research). And he was going to use the Wuhan lab and Dr. Zhengli Shi’s team. The only thing more insane that the US taxpayers and academic institutions giving China GOF technology (ex. chimeric viruses, humanized mice for serial passage and gene splicing) is that Daszak thought it was a win-win for him to pitch outsourcing bioweapons research to China.
As I’ve noted before, the furin cleavage site initially found in SARS2 wasn’t the consensus sequence a genetic engineer would likely have used. IIRC, the furin cleave site is mutated to a more effectively cleaved site in later variants.
FYI, a furin-cleavage site was genetically engineered into SARS1 almost two decades ago. That work was published in 2006. So your conspiracy theory about Dansak wanting to do so appears wrong. Note that these researchers inserted an RRSRR sequence, not the furin cleavage site found in the original SARS2.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0042682206000900
“To determine whether proteolytic cleavage of the S glycoprotein might be important for the newly emerged SARS-CoV, we introduced a furin recognition site at single basic residues within the putative S1–S2 junctional region. We show that furin cleavage at the modified R667 position generates discrete S1 and S2 subunits and potentiates membrane fusion activity. This effect on the cell–cell fusion activity by the S glycoprotein is not, however, reflected in the infectivity of pseudotyped lentiviruses bearing the cleaved glycoprotein. The lack of effect of furin cleavage on virion infectivity mirrors that observed in the normally cleaved S glycoprotein of the murine coronavirus and highlights an additional level of complexity in coronavirus entry.”
Finally, you should know that the statistically-significant weighted geographic center of the first 175 COVID infections in Wuhan was at the infamous Market. That market sold wild animals that we now know can be infected by SARS2. (IIRC, today here in the US, deer might be able to infect humans, if we had wild-animal markets.) No wild animals in the market were ever tested for SARS2, because they were gone before the market was sampled. Likewise, farms where wild animals were raised have been closed. (It seems to me the Chinese don’t want their people and the world to learn that this pandemic started because they ignored the lessons of SARS1.) Environmental swabs (that could have picked up excrement from wild animals) positive for SARS2 were scattered throughout the market, but were geographically centered on the location where wild animals were sold. Finally the earliest human samples sequenced showed a Type A and a Type B virus, but no common ancestor in humans. This is consistent with two independent crossovers events from animals to humans in the Market, but not with the lab leak hypothesis nor with the Market only being important as the site of a superspreader event (that would amplify only one strain). Finally, I’m sure you know coronaviruses from bats in Laos that are more closely related to SARS2 than RaTG13 have been found and use exactly the same amino acids in the receptor binding domain to bind to ACE as does SARS2. The only thing missing from the zoonosis hypothesis is the furin cleavage site, which is found in three of four major classes of coronaviruses, but not the beta family. Finding this cleavage site in the other three families, however, proves that such a site can evolve independently or be transferred by homologous recombination.
It is my expectation that a decade from now there will be dozens of books with conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID, just like there are about the grand-daddy conspiracy theories, the Kennedy assassination. Of course, most of these are nonsense that destroyed public trust in our government. The books that are still of some value are those that weave the basic facts about the assassination into their narrative. Oswald purchased a sharpshooter’s rifle like the one found on the top floor of the Texas Book Depository with shell casing with Oswald’s fingerprints. Oswald carried a rifle-sized package to the Depository the morning of the assassination. Oswald fled the scene and shot Officer Tippett when he was approached. Experiments show that if Kennedy was shot from behind, his head (counterintuitively) could have moved back as in the Zapruder film. There is room for a second shooter (a conspiracy), but it most likely involved Communists. Oswald was a highly-motivated Communist who supported Castro and visited the Russian embassy in Moscow weeks before the assassination. Yes, JFK’s autopsy was badly compromised (just like the “autopsy” of the Wuhan Market). IMO the theories about JFK AND Wuhan of any lasting value are those that incorporate important these uncontested facts.
You seem to be trapped in a web of conspiracy theories that don’t address all of the facts. You may want to expand your range of source material.
Thanks for dispelling all the misinformation and conspiracy theories with your incisive opinions.
I like RealClearPolitics because they publish a wide variety of information. Their investigative unit has done really good work in exposing the deep state/media/big business collusion to interfere in our elections. You seem to really have a “both sides can’t be trusted” attitude that is quite biased. There is a vast difference between Ben Shapiro and Joy Reed or The View. Shapiro is a much more honest.
I don’t know Frank why you are focusing on outlier articles that got herd immunity wrong in 2020. The real focus here should be on the public health establishment and science itself which lied to us on virtually every important issue. There was a flood of fraudulent and badly biased studies and censorship of papers and opinions that were contrary to the official lies. These people need to be fired in mass much as Musk did at Twitter.
You are also smearing the Florida attorney general as being an anti-vaxxer. What I have heard for example in DeSantis’ event on vaccine investigations recently was just a careful and very dispassionate recounting of publicly available data.
It is indeed malpractice that our “authorities” recommended that healthy people under 50 get vaccinated. For this group, the serious side-effects were more likely than them getting seriously ill from covid. You can easily find the video of this Florida meeting. Battacharia was also there.
This pandemic will go down in history as the biggest and deadliest Western elite failure since WWI. Not to mention this era brought a social credit system to the West with government and big tech colluding to censor and shut down opinions or rigorous science the government dislikes. And then there is the politization of the FBI to go after people on trumped up charges, such as peaceful pro-life activists. The use of swat teams in these circumstances is a gestapo tactic designed to intimidate and persecute people.
Frank, You have spoken of this before at this blog and gotten taken down for a very biased view.
Focusing on a few articles that got things wrong in the spring of 2020 is irrelevant. The real issue here is that public health authorities and many scientists lied to the public about almost every important issue related to covid. They censored and in some cases got people fired for disagreeing with them. They shaped public opinion around pseudoscientific narratives. There need to be mass firings and accountability.
You should not smear Florida’s surgeon general either. What I’ve heard him say is very restrained and data driven. It is true that it was malpractice to recommend that healthy people under 50 get vaccinated given the rate of serious vaccine injuries in the trials. Suggesting that children get vaccinated was really really bad science that harmed these children. DeSantis is going to investigate this and probably end up trying to recover damages.
Franktoo – do you not realize the citizens of China have been rioting over COVID lock-downs? Their economy has taken a huge hit because of this and poor people tend to die earlier. Finally, China has now realized that net-zero won’t work, and are starting to back off it. Blazing success? NOT!
Frank, You are just very biased on covid19. You smear those who said protect the vulnerable by saying they didn’t mean it. That’s mind reading and inaccurate.
All you have to do is look at the deaths per million people to see that Florida despite a population skewed toward the elderly did only a little bit worse than New York and New Jersey which had very draconian and costly lockdown policies. Indeed if anything what this pandemic proves is that Americans are quite unhealthy because of the obesity epidemic. Obese people are likely to develop diabetes and a host of other serious diseases making them very vulnerable to covid. This is the shameful part of this is that our public health authorities de-emphasize our most serious problems while recommending draconian policies with lots and lots of collatoral damage. Are you aware of the mental health and suicide crisis among our young people? It’s well documented that locking them in their houses was a prime cause.
Franktoo comment “Experiments show that if Kennedy was shot from behind, his head (counterintuitively) could have moved back as in the Zapruder film.”
fwiw – in the zapruder film – you can see brain matter spewing forward in the two to three frames prior to the frame which shows his head rocking backward. The pro- second shooter from the front proponents ignore those two frames.
> Nic’s analyses failed mostly because he had bad data.
No.
Nic’s analyses failed because he failed to properly model a number of variables, notably behavioral variables such as Swedes going to second homes in rural areas.
His failure to account for uncertainties is what made his data “bad.”
Finally, Ron before hopefully leaving you in peace, Joseph Lapado perhaps the most extreme of the anti-lockdown gang promoted by the WSJ, has now become Surgeon General of Florida. He now appears to be an anti-vaxxer. At his hearings, he resisted agreeing that mRNA vaccines work. He has been exaggerating the real, but small, risk of cardiomyopathy for male adolescents and young men. Now he is outright appealing to the anti-vac crowd by filing a lawsuit against the vaccine manufacturers. Both the sponsors of a clinical trial and the FDA independently analyze and present side effect and efficacy data from clinical trials to the expert committee that advises on drug approval. The database is populated by nurses and doctors who don’t know which patients received drug (instead of placebo), not by employees of the sponsoring company. If DeSantis is in the grip of other advisors who are Trumpy conspiracy theorists, he probably won’t get my vote.
Lapado is also a big advocate of ivermectin and other “repurposed drugs” for which there is only anecdotal evidence of efficacy. Today, with vaccination, therapeutic antibodies and Paxlovid that really work, there is no reason to take ivermectin. If you hadn’t heard, ivermectin just failed to show any benefit in another properly designed double-blind, random-assignment clinical trial. As I predicted…
https://www.kumc.edu/about/news/news-archive/jama-ivermectin-study.html
IMO the risk of cardiomyopathy following infection by COVID is likely larger than the risk following vaccination. In both cases, cells inside your body express spike protein on the surface that induces neutralizing antibodies (and antibodies to other viral proteins in a real infection). In the case of vaccination, limited expression of the spike protein occur in a small area of your arm and the nearby lymph gland. In a real infection, uncontrolled expression of spike protein occurs in lung, heart, nerve and other tissues with ACE2 receptors.
In a clinical trial, a vaccine may be randomly given to 10,000 volunteers while another 10,000 from THE SAME GROUP randomly get placebo. That way we accurately know that there is perhaps an 0.1% greater chance of mild cardiomyopathy in the vaccine group than the placebo control. However, we do not infect 10,000 volunteers with SARS2 and reliably compare them to another 10,000 who receive placebo. Instead we cult consult a large database that contains data on the average incidence rate of cardiomyopathy by age and sex. However, for cardiomyopathy triggered by the immune system, the incidence rate might vary widely with the number and nature of the inflections that are circulating locally. So we have a vaguer idea of how often COVID infection causes cardiomyopathy than we do for COVID vaccination
Ron –
> I think hindsight is on the side of Sweden and Florida.
What are the criteria you’re using for assessment?
I think across-country and across-state comparisons are extremely noisy and not at all reliable (due to the myriad confounding variables), but if those are your standards of assessment, it doesn’t seem to me that either Sweden or Florida did particularly well in terms of Covid morbidity and mortality.
What’s most interesting to me, however, is how you can predict how people will evaluate those comparisons by looking at their their political orientation. Not at all unlike climate change in that regard. The pattern plays out across so many different polarized contexts with a lot of uncertainties. It would be nice to hope that might change but if anything, it seems to me the pattern has become all that much more widespread.
On the damage done to young people by pandemic restrictions.
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/01/pandemic-stress-physically-aged-teens-brains-new-study-finds/
> by pandemic restrictions.
Classic example of exactly what I was talking about.
dpy: I’ve read some of Lapado’s complaints about vaccination. He tells you about the risk of cardiomyopathy from vaccination, but he doesn’t consider you the greater risk of cardiomyopathy from COVID. An mRNA vaccination is a little like a controlled infection of COVID localized to your arm (and the nearest lymph gland). In both cases, neutralizing antibodies are made to spike protein budding out on the surface of infected cells, but in the case of a real COVID infection this is happening in lung, heart and nerve cells too. And antibodies are being made to a half dozen viral proteins, not just the spike protein. Cardiomyopathy is caused when some of these antibodies attack heart tissue. No one has died from cardiomyopathy following vaccination.
When you think about the parallels between vaccination and infection, a vaccination is almost certainly much safer that an infection. 1% of school children infected with omicron were sick enough to be hospitalized, though few died.
When we do clinical trials on a new vaccine, randomly assign 20,000 volunteers to get vaccine or placebo and then scrutinize them closely, which allows understand the incident of side effects at a level of one in 10,000. However, we don’t give 20,000 volunteers SARS2 virus or placebo and accurately track the side effects including cardiomyopathy of a COVID infection at the level of 1 in 10,000. So we don’t have a great idea of how often cardiomyopathy is a problems in people suffering numerous problems from a COVID infection.
As best I can tell, the rest of the developed world isn’t advancing childhood vaccination as much as the FDA. Maybe their cost benefit analysis isn’t as favorable as the FDA’s. At worst, this is an analysis that ended up in a gray area, however the advisory panel of outside doctors has been unanimous in approval of vaccines for children. This isn’t come kind of conspiracy to sell more vaccine that is putting our kids at risk.
One possible result of this is that pharmaceutical companies will never again invest in trying to create a new vaccine. (The feds are already providing insurance for children who suffer side effects from recommended vaccinations). And even if they did, people will be too scared to use something the DEEP STATE has approved. We are going back to the dark ages of smallpox, polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough etc. And all because DeSantis hired a doctor is still pushing ivermectin as a treatment for COVID.
You are wrong that mRNA vaccines didn’t stop transmission of the alpha variant. And vaccination wiped out COVID in Israel – which was the first of Vaccination 50% of their people by March 1, 2021. Look up the data. Vaccination slowed transmission of Delta. And with a fresh booster, vaccination slows transmission of the early omicron strain.
Lest anyone be fooled by Frank’s attempts to imply vaccination of young men as justified and to attack what is happening in Florida, here’s a recent article showing it is not ethical to do so, just as the Florida SG has been saying.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
It’s becoming a pattern, Frank seems to me to be so biased politically he seems to resort to cherry picking more often than he accuses Trump of doing.
Frank –
Paul Offit has been one of the scientists involved with vaccine approval who’s been more on the skeptical side when we consider the full spectrum of views. I find what he says as a pretty good touchstone to use when looking at the varying expert opinions. Here’s a very short piece where he discusses vaccines and kids. It’s easy to find videos where he discusses that issue in more depth but I’m linking this one because it has (very general) information in print form:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/doctor-covid-19-vaccines-kids-203304588.html
Offit seems to be pretty middle of the road, politically, so mahbe some of the people who view COVID through a politically tinted lens will find him credible:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/doctor-covid-19-vaccines-kids-203304588.html
Here’s Offit recently (in podcast form) on boosters (and the bivalent booster):
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4u4S6LvxoG9zamLIxG4VjA?si=7By59cmiSw6gFK4knfeq0A
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4u4S6LvxoG9zamLIxG4VjA?si=7By59cmiSw6gFK4knfeq0A
Sorry – that second link was supposed to have been to a podcast with Offit from further back, rated to boosters. Intbink it’s always interesting to see how people’s opinions change over time (or don’t change over time) as more evidence becomes available.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7HWcK20t6oCpC7vCtvsmAY?si=UMujDsB9Q4CPglKaekuJ-w
Re the bivalent boosters – I think it’s important to recognize that the evidence is still coming in. There’s is evidence coming in that points in different directions regarding their efficacy, and imo, people who make definitive, sweeping statements re their efficacy display a “motivation” to get out over their skis.
Joshua, Dr. Paul Offit is the author of the book “Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All.”
He has been the number one industry advocate for childhood vaccinations over 15 years, slamming vaccine hesitancy and indoctrinating new pediatricians (to not think twice about giving 26 inoculations from infancy to year 5) as his profession. When Offit has a reservation about a child vaccine we should listen.
Ron –
> He has been the number one industry advocate for childhood vaccinations over 15 years, slamming vaccine hesitancy and indoctrinating new pediatricians (to not think twice about giving 26 inoculations from infancy to year 5) as his profession.
Indeed, he’s strongly opposed to the advocates who associate vaccinations with autism – do I recall correctly that you think there is such an association?
> When Offit has a reservation about a child vaccine we should listen.
I wouldn’t really characterize his view as “reservations,” but I do think he’s a good touchstone in that he’s relatively reserved.
“I wouldn’t really characterize his view as “reservations,” but I do think he’s a good touchstone in that he’s relatively reserved.”
Thanks for the link. Offit specifically said that he does not promote the vaccination for children but since it is recommended by the CDC he does not refuse it for parents that ask for it. This from the most aggressive vaccine advocate in the country.
Offit also points out that less than 40MM bivalent booster shots have been given out of the 170MM purchased by the government last summer. He says the data on the bivalent booster versus and combination of prior vaccination without the booster gives only 1 month of limited protection and no difference in outcome for severe disease. Thus it is a failure in terms of any public health objective. And therefore, he does not think that we should continue “chasing variants” unless a new one springs up that is particularly deadly and resistant to the original Wuhan 1 vaccine.
Offit represents the best face of the vaccine. The skeptics point to studies that show negative efficacy for boosting and an alarming increase in all cause mortality for the last two years versus historical data, implying possible broad and varied impacts of vaccination of health, especially cardio.
On the early childhood vaccines contributing to autism debate, it’s a hugely complex topic but perfect example of institutionally motivated campaigns to refine a simple public message.
For example, I found this 2011 NPR interview with Offit where he is asked about why the CDC never does a study of vaccinated versus unvaccinated to look for an autism signal. He answered that they did 1000 child (a small number) where they compared vaccinated to less vaccinated and found no signal. He was talking about DeStefano (2004) which looked at the MMR vaccine, scheduled to be given at ~18 months. Three years after that interview the first coauthor of that study, William Thompson confessed to autism researcher Brian Hooker that the CDC had in fact found a significant signal for autism in relation to age that the MMR was administered, particularly among African American toddlers. The result was two years of internal CDC debate that culminated in all of the coauthors meeting in a remote location and throwing half their data into a trash can to dilute the statistical power of the study enough to ignore the signal. This story was documented in the now banned and blacklisted movie, Vaxxed, which I found here on a Duckduckgo search.
https://rumble.com/v1x0jwa-vaxxed-the-movie.html
Ron,
Here is you:
https://judithcurry.com/2017/08/20/reviewing-the-ccsr-discussion-thread/#comment-856969
I am not sure what kind of complexity you are trying to conceal your vax stance, but you do you.
“I am not sure what kind of complexity you are trying to conceal your vax stance, but you do you.”
I was trying to conceal complexity or my stance. The science is extremely complex cutting edge developmental neurobiology. I am pretty sure it is beyond the scope of Climate Etc, though we have an amazingly tolerant host.
Paul Offit in the 2011 NPR interview saying we know that autism can’t be caused by vaccines is either talking outside of his level of knowledge or is lying.
Just because there is a proven genetic marker for one kind of autism, Rets syndrome, does not mean that autism is genetically predestined. The theory I am following is that environmental influences at specific critical developmental points can alter gene expression (with epigenetics) in harmful ways. There are identified pathways related to Rets that are implicated in this. There is way too little research being done on this due IMO to the huge liability should vaccines be found to have been even a partial contributor to the exponential growth of autism from 1980 to present, from one in a ten thousand to one in fifty. I suspect there are some big reckonings in the offing for the autism story.
There is much more harm being done to humanity from autism than from climate change.
Ron,
You realize that when I mention a molecular neurobiologist I am referring to Frank, right?
The exponential growth of diagnosis is tightly connected to the development of the diagnosis itself. Still, you succeeded in peddling Wakefield crap without mentioning him. Better than hide under irony, e.g.:
https://judithcurry.com/2018/08/25/week-in-review-science-edition-85/#comment-879687
Please consider revising the concept of environment in that context before going forward.
Well played!
> Just because there is a proven genetic marker for one kind of autism, Rets syndrome, does not mean that autism is genetically predestined.
Classic. Just ’cause environment might influence the development of autism, does not mean that vaccines cause autism.
Nor that autism might be caused by monkeys flying out of your butt.
What would help, Ron, is evidence that vaccines cause autism.
But why let a lack of evidence get in between you and a good old fashioned conspiracy theory, eh?
I have a longish comment in moderation giving copious source material on the issues raised here regarding covid and documenting the junk science that has predominated including from the CDC.
“Ron, You realize that when I mention a molecular neurobiologist I am referring to Frank, right?”
If Frank is interested in having a high level discussion on potential epigenetic pathways that are under investigation for possible contributors to autism I am happy to discuss. But I won’t attempt to educate one without a biology background.
Also, I respect Frank as being someone open to persuasion with new knowledge.
If others are interested in getting up to speed on hearing the vaccine safety advocates mostly censored point of view the movie Vaxxed is very easy to watch and understand. I would start there, not the neuroscience biochemistry. https://rumble.com/v1x0jwa-vaxxed-the-movie.html
Ron –
I just want to say that I love that as a climate “skeptic” and frequent “skeptic” contributor to this blog, you’re all in on a film made by Andrew Wakefield.
It’s just perfect.
Almost as good as that guy who frequently commented here on COVID, who was all in on the theory that 9/11 was an inside job.
Or maybe it is just as good.
Joshua, I think it’s great the you and Willard keep a dossier on all the CE contributors in what you think is a noble calling as a foot soldier or whatever you want to call yourself. You seem to rarely put forth anything of substance to the hard sciences, so neurobiology discussion is definitely out of bounds.
I don’t dispute Wakefield has a much maligned reputation. Being in the way of governments collaboration with big pharma is not a career move that many will take or survive. I honestly think he did it accidentally in genuine medical pursuit without thinking through the big toes he was stepping on. However, it was thanks to Wakefield (1998) that the CDC embarked on prebunking the autism – MMR connection by commissioning DeStefano the following year. Imagine their horror when instead of putting the nails in Wakefield’s coffin it supported his claim. We would never know anything about that if it were not for the dogged persistence of Brian Hooker developing the relationship with Thompson over months of phone calls that he later began to record. Also thanks to Thompson for having the conscience not to destroy his copy of the data and instead save it for the occasion that someone like Hooker would come calling.
But also we must thank Wakefield again and his being able to make a movie for you. It’s only 90 minutes but I doubt you will view it because as you mentioned a few days ago you are not interested in ever risking changing your mind on something.
BTW, Fahrenheit 911 was a liberal conspiracy theory IIRC.
I prefer *ninja*, Ron, but if you want to get technical, it’s *ronin*. Only Freedom Fighters have an army.
There is no need to keep any dossier, btw: a simple search for your name and autism was good enough. A bit of background on anti-vax dog whistles also helps. That, it is great that you become more open about this, otherwise readers might get the impression that you are Just Asking Questions.
Your openness gives you a higher ground, a bit like Sean:
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144926308/fox-news-sean-hannity-dominion-lawsuit-trump
It is important to own what we are doing, here and elsewhere.
Ron –
> I don’t dispute Wakefield has a much maligned reputation.
Lol. A basic component of conspiracy theoriesis is that the denial of the conspiracy is part of what proves the conspiracy. You won’t deny he has a much maligned reputation. That’s precious!
I watched at least thirty minutes of it. Indeed, it’s heartrending. The pain of a parent watching their child deal with severe and disabling autism must, at least in such cases as when the children self-harm, be overwhelming.
What struck me about the movie, though, was how the producers assume complete credulity on the part of the audience. Different views on controversial aspects of the issue are never presented, or even gestured to. The music is evocative and the images moving, and who, when watching something like that, would be so cruel as to wonder if their might be another side to the story Wakefield presentes?
What kind of person would be skeptical about what they present?
Who would be a skeptic?
Joshua, did you see this part:
‘I have waited a long time to tell my story and I want to tell it truthfully. I was involved in deceiving millions of taxpayers regarding the potential negative side effects of vaccines. We lied about the scientific findings.’ – William Thompson
It was in the first minute of the movie. That apparently was in an email Thompson wrote to Hooker. The two had over 40 phone conversations before Thompson fully spilled the beans.
African American boys were found to have a 340% higher likelihood of autism over that same demographic that skipped or delayed the MMR shot (but may have had many other shots).
https://www.hippocraticpost.com/infection-disease/vaxxed-make-mind/
Searching the confession I also found that the movie was effectively banned as I suspected by not finding it. Robert DeNiro asked to have the movie screened at his Tribeca festival when it came out in 2016. The organizers objected and he let it be pulled despite having an autistic child himself. When asked by the Today show hosts if he thought his child had been effected by vaccines he admitted that his wife saw the original regression being associated with vaccination.
Searching DeNiro I see he was going to do his own movie on autism and vaccines in 2016 but we never saw it come out.
https://financialpost.com/opinion/junk-science-week-robert-de-niro-gets-vaxxed
Joshua and Willard, until Frank stops by I am going and try to walk you through some general points on autism.
Autism is more widely diagnosed currently than in the past. That is true. It’s recognized as a spectrum of cognitive disorders, autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The claim that we just didn’t notice these disorders in the past, and that accounts for the exponential statistical curve, is not true. Think of autism like cancer and the fact that there are many types and causes of cancer.
In fact, cancer and autism may related in that they are both manifestations of errant signaling in gene promoters. Broadly, there are three causes of disease: environmental, hereditary and infection. Some diseases are caused on one of these exclusively but others like cancer can be caused a combination of these. That makes them much harder to understand. I believe autism is mix of the first two.
Around 1970 Rett Syndrome was recognized when two young girl patients that were unrelated happened to be in the doctor’s waiting room at the same time. They had an identical list of abnormalities. Twenty years later it was well established that there was a hereditary link. Rett is under the ASD classification and thus was an indicator the autism is genetic. Perhaps being aware of this is a way I can see Paul Offit feeling he is truthful when in the 2011 NPR interview he said, “But it doesn’t even make sense that vaccines would cause autism, given what we know about autism.”
Ron –
> Joshua, did you see this part:
I saw that part. The material from Thompson was secretly recorded. He was never interviewed for the film. If he long wanted to tell a story of vaccines causing massive amounts of autism in children, why wasn’t he interviewed? Why isn’t he out there now telling his story all over the place?
Given all the attention paid to this issue, why haven’t there been a slew of researchers presenting data that show an association between the MMR vax and autism?
Why aren’t there a slew of researchers showing the details of a biological link?
> African American boys were found to have a 340% higher likelihood of autism over that same demographic that skipped or delayed the MMR shot (but may have had many other shots).
Then why is autism less prevalent among African American children? Perhaps because they are vaxed at a lower rate? Perhaps because they have less access to medical insurance and medical care? I doubt those factors would explain a 19% lower rate of diagnosis if they are much more likely to have autism as a result of being vaccinated.
I could find conspiratorial explanations for these questions plausible.
Or I could think of benign answers to questions like why didn’t they mention in the movie a change in diagnostic criteria for autism concurrent with an increase in the number of diagnoses (when they discussed the increase in the number of diagnoses)?
If I weren’t a skeptic.
The problem with conspiracy theories is plausibility. Yes, it’s possible that the MMR vaccines are causing a massive increase in autism diagnoses, and tons of doctors and researchers and public health officials and politicians are conspiring to cover it all up.
The question for me is whether such a conspiracy is plausible.
However, by 2011 it was well known that Rett was not purely hereditary, and there were many causes. The common denominator is a mutation in the MECP2 gene, which is in charge of turning on and off other genes associated with nerve development. The gene is on the part of the X chromosome that is missing in the male Y one. This partly explains why Rett is predominantly a female disease or males with XXY chromosomes.
This seems to be the opposite pattern for most ASD, which is associated with boys 4:1 over girls. But it is not really once the closer look is taken and investigators found that males with Rett are dead at birth or soon after, meaning that Rett is much worse for males, so much so that it is immediately fatal. tbc…
Ron,
When I asked you to dust up your concept of environment, you are supposed to get the secret handshake. It certainly was not a signal for more condescension. Unless you are willingly playing dumb?
That is definitely possible. But then I am at a loss to explain your lack of mention of the M word. You know what is the M word, right?
No, not measles.
Meanwhile, have you ever considered the link between conspiracism and autism? I have yet to see any evidence disproving the causal mechanism one way or the other. It is an important question, and I think we should discuss it in a manner that would be fair and balanced.
Leave no stone unturned. A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men cannot get out. As above, Saul Bellow.
Joshua, you are asking very good questions. I will try to begin to answer them.
“Given all the attention paid to this issue, why haven’t there been a slew of researchers presenting data that show an association between the MMR vax and autism?”
The reason is there are likely many causes of autism. Wakefield’s 1998 paper was to try to get researchers a base upon which they could ask for funding to investigate it. He and 12 coauthors looked at 12 kids that has very similar gastro disorders and also cognitive symptoms. Wakefield was the top child gastro doctor at the prestigious London Hospital. Eight of the 12 studied subjects had the MMR vaccination in a proximate time of the onset of symptoms, according to the paper.
The paper was the first like it after many parents had noticed their child no longer walked or talked after the 12-18 month visit to the doctor to get shots. The were suing in vaccine court and losing due to lack of evidence. So the paper had huge legal implications. A private investigator named Brian Deer was assigned to investigate Wakefield, and after seven years alleged fraud by claiming inaccuracies in the paper’s data. Wakefield was ultimately suspended from practicing medicine due to alleged ethical violations, not getting the proper permission from London Hospital to use his privilege’s and his coauthors to use their facilities. Ten coauthor’s saved their careers by disowning the paper and begging for its retraction. One got his credentials back in court after a million dollars and then years and a finding of being wrongfully punished.
On top of all that, in case anyone got the idea of doing research the CDC did it for them with DeStefano. Many other countries followed suit with similar studies, all of them designed to find no association, none of them comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated.
Joshua, my first reply to your questions is currently in moderation. I am trying to break them.
“Then why is autism less prevalent among African American children? Perhaps because they are vaxed at a lower rate? Perhaps because they have less access to medical insurance and medical care? I doubt those factors would explain a 19% lower rate of diagnosis if they are much more likely to have autism as a result of being vaccinated.”
Great questions. Remember DeStefano was designed to hopefully not find any associations. If autism was more prevalent in African Americans the study would not show this because it was comparing autism prevalence between MMR vaxxed versus not. The reason that the MMR was affecting a racial group is unknown to me and could be genetic or environmental or both. But it was not followed up due in part obviously to the CDC’s eradication of this evidence.
My brother, who brought this all to my attention, actually does have a theory as to what caused the African American signal in DeStefano. It’s very technical and will wait to see if Frank wants to come in.
“Or I could think of benign answers to questions like why didn’t they mention in the movie a change in diagnostic criteria for autism concurrent with an increase in the number of diagnoses (when they discussed the increase in the number of diagnoses)?”
There is certainly bias and when one has limited time they like to focus on their supporting points. I think the debunkers are more dishonest when they say that all of the increase in autism is just better diagnosis. Certainly a scientific debate would be healthy but one side, the one with power and money has the luxury of stifling that debate, with the help of (well meaning) foot soldiers.
Joshua,
You might be flabbergasted:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5789217/
Who would have thunk?
“The problem with conspiracy theories is plausibility. Yes, it’s possible that the MMR vaccines are causing a massive increase in autism diagnoses, and tons of doctors and researchers and public health officials and politicians are conspiring to cover it all up. The question for me is whether such a conspiracy is plausible.”
Plausibility is directly proportional to one’s background knowledge on the topic and overall view of political environment’s affect information flow. I happened to think there is good historical patterns for coverups, even of big things. That in fact it is very hard to expose big coverups precisely because they are extraordinary. And as the great Carl Sagan often said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
First the establishment holds the microphone. They can put out straw men arguments of what the skeptics are claiming to debunk non claims. In climate the common talking point is that climate deniers are a 3% minority. And then they call all scientists that question the most extreme projections climate deniers. You are well of how dishonest that is and yet see it all the time. Well, the case is even worse for the vax skeptics. They do not even have a microphone with the conservative media because the issue is not political left or right.
I would say that the MMR is likely not the cause of 97%-99% of autism. There is not one cause of cancer, yet we certainly don’t argue about removing carcinogen exposures.
Willard –
Indeed. The critical link:
> Whereas intervening to treat an existing condition is easy to understand, the notion of prevention is intangible.
Not that I think that there’s a causal mechanism for “skeptics” being more prone towards conspiratorial thinking than anyone else (let alone, numerically, a significant differential association), but nor do I think that it’s purely coincidental that Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and COVID vax conspiracy theorizing, and belief in a stolen election are so popular in the “skept-o-sphere.”
More generalized vax conspiracy ideation is like an icing on the cake. Which is why I appreciate Ron’s openness about his beliefs just as I appreciated it when that dude from a while back was explaining here at Climate Etc. why 9/11 was an inside job. He was into the “Plandemic” stuff as well. It’s such an interesting soup.
Ron –
> Plausibility is directly proportional to one’s background knowledge on the topic
Perhaps I wasn’t being clear. I’m not evaluating the plausibility of different scientific theories. I wouldn’t be in a position to do that. I’m evaluating the plausibility that so many people would be conspiring to hide the cause of so much unhappiness.
> and overall view of political environment’s affect information flow.
I’m closer to agreement there, but even still there’s an issue of plausibility for a massive imbalance in how politics affect information flow. That’s why, while I recognize real issues with something like government entities interacting/intervening with social media platforms, I don’t buy many (not necessarily all) of the “political” explanations. The bottom line for me there is a basic principle of perspective-taking, or cognitive empathy if you will. The political explanation would lead one to conclude that “others” in an out-group are conspiring to silence “us” in an in-group. Another explanation would be non-political – that government and people managing social media platforms are concerned about misinformation. I don’t see that there are bright lines to distinguish these determinations. So when I see people with absolute certainty going towards political explanations (or 100% politics free explanations), I am skeptical. The theory of motivation reasoning would absolutely predict that people will find purely political explanations, that find the causal mechanisms firmly in the evil out-group dynamics, which explain how the in-group is victimized. The fundamental attribution error is another interesting frame.
> I happened to think there is good historical patterns for coverups, even of big things.
I don’t disagree. And surely some things that would have been dismissed as improbable by many at one time have later turned out to be not the least bit implausible. That’s part of the mix. But it’s clearly a logical fallacy to say that the existence of that phenomenon in the past justifies any particular current conspiratorial belief.
> First the establishment holds the microphone.
See. There we go. That’s the kind of evidence I look for in someone’s thinking:
The president has tweeted more than 20 times claiming […] there is a link between vaccines and autism.
Arguing that everything that you don’t understand is a conspiracy theory is not distiquishable logically from calling everything you don’t understand a conspiracy.
So Joshua and Willard, I would present that by your own arguments of forming beliefs purely out of bias is exactly what you are guilty of in your thinking.
Mindreading and straw argument smears are the tools of those who don’t have facts.
From your linked paper on the origin of autism myths:
“The MMR vaccine is administered to 12- to 18-month-old children. At this age, the first signs of an impending developmental condition, such as autism, start creeping in and become noticeable. The idea that “vaccine precedes event, hence vaccine causes disease” fits the cognitive bias to search for patterns and is much more comforting than the notion of coincidence or bad luck. A simplistic explanation, such as the claim that the emerging but still weak immune system of the toddler is overstimulated and damaged by the vaccine, adds credibility to the cause-effect sequence. At the same time, the current and future benefits of the vaccine are much more difficult to imagine and process.”
This is pure patronizing BS. But let’s take the one fact mentioned that autism’s onset typically coincides with the 12-18-month window of vaccination by coincidence. There is no footnote for this fact because even it is BS. Autism can manifest any time from birth to adolescence. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.674009/full#:~:text=About%20a%20quarter%20of%20children,usually%20between%2018%E2%80%9324%20months.
My point here:
> Whereas intervening to treat an existing condition is easy to understand, the notion of prevention is intangible.
Was that the difficulty of addressing prevention, or “mitigation” if you will, is inherently more complex than pointing to the immediacy of an increase in fuel prices (importantly, as distinguished from costs). There’s a built in cognitive bias – one that overlaps with immediacy bias, that interacts with understanding risk that plays out over a long time horizon, that interacts with the abstract aspect of risk from climate change (after all, how “real” is a change of two degrees over the course of a few decades in terms of day to day life?).
I think that Judith is right that climate change is a ‘wicked” problem – even though in my view she has a very selective focus in her concern about the wicked elements – in that it’s quite a hodgepodge of biases related to risk management.
Ron –
Please compare and contrast:
this:
>At this age, the first signs of an impending developmental condition, such as autism, start creeping in and become noticeable.
and this:
> Autism can manifest any time from birth to adolescence.
Holy non-sequitur, batman.
J,
You do not understand. Ron knows the vaxx and other conspiracies inside out. You don’t. That’s why they look more plausible to him than to you.
You are just an ignorant slot.
Sure, you might know that we tested his pet theory and, well, it is hard to confirm when reduced vaccination did not prevent autism from skyrocketing. But at least the hypothesis was not invalidated. Perhaps nothing will. Or if it were, it would still have raised questions. Important questions, about trust and integrity.
Just like Covid, of which you know nothing about.
If we could all exude integrity like Ron does, the world would be a better place. If only children could live like in the old days, where licking lead paint was OK. Wait, did I mention industrial metals?
Damn.
> Arguing that everything that you don’t understand is a conspiracy theory is not distiquishable logically from calling everything you don’t understand a conspiracy.
I don’t argue that everything I don’t understand is a conspiracy.
I argue that when people say there’s a massive conspiracy (say, collusion among researchers, doctors, and public health officials to hide an enormous amount of harm to children caused by a causal link between vaccines and autism), they’re saying there’s a conspiracy.
Conspiracies happen, Ron. You’re proud of your beliefs and I think that’s commendable. So if you believe in conspiracies I think you should be proud of your conspiracy theories.
Frank, RealClearPolitics is non partisan and gives a good selection of opinion. RealClearInvestigations has done a fantastic job on the Russia hoax and laptop and Bobolinski suppression — collusion by our government to spread disinformation to affect an election.
The long winded discussion of conspiracy theories shows more about how shallow thinkers use rhetorical devices to avoid having to do actual research or inform themselves on the underlying science.
As Musk said, all the conspiracy theories about Twitter were true. He could have added Big Tech and legacy media to the list. Our elites use “conspiracy theory” exactly the way Joe McCarthy used “Communist.” It’s a smear that allows those with nothing to say to write long word salads.
Frank seems to have left, but here’s a new paper that might explain why the vaccinated seem to be more susceptible to covid infection.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.ade2798?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Frank,
You might like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealClearPolitics
When a Murican tells you they are independent, you could bet they are libertarian.
Bee careful: These guys are no doubt in on the conspiracy:
https://twitter.com/kischober/status/1606002981513662478?t=JsCv23Ez-1GEMRW5U_BsbQ&s=19
Also, more related details Tweeted at the preprint stage:
https://twitter.com/kischober/status/1546417329856253954?t=YJ7Yw3DgmI3Zcbo4BhFX5Q&s=19
Joshua, the paper you found on Twitter that you likely don’t understand is exactly what your earlier link to the Paul Offit podcast in This Week in Virology was talking about, which you likely also didn’t understand. The claim is simply that the best immunology is getting the first two Wuhan 1 shots and then getting a either a breakthrough infection or a booster at least 4 months later.
The relevant question for today is whether the government should be pushing more boosters and chasing variants. Or whether in light of this great news about vaccine success they should still maintain a policy that ignores the benefit a breakthrough infection, or any natural immunity, or to ease up on their fascist zero tolerance of vaccine hesitancy among government employees or ones in need of an organ transplant.
Dave, they were actually being nice for awhile until I had to go out and they got impatient and jumped to their default John Oliver impression. Something about Joshua and Willard reminds me of Beavis and his partner. What was his name? I had to turn it on for 5 seconds 20 years ago to be sure my kids were not going to be allowed to watch. Willard and Joshua were unsupervised apparently.
And btw, Ron –
For those of our friends here inclined to have said “It’s just a bad cold,” or “It’s about as virulent as the flu,” or “They’re way over-counting COVID deaths.”
We estimate 14.83 million excess deaths globally, 2.74 times more deaths than the 5.42 million reported as due to COVID-19 for the period.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05522-2
@ https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984185
Good article, Josh.
And Ron –
I’m sure you’ll enjoy this. Please don’t forget to come back and Ronsplain it to me after you’ve listened:
youtu.be/hIqmg4tIJ6c
Josh, you have me confused with someone else. I never downplayed Covid. I probably still have a mark on my nose from wearing an N95 mask for a year. I drove an hour to get the jab two times.
The excess deaths can be read many alternate ways:
1) Deaths from Covid that went undiagnosed or unrecorded.
2) Deaths from the shutdown of medical system, places to exercise, rise in substance abuse, depression caused poor self-care, etc…
3) Deaths from the vaccine effects.
In regard to #1, there is the more of the reverse situation of people dying with covid due to being tested for covid for all hospital admittances regardless of reason. This was according to Offit’s words in your linked podcast.
The other part of the Beavis and Butthead routine is to find snippets from super reliable peer reviewed sources like Twitter and Wiki and misrepresent them. The thread on the preprint by one of the authors does not say what Joshy says it says. It does say these results are unusual and we need to rethink some things about the vaccines like timing.
I think Frank what Ron meant was that Battacharia and Atlas were right about the policy issues from the beginning. I also think that is true.
Everyone made big mistakes in March 2020. The best work was Ioannidis’ work on the Diamond Princess that proved the strong age dependence of covid deaths.
The proof on the policy front is just that there is not a lot of corellaton between covid fatality rates and strong lockdown policies.
Frank, you really have such a strong political bias against the “Right” whatever that is, you are blinded to the growing evidence of censorship and disinformation by the media colluding with government. This is not a Fox news problem.
FWIW:
> Thus, the immune response seems to become less harmful for the person and more effective against the virus with subsequent vaccinations and class switching from IgG1 to IgG4 might be part of this.
https://twitter.com/johnjljacobs/status/1606375708384759809?s=20&t=Ya0qI8pmFmnnS5LGlGYITA
dpy6629: You’re absolutely right that I’m prejudiced against the “protect the vulnerable” crowd … because they didn’t offer a viable plan to protect the vulnerable! Hxll! We couldn’t even protect our president!
Around the time of the GBD, I dug up data for nursing homes. You were 6 times more likely to test positive if you lived in a nursing home than the average American. And the elderly outside of nursing homes had to protect themselves.
At the time of the GBD, knowledgeable scientists knew that Phase III studies were underway vaccines with promising activity in animals and antibody levels in Phase II. They offered great promise of being able to “protect the vulnerable” in a few months. However, the Trump administration’s time table was to complete vaccination sometime in the fall of 2021! Why weren’t they screaming about “protecting the vulnerable” via quicker production of vaccination?
When vaccine was rolled out, half was devoted to protecting “essential workers” and half to the elderly. The GBD crowd wasn’t screaming about “protecting the vulnerable first” then. “Protecting the vulnerable” only seemed to be important in the run up to the 2020 election (or am I too cynical).
If you want to do a fair comparison of Florida and NY deaths, skip the NY and NJ deaths in April. Those deaths were already inevitable when NY locked down and began struggling to deal with a pandemic they had been left blind to. When I eyeball the NYT’s data for NY, it looks like about half of the deaths occurred during the spring surge. Rather than opening up immediately in 2021, DeSantis should have said we will remove restrictions (except for schools) just as soon we have “protected the vulnerable” by vaccinating everyone over 65 who wanted it. Full protection required 5-6 weeks after the first dose, but I’d have given him credit even if he skimped on the full period.
(As best I can tell, something good did happen in Florida, because their fatality rate per infection was relatively low despite the elderly population. However, Miami-Dade led every urban country in the nation in terms of confirmed infections in early 2021, which is not surprising given DeSantis’s policies.)
Yes, I’m reasonably aware of the increased suicide rate and huge educational setbacks our children have suffered. I greatly admired Mitch Daniels for saying Purdue existed for its students and needed to be open beginning in the fall of 2020. However, he demanded and devised a plan that allow them to do so SAFELY including serious student pledges to abide by the rules. No member of the Purdue community died of Covid. That can-do attitude was missing in our public schools.
Blaming obesity is pretty stupid. There was certainly nothing that could be done about obesity once the pandemic broke out. The obese generally can’t lose weight even when offered compelling monetary rewards because obesity is caused by failure of the systems that regulate appetite and weight. Even if we could have forced them to lose weight, the diabetes and heart and circulation problems that actually cause most of the increased death wouldn’t go away.
Frank this is really easy. You offer nursing home workers double the pay to live on site. Those who can’t do this are tested every day before entering the facility. Now you need a lot of test for this, but by summer of 2020 we had a lot of tests. They were in some cases corruptly used on relatives of politicians, such as Chris Cuomo.
What is almost criminal is sending covid positive patients from hospitals into nursing homes because you hated Trump so much you didn’t want to use the hospital capacity he provided. Cuomo deserved to get fired.
I don’t know why something so obvious is a stumbling block for you to at least look at the writings of Battacharia and Ioannidis.
Maybe you suspect they might have been right.
Blaming obesity is no more stupid than blaming alcoholism for liver cancer. That you say this is itself not very smart.
Frank
A lot a misrepresentation of the data – NY/NJ v Florida
In Nov 2021, I did a a calculation of cumulative per capital deaths for the 65+ age group. (I used the 65+ age group since that is where 90+% of the deaths were occuring. )
All the states fell within a very narrow range 1130-1180 per 100k. Florida was at 1135 per 100k . The exceptions were HI, WA , VT NH and ME Which were much lower.
NY & NJ on the other had was much higher 1350-1400 per 100k.
Point being, most if not all the agenda driven data posted by the CDC is crap.
Look at the raw data to avoid being fooled
CKid: Rising CO2 is causing warming far faster than the Milankovitch cycle can develop an ice age.
Sea level was already rising when the tide gauge record began from the end of the LIA. However, there was relatively modest warming until about 1970. Since then we have been warming at roughly 0.2 degC/decade. So it isn’t surprising to me that acceleration is associated with the beginning of satellite altimetry.
I’m fully aware of all the problems that accompanies early satellite altimetry: The correction factors for converting the time for the return of the radar signal into altitude are enormous. I’m not sure other systematic errors won’t be found in the future.
My take: SLR right now is about 1 inch per decade. If SLR is going to reach 1 m by the end of the century, it will need to accelerate at 1 inch/decade/decade. When and if such acceleration is observed, then we can start worrying about 1 m of SLR. Until then, the observed acceleration from altimetry is actual consistent with the IPCC central projection of about 0.6 m of SLR. The alarmists don’t publicize this agreement.
A side note, Judith, there is a new shingles vaccine that is very effective. Much better than the older one. It takes 2 doses but I did it based on my brother’s painful case of shingles.
Well I have been investigating shingles vaccines for last several years, trying to figure out timing etc. Then covid-19 struck, and 1st booster shot my immune system to hell. Shingles is one of my ‘adventures’ over the past year.
Judith,
To be fair, the first booster association could possibly just be coincidence. Herpes viruses are strange, elusive organisms that are good at hiding in a dormant state, and appear to be triggered often by other infections or even emotional states. The fact that shingles arises in later years, after having chicken pox as a child, strongly suggests that something about aging triggers outbreaks. I’d be more suspicious if someone who was young had their first shingles outbreak after a COVID booster. In any event, there isn’t a lot we know about what triggers the various herpes viruses to present after long periods of dormancy.
For Covid-19 mRNA treatment, see:
The Frontline Critical Care Doctors:
I-Recover Long Covid Protocol
https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/i-recover-long-covid-treatment/
I-Recover Post Vaccination Protocols.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/treatment-protocols/i-recover/
@EthicalSkeptic is raising the statistical alarms over massive increases in most cancers and deaths. At least 420,100 Excess NonCovid deaths since April 2021. He projects Excess NonCovid deaths to exceed all Excess Covid19 deaths by Nov. 2023. e.g., his post Dec 7th
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1600573747500646400
Two articles:
Houston, We have a problem (Part 1 of 3)
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2022/08/20/houston-we-have-a-problem-part-1-of-3/
Houston, CDC has a problem (Part 2 of 3)
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2022/10/24/houston-the-cdc-has-a-problem-part-2-of-3/
All Covid vaccines depress your immune system at least temporarily (some evidence that is permanent) which makes a shingles or herpes outbreaks much more common.
Since the vaccines are not safe and do not precent deaths, there is no reason for them. They have no effect on the Omicron common cold virus falsely called a Covid variant.
These were the least safe vaccines in the history of vaccines and may have been the least effective too.
Based on excess deaths before AND after the vaccines, they were a medical disaster. I have read over 200 articles and studies on those vaccines since Spring 2020 and stand by my claims.
The linkage between climate “skepticism” and belief that the vaxes are causing a surge in excess mortality is interesting indeed.
Reminds me of the linkage back in the day between climate “skepticism” and certainty that polls were being skewed to make Obama look more popular than he really was before the election in 2008
Then Obama outperformed his polling and so many climate “skeptics” stepped up to explain how they believed what they believed ’cause they believed what they wanted to believe.
Haha.
Just kidding.
One way to get behind getting the shingles vaccine is Google it and, “If you live long enough”
You should not get the vaccine if you currently have shingles disease. It would serve absolutely no purpose.
Welcome back. Many of your guest writers are over my head, esp. the charts/graphs. Not their problem, but mine. As a philosopher and author, I like “simple” statements that build to a crescendo. And, of course Occam’s Razor. My problem is I can’t wrap my mind around climate change. Complex, yes, but I’m looking for a simple explanation..1st grade reader, maybe 😀Looking forward to your posts…Jerry
Jerry, you don’t need to wrap your mind around climate change: Since the end of the Little Ice Age the world has grown slightly warmer and wetter, which has been a boon to the biosphere and mankind.
Over the last 100+ years no climate metric has become more deleterious: Actual long-term data shows that hurricanes, storms, floods, droughts, tornadoes, wildfires & etc. have not become more frequent, intense nor of longer duration and sea level rise has not accelerated in recent times. Those data are readily available at the WUWT site and from individuals such as Roger Pielke, Jr.
Climate disaster speculation is based upon proven faulty climate models fed with unrealistic scenarios of future CO2 emissions. The UN IPCC global climate model predictions have been shown to be inaccurate and even their “hindcasts” don’t reflect actual, measured climate metrics over time. Their predictions of significant feedbacks to minor theoretical CO2 warming is disproven by the absence of their predicted tropospheric “Hot Spot.”
I really like what you wrote. Simple and understandable. I get it ! Keep going writing the “first-grade reader”. It’s obvious human is abusing the term “science” from theory to law. Abusing the scientific method from observation to data. This is so true with climate change to Covid. Have the “scientific imposters” have no shame !
David Fair: You are clearly going too far here. There is ample evidence that the increased in water vapor accompanying warming amplifies the warming from rising GHGs. That can be seen most clearly in the seasonal cycle of warming in GMST (before anomalies are taken). If you aren’t aware GMST rises about 3.5 degC during summer in the North Hemisphere, which due to the asymmetric distribution of land warms far more than the Southern Hemisphere. We have been monitoring the seasonal increase in LWR emitted a planet that warms 3.5 degC every year for 30 years:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1216174110
Figure 1 clearly shows that our planet doesn’t emit 3.3 W/m2 per degK of surface warming (the dotted line) like a gray body at 288 K and with an emissivity of 0.61 would be expected to do. Less heat escapes because of increased water vapor and that is partially compensated for by greater warming at higher altitudes than at the surface (lapse rate feedback). Observations are consistent with a combined WV+LR feedback of about +1.1 W/m2/K through clear skies, just what climate models predict. Observations say there is less LWR feedback through cloudy skies than models predict. Everything to do with SWR is a mess because changes in reflection of SWR lag surface temperature change, but models are inconsistent with each other and observations in this regard.
Furthermore, your assertion that the rate of SLR hasn’t accelerated is dubious. The rate of SLR appears to have varied or oscillated in the past. Relatively little warming occurred before 1970, but the steady warming of about 0.2 degC/decade since then has almost certainly resulted in an acceleration in SLR since that is overwhelming the noise of the past. You might also want to remember that 6 deg of warming at the end of the last ice age produced 120 m of SLR – over 10 millennia. WIth less land covered with ice caps at risk as ice has retreated poleward, I wouldn’t expect 20 m of SLR per degC of warming, but today’s 1 degC of warming may be accompanied by 2 or 4 m of SLR when the situation stabilizes. The question about SLR is not if, but how fast.
OK, Franktoo. Alot of words on radiative forcing, but no discussion of the measured absence of the UN IPCC CliSciFi model-forecasted tropospheric Hot Spot. If actual experiment contradicts a theory (significant WV feedback), the theory is wrong.
UN IPCC climate model results are not sufficient to fundamentally alter our society, economy and energy systems. Dr. Curry used that statement of mine in a presentation to a lawyer group awhile back. Show me where I am wrong.
Frank, so much for a first-grade reader version. LOL
Seriously, forecasting SLR based on the glacial cycle is a bit hazardous. Remember, that according to the cycle we are very near the point where rapid reglaciation happened in past cycles. The Little Ice Age (~1500-1820) was possibly a for-tremor. Increased CO2 warming is without a doubt battling Milankovitch influence cooling a present. To know the effect on precipitation versus melt in the poles is a guess, IMO. Remember, that warming increases water vapor but the gradually lessening Earth tilt makes poles more extreme and prone to precipitate it – glaciate.
Franktoo, in rereading your comment I note your SLR discussion lacks data support. Long-term tidal measurement stations show inter-decadal variations in the rate of relative SLR which you seem to refer to as “noise.” Those measuring stations show long-term SLR of less than 2 mm/yr. with no recent acceleration of SLR.
Satellite (4 over the last 30 years) measurements, with many adjustments, indicate a 3.4 +/- 0.4 mm/yr. gross (open ocean) SLR with a calculated 0.084 +/- 0.025 mm^2/yr. acceleration over that period. [Note the assumed acceleration accuracy of +/- 0.025 mm^2/yr. vs assumed SLR accuracy of +/- 0.4 mm/yr.]
All of those calculations are derived from instrument/systems accuracy in the centimeter range. Since each individual satellite measurement is unique, the statistical rule of large numbers doesn’t apply. [1) Figures don’t lie but liars can figure; and 2) Lies, damned lies and statistics. Mark Twain said it all.]
Frank
There are too many studies indicating little acceleration, if any, to make any estimates of runaway SLR. The satellite data have many uncertainties and the acceleration associated with the initiation of the system in early 1990s is a little bit too much of a coincidence to place much credence into the numbers.
Just for the sake of debate, let’s assume that the next century doubles the previous century SLR of ~7 inches. We have the means to adapt to those numbers. Especially since those areas at greatest risk are already encountering rates of subsidence, in some cases multiple of GMSLR. Further, a study found that of those locations studied with subsidence issues, 78% were human caused. Thus, some of the small acceleration we have experienced might have been introduced from that factor alone over the last 200 years.
Models predict what they are programmed to predict
The programmers must support the consensus ECS from the 1979 Charney Report, or the slightly modified ECS by the IPCC a few years ago, if they want model funding and a paycheck
CAGW is not based on models
The models are based on the false CAGW belief.
In fact, since they make wrong predictions, they are just computer game propaganda, not real models of the climate of this planet. Always wrong predictions of doom are not science. They are a devious form of leftist politics.
Always enjoy your rational, analytical approach to issues, amid the media and political hysteria.
Stay at it Judith ….
Robert, +1. Judith, +100
Looking forward to the book!
The link to your SkyNews article reaches SkyNews but not your piece.
“https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/26/theres-no-emergency-dissident-climatologist-dr-judith-curry-on-climate-change/”
I bookmarked Judith Curry’s interview on SkyNews on the WattsUpWithThat blog.
Here it is.
Thank you.
Thank you Judith! Unlike the old twitter police, I believe that a person of good intent should want to promote the whole truth, whether or not parts of it help or harm a particular cause. You are a bright and capable person of good intent. So sorry you were shadow banned, Let’s hope that the current short term trends toward openness continue and your visibility increases.
free rein, not reign.
Judith, here is a quick, first-blush, Intro of proposed simple “first-grade reader”:
‘Climate change is typical on planet Earth. Once, the surface was covered by water. Once, ice covered much of the surface. Once, the surface uplifted and land masses separated. Once, oceans became deserts, tropics, and polar caps. Once upon a “time”.
Causes are mostly unknown, but speculation are natural events like winds, volcanoes, earthquakes, meteor impacts, temperature, earth axis tilted, sun radiation, are a few’….
Judith, you pick it up and finish the “simple first-grade reader” for a best seller 😀
My forthcoming book is targeted at the educated non-scientist. It should be understandable by anyone with some college education (or a smart high school student). My internal reviewers were mostly non scientists. Its not light reading, but it should be understandable.
GREAT ! Look forward to your “12-grade” reader 😀
Go transhuman and use GPT-3 for state-of-the-art propaganda.
Ms Curry,
Check out a recent conversation with ChatGPT on the topic of humans and climate change. Posted by CACOR [a non-governmental organization dedicated to intelligent debate and action on global issues.]
“TDD: What is climate change?
ChatBot: Climate change refers to long-term changes in the average weather patterns that have been observed over several decades. These changes are primarily caused by the increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which trap more heat from the sun and cause the Earth’s surface temperature to rise. This can lead to a wide range of impacts, including more frequent and severe heatwaves, droughts, and storms, as well as rising sea levels and changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation.
TDD: How bad will climate change get?
ChatBot: It is difficult to predict exactly how bad the impacts of climate change will be, as they will vary depending on a number of factors, including how quickly greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and how effectively we are able to adapt to the changes that are already happening. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the United Nations body responsible for assessing the science related to climate change, has concluded that the effects of climate change are likely to be “severe, pervasive, and irreversible” if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced. This could lead to a wide range of negative impacts, including more frequent and severe heatwaves and storms, droughts and water shortages, loss of biodiversity, and sea level rise, which could displace millions of people.
TDD: Are we on track to reduce emissions?
ChatBot: I’m sorry, but I am not able to browse the internet, so I am unable to provide information on current emissions levels or whether or not we are on track to reduce them. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and my knowledge is based on the text that I have been trained on, which has a fixed cutoff date. I can only provide information on general concepts and knowledge that was available up until that date.
TDD: Will we reduce emissions sufficiently to limit climate change?
ChatBot: It is difficult to say whether or not we will reduce emissions sufficiently to limit climate change, as this will depend on a number of factors, including the actions that are taken by governments, businesses, and individuals around the world. There is currently a great deal of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a more sustainable, low-carbon economy, and many countries have adopted ambitious targets for reducing their emissions. However, it is also important to note that there are still many challenges to overcome in order to achieve these targets and limit the impacts of climate change.
TDD: What are some of those many challenges you mention?
ChatBot: There are many challenges to overcome in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the impacts of climate change. Some of these challenges include the following:
· The high cost and technical difficulty of transitioning to low-carbon energy sources, such as renewable energy and nuclear power.
· The need to change the way we use and manage land, including through practices like reforestation and improved agricultural and forestry management.
· The challenge of reducing emissions from the transportation sector, which is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
· The need to change the way we build and design our cities, including through the use of more sustainable materials and energy-efficient buildings.
· The need to reduce emissions from industry, including through the development and deployment of new technologies and processes that are more efficient and less polluting.
· The challenge of convincing individuals, businesses, and governments to take the necessary actions to reduce emissions, including by changing their behavior and supporting policies that promote sustainability.
Overall, addressing climate change will require a significant and sustained effort from many different sectors and stakeholders, and will require both individual and collective action.
more at:
https://canadiancor.com/breaking-news/cacor-member-david-dougherty-recently-had-a-conversation-on-climate-change-with-a-new-chatbot/
You think that’s cool wait till you see how it writes malware!
Judith … I received this vaccine for shingles. I believe it works even if you have contracted it. Two shots. Well worth it.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/shingles/public/shingrix/index.html
Good luck with the book!
Twitter is indeed a very disturbing story. They had become essentially state run media with weekly meetings between top Twitter executives and officials in the FBI and even the DNI. This is very illegal and the Supreme court ruled on it 30 years ago. It is unconstitutional for government officials to deputize private entities to do things the government can’t do, such as censoring speech. I hope those who were banned or shadow banned sue those responsible, especially people such as Jay Battacharia, who suffered real damaged to his career and income.
In fact, the state sponsored “news” was often a lie and amounted to interference in elections. This is really banana republic stuff and shows how deeply corrupt our elites in media and the deep state have become. The majority of the state media narratives around covid were blatant falsehoods, such as the vaccination kept you from catching covid or that if enough people got vaccinated, the pandemic would end. The most pernicious lie that amounted to malpractice was that young healthy people should get vaccinated. These people had essentially zero chance of dying from covid and a higher chance of suffering serious vaccine caused injuries.
We need accountability and the FBI and DOJ need the same mass firings Musk has done at Twitter.
My best case scenario is that Twitter takes off a prefered platform for distribution of news and information and increasingly takes market share from the state run “mainstream” media who are forced to lay off their mostly partisan hack “journalists.”
I was never a Twitter user, but the apparent outcry from the left since Elon has taken over has been incredible. I saw a part of a clip of Whoopi Goldberg having a whinge on her show about what Elon has done to Twitter. “Goldberg said she was tired of “attitudes” that have been blocked and are now back on the site. ”
So its OK for some people to control what they want you to know but give some one that’s not aligned to their belief and all hell has broken loose?
Yeah some stuff shouldn’t be on there but if someone has a counter view that challenged the accepted view, i.e. climate change it’s not allowed? Shadow banning – sounds insidious. Add you-tube to that list of social medial that wants to control what you see, read and hear. And the biggest bogey of all, GOOGLE.
Judith, I was happy to hear that your new book is coming out soon and very much look forward to getting my own copy of it hopefully “soon.” Writing the book is a great achievment, getting through peer review takes time and I hope that it is not because your views, positions and opinions are considered too balanced and science based and insufficiently “alarmist.” I imagine your work in Australia will be made available to us here in the U.S. e.g., via Climate etc. and other venues, appearances, presentations etc. All the best. .
I miss the Week in Review posts but look forward to reading more blog posts.
Keep stirring the pot. I, and I am I sure there are others here, who recall your brave, noble and righteous act of inviting Steve McIntyre to give a talk at Georgia Tech. Who knew that such a simple means of adding to the scientific dialogue would bring such changes.
I am giving Koonin’s book as a gift this Christmas. I am looking forward to giving yours next Christmas.
I appreciate that these platforms are evolving and maturing. I was delighted to see that Roger Pielke, Snr will soon be contributing on his son’s Honest Broker site. I will look forward to your posts.
As someone who searches for a sense of balance in the often tedious and conflicting ‘climate change’ debate, I always find your views to be refreshingly sane and reasonable. It is difficult to grasp why so many readily adopt and nurture, ‘gloom and doom’ future scenarios with so little supportive evidence. Given opposing ‘expert’ views on the topic and one-sided media reports, many become confused. It would seem self-evident that nobody fully understands something as vast and complex as global climate. Yet unfounded certainty seems to prevail. By providing informed, understandable counterpoint to alarmist rhetoric, you are doing a great service to those who value a reasoned, ‘down to earth’ viewpoint. Keep up the good work.
Judy, it looks like getting out of academia was a liberation for you. Academia used to be one of the public spaces where people was freer. The times that we live in.
You are definitely making a difference as one of the most authoritative voices in the residual skeptical climate scientist community. And you are helping many others like me to keep the debate alive until the time comes when others recover their senses slowly, and one by one. I just hope that when that time comes your legacy is properly recognized.
It is good that the electronic versions of your book are priced within the reach of your target audience. Academic books are usually not priced for human beings.
Hi Javier, the publisher wanted to price the e-version at $35, which i thought was outrageous. I offered to personally purchase 100 e-copies (I will give them to my clients), if they would reduce the cost to $25. They agreed. The issue is that academic books don’t sell many copies, which is why prices are higher (of course I hope my book will be an exception to this.).
For a good story on that:
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/sep/04/academics-are-being-hoodwinked-into-writing-books-nobody-can-buy
My solution to this is to run all interviews at times 2 speed and to turn on the auto-generated text display.
You may of noticed; Without the 100% biased censorship the Alarmist crowd is in full retreat on Twitter. Well done you and Elon.
So glad you are continuing with the blog…I visit it daily and look forward to hearing your logic and you help me in my understanding of the issues. Thanks
Judith : I don’t suppose that in your book you have exposed the fact that claims about radiation from the atmosphere warming the already-warmer surface would require a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which refers to every single one-way passage of radiation because there are no interacting systems creating a “net” effect of increasing entropy.
FLOG, OzNonScientist, The Sun warms the surface, and no law of thermo is broken in Q=k(Thot^4-Tcold^4) and no heat flows from cold to hot…. The “radiation” from the atmosphere normally being the (-Tcold^4) portion and the surface being the (+Thot^4) part….Read up on Planck’s law, do an example calculation on parallel plates of different temperature yourself until you realize how “back-radiation” works. Educate yourself…you can string together good sentences, I’m sure you’ll catch on.
Judith
It is not radiation from water vapor, CO2 etc that raises the global mean surface temperature well above what the solar radiation could achieve, but rather it is the process of maximum entropy production (resulting from the Second Law of Thermodynamics) which, in a force field like gravity, creates the non-zero tropospheric temperature gradient we see in every planetary troposphere. This gradient (aka lapse rate) is the state of thermodynamic equilibrium because unbalanced energy potentials have all dissipated. We can very easily understand this fact (known by physicists since the 1870’s) because when the state of maximum entropy exists then the sum of molecular potential energy + kinetic energy is constant over altitude. Since PE increases with altitude it is blatantly obvious that KE must decrease, temperature being proportional to mean molecular kinetic energy as per the Kinetic Theory of Gases. I don’t know why climatologists still have not learned this basic fact. Instead they add atmospheric (back) radiation to solar radiation thinking incorrectly that the surface temperature (and any increase therein) can be quantified using the sum in Stefan-Boltzmann calculations. No physical experiment anywhere confirms that can be done, but rather, experiments prove it can’t be. Thus all climatology models are based on false physics. That’s what you need to understand Judith and explain to others.
Clausius’s most famous statement of the second law of thermodynamics was published in German in 1854, and in English in 1856. “Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”
Note: “connected therewith, occurring at the same time.”
Similarly, in Wikipedia “Laws of Thermodynamics” …
“The second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems never decreases.”
Note: “interacting” being similar to what Clausius said.
In regard to the one-way passage of radiation from the cold troposphere to warmer regions on the surface, no other thermodynamic system “interacts” with such radiation or is “connected therewith” or “occurring at the same time.” So it cannot cause an effective transfer of thermal (kinetic) energy into the surface as such would decrease entropy and thus violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
If you want to know what happens to the electromagnetic energy in such radiation, Prof Claes Johnson correctly explained the resonance process wherein that energy does not get past just raising electrons through quantum energy states and then being re-emitted as identical photons when the electrons revert to the ground state. That energy never accelerates the whole molecules and so does not increase kinetic energy or affect temperature at all. Back radiation CANNOT raise a warmer surface temperature even by the smallest amount. Nor can back radiation slow the overall rate of surface cooling because it can have no effect on non-radiative cooling which will accelerate and compensate for any slowing of the cooling by radiation.
So the overall rate of cooling is not slowed by back radiation, but it is slowed at night by the energy in nitrogen and oxygen molecules which can only get to Space if those molecules collide with water vapor, CO2 etc molecules that then radiate the energy to Space, acting like holes in a blanket.
OzScientist – the passage of radiation is two-way not one-way. All bodies radiate, and if you have a warmer body and a cooler body then the cooler body will still radiate in all directions (no-one told it to stop because there was a warmer body somewhere), and that includes towards the warmer body. The warmer body will absorb the radiation (no-one told it to ignore the radiation because it comes from a cooler body). The whole issue in the 2nd law is about net transfer in a two-way system: the transfer from cooler body to warmer body is less than the transfer from warmer body to cooler body. The transfer from cooler body to warmer body is not zero.
And if you want to know how the surface distinguishes between photons from the Sun around noon on a clear mid-summer day and those from back radiation, then you need to understand that the Planck function for the cooler source is fully enveloped within and under the Planck function for the Sun. Thus there are photons (represented by the area under the cooler Planck function) that are identical in energy to those represented by the same area for the Sun. So, when you understand quantum mechanics you will understand that only these photons can resonate because their energy exactly matches that required to raise a target electron through one or more quantum states. If some of the Solar radiation has photons that do not match, those photons carry on into a complicated process that does lead to warming due to an increase in translational molecular kinetic energy. Only the photons between the Planck functions can do this warming. Since the Stefan-Boltzmann calculations used by engineers to quantify heat transfer are based on the difference between integrals of the Planck functions, such a one way effective transfer of kinetic energy from the Sun to the surface is quantified by the area between the Planck functions – in agreement with engineers’ calculations. There is no net effect of any two-way heat transfers even though the math seems to imply such. The one-way heat transfer is quantified by the area between the Planck functions. Of course, if the source is cooler than the target then there is one-way heat transfer the other way.
Earth’s atmosphere is very thin to have any measurable (significant) greenhouse warming effect on Earth’s surface.
Thus we can say – there is not any GHG warming effect on Earth’s surface.
–
On planet Venus – it is very much different. Venus has a very thick atmosphere – thus on Venus we observe a very strong GHG warming effect on the Venus’ surface.
–
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Nevertheless, Christos, our atmosphere is thick enough to absorb all of the photons at the wavelength best absorbed by CO2 within 1 meter of travel. In truth, our atmosphere is total opaque at most thermal infrared wavelengths.
However, CO2 emits strongly at strongly at exactly the same wavelengths it absorbs. After traveling 1 m upward the photons absorbed by CO2 have been completely replaced by new photons emitted by CO2. However, higher in the atmosphere where it is colder, more photons are absorbed from upwelling radiation than added to upwelling radiation (that was emitted from lower where it is warmer). That produces the GHE.
If there were no temperature gradient in the atmosphere, there would be no GHE.
Franktoo:
“Nevertheless, Christos, our atmosphere is thick enough to absorb all of the photons at the wavelength best absorbed by CO2 within 1 meter of travel. In truth, our atmosphere is total opaque at most thermal infrared wavelengths.”
–
“absorb all of the photons at the wavelength best absorbed by CO2 within 1 meter of travel.”
– It is impossible!
–
Our atmosphere is invisible, but we can not do without it.
–
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
Ok!
OZ: Standard QM and radiative transfer calculations have been throughly tested in the laboratory and in the atmosphere. If Claes’s new mathematics makes predictions about “back radiation” that differ from QM and laboratory observations, then his mathematics is wrong. If they produce the same result, it doesn’t make any difference.
In the real world, a SINGLE 10 or 15 um photon from the sun or the sky contains no information about the temperature of the molecule that emitted that photon. Nor does it have anyway of knowing the temperature of the molecule it encounters on the surface, so it can’t “decide” whether to be absorbed or reflected. Individual molecules have kinetic energy (which changes about 10^9 times per second due to collisions, but they do not have a temperature. In thermodynamics, temperature is defined as the mean kinetic energy of a large group of rapidly colliding molecules. A molecule has NO TEMPERATURE and no way of assessing the mean kinetic energy of the molecules around it to decide whether to emit or absorb a photon. The whole idea that the 2 LoT prevents a photon from the cooler sky from being absorbed by the warmer surface is totally absurd at the level of molecules and photons. Individual molecules and photons obey the laws of QM, not the 2LoT! It turns out the 2LoT is a consequence of large numbers of molecules and photons obeying the laws of QM!
Temperature and heat are properties that only exist for large groups of molecules. Heat is the net flux of energy between two groups of molecule that have a defined temperature. That net flux is always from warmer to cooler.
“ I am appalled at the state of both the scientific and policy debates surrounding climate change. I am hoping that my little voice can help bring some common sense to this situation.”
In 2100 there will be a few voices in the wilderness which will be remembered. I’m pretty sure which ones.
One of the interesting things about twitter is that between 2010 and 2021 they had only two profitable years. Clearly, they were doing something wrong.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter/
How did Musk get persuaded to pay so much for Twitter?
1. The two profitable years were very profitable.
2. He wasn’t afraid to make huge changes while p****ing people off.
Is it possible they were being subsidized surreptitiously during the unprofitable years in order to survive?
Twitter was a public company listed on the NYSE. A surreptitious subsidy would be pretty difficult to hide.
One hell of an intriguing post this. Tks. A familiar predicament in some ways.
A couple of comments if allowed:
Have just downloaded video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEh5JyZC218 from Jordan Peterson on Covid. However the second half is on the present state of the academic/political unholy alliance, as I see it. Good for later reference in my case (but I recommend). Takeaway: the change from the academic search for truth to a form of religiosity, and Peterson’s psychological angle.
YouTube videos: they seem to disappear, and in my case search is near futile. Suggest record and keep link. One goes directly to it when given.
Re “–my personal interests are moving me in the direction of energy, agriculture and adaptation to weather extremes.” Therein lie enough ‘wicked science’; in my case I think worse than your view. Energy and Agriculture, two elements most everybody have come to consider as god-given rights that can/are to be, had at the flip of a switch or trip to a supermarket. No one anymore would look back a hundred years and recall that these did not exist then, and today’s high risk of/if losing those ‘rights’. (Echoes of RIE’s Dragon Kings and Black Swans).
I link to a page of mine as example. It has a link to a video that is not found in searches. Second: the value of science/technology in agriculture, admittedly in the distant past, yet not available in such direct manner today, from basics. But also proof of the visitation of a Dragon king in 2346bce, the 4k2 event. That was an outlier in the data. It was put in context here (the key): https://judithcurry.com/2018/06/28/nature-unbound-ix-21st-century-climate-change/
And explained here: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0907/0907.4290.pdf
My page: https://melitamegalithic.wordpress.com/2017/02/24/first-blog-post/
I wonder what Hypathia would say of the present. Anyway, Good luck.
Dr. Curry wrote: “Searching for “Judith Curry”, “Judith Curry climate”, “Judith Curry BizNews” did not show the video.”
I comes up number one with a Duckduckgo.com search. I just noticed this same thing recently vaccine safety sites disappearing from Google index (and thus virtually censored).
Same on the Canadian presearch.com which I trust more and use now for about 1 year.
Pingback: JC navigates the new media - Climate- Science.press
If you want a giggle, check out Babylon Bee’s video on ex-Twitter employees interviewing for new jobs.
I am happy to see you are still active in the climate science field. It’s refreshing to find someone with a reasoned, rational approach amidst a lot of needless hype. Best wishes for 2023.
It would be interesting to hear from JC’s former colleagues about her post Georgia Tech success.
Judith …
In your Sky News piece, towards the end you say:
“Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.”
Why the word … ‘need’? You point out that the earth is not warming according to the IPCC’s predictions, we know sea level has not accelerated to their expectations, extreme weather events are not related …
The word ‘need’ used in an environmental context suggests, at the very least hints, at a danger. This goes against the thrust of your piece, which argues that we should be careful of the dangers of embarking on public policy which is ill informed.
I realize you’re on a high wire. I’m not saying you should take the position that CO2 doesn’t cause warming. Just that if you’re trying to reach the unwashed (like me) in an article or book, be careful when you use CO2 in a sentence and the word need. That word is what got us into this mess, as it evokes emotional responses.
Again, thanks for all you do.
Judith wrote at the conclusion of the Sky News article:
“Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.
However once we relax the faux urgency for eliminating CO2 emissions and the stringent time tables, we have time and space to envision new energy systems that can meet the diverse, growing needs of the 21st century.
This includes sufficient energy to help reduce our vulnerability to surprises from extreme weather and climate events.”
I think this is the most important message and needs to be the conclusion of every article. It tells the reader the bottom line: yes, fossil fuels are a limited resource that humanity needs to eventually replace; no, there is not an existential threat to humanity nor evidence of weather becoming more extreme. There is time, thus our resources should be put toward resilience by strengthening infrastructure and building codes.
Ron … in your last sentence:
“There is time, …” I couldn’t agree more.
When we say ‘need’ there can be this expectation of danger and not much time to resolve it. When time is no longer pressing then there is no need for a massive effort to avert a danger … because there is no danger.
Energy other than fossil fuels will undoubtedly be developed and used. What we ‘need’ to do is to stop creating boogeymen narratives, which only feeds into the extremist game of emotional ping pong.
I respectfully disagree here. Even if a new design for nuclear reactors made it impossible for them to suffer from a loss of coolant pumping meltdown, it would take 50 years to test, conduct safety trials and build enough of these to replace a significant fraction of our future electricity needs If we use electricity to replace fossil fuels in cars and elsewhere our electricity needs are likely to double.
Unfortunately renewables can’t provide reliable electricity until we find a way to store electric on a grid scale and building such storage with likely be an enormous task. If we aren’t building Judith’s “new energy systems” right now they aren’t going to prevent the emission of lots of CO2 before the 2070’s.
Frank, right now our nuclear technology is not being made a priority. Put the trillion-dollar green budget into it and it will take 5-10 years rather than 50.
You point out rightly that the grid will also need to power transportation. This is not an argument for wind and solar, especially without energy storage on scale. The environmental impact of solar-wind on 40X scale is not well appreciated.
The clear way to power the 22nd century and beyond is nuclear fusion. It needs to be center stage at Davos and COP.
We have time for it. We don’t need to lock down our economies.
Franktoo … You said:
“… they aren’t going to prevent the emission of lots of CO2 before the 2070’s.”
If you’re correct, are you saying that is a bad thing? So far, CO2 has supposedly doubled from preindustrial times, yet there has been no manifestation of negative consequences. In fact, every time someone expresses a negative consequence it is proven wrong … from polar bear extinction to catastrophic sea level rise to extreme heat to increasing storm activity. While there has been some warming, it only appears to be beneficial. I would be very interested if someone could point out factual negative consequences from increasing CO2 levels that would justify the massive social investments/social policies we’ve witnessed.
I am not saying that the 1862 California flood returns soon, but it seems to be a bigger danger than rising CO2 levels. And we are woefully unprepared to cope with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862
THANKS JUDITH. I share your hopeful expectations that Musk will increase free speech and encourage more visible discussions and return the scientific process to the truth seeking debates that advance our knowledge.
In addition to Twitter files, it would be nice to see New York Times files, Washington Post files, Facebook files, YouTube files, and so on.
JM: So she posted on liberal twitter and got shadow banned. At least the right has much more respect for free speech.
“This interview went viral on youtube, with 500,000 views in 7 days.”
We like to think we can see signals. Such as a coming transistion. That video was a signal. You’re good.
Judith, I look forward to following your communications ventures, and to your new book.
THANKS a lot.
I watched your interview on BizNews very carefully. Here is why I found it very useful. I have been disappointed by the continued use of RCP 8.5 by the IPCC. I have been following the ECS story about the IPCC adoption of the Sherwood paper, the good work by Nic Lewis and others and the reduction in ECS estimates towards a current level of around 1.8. The IPCC still seems to favour 2.0-4.0. Then we have the CMIP5 models followed by CMIP6 that runs even hotter and still uses RCP8.5.
I used to wonder why the IPCC doesn’t just correct their models to run less hot. After COP27, and Guterres claiming that we were on the Highway to Climate Hell, the answer became clear. They don’t want to. All the science is alarmist for good reason. It drives the UN redistribution of wealth project. Add that to the various claims by UN officials since the Eighties, including Strong, Edenhofer and Figueres and the UN objectives are very clear. I remember mentioning them in a post on this site.
As well as redistributing wealth from the richer countries to the poorer ones, the UN wishes to change the financial status quo. Pushing the richer countries into fuel poverty makes a pretty good start. Net Zero will finish them off.
But worse than all of that, the UK climate policy (and energy) is effectively managed by the IPCC. The government has signed up to the UNFCC and its science which means that our scientists follow it faithfully if they want to retain funding. We have a Climate Change Committee that turns IPCC emission warnings into action plans for ministers.
I recently wrote to some Members of Parliament pointing out much of the above. (No reply yet.) I am not a climate scientist or an academic. I have retired from R&D in industry. I was beginning to feel slightly alone and exposed since I figured out most of the above based on information from a few blogs.
Then within days I saw your BizNews video. You talked about the UN political agenda. It effectively confirmed my thinking. You told it as it is in a very matter of fact manner. It made me feel much better. Thank you for that.
I have explained in detail why that worked for me, but I feel that all of this goes to the heart of the matter. Most politicians have no idea about any of this. They need to be told in simple terms that the UN uses alarmist science to drive its political agenda. Governments like the one in the UK are falling over backwards to facilitate the UN plan which aims to impoverish our nations.
In the video, you referred to the UN and IPCC activities almost as an aside. But they are driving the whole problem, are they not?
“redistributing wealth from the richer countries to the poorer ones”
It is so unfair that some (countries or people) are rich and some are poor. In the name of Socialism, everybody should be poor.
When it is acknowledged Earth’s atmosphere is very thin – it will become obvious, Earth doesn’t have any greenhouse warming effect.
–
https://www.cristos-vournas.com
I think is that the present UN & IPCC want to redistribute other people’s money, so it is about their power trip. Don’t touch their own personal fat salaries though!
Well I just searched for my BizNews video on youtube, and it appeared!!!
It’s the Musk-effect. You’ve been un-banned. LOL!
Common sense is not so common.
— Voltaire
I am always interested in the information you supply. It is pragmatic, polite and as far as I can ascertain unbiased. That is probably why certain groups don’t like it. You are also not too stuck up that you can’t poke fun at yourself.
Thanks for continuing this blog- it is a much needed breath of fresh air. I think that when the dust settles over twitter that it will end up in a much better space (I hope and pray). I am in the medical field and it has become so one sided that when i see how many people who were ardent fans of twitter lose their minds i wonder how they got along beforehand. And i also wonder where they will go now that they have demonized Musk and twitter as abetting far right, unsafe, and toxic ideologies. (Don’t you just love the concept of “microaggressions?”) Someday, when i no longer need my job i intend to start a blog on this madness that has overtaken the medical world.
Speaking of which, I am also a person surviving with trigeminal neuralgia (did not come as a sequel to shingles, whether that is better or not is debatable). Until one experiences that level of pain it is hard to explain it to someone else. I am hopeful that yours will subside and you can hopefully return to some version of life without it. I suspect, like with cancer, that surviving or not, one will always have in the back of one’s mind that it is still there lurking and ready to come out again when you least expect it.
As a long time reader and great fan, thanks for continuing your work, i wish you nothing but the best, and hopefully great success with all your endeavors working to return sanity to this space.
Hi Barry, thanks for your comment. Your experiences with TGN are helpful. Actually I think that post-herpetic is not as bad as what you have, i have been managing ok for the past month. I suspect yours is much worse :(
Judith – you have done a fantastic job bringing sanity into the climate issues, but in your Sky item I find “Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.”. IMHO that one totally incorrect statement undoes a lot of the good work.
Heritage blog. I like it.
Very refreshing to read this. With Musk taking over Twitter and the ubiquitous censorship now exposed, hopefully people will wake up to what’s happening. I am not optimistic.
Great to hear you plan to do more posts, we’ve missed your reviews, insights and opinions. I enjoy finding video interviews (mostly find them on WattsUpWithThat), so nice to see you are looking to find a home for regular video posts. I agree, Rumble is a good choice. FYI – I follow Roger Pielke, Jr substack. It works well as he posts at least once a week. Makes for an easy follow -not too long and not too short. He also provides links to papers for additional deep dives, which are very helpful.
Just a suggestion, perhaps you can have followers provide topics for you to write about. I am interested in your views on California climate propaganda and energy transition craziness. I am sure this will create interesting and long lists.
Is your book available for pre-order? I want one.
Thank you for all you do.
I get an e-mail from RP Jr almost every day. Always interesting.
Glad an eccentric billionaire pulled back the curtain so light can once again shine on your wicked science Dr. Curry. Thanks for staying the course through all the storms . . .
When people suggest that the carbon sink will diminish, I like to ask “why do we think the earth will be so much more resource limited than it has been throughout earth’s history?”
Judith,
My wife for 59 years caught shingles while in hoispital. This continued to a severe case of post-herpetic neuralgia to her left face that has persisted as continuous, severe pain for 8 years now. We have explored every medical path we can find, with not one positive outcome. The last resort, surgery, is stalled because of difficulty in determining which nerve is affected and the tough consequences if the wrong one is damaged. Medicine has no answers here in Australia.
I am sorry to report that consequences of post-herpetic neuralia can be severe and permanent, while hoping that your case is short and not severe. There is a vaccine to “prevent” shingles in the first place and we often recommend ion blogs that people take the vaccine. Of course, untold damage to public acceptance of vaccines has been caused by the Covid-19 exercise, which each day emerges more as a corruption of proper science combined with extravagant public relations lies.
Over the years, I have been in almost perfect agreement with your writings on good science and truth, as demonstrated in climate research. I feel sorry that similar stories have arisen from Covid. I wonder about the nauture of the next event after global warming, climate change, Covid, is set to be maukled by post-normal science rubbish instead of deeper study of wicked problems. Geoff S
Geoff, I have been having some success with naturopathic remedies (large doses of B12, alphalipoic acid, lysine, and also cold infrared laser. Email me if you wife is interested in any of this.
“Abstract
Background: Reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus (VZV), which causes herpes zoster (HZ, synonym: shingles) in humans, can be a rare adverse reaction to vaccines. Recently, reports of cases after COVID-19 vaccination have arisen.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35470920/
“We report 10 incidences of herpes zoster reactivation within 7-21 days of getting the COVID-19 vaccination. Transient immunomodulation following vaccination, similar to that seen in COVID-19 illness, could be one explanation for this reactivation.”
https://www.cureus.com/articles/94568-reactivation-of-herpes-zoster-virus-after-covid-19-vaccination-is-there-any-association
Judith,
Thank you for the offer, but in this home we do not use alternative medicine. Geoff S
Don B: I read the first paper on the link between mRNA vaccines and shingles. Very strange. Paper looks roughly a million vaccinations and matched controls and shows an incidence rate in 60 days of about 0.1% in the controls and 0.2% in the vaccinated. The 0.1% rate agrees with the expected lifetime incidence of shingle and the 0.2% rate is definitely significantly different. However, the vaccine trials of the Pfizer vaccine used 20,000 controls and 20,000 vaccinated taken from the same population of volunteers (not matched). There should have been about 20 cases of shingles in the control group and 40 cases of shingles in the vaccinated group, But the papers on vaccine safety and efficacy don’t explicitly mention shingles as a side effect. It could be hiding in the “any serious adverse event” category: 126 of 21621 for vaccine and 111 of 21631 for control or in the “severe” category 240 vs 139. I’m a little surprised they got away with such vagueness.
In any case an mRNA vaccination is like a controlled mini infection of COVID in muscle cells expressing only spike protein while a real COVID infection is uncontrolled, gets into here, lung and nerves and expresses spike protein and many others. Almost certainly the risks from natural infection are greater than the risks from vaccination. That generalization likely includes cardiomyopathy and shingles. So, if you have an 0.1% chance of experiencing shingles in any 2 month period (with shingrix) and an 0.2% chance in the 2 months after vaccination, then you almost certainly have an 0.2% chance or greater of experiencing shingles after an mRNA vaccination. However, the increased risk of shingles is ignored in the background of serious problems that can accompany COVID. FWIW
Sorry to hear of the shingles. I caught it when I was in my thirties and I was out of circulation for 2 or 3 days then was able to travel home and it disappeared after a week or so.
Obviously it affects people in different ways but I am a life long vegetarian so diet might be a factor.
Tonyb
Geoff Would you consider medications for COVID-19 early treatment based on real-time analysis of 2,338 professional medical studies? See the publications collected and categorized at https://www.C19Early.com
“Analysis of 47 COVID early treatments, approvals in 80 countries, database of 1,986 treatments”
Judith,
After listening to your EISM and BizNews pieces, it was excellent to hear so clearly about some of the historical origins of prevailing political attitudes. The Man on the Clapham bus is more receptive to plausible tales, able to be checked, that conform with his vague memory of what happened back then.
Despite trying since 1970, when I first became involved in the nuclear industry, I have never been able to uncover the significant history of Australia’s policy to oppose nuclear power. Anyone know the inside story?
Related to this, much of the public commentary just now is about banning fossil fuels. Even young children are pledging to help fight fossil fuels. Again, what is the inside story here? It is evident that once CO2 was declared a global threat, moderating fossil fuel use was a logical consequence. So, who wanted to be cosy with promotion of CO2 as a global threat? Scientists I knew at the time were of a cautious class, who would not declare such a threat until a great deal of measurement and observation showed it to be. Yet, seemingly out of nowhere and quite quickly, we faced solidified plans to uproot in short time one of mankind’s most beautiful developments of resources.
Maybe we are now on the start of a time when serious scientists are starting to say “Look, I was too enthusiastic when I joined the bandwagon. I did not imagine that agreeing that CO2 was a threat would lead to so much serious, even deadly, action as is happening now. Therefore, i wish to alter my support for the move to ‘renewables’ or whatever their proper name is.”
Do we see signs of this awakening? Geoff S
Too few, if any.
You write,
“At this point, I plan to keep Climate Etc. as is and completely under my own control, thus avoiding any possible censorship or institutional pressure.”
Please do so as it is the ONLY way to protect your blogs integrity as I know this from experience and be very careful who you chose to help you moderate as Tony Heller learned from experience to the point that he had to let go of his old blog (able to transfer the database) to start a new one without that moderator who got control of the original one in order to regain control of his blog.
Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo covers how much of the Inflation Reduction Act goes to China. Also, note the silence of the Media regarding the Twitter revelations. Silence is complacency. We need an Elon Musk to emerge in the Climate Science Field.
Consensus is all-too-often created through censorship, suppression, greed, and opportunism. ~David French
Very glad the blog is continuing; thanks for all your efforts.
Yes, very glad the blog is continuing. Those that provide articles and interaction remain the best so that includes here, Notalotofpeopleknowthat, WUWT and Jonova
Tonyb
Judith
Glad to hear that you will be publishing more blog posts in future.
I’m sorry to learn that you had been shadow-banned on Twitter; it is appalling what lengths many people in positions of power (of one sort or another) who profess to support democracy will do to subvert free speech.
Yes Nic, in the USA its much worse than that. Taibbi’s latest blog post is titled “Twitter, the FBI subsidiary.” This collusion to interfere in an election is clearly illegal under US law. Taibbi is a leftist but an honest one. He’s also recently called out the American media as being corrupt. I have a blog post I sent Judith for next year on the damage done to science by the last 6 years of political warfare. It’s worse than most people realize.
I have always assumed that in the UK, media is much more diverse and not a de facto arm of the government.
Comments seem to not be working yet again
Judith –
You’ve been fooled, apparently. You see, Musk is actually in league with the deep state. You have to get with the chess in the three dimensional level crowd.
https://maajidnawaz.substack.com/p/elon-musk-wants-to-microchip-your
Dr. Curry ==> I agree on podcasts — I’d much rather read the transcript and spend 1/4 the time. When I am forced to listen to a podcast, it is always “in the background” while I write or read something else (I can do two things at once, one 100% and the other about 75% but not three .. so I can’t watch a video podcast and listen and write…)
I hope you will see that your interviews and podcasts are transcribed.
Dr. Curry – I endorse Kip’s recommendation for transcriptions.
I encourage you to evaluate Nuance’s Dragon Speaking Naturally Transcription software capabilities. Best.
“Powerful transcription that’s ready for work
If you’re a mobile professional—or anyone on the go—who relies on a digital voice recorder or smartphone to capture notes and memos, use Dragon’s robust transcription features to turn your recordings into text quickly, easily and accurately. Dragon can even transcribe another single speaker’s voice from pre‑recorded audio files or from podcasts to maximize flexibility and drive productivity.” https://www.nuance.com/dragon/transcription-solutions.html
On a related note, some cracks appear in the Net Zero Asset Managers group.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vanguard-defects-from-the-climate-club-net-zero-asset-managers-pledge-11670618508?st=6sdmnoro93vvg5q&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I’m one of those persons who likes to print off newspaper articles to read at leisure.
Would it be possible, Judith, for you to post on your blog the Sky News articles you do, so we don’t need to wade through all the advertising guff?
yes i think i should do full blog post on each of these articles
A Google seach ” judith curry on climate change” brings up your interview for me, (listed second after an advert for ‘climete active super!))
Thanks for the video link, Mark.
Dr. Curry, the only thing I would have added is that many do not realize that sea level rise has been at a steady rate before and after the LIA. This is not a human-caused warming thing for the most part. And even activist scientists would hesitate to state that it is. So we need to face it as a separate problem from warming.
SLR, like any problem that may be exacerbated by warming, will not improve just from a cease in fossil fuel use so the problems will need other solutions regardless of fossil fuel prohibitions.
“… undergoing peer review, …”
I’m kind of hoping for something more like an autobiography than an academic treatise, but best wishes for whatever it is. And FWIW don’t forget the movie rights.
On the issue of Twitter banning, I’d like to note that Willis Eschenbach and Steven Mosher still have their accounts suspended.
I just got mine back. I even got an apology. All they need to do is apply.
don’t give up on week in review. i like your personally invested posts very much but the week in review was valuable. There are others who undertake similar listings but yours seemed filtered by topical interest and instincts rather than looking for bits with your favored results and was well organized and widely informed.
It may be with everything else you have on your media calendar, this bibliography exercise can’t be sustained at the same level, but consider this thanks for the years of bread crumbs you have left and actually hoping the concept won’t vanish completely amongst the more directed offerings.
Brian
PS – Substack seems OK for a mixed feed of podcasts and posts, but I still like blogs.
PS – I don’t like blogs to the exclusion of longform podcasts. I’ve never tried to time out whether reading transcripts of interviews is more efficient although I understand there is some tool that allows you to listen to podcasts at higher speeds. I haven’t bothered yet because I mostly listen while driving for work so I can’t be reading anyway. And the natural space in our conversation means I can use those gaps as part of my multi-tasking in turning over and thinking about what i’m hearing. But when I just want to run through content or refind a particular spot I would think a fast play option very handy.
And if they weren’t busy shadow banning people. Youtube still has the easiest function i’ve found for sharing a file at a certain time instead of sending the file along with some note saying advance to x:xx:xx time to hear what i’m talking about.
Good morning, Judith. Thanks for Climate Etc. and the climate information it provides. What are your thoughts about the Climate Discussion Nexus out of Canada? What do you think is the Ultimate aim of “Scientists” such as, Michael Mann are? Do they really believe what they claim?
JC Your posting to skyNews. My opinion is that it should be written for 5th graders. The material is spot on but I’m not sure it means a lot to the casual reader. You’re the best, carry on!
Doug MacKenzie
The Sun’s direct radiation reaching the surface of Earth does not warm the surface to the observed global mean temperature. Such radiation is on average equivalent to about 168 w/m^2 and, by the Stefan-Boltzmann, that cannot produce a global mean surface temperature above about -40°C. The parallel plate experiments assume a vacuum between the plates. In contrast, there is also non-radiative heat between the surface and the atmosphere. I have written peer-reviewed material on Planck functions some of which is summarised in this comment: https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-983222. My other comments explain how and why you are mistaken about “how back radiation works.” I suggest you read all such comments and don’t reply with assertive statements containing not a word of relevant physics in which I doubt you are qualified.
Mike Jonas
Of course radiation is two-way. Of course “cool” bodies radiate – anything above 0K does so, but radiation from a block of ice won’t warm you. You haven’t explained what you assume happens when you use the word “absorb” so I suggest you read this comment to help you understand the difference between an electron’s energy and the translational kinetic energy of a whole molecule. https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-983222
Christos Vournas
The height of a planet’s atmosphere has plenty to do with the temperature at the base of its troposphere and in any solid surface there. The Sun’s radiation supports an equilibrium temperature at the so-called radiating altitude and, from that altitude down to the base of the troposphere the temperature gradient is closely quantified by the quotient of the planet’s acceleration due to gravity and the weighted mean specific heat of the gases. Water vapour in Earth’s troposphere reduces the magnitude of the gradient by about a third, but on Uranus the actual gradient is only about 5% less than the theoretical one. So the Venus surface is hotter than Earth’s surface because the radiating altitude is a bit hotter and the distance between that altitude and the surface is several times what it is for Earth. Even the base of the 350Km high nominal troposphere of Uranus is a little hotter than Earth’s mean surface temperature and that is because its troposphere is so high. There is no solar radiation reaching down there and no solid surface absorbing back radiation.
To all:
There is no need to reiterate to me the teachings of Pierrehumbert et al that are based on false physics. The flux of radiation does not correspond to the effective transfer of thermal energy because, as I have explained in peer-reviewed writings, much of the radiation merely raises electrons through one or more quantum energy states. Only in a target at 0K would all the electro-magnetic energy be thermalised. There is no correct law in physics which says heat is always from hot to cold even in a force field. Experiments with centrifugal force prove there can be heat from cold to hot such as happens radially in a vortex cooling tube. To understand this you need a correct understanding of entropy and the fact that tropospheric temperature gradients are the state of maximum entropy which we physicists call thermodynamic equilibrium. I stress that the gradient is an equilibrium state: if it is disturbed by weather events it will tend to repair itself. The process whereby that gradient (aka “lapse rate”) tends to return to its normal value happens at the molecular level and has nothing to do with rising “parcels” of air from a surface supposedly heated by a combination of solar radiation and atmospheric radiation. Climatologists incorrectly quantify the global mean surface temperature by using the net total of radiative and non-radiative processes in Stefan-Boltzmann calculations. That law only ever applies for a single source and simple experiments prove that it does not give the temperature achieved by the sum of radiation from two or more sources. But that is what climatologists think it does, so that is where their “physics” gets it all so horribly wrong. I have pointed out that the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not apply to the net effect of independent processes – only to interacting processes occurring at the same time – see this comment: https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-983221 and, if you disagree, suggest a new statement thereof in the Talk pages at Wikipedia and let me know when they accept it.
Hi Doug.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, 10 AM EST, The U.S. Department of Energy said it would announce on Tuesday a breakthrough in ongoing research on nuclear fusion, long heralded for its potential as a source of clean, essentially limitless energy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-to-announce-nuclear-fusion-energy-breakthrough-11670881298?st=ex1a4kdv9zlj0vg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Should be interesting …
Good post, Bill, I should have been more thorough reading the comments! Late to the party in my post below. But I’m sensing fusion is now closer to reality than anyone can imagine. It’s easy to understand this after so many decades of Pollyanna promises. The next technological revolution of humankind is getting near.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-laboratory-makes-history-achieving-fusion-ignition
From their site: https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/building-to-a-solution-elements-of-a-fusion-breakthrough
“This is a Wright Brothers moment,” Hurricane said. “Our result is a significant step forward in understanding what is required for (fusion) to work. The fusion energy generated was about five times the energy absorbed by the capsule and about 70 percent of the laser energy shot at the target. We got off the ground for a moment.”
It may be a critical junction in the development of fusion energy, but it is not;
1. Energy out > energy in.
Read closely their announcement. Because of inefficiencies in the amount of energy that the lasers direct at the target vs what is absorbed by the target, the energy out is only 70% of the laser energy shot at the target.
2. A readily scalable project. This is a very expensive setup, and only achieves (if they are able to deal with the inefficiencies of item 1) about 1 MJ which is about about 400 times less than a nominal sized power plant.
I am a strong supporter of fusion research, and think that this could be a big milestone, but they have a great deal of work to do to make this a project that can be done as a viable plant. Further, I think a bit of caution is in order in terms of how quickly this can be made into something economical. We have had to wait for about 30 years to get to this point, the remaining work may go faster or slower than that, but we really don’t know. Finally, if they were ready to implement the first power plant today, construction of all the plants necessary to convert over and bringing them online will take at least 10 years.
There is also the stigma of nuclear power to deal with. I do not see the resistance to nuclear power going away just because this is fusion instead of fission. The fear of nuclear power is not fact based so one can’t guarantee that fusion will be universally accepted. I can see one making several emotional arguments against fusion power. One such argument is it doesn’t make emotional sense to develop a sun on the earth, what could go wrong?
Your linked article is from Nov 2, 2021. Did you post the wrong link?
From the DOE link posted above:
“On December 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.”
“LLNL’s experiment surpassed the fusion threshold by delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output, demonstrating for the first time a most fundamental science basis for inertial fusion energy (IFE).”
Comment in moderation.
Your link is from November 2, 2021. Is that the link you wanted?
Possibly not, but the idea is still the same from what I understand, the output may be a higher percentage, but it is still not 100%+ of the input. It would be nice to get the link to their actual announcement, not some presser that losses the resolution of what they actually accomplished.
Awesome! Now inertial confinement fusion is only 50 years away!
From the DOE link posted above:
“On December 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it.”
2.05 MJ input
3.15 MJ output
They succeeded. Now time to commercial construction is probably at least 10 years away.
But … they succeeded.
How long were they able to produce this power? Wasn’t it on for only a few seconds?
We are a lot further away then 10 years from a fusion power plant.
Rob … you could be right about the time it will take for a commercial plant. Yet, this was a ‘first’, so let’s see how much progress comes after this hurdle.
Exciting times! I’m glad you are widening your scope, as finding you in 2015 completely changed the way I thought about climate change. I’m sure reaching more people would have similar effecfs
Dr. Curry, I really enjoyed the determined, enthusiastic tone in your post. Your reasoned voice is exactly what’s needed to broaden what has been myopic, politically channeled discourse about climate, and energy within most of the broader media.
Relative to your personal interest moving in the direction of energy you might find this article posted yesterday about Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s fusion breakthrough interesting: https://news.blackchronicle.com/us-scientists-boost-clean-power-hopes-with-fusion-energy-breakthrough/
Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has also been making significant progress towards the realization of fusion, here’s a fascinating video: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exotic-fusion-reactor-program-moves-forward-with-larger-more-powerful-design
The pedigree of success behind the science of these institutions makes it difficult to not take them seriously, Skunk Works in particular is seeing the imminent commercialization of fusion, their enthusiasm is engaging. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29074/skunk-works-exotic-fusion-reactor-program-moves-forward-with-larger-more-powerful-design
This is the video link I meant to post in the last link above. Skunk Works fusion technology, they’re a believer that it will happen sooner rather than later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=UlYClniDFkM&feature=emb_title
Looks like Elon’s Jet likes some privacy:
https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/the-elon-musk-jet-tracker-claims-hes-shadowbanned-on-twitter/
Funny. Cue shrieks of “See what the leftists do…um…Elon will save free…um…they’ve ALL got it in for us!” from the pseudo-skeptic glitterati and the adoring fans. Priceless.
Good on him.
Good on the plane or Elon? And for what? Wanting privacy?
JMurphy – it’s his plane and his business. I don’t blame him at all for getting rid of the nuisance. In this age of violent activists, it’s just good common sense to do so.
Elon disagrees with you:
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”
Until, of course, that account is shadowbanned and then un-shadowbanned when found out! Those lovers of freedom and free speech don’t like it when it applies to them, do they, especially when they get caught out playing the same games. Is free speech only acceptable when it means you can write crazy conspiracy theories about being hidden on search engines and then claim to be a fighter for freedom when it appears that you were visible all along, just not important enough to be near the top of search results?
Finding inconsistent practices by anyone is easy pickings. Each case is unique and depending on the specifics, one principle may override another in one case, while not in a second case.
Weak tea, JMurphy. You, Williard, and Appel revel in these sorts of banalities. At the end of the day, they are meaningless swats at the climate ball.
If I were Elon, I would just ban this id-eee-ot flat out, and announce it to the world.
Don’t be such a snowflake, JM.
Let the Realest Man (or the second Realest one, Bernard Arnault now being on top) manhandle all the things at the same time:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9344194/musks-twitter-trust-safety-council/
Good for him!
The Trust and Safety Council was nothing more than the Ban Conservatives Wherever Possible Committee. The Chinese would have been very proud to have such a tool.
[JIM] Good for him. It’s his plane and his business.
[ALSO JIM] The Chinese would have been proud of such a tool.
Never change, Jim.
jim2 wrote: “If I were Elon, I would just ban this id-eee-ot flat out, and announce it to the world.”
So, does this only apply to Elon or also to any wealthy person who owns a company or country (think Saudi Arabia)? They can ban who they wish to (because they can) but the freedom to know/of speech must apply to everyone else/ordinary people (because they don’t own their own company/country)?
Seems that some people don’t want to learn from history or deliberately want to take us backwards!
Who was it who said that China would be proud to have such a tool?
JMurphy – if the guy is putting Musk in danger by tweeting the jet’s location, Musk should kick him off. The id-eee-ot in question can still say whatever he wants, just not on Twitter. Just like they kick off child porn slugs, violent terrorists, violent anyone, there will always be exceptions. Self-preservation ranks high on my list and can result in may exceptions.
Well, Jim, I am glad that you agree with Twitter’s decision to ban teh Donald.
‘Twas their business and a matter of security, right?
Willard, how could jim2 agree with that decision against the Donald. Don’t you know that right-wing firebrands are freedom fighters (especially when they are literally telling people to fight against a democratic vote) but little people who want to reveal all about the air habits of rich people and/or tyrants are threats to safety. You know, they might allow an anti-freedom freedom fighter (i.e. Someone who is not rich or doesn’t own their own business/country) to, um, somehow threaten the safety and relaxing-without-a-care-in-the-world business (while fighting for freedom) of a self-concerned rich/dictator person. Come on, open your eyes to the troof! (Or go to Tumbler or Truth Social for help in finding it under those liberal rocks).
JM,
I heard you speak of freedom fighters. You might like:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2017/05/13/freedom-fighters/
Jim is a dedicated Freedom Fighters. Freedom comes first. Consistency comes second.
Never ever let Freedom be constrained by your moral principles, OK?
OMG JMurphy. Trump wasn’t a danger to anyone. The FBI lead a raid on the Capitol and some actual Trump supporters joined in. Trump certainly wasn’t there and didn’t tell them to do it. You are so typical of the disingenuous left. You have a PhD in FUD.
Wait, Jim.
The guy who tweets about Elon’s jet would need to be next to it to be dangerous?
I have seen better special pleading in my ninja career. Including from you.
Yes, Trump was not leading the charge, Williard. Give an example of a press conference, phone call, or speech where he told people to storm the Capitol. You can’t because he didn’t. And don’t cherry pick and isolate one sentence or some other non-sense for which you are infamous.
When it comes to decision making; a vigilant, flexible, adaptive approach is superior even if it leads to what you appear to consider a bugbear: inconsistency.
A rigid algorithmic approach is dangerous. See Long Term Capital as an example. But I think it is obvious to many people, probably even you. It’s just not convenient for your political manipulations.
Getting funnier now! Not wishing to go deep into Godwin’s Law but I hear there are also strange people who say that man Hitler never mentioned doing any harm to a certain religious grouping (yeh, go on, show the actual words, huh. You can’t so he’s innocent, ok) so he didn’t do it and certainly didn’t want or encourage his fan boys to do any such thing either. Jim2 logic: innocent.
Lots of words there JMurhpy, but no content. So you can’t find anywhere Trump told anyone to bust into the Capitol? Told you so.
Yes, jim2, innocent like that German dictator!
And now he’s banned/suspended journalists. Was it William Wallace, Donald Trump or Elon Musk who proclaimed “Freedom”? (Hint: not trump or musk – they only want the freedom to ban who they don’t like…)
FREEDOM! (to post rightwing conspiracies and complaints about liberals)
Unlike Wallace, Trump did not lead a rebellion. On Jan. 6, it appears the FBI led it – there’s more than enough evidence for that.
Trump merely spoke the truth as he saw it. It is not criminal to allege the 2020 election was rigged. He had every right to say it. If some of his supporters, led by the FBI, walked into the Capitol, some with the aid of Capitol police, it isn’t his fault. He should not be expected to remain silent due to the FBI and a few crazies. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
Freedoms have a price.
Guys the proof on this is quite conclusive and is in the Twitter files. Internally, everyone at Twitter said Trump didn’t violate their rules but he was banned anyway.
Try this, Jim:
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension
Otherwise search for One Single Proof, a classic trope from your kindred spirits. You might also like:
https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-technology-business-dac21de7abb6167bb604f5317aeda10a
Got to love the smell of freedom in the morning.
Williard, whining doesn’t become you. So, Musk runs the company. I seriously doubt you can find any utterance by him saying free speech on Twitter is an absolute. In fact, you can find many instances where he has made rules about no violent speech, no child molesters, etc. So, we already knew he wasn’t a proponent of ABSOLUTE free speech.
He has implemented another rule, a very level headed one IMO. No doxxing.
I doubt you would want to be doxxed and then possibly swatted. To me, this appears to be a rule that all Twitter users should appreciate.
Earlier in the evening, Musk’s network threw reporters from CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times, among others, into a seven-day suspension for allegedly disclosing the location of his private jet.
…
Musk dropped in on the session as well, after it accumulated thousands of listeners, to say tersely that anyone who doxxes — gives personal location information about another person — will be suspended. The journalists countered that they had not posted any real-time flight data, as he alleged, but by then the billionaire had quit the call. The dialogue drew more than 40,000 listeners at its peak.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-16/musk-disables-twitter-spaces-after-clash-with-journalists
Maybe I’m just dense, but don’t see the climate connection.
Geowhizz, Musk is one of those elite persons who use their private jets a lot and don’t like to be reminded about how damaging that is to the environment. Also, patriotic freedom fighters for liberty (while not suggesting that anyone actually does any physical fighting, of course – that would not be cool and you can’t prove they wish that anyway; they’re only words and, anyway, they didn’t say it in those exact words, i.e. Fight like hell (*whisper : don’t fight really *) – usually like to criticise the elites who use their private planes. It’s OK for musk to do it, though. But you’re not allowed to know about that and you’ll be suspended from twitter if you mention his private jet.
dpy6629, um no, everybody at twitter was not saying that.
Latest twitter files dump shows extensive collaboration between the FBI and DNI to censor and control speech and interfere in an election. It is settled case law that the government officials were violating the law. And it shows that Twitter was really essentially state run media, just as in many totalitarian regimes.
Jay Battacharia had an excellent interview about his banning by Twitter. He is quite upset that the public was denied a robust debate about covid science and policy. We now know that public health officials and many scientists lied to us. They claimed that vaccination would prevent spreading covid. They claimed that masks work when all the evidence shows at the most a very weak effect and the existence of side effects. They lied about the side effect profile for young healthy people of the vaccine vs. the very very small risk from covid. There was also a flood of zombie studies and fraudulent papers. This I think puts the last nail in the coffin of public confidence in “the science.” There is no such thing. Science is a process and in viral epidemiology, uncertainty is usually higher than the signal.
But climate science pioneered this censoring and smearing strategy. It is done by corrupt NGO’s and often anonymous online mobs of activists who are usually totally ignorant of the science. It is not surprising then that that template is now going to be pulled out by “scientists” in almost every important public dispute about policy.
No amnesty, accountability is needed.
JMurphy, Have you read any of the reporting on the Twitter files? Taibbi is a fellow leftist so you should find him credible. The Times is lying about the contents of this reporting too as Taibbi himself has pointed out often.
gmurphy should like Matt Taibbi as he is a fellow leftist, albeit an honest one which may distrurb our local anonymous activists. His latest post is titled: “From the Twitter Files: Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary.” Turns out Twitter was serving as essentially a state run media outlet, colluding to interfere in an election. This is actually worse than the corruption in the Gilded Age, because at least then there were tens of thousands of newspapers with a variety of editorial positions.
> Twitter was serving as essentially a state run media outlet,
Not that these issues shouldn’t be interrogated; they should be.
But equating 150 emails over 3 years to “essentially state run media outlet” may be just a tad hyperbolic.
Just a tad.
Here’s a recent Greenwald post. Another leftie but an honest one.
“The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments.”
Let me ask you Joshie, does the bother you at all, or are you comfortable with a Chinese style social credit system?
I read that there were weekly meetings between FBI and DNI officials. That’s more often than my CFD team meets. In the spirit of Joshie’s persona, I’ll ask him to find the source. Certainly collusion to interfere in an election is quite accurate. It’s also illegal.
From Taibbi’s piece today.
“After countless fits and starts, and enough plot twists to fill a dozen pulp novels, I’m finally comfortable enough reading the documents to see the outlines of the animal I came to hunt. Every day, the Twitter Files reveal more about how the machinery of state censorship works. We learn more and more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags social media content in a neverending, cyclical process. The state isn’t a bit actor in a mostly-private “content moderation” movement. It’s the central player, clearly the boss of the whole operation, and clearly also the driving force in its expansion, a truth we can show in pictures.”
This is something most Americans don’t want and it is unconstitutional.
I’ve known people that were the target of FBI surveillance for years because of their open advocacy for their political beliefs. I’m not going to sneer at delving into whether or when this type of FBI activity is or isn’t defensible.
But you left out another part of Matt’s tweets:
Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
That’s right. 150 emails over 3 years, that you pearl-clutch your way into equating to “state-run media.” Your kind of hyperbole is perhaps the worst way to deal with these issues, because it’s reducing real issues to leveraging cheap political point-scoring. It’s hard to get into the meat of these discussions when people are fanning themselves on their fainting couches.
Matt’s “reporting” on this borders on self-parody and leads people to equate questionable FBI activity with “state run media outlet” because apparently they can’t tell the difference between questionable activity and “state run media outlets.”
But I hold him responsible, not the drama-queens for doing what drama-queens do.
Matt has unquestionably been a Musk-run media outlet during all of this, publishing a curated trove of information surrounded by melodramatic window dressing. It was made clear at the beginning, when he forgot to mention that the information “handled” at the Biden team’s request were pictures of Hunter’s junk. But it’s not surprising, as Matt’s been a huckster since his days back when he was in Russia harassing female reporters in essentially tabloid publications. It’s hard to blame the marks when someone so experienced in grifting is involved.
150 emails, but what other communications channels were there? We probably haven’t discovered all of them yet.
The FBI alerted Twitter in weekly meetings ahead of the 2020 presidential election to anticipate “hack-and-leak operations” related to Hunter Biden by foreign state actors, providing the company a pretext to immediately bury the New York Post‘s laptop bombshell when it broke just weeks ahead of the election.
Organized by FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, as many as seven D.C.-based FBI agents held weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook executives during the 2020 race, Chan testified in an ongoing lawsuit, the Post’s Miranda Devine reported. The lawsuit, launched by Republican attorney generals of Missouri and Louisiana, alleges that the White House and federal agencies colluded with tech companies to censor speech along ideological lines on social-media platforms.
https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-held-weekly-meetings-twitter-134909110.html
Your long and almost content free comment, Joshie, illustrates the fact that most lefties are quite viscous to Taibbi and his recent work because he is an honest lefty.
Matt has spent vastly more time looking at the source materials than you have, so he is vastly more credible than you are Joshie.
I read that there were weekly meetings between Twitter and FBI and DNI officials.
I’m a little bit surprised that you are acting as an apologist for this kind of unprecedented spying on and censoring of Americans at the behest of the FBI. Or maybe its just that your typical persona is purely reactive. Whatever Nic or Judith or I say, you cavil and quibble.
It will be interesting to see what else comes out.
I think there’s certainly room to have a discussion about what is or isn’t legitimate engagement between government and social media platforms. I hope that what we saw happening between Fox News and the Trump administration could be a part of that discussion, but for any reasonable discussion to take place people would have to stop trying to leverage the whole thing for political expediency and I don’t see that happening anywhere.
The drama-queening in both sides won’t get the job done
As much as I have criticism of Bari Weiss for the quality of her participation in this dog and pony show, I’ll give her credit for at least not being totally hypocritical in all respects.
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1603788344470556674?t=M8r9RmpuhR3M6JC5JA0I2g&s=19
You saw Jim what Joshua did. He quoted out of context 1 item and them minimized it, ignoring the wealth of information about how widespread the coordination. He then attacks people who are concerned and then says “its a both sides issue.” This is simply not true and is a really dispicable way to justify illegal collusion.
And of course, Taibbi has spent vastly more time on this than Joshua and therefore his opinion is vastly more credible. Does anyone care what an anonymous internet persona says about Taibbi and the quality of his reporting? I don’t think so.
David’s hero:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html
A real champion for free speech, this one is:
The controversy still rankles Taibbi. “I wrote some absolutely disgustingly offensive stuff, but particularly in my case this was almost 100 percent a pose, as I’m kind of a recluse and wallflower in my private life,” he said. “The drug aspect was real, but a lot of the rest of it was done for effect, to be deliberately offensive, because the conceit of The eXile was that it was the unvarnished tourist guide for the plundering Ugly American — if conquistadors wrote Time Out, for instance.”
Back when Taibbi was interviewed for the Vanity Fair piece on The eXile, he grew so enraged with the journalist, James Verini — Verini called Taibbi and Ames’s eXile book “redundant” and “discursive” — that he cursed Verini out and threw coffee in his face.
Taibbi’s a real peach:
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/02/exile-201002
Just goes to show, there are vile grifters like Taibbi on “the left” just as there are on “the right” and suckers who fall for their gifts all across the political spectrum.
Classic ad homonym Joshie! How about the substance? You tried to minimize collusion to interfere in an election. I thought that was tantamount to being anti-democracy
At any rate, what’s important isn’t really whether Taibbi’s a grifters or a total dick, what matters is that he’s not actually reporting here, hes curating a message at the behest of Musk.
He’s using Twitter to push an agenda, just like the problem he’s putatively “reporting” on. Again, the perfect example, although there were many, was when he left out obviously important context when he Tweeted about material being “handled” at the request of the Biden team. The only viable explanation for why he left out thst context was that he was spinning narrative.
Its amusing to see how perfectly Taibbi is exposing the faux concernabout media bias from people whose concern is actually entirely selective and nothing other than an excuse to push their ideological agenda.
It’s certainly not a shock to see some “skeptics” fall right in line.
What will be interesting is to see if there are any “skeptics” with enough conviction in skepticism (without quotes) to push back.
Maybe Frank might. Hard to imagine any others will. Let’s ass what happens.
Where is the proof that Taibbi is curating a message on behalf of Musk? I must have missed that part.
I also haven’t found any inkling that the Trust and Safety Council of Twitter had a list of transparent rules and procedures used to determine who gets banned. From what I’ve read, they just discussed among themselves then pulled the trigger.
Joshua, this is fallaciously attacking the person. So far it appears as if Taibbi’s conclusions are very carefully sourced. You should stop smearing people who find collusion by our own law enforcement to influence an election a huge scandal. You also haven’t responded on the fact that its clearly illegal. Why only 4 years ago Russian collusion (even though it didn’t make much difference) was an impeachable offense and the worst sign of authoritarianism. Why can’t you just admit that without lashing out at what is clearly the truth? Could it be that you are extremely biased and actually don’t mind too much what happened?
Jim is right that your Musk smear is just totally unsourced and you have no evidence which is usually the case.
This is not a both sides issue despite your emotional attempt to deflect from the facts.
I miss Hunter Tompson. These new kids are just egotistic arsonist. At least I don’t think Musk is paying Taibbi so I’ll remain neutral until I see a billionaire go to jail for their crimes.
> Where is the proof that Taibbi is curating a message on behalf of Musk?
I already described, twice, what I think is the most obvious example. An actual reporter, as opposed to a message curator, wouldn’t have left out the critical context as to what was “handled” in response to the Biden team’s request. If you can’t see that, then there’s no point in any further elaboration.
And of course, it’s prolly just coincidence that all of the “Twitter Files” messaging curators are strong advocates for a particular agenda.
If you think it’s just a agenda-free, free speech agenda, then you might look at Musk’s long history on “free speech” in China, and elsewhere with regard to his critics.
It’s always amusing to see self-styled “skeptics” be so credulous when it fits their ideological orientation. Unlike all other politicians, Trump isn’t pursuing his own self-interest, he’s just fighting to make America great again. Unlike all other corporatists, Musk isn’t curating messages in his own self-interest, he’s must crusading for “free speech.”. Unlike all other members of the media, Taibbi isn’t trolling for substack subscribers or advancing his ideological agenda, he’s trying to advance truth to power.
See – this is why I love you boyz.
> Where is the proof that Taibbi is curating a message on behalf of Musk?
I already described, twice, what I think is the most obvious example. An actual reporter, as opposed to a message curator, wouldn’t have left out the critical context as to what was “handled” in response to the Biden team’s request. If you can’t see that, then there’s no point in any further elaboration.
And of course, it’s prolly just coincidence that all of the “Twitter Files” messaging curators are strong advocates for a particular agenda.
If you think it’s just a agenda-free, free speech agenda, then you might look at Musk’s long history on “free speech” in China, and elsewhere with regard to his critics.
It’s always amusing to see self-styled “skeptics” be so credulous when it fits their ideological orientation. Unlike all other politicians, Trump isn’t pursuing his own self-interest, he’s just fighting to make America great again. Unlike all other corporatists, Musk isn’t curating messages in his own self-interest, he’s must crusading for “free speech.”. Unlike all other members of the media, Taibbi isn’t trolling for substack subscribers or advancing his ideological agenda, he’s trying to advance truth to power.
See – this is why I love you boyz.
If you think it’s just a agenda-free, free speech agenda, then you might look at Musk’s long history on “free speech” in China, and elsewhere with regard to his critics.
It’s always amusing to see self-styled “skeptics” be so credulous when it fits their ideological orientation. Unlike all other politicians, Trump isn’t pursuing his own self-interest, he’s just fighting to make America great again. Unlike all other corporatists, Musk isn’t curating messages in his own self-interest, he’s must crusading for “free speech.”. Unlike all other members of the media, Taibbi isn’t fishing for substack subscribers or advancing his ideological agenda, he’s trying to advance truth to power.
See – this is why I love you boyz.
> whine doesn’t become you
Alright, Jim. Let me raise you:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/01/12/the-big-cancel/
You made interesting comments in that thread. Want me to recall a few? Dare to continue licking jackboots.
Meanwhile, spare a thought for a journalist without a livelihood for having tweeted non-threatening information:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/twitter-bans-freelance-journalist-1.6689156
Lest anyone think that Bari is doing journalism rather than serving as a court scribe.
This isn’t reporting:
“What’s surprising is how thoroughly Twitter misled the public, insisting that they didn’t suppress disfavored users and topics when they absolutely did,”
No. The people at Twitter absolutely explicitly acknowledged doing “visibility filtering” – which is what Bari described.
What’s arguable is whether or not they did “censoring” or “shadowbanning” – which they denied doing. Both are arguable.
Like I don’t think that Judith is doing “censoring” when she deletes one of my comments I don’t think “censoring” describes what Twitter did. If you think Judith “censors” me when she deletes them my comments, then I guess you could day that Twitter “censored.”. Tiweter censors and Judith censors.
As for shadowbanning….when Twitter people testified before Congress they explained their definition of shadowbanning – effectively banning people without them knowing it (the logical definition given the “ban” part), as distinguished from the ‘visibility filtering” tyoe stuff they explicitly acknowledged doing.
So not only was Bari curating a narrative, it’s ridiculous that she called finding out that they did’ “visibility filtering” surprising since they acknowledged doing so.
The “surprising” part looks like disingenuity on top of curated messaging, under a veil of “journalism.”
J and W
I can’t think of anything more traumatic or unsettling for leftwing extremists than being suspended from Twitter. It must be some of their darkest days. But for those who have lapsed into a catatonic state from anxiety and have curled up into a permanent fetal position, they should know they have not been been forgotten. Special accommodations like this might soothe their pain.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkJZpgfXEAE4J2e?format=jpg&name=small
I really enjoy how some of you like to substitute “banned” for “suspended.” I don’t have time to fact check everything you libs say, but when I do, I frequently find this sort of misrepresentation. A suspension is temporary. I am, however, liking how Musk is making your heads explode.
Joshua is lapsing into his pattern of very repetitions, long winded, and essentially content free proof by insinuation comments. It’s mostly smears of Weiss and Taibbi, by painting them as ideologically motivated. That’s all irrelevant and fallacious anyway. The issue is whether what they are saying is actually true and Joshie has absolutely nothing of substance on this issue.
I really like how Jim changed his tune since a year ago:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/01/12/the-big-cancel/#comment-941215
Soon he will do his Snoopy dance for his favorite Apartheid tycoons’ heir.
And there I thought it was shadowbanned that people were talking about when all along people were talking about shadowsuspended.
Just to be clear, I think that Bari and Matt have perfect right to do issue advocacy and curate the information from Twitter to push Musk’s agenda.
Just as “skeptics” have perfect right to be as credulous as they want. I know that defending a daddy figure is kind of a thing around here.
But maybe people should take time to think about the difference between journalism and issue advocacy even when they like the issue advocacy.
Matt Taibbi has responded to the narrative motivated attacks on him which Joshie is echoing here. It’s a diversion from discussing a very real scandal about government law enforcement data collection and interference in elections.
“Elon Musk has been candid and straight with me, and there are a lot of things about him I definitely like, but he doesn’t need my endorsement and neither should anyone else. If we had a real press corps, its minions certainly wouldn’t be calling me about him or Bari Weiss at this moment. They would be calling about the FBI, DHS, ODNI and other such over-empowered entities, whose secrets are only just starting to bleed out. They’re the story, everything else is a head fake, and people like Mehdi know it.”
Journalism, and twitter, lol. Might want to throw in “fact check” there, J-gas.
The quaint notion of shadow suspension aside, at least your inadequacy for twit speak atmospheric gravitas is amusing, J-gas
Trunks and scatology? Who woulda thunk it?
The pedigree of your aromatic waft proceeds all your political inculcations, J-gas, it’s nothing personal; it frames itself in the same way a gerbil, or bunny is cute.
Another aspect of this that Greenwald and Taibbi have reported extensively is that it’s not just Twitter. Many corporate media outlets have become arms of the deep state to censor and propagate narratives. This really got into high gear in 2016 with the Russian collusion lie and reached a very high level during the pandemic when the CDC got into the act. Part of this elite collution strategy is digging up dirt to discredit the messengers exposing it to deflect from the alarming nature of this collusion. And then they have tools like Joshie who spread the smears. Given Joshie’s history of distraction and misrepresentations, this latest is no surprise.
Here’s Turley on the media and the FBI/Twitter scandal. Joshie is in this thread acting as their mouthpiece attempting to smear those who are telling the truth.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/12/16/turley_self-loathing_media_embrace_being_censorship_apologists_while_pretending_to_believe_in_free_speech.html
Greenwald exposing the media smear of Matt Taibbi and mouthed with real feeling here by Joshie.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1599058977198731264
In the unlikely event that there migh be some skeptical “skeptics” running zbiut – gis is a pretty even-handed article:
https://www.thebulwark.com/do-the-twitterfiles-matter-or-are-they-a-nothingburger/
For those who think they know what was the net effect of Twitter’s algorithm:
https://t.co/whSgxNTZ7e
For those who think that Bari wasn’t curating messages just like Matt:
https://t.co/nsJEzpItWG
The Bulwark essay Joshie is a deep dive into the weeds while ignoring the giant alligator. This writer is ignoring the bannings of anyone who questioned the Covid dogma propagated by the CDC. There are at least a half dozen prominent ones. Oh and the banning of the New York Post for reporting a true scandal right before the election. Twitter propagated instead the lie that the Hunter Laptop story “had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation,” a lie designed to further the political purposes of the authors. We now know that this censorship affected to outcome of the election. Your Bulwark author, in a clear case of strong bias, failed to mention it.
The vaccine issue was indeed an example of journalist malpractice and Twitter’s suppression of debate on this is shameful and cost lives.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
These things are all assaults on truth and free speech. That’s a huge scandal.
The idiotic study of the algorithmic boosting of tweets is not the issue either. Just for starters, its not valid to lump US right wingers with those in Europe or Canada. You are focusing on a largely irrelevant issue. The issue is interfering in an election and denying the public an informed debate on covid. It is illegal for the Feds to collude with private actors to do what the Feds cannot do.
Listen to Greenwald’s Rumble video on the media’s deep corruption. Of course you won’t because you like diving into the weeds to find any quibble or insignificant cavil and to excuse how corrupt the media and the science establishment have become.
And of course, you double down on your personal smears of Taibbi and Weiss. It proves nothing and shows you to be quite small-minded and petty.
Why did I know Joshie would dredge up some material that is largely irrelevant to the most important facts here but allows him to muddy the waters and act as a shill for mainstream media narratives.
The Bulwark essay is a master class in deflection and diving into the weeds to obscure the giant alligator. She doesn’t mention the Hunter laptop, the worst kind of election interference perhaps done in collusion with the FBI. Twitter then went with the lie that it had “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation” from a bunch of professional liars from the security state as Greenwald calls it.
Then there were the bannings of anyone who questioned the CDC covid dogma. Jay Battacharia was just one of many. They denied the public an honest debate of covid response when the “state media” sponsored policies were harming people. Childhood vaccination is a very obvious example.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
This was all deeply political.
Your study on the algorithms to boost things is largely meaningless. It is wrong to lump in American conservatives with European or Canadian conservatives. In any case, its a deflection from the main issue, which is actions people at Twitter took to censor content at the direction of government actors or former intelligence officials who were lying.
I know you won’t do it because you are very biased, but you should listen to the Greenwald Rumble video I cited near the end of this comment section. It reveals a media that is very corrupt and is lying to us using fraudulent titles such as “fact checker” and “disinformation expert.”
And you should stop doubling down on attacking the reporters who are bringing this out. It is childish and means little but does show your biases.
> For those who laughably pretend Musk is a champion of fee speech:
> Elon Musk’s Twitter Suspends Reporter Who Has Investigated Him for Years
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-suspends-insiders-linette-lopez-another-reporter-who-pissed-him-off
For those who laughably think Musk is a champion of free speech:
https://twitter.com/robertwrighter/status/1604610590219149312?t=wjuayGGKaRukBGajh2dAQw&s=19
Hilarious that self-described “skeptics” are credulous enough to fall hook, line, and sinker for this obvious com man’s gift.
> Musk blamed a Twitter account for an alleged stalker. Police see no link.
Twitter owner Elon Musk threatened legal action, changed the platform’s rules and suspended journalists’ accounts after a confrontation involving his security team at a gas station. But the incident’s timing and location cast doubt on a link to the @ElonJet account.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/details-of-musk-stalking-incident/
Joshie, you are distracting from the main point with irrelevancies such as the algorithms for boosting.
The Bulwark essay is a master class in deflection and diving into the weeds to obscure the giant alligator. She doesn’t mention the Hunter laptop, the worst kind of election interference perhaps done in collusion with the FBI. Twitter then went with the lie that it had “all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation” from a bunch of professional dissemblers from the security state as Greenwald calls it. This was all very partisan.
Then there were the banings of anyone who questioned the CDC covid dogma. Jay Battacharia was just one of many. They denied the public an honest debate of covid response when the “state media” sponsored policies were harming people. Childhood vaccination is a very obvious example.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
This was all deeply political.
Your study on the algorithms to boost things is largely meaningless. It is wrong to lump in American conservatives with European or Canadian conservatives. In any case, its a deflection from the main issue, which is actions people at Twitter took to censor content at the direction of government actors or former intelligence officials who were lying.
I don’t understand why you think that minor issues will help your attempt to cast doubt on how important this is. Merchants of doubt stuff again?
Lorenz is a partisan hack who misrepresents everything and then cries about it when caught. She tries to contact minors to find dirt on their parents. She’s scum.
Musk is more an advocate for free speech than you are Joshie, and a vast improvement over past management. Why do you think pointing to minor things Musk’s detractors say is important? It is not important and makes you look like you are just muddying the waters.
You knew this was coming…
https://youtu.be/YHtSUcw4q4M
Sorry wrong link:
https://www.captiongenerator.com/v/2284647/elon-reacts-to-twitter-implosion
Interesting article from Glenn on Bari’s integrity, and viewpoint diversity.
https://theintercept.com/2017/08/31/nyts-newest-op-ed-hire-bari-weiss-embodies-its-worst-failings-and-its-lack-of-viewpoint-diversity/
Perhaps the most interesting part is how Glemm decribes Bari’s target as marginalized lefties.
Joshie, Why do you keep doing the smearing people thing and deflecting from the main point? There was collusion with the FBI to interfere in an election. There was total suppression of any dissent from CDC dogma on Covid that harmed the country. That’s a big deal.
Josh – where is your analysis of counter-factuals, context, and general fact checking of the Bari Weiss hit piece?
Yes, I was thinking just the other day that covering up the real time location of a billionaire’s jet was every bit as important as covering up government corruption at the highest levels. Good find!
Most welcome. You might also like:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-suspends-mastodon-twitter-account-over-elonjet-tracking/
Thanks for playing dumb, Steven!
Is that link in some way supposed to change my opinion on the equivalency between the issues and if so, how would it do that?
Not sure why I should care about your mind states, Steven.
Even your misdirection is of little concern to me.
Have more Elon News:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9289080/twitter-hq-projected-insults-elon-musk/
I rather like *Space Karen* as it seems to seek to neutralize the term’s gender.
Not sure why I should care for your mind states, Steven. Even your misdirection is of little concern to me. Have more Elon News:
https://globalnews.ca/news/9289080/twitter-hq-projected-insults-elon-musk/
I rather like *Space Karen*. Captures his persona quite well, and it seeks to neutralize the gender.
Misdirection? Is that similar to misinformation? There is no equivalency. That’s what you stating misdirection means, correct? Now that we know you want to argue snowflakes while the rest of us are concerned about avalanches it puts things in perspective.
Steven, see my last comment above. Taibbi has responded to the misdirection and personal attacks online. It is quite compelling.
“Elon Musk has been candid and straight with me, and there are a lot of things about him I definitely like, but he doesn’t need my endorsement and neither should anyone else. If we had a real press corps, its minions certainly wouldn’t be calling me about him or Bari Weiss at this moment. They would be calling about the FBI, DHS, ODNI and other such over-empowered entities, whose secrets are only just starting to bleed out. They’re the story, everything else is a head fake, and people like Mehdi know it.”
Steven,
Yes, misdirection. I could also add misinformation for two reasons. First, you misrepresent the point I was making. Second, you feign being interested in something you failed to comment so far in this thread. Which is not that surprising, considering that your usual conspiracies are mostly irrelevant here.
Looks like there is a Subreddit you will appreciate:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElonJetTracker/
If you would like me to look back for all the times you cried about celebrities and other jet sets, please respond to this comment.
“ The White House issued a dire warning this week, reminding the nation that Elon’s continued ownership of Twitter means they now only control 97% of the media.
“We can’t overstate how dangerous this is,” said Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “Yes, we still control Facebook, Google, Apple, Instagram, YouTube, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Hollywood, TIME, USAToday, The Wall Street Journal, and pretty much all the rest, but we don’t control Twitter. This is dangerous to democracy.”
The entire intelligence community at the CIA, FBI, and NSA concurred with the warning, stating that “Elon’s ownership of Twitter leaves America vulnerable to dangerous opinions we do not approve of.” Leaders with the agencies are recommending immediate investigations to bring down the Twitter CEO provided their planned drone strike doesn’t work first.
“Democracy is at stake,” said all the agency leaders in a shared statement in which they all recited the words simultaneously in a robotic monotone. “We must do something. Democracy is at stake.”
https://babylonbee.com/news/government-warns-that-with-elon-owning-twitter-they-will-only-control-97-of-the-media
Wrong link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElonJetTracker/comments/znsjeo/great_question_for_elon_musk_here/
Perhaps Denizens (go team!) could chime in and ask Elon to permaban Fox News?
Willard, that’s a good idea. Why don’t you do that and report back to me.
Willard, have you completed the search on my crying over celebrities yet? I’m interested in what you found.
Looks like Elon has some legal work ahead:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ElonJetTracker/
Let’s hope he will realize what *public information* means before wasting more of his money.
While President PuddinHead listens to the Climate Doomers, blocking oil and gas development in the US, Norway is expanding production.
Norway will add a new natural gas field in the Norwegian Sea from 2026 in a push to bolster supplies to continental Europe as the EU rushes to replace Russian flows.
Equinor ASA will lead the development of the Irpa gas discovery in the northern reaches of the Norwegian Sea to unlock an estimated 20 billion standard cubic meters of recoverable reserves, Norway’s Petroleum and Energy Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. Investments will total 14.8 billion kroner ($1.4 billion), with production planned for the fourth quarter of 2026.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-22/norway-to-develop-new-gas-find-in-bid-to-keep-up-european-flows
FYI there is a problem with WordPress today. can’t access to release posts caught in moderation, can change any settings, etc. Seems like new comments are coming through, which is good
problem fixed. I’ve had to hire a company to keep my blog “clean” and uncorrupted. What is astonishing is that I’ve managed to run this blog without any problems for the last 12 years, without having a clue as to what I am doing
Deleting posts without deleting the subposts can never be a good thing, but one which you have done on numerous occasions (I realize you have your reasons). WordPress does seem to mostly do the correct thing and allocate the orphans to the next higher message in the chain, but each version could deal with the issue slightly differently, and it is likely to cause problems (not to mention confusion to the readers). Hiring someone to read through the HTML and look for issues is a very good idea.
There have been issues in the past, you might not have noticed them, but I have several times. For instance, the last entry should always be at the bottom. In the past, many times this has not been the case. Several people have complained about notifications not working, etc. These are signs of a problematic site, which may still work ok due to the forgiving nature of HTML code, but are all indications of corruption.
WordPress is used by a large number of people, and so the code has been pretty well tested, and is therefore inherently stable, so it doesn’t surprise me that you have had a successful site for 12 years. It does have its moments, though.
Has it only been that long? I have been a fan since the heretic days, thought it was longer than that, but time flies when your having fun. Now you are a wicked heretic, so congratulations!
Climate Doomers are sending Germany to the junk heap.
Major German steel plant threatened with closure due to green energies transition…
German site pleiteticker.de here reports on one of the latest victim’s of the green energy’s debacle in Germany as the fourth-largest steel producer is now seriously threatened with closure.
Much of Germany’s industrial bas been hard hit by the skyrocketing energy prices that have resulted from the country’s move to green energies, like sun and wind, and away from nuclear power and fossil fuels.
“3100 jobs are now in acute danger, reports opleiteticker.de. “The planned conversion to climate-neutral steel production at Hüttenwerke Krupp Mannesmann (HKM) in Duisburg is in danger of failing due to financing, according to IG Metall. IG Metall is Germany’s powerful industrial and engineering trade union, representing more than 2 million workers nationwide.
“That would be the end of Germany’s second-largest steel mill,” the IG Metall reported Thursday in Frankfurt am Main.
Pleiteticker calls the recent development “a brewing tragedy”.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/11/germanys-krupp-mannesmann-steel-mill-in-danger-of-failing-due-to-financing-green-energy-costs/
Noah Rettberg is the very popular Decouple podcast’s second most popular guest. He’s very versed in technical minutia. It’s hard to believe he’s only in his early twenties. He has a very dire assessment of Germany’s situation:
It’s the Morgenthau plan risen from the post WWII hate Germany faction. The relentless German haters.
The cryptoscience of Global Warming Catastrophism has driven reason out of Western academia.
More on the damage caused by the Climate Doomers.
The problem is, energy markets are so tight that only a few degrees Celsius, or a few windless days, are what separate Europe facing blackouts from having enough power to make it through the winter. And although gas has been emblematic of the energy crisis since Russia cut supplies, I remain more worried about electricity.
There’s still a significant risk that consumers will be asked to reduce demand. Localized blackouts remain a strong possibility, particularly for France, Finland, Ireland and Sweden. In its winter outlook, released last week, the association of the European companies that manage the grid (ENTSO-E) said: “[The] situation this winter is critical but manageable.” That doesn’t sound like the worst is over.
Last week also offered a preview of how a crisis could develop in the coming months. Across Europe, the wind nearly stopped, forcing the grids to lean harder on gas-fired power stations and, in Germany, on coal. In the past, the French nuclear industry would have stepped up, exporting electricity to everyone. But France was importing lots of power as many of its reactors have been down for repairs, further tightening the market. As a result, electricity prices surged. In the Nordic region, the weekly average price surged to €318 per MWh, the third-highest weekly price ever.
Weekly average wholesale electricity prices have surged in the Nordic region above €300 per megawatt hour, the third highest level on record
With so little wind, Germany fired up its coal plants. At times last week it was producing 40% of its electricity from them, polluting as much as coal-hooked nations like India and South Africa. If nothing broke, it was because it wasn’t particularly cold.
From now on, the dreaded scenario is what energy professionals in Germany call a Dunkelflaute — literally meaning the dark doldrums, a period with little solar and wind electricity and high demand because of low temperatures. If a Dunkelflaute episode hits Europe — and some traders and meteorologists believe there’s a high chance of one this week or next — the region will be in trouble. The grid operators would likely ask consumers to cut their demand to avoid blackouts.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-12-05/the-worst-of-europe-s-energy-crisis-isn-t-over-electricity-blackouts-loom?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=221205&utm_campaign=author_19016770&leadSource=uverify%20wall
Your biztv interview was excellent!
BizNewsTV just did a great interview with John Christy.
Dr Curry,
Actually in all seriousness, you could probably ask Chat GPT to summarise a longer article you might want to post here. It will probably do the job well enough and you can tweak it afterwards. You could even include a link to your blog for a more in-depth discussion in your article.
Worth a thought?
I looked into ChatGPT for writing code. It’s code sux. Just sayin’. It writes code on the level of a beginner, with all the beginner mistakes, some of which are non-obvious. Having to talk to it to correct it is very slow compared to an experienced programmer writing high quality code using a keyboard.
It’s been massively upgraded. I have a friend that is getting it to write code for him in the music business. It’s amazing what’s able to do atm. But I think he is only asking it to write fairly simple code. I was thinking for summaries it ought to be able to manage it fairly well.
Jim2. Yes I know what is going on in China. A negligible percentage of the population has died. Their economy officially grew 6.8% in 2020, 3.9% in 2021, and 2.8% in the first three quarters of 2022. There have been some really severe restrictions before cases have been locally reduced to zero. I don’t know how “normal” things have gotten back to between the worst of the lockdowns, but we suffered from nearly a year of restrictions that never significantly shrank the pandemic.
The US has suffered a million deaths and the highest death rate among peers, but, for reasons I can’t understand, many think we tried too hard. Success is containing or ending a pandemic, not losing a 0.32% of your people. SAR1, MERS, and Ebola examples of success. China came close to that level of success and most of its outbreaks may have come from outside the country. Smallpox, polio, and numerous childhood diseases (thanks to mandatory vaccination) are other examples of success.
I’ve read about protests and some of the horror stories (in Shanghi, for example), but those suffering Chinese people probably wouldn’t want to have been living in an American nursing home either.
Everyone here seems to think the Chinese are going to love getting rid of their Zero-COVID policy. Let’s ask them in another two months when they have experienced the cost of not having Zero-COVID.
I certainly don’t think China has done a great job of handling COVID. South Korea and Taiwan did extremely well at constraining the pandemic until a vaccine was available and the less deadly omicron variant replaced earlier more deadly (per infection) variants. 85% had been vaccinated (vs 69% here), nearly everyone except children. Then they intentionally removed their restrictions, suffered an explosion of cases and peak death rates similar to our worst, but cumulatively 1/5th as many deaths overall.
Right, Franktoo. Net-zero was working so well they abandoned it. Yes, there will be deaths, but that is the cost of living. Freedom means a lot to everyone, even, maybe especially, those under the jack boot of Communism.
The number of Covid-positive dead arriving at Beijing’s funeral parlors and crematoriums is rising, according to media reports, despite China not reporting a fatality from the virus for two weeks.
…
Reuters reported funeral homes in Beijing being overwhelmed.
…
Still, China hasn’t recorded a death from Covid since Dec. 4, when two were lodged, that of an 84-year-old man in Sichuan province with underlying health conditions and another in Shandong province. The last official Covid fatality reported for Beijing — which was seeing thousands of cases a day even before China’s swift u-turn on Covid Zero — was recorded on Nov. 23: A woman, 87, authorities said had chronic heart disease.
…
It’s becoming increasingly hard to get a handle on the scale of China’s Covid onslaught, with the country last week halting reporting of asymptomatic cases, which typically made up the bulk of the infection tally. Even before that move, the dismantling of the country’s once ubiquitous PCR testing apparatus and increased used of rapid antigen kits meant official data was virtually meaningless.
…
When contacted Sunday, the NHC had no comment on the reports of Covid fatalities and stretched funeral parlors in Beijing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-18/reports-of-beijing-covid-deaths-fuel-speculation-china-covering-up-data
There has been a tendency for “authorities” to focus on single factor analysis with regard to Covid, as Frank is doing here. They seem to be unable to recognize that every policy response has both costs and benefits. One heavy cost has been to the mental health and education of young people particularly in the US blue areas. Keeping schools closed was always an anti-science position and like many covid responses from the “zero covid” zealots, it was scarcely rational. Masks is another area where the science shows pretty clearly at best a very small benefit. Yet everyone ignored the real costs and side effects of mask use.
Generally, it does appear that covid “deaths” are higher in countries and areas of the US where people already had health problems, such as obesity and diabetes. It shocked me when I found that 40% of the US adult population is obese. Another lie spread by our state run media was that healthy young people were at significant risk of death from covid. It was clear from the beginning that covid was killing mostly people who were already seriously ill or quite elderly.
For Frank, Another example of zero covid fanatics harming people.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
DPY: Twitter was run as a state media: An average of 35 Trump Tweets were sent without context or rebutting to almost 90 million Americans every day in the second half of 2020. About 100 per day during his first impeachment. And they were echoed by retweets, social media, Fox News and a dozen sites on the internet.
Here’s an introduction to our current corrupt media by Glenn Greenwald.
https://rumble.com/v1xbl8g-the-medias-deranged-hysteria-over-elon-musks-restoration-of-free-speech.html
Ron –
> The reason that you find so many highly intelligent people here with astonishingly skeptical views about the state of educational and scientific authority…
Consider, just for a minute, that the people here are not materially different than any group of highly identified advocates, and that they display the same patterns of cognitive biases as other groups do, generally. Consider that just because you agree with people, that doesn’t mean that they’d be relatively immune from motivated resoning, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, etc.
And consider that along with normal cognitive biases, it’s predictable that members of pretty much any ideologically aligned group would think that their own group a special case, and relatively free of biases when compared to members of out-groups.
Just a thought.
This is so lame Frank. You are cherry picking. Twitter interfered in the 2020 election by banning the New York Post and scrubbing anything about the Hunter laptop. It was all true. Twitter instead went with the “Russian disinformation” lie.
Twitter was also banning anyone who questioned the CDC covid dogma, most of which was a tissue of lies and half-truths. Jay Battacharia is the best example. Jay says that the public was denied an honest debate on covid responses that allowed bad policies to harm people.
Dr. Scott Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Your House, outlines in fine detail the failure in US Covid policy from start to finish. The one bright spot is that the states ultimately had a choice to ignore Dr. Birx’s in person recommendations to governors as Fauci put pressure on them through his media blitz. Ron DeSantis was the only governor to invite Dr. Atlas to present his policy of extreme protection of nursing homes and highly vulnerable while opening up the rest of society. I think there was a pole last November 3rd in which the people of Florida showed their appreciation of DeSantis’s policy, which was subject to two years of relentless attack by the legacy media.
And Florida has the 14th highest death rate out of all the US states, even higher than New York. How exactly did DeSantis benefit his State? Allow the rich and healthy to say “Up yours” to the poor and weak? He’ll make a great republican nomination for president (I hope).
At JMurphy
Florida is where old people retire to live out their last years.
Many are New Yorker’s who decided they did not want to spend their last years in New York.
Florida’s age-adjusted death rate for seniors is pretty good.
Remarkably, despite its elderly population and laissez-faire approach, Florida has only the 33rd highest age-adjusted COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 population (251) among the states. That puts it in the same ballpark as mandate heavy Illinois (ranked 32 with 255 deaths/100,000) and California (ranked 38; 234) and well below New York (ranked 7th highest; 334).
https://nypost.com/2022/02/23/without-mandates-or-lockdowns-florida-better-managed-covid-than-ny/
JMurphy failed to account for the high number of elderly retirees in Florida. (That’s right, they didn’t go to New York to retire – wonder why?)
All of this partisan politics by proxy, comparing COVID rates across states in facile ways as if it’s meaningingdul to do so, and as if the differences are easily attributable to the politicians in office, are symptomatic of how people will subvert science and legitimate analysis to score cheap points.
For example –
JMurphy failed to account for the high number of elderly retirees in Florida.
Age adjustment is a meaningful factor but jim “forgot” to adjust to account for the better baseline health status and SES among Florida retirees, or lower prevalence of living in multi generational households among Florida retirees, as compared to seniors in other states. Jim also “forgot” to mention that COVID death rates among young people in Florida were considerably higher then in some other states – which likely reflects those same factors related to SES and baseline health, given that the rates are higher among the young while lower among the elderly.
States can be quite diverse within their borders and aggregating stats within states, and then using them as units of comparison, are prolly pretty meaningless.
But if you’re going to try to compare one state to another to assess COVID policies, and you’re doing do for any reason other than scoring cheap pojnts, then ii should avoid simplistic analysis results even when they confirm your biases.
I do think Joshie is taking this too far. He sees bias and political beliefs under every rock. Comparisons are possible if carefully done. On the whole, the thing we do know is that covid mostly killed the really old or the really ill. Thus age adjustment is essential. One could adjust for obesity rates too since that’s a pretty good proxy for fitness and the most widespread risk factors like diabetes. So jmurphy is clearly wrong and jim2 is a lot closer to being right. Mississippi’s high covid mortality is probably due to their very high obesity rate.
Florida and New York have almost identical obesity rates, so comparing them is probably justified. The conclusion is that strong mitigation measures didn’t make a big difference.
It is also true that there was never any real scientific evidence to support most of the mitigations, especially shutdowns which are unprecedented in American history, even during wartime.
We know that the vast majority of people have antibodies to covid and I doubt if that varies much state to state. In short, trying to “stop” the virus as many many anti-science scientists and politicians tried to do was always an impossible task. But hey it was a good excuse to extend government power and to reinforce the censorship regime we live in today, and to spend trillions that set off the worst inflation in 40 years and has enabled many people to continue living off their covid savings and not look for a job. Thus the labor shortage.
Even the golden calf, the mNRA vaccines seem in retrospect to have only helped the elderly. Young healthy people on the whole were harmed. This was done at the behest of government officials who are corrupt and either stupid or lying to themselves. The vaccine mandates were always inexcusable and almost certainly unconstitutional.
I’m just quoting the stats, Josh. As far as you know, it WAS in fact Florida’s approach that resulted in fewer deaths per elderly head count. Of course DeSantis didn’t send the elderly sick with COVID back to the nursing home resulting in skyrocketing nursing home deaths in New York.
It’s funny how you always want facts until the facts oppose your political narrative.
Hey jim2,
(Off topic)
I just heard that 3M is discontinuing all production of PFAS related chemicals due to the risk of cancer.
“3M to phase out manufacturing of all fluoropolymers, fluorinated fluids, and PFAS-based additive products”
They are also taking a multi-billion dollar charge because they know they are going to be sued for damages.
One small step forward.
jim –
> I’m just quoting the stats, Josh
You’re just quoting stats you got from political source. Which is why you had none of the details that (necessarilyy)contextualize the different rates of COVID morbidity and mortality by state among seniors.
Josh, the question you should be asking is if the article is correct, that is, is it presenting the age-adjusted, per capita stats? So is there an error in the information presented? And I’m not talking about information NOT presented.
@jacksmith4tx | December 20, 2022 at 8:53 am |
Yes, I saw the PFAS news. I’m surprised action is taken with such a dearth of solid data. All the articles I’ve read about problems with them use the may/might weasel words.
The NYPost was reporting, not doing a medical journal article. It’s fine if you want to add context, but that doesn’t alter the result. I noted you omitted the context that NY and some of the other states noted in the article had lock downs more severe than FL. I’m sure if you tried you could find more “context” that suggest FL should have been worse.
jim –
> I noted you omitted the context that NY and some of the other states noted in the article had lock downs
My point is that there’s a lot of context necessary to understand the implications of the stats. And so you do it yet again:
Which is necessarily (in part) related to other factors – such as that NY was hit hard early, when less was known, when there were less treatments available, when behaviors were different absent NPIs, where there was less international travel. That Florida started out with so much of head start but still surpassed NY in per capita morbidity and mortality could be seen as an indictment of the policy choices there, if you were so inclined as to make facile comparisons to reach conclusions. We could consider the differences in the amount of people spend outdoors, population density, etc.. It goes on and on. To meaningfully assess the impact of policies you need to look at all of that. But instead you focus on one relevant variable to the exclusions of all the others. And of course, I’m sure it’s coincidence that you focus on metrics that would put what happened in Florida in a good light, to the exclusion of those that wouldn’t.
Yeah, that’s the ticket
Just a coincidence.
Joshua, the main reason DeSantis was appreciated by Floridians was his keeping schools and small businesses open. So Florida exceeded NY in protecting the physically vulnerable while also protecting the financially vulnerable. Threading this needle and others like it are what pragmatic policy brings. I don’t know what it was about leftism that wanted so much to lock down the population. You tell me.
Joshua, the relative outdoor activity in FL to NY in the summer during 2020 was likely lower, which likely led to the FL surge. The most important factors like indoor ventilation were still unknown while the death rate in nursing homes was known from the start with the WA state disaster and the cruise ship infection analysis.
Ron –
> Joshua, the relative outdoor activity in FL to NY in the summer during 2020 was likely lower,
Given the amount of time people in Florida might spend at the beach in the summer, or in boating activities, I’m not sure that’s true.
But further, to say anything meaningful you can’t focus in on only one relatively short period of time that would create a favorable comparison for those politicians you’d favor. You’d need to look at a longer time frame, the full COVID period, cross-referenced with the timing of the different waves of the different variants, with consideration of how easily transmissible the different variants were, and the prevalence community immunity at the times. You’d need to look at the general state of ventilation infrastructure in the different regions, etc.
It’s just think it’s really obnoxious to leverage the illness and death of people to score cheap political points in service of supporting self-serving politicians. These are complicated assessments. I get why people would want to make facile speculation that fits their political preferences. It’s just sad that at a website where people with the skills to be more scientific in their approach fail to do so. Especially when they focus a lot of their energy on reinforcing their beliefs that they’re skeptical.
Josh – even if you conducted the COVID deaths study using some of the context you contend matters, it probably still wouldn’t be definitive. NYPost does lean conservative, but I believe they faithfully reported the numbers they had. Most newspaper articles, left or right, don’t go into the detail you are demanding. Even if they do, they probably don’t capture the reality of whatever subject is on the table.
jim g
I’m not questioning the veracity of the stars per se, or arguing that the NYPoat (or conservative-leaning publications) are more prone than others to politicize COVID.
Josh, You could make a better contribution is you would stop the “skeptic” bashing and the self-righteous pointing to political bias in everyone but yourself. It’s transparent projection and biased on your part.
New York vs. Florida is a pretty good comparison with regard to covid. It is not political in the slightest to point this out. You can adjust for age structure and obesity rates are almost exactly the same.
There are any number of liberal newspapers and mags I’m sure you can find that also don’t write research papers. The Atlantic writes some long articles, but I find that those are politically biased.
Joshua: “It’s just think it’s really obnoxious to leverage the illness and death of people to score cheap political points in service of supporting self-serving politicians…”
I think this is as close as you or any leftist bureaucrat or politician will ever come to apologizing. Thanks for thinking of us people though.
The reason that you find so many highly intelligent people here with astonishingly skeptical views about the state of educational and scientific authority is that we are fearful for the sake of humanity, not as much from CO2 as we are from other anthropogenic dangers, ones that would be recognizable to the drafters of the US Constitution: bias, corruption, enforcement of religion and mass delusion. I think you would agree these are real dangers. But I am guessing you feel that stricter compliance to educational and scientific authority are the answers. I am guessing the left leaning media feel the same way so thus due to the crisis in confidence in these authorities they must be bolstered at all costs, including the squelching of dissenting views. At some point I think the non-leftists are hoping they left will come to their senses. But delusion doesn’t work like that. It needs the dissenting views. That is the only medicine that can be counted on.
Thank goodness for this site’s host and the new one at Twitter. i know you will be happy to see him gone.
Oops. This belongs here:
Ron –
> The reason that you find so many highly intelligent people here with astonishingly skeptical views about the state of educational and scientific authority…
Consider, just for a minute, that the people here are not materially different than any group of highly identified advocates, and that they display the same patterns of cognitive biases as other groups do, generally. Consider that just because you agree with people, that doesn’t mean that they’d be relatively immune from motivated resoning, confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, etc.
And consider that along with normal cognitive biases, it’s predictable that members of pretty much any ideologically aligned group would think that their own group a special case, and relatively free of biases when compared to members of out-groups.
Just a thought.
Ron has a really really important point here. The pandemic accelerated the loss of faith in most Western elites including science. There was a rash of fraudulent, badly flawed, and politically motivated papers. People like Ioannidis was caned by an online mob including our own juvenile Joshua for doing good science. There was never an honest debate about the science of covid just as there has not been an honest debate about climate science and its “results.” We do know that both covid modeling and climate modeling suffer from the same problem of trying to address an ill-posed problem.
Science has hit the wall of complex systems and chaos. Viral epidemiology is a primitive science based mostly on crude mechanistic narratives that lack quantification. That’s why our authorities were so wrong, but for some reason they seemed to like forcing people to do the wrong thing. This speaks to a really dark strain in human nature and modern cultural Marxist thought. Even if you have no real idea if its good, tell people to do it because you are a really really fine person who has noble motives. The trend toward authoritarianism especially in the deep state is quite troubling. I have come to the conclusion that this trend goes back to 9/11 and Bush and his deep state’s authoritarian response to it. Obama accelerated it by packing the deep state with ideologically motivated partisans like James Baker, who were quite willing to lie to advance their goals and started the conversion of the FBI into a domestic intelligence agency with disastrous results. There was a temporary pause under Trump who actually was remarkably restrained in his response to what was really a 4 year insurrection with massive rioting in the streets and a massive increase in the murder and crime rates.
Joshua’s mind I fear is too unfocused and ideologically biased to come to grips with this as his previous comment shows.
Joshua, Judith’s blog is one of the most open and free on the internet. She doesn’t need to explain anything to you and expecting an explanation is quite arrogant and shows an amazing lack of self-awareness.
Joshua’s comparison between Judith removing an irrelevant comment from her blog and Twitter banning people at the behest of the FBI and colluding to influence an election is as absurd as it gets. There is no comparison. Judith’s deletion will affect no one and actually improve the comment blog. FBI/Twitter collusion is the biggest political scandal in the last century.
Ron –
How many times at this site have we read complaints about the unfair and authoritarian “censorship” at Real Climate? For years, I’ve been laughing at the self-victimization that lies beneath the idea that a proprietor moderating their online platform (by deleting comments they feel don’t enhance their product) amounts to “censorship.”
So with that understanding, this is also quite perfect.
You say ‘including the squelching of dissenting views.” and “Thank goodness for this site’s host”
While Judith (free speech) Curry explains why she deletes a comment of mine, which noted Glenn’s hypocrisy about “identity politics.”
And leaves up David’s constant stream of personal attacks.
And then says I’m responsible for the “worst” behavior of other commenters.
Pretty much in line with Elon’s attitude about “free speech” and the kind of adoration he gets for his “free speech” advocacy.
“The problem with totalitarianism is that everything has to be perceived thought the lens of ideology.” – Paraphase of Michael Malice.
He was talking about Russia in the past. But many of us can see this here now.
—————————————
Judith you should contact Malice about his podcast. If you were to see what he’s about, Lex Fridman recently had him on his podcast.
Here’s a much more honest discussion of collusion between federal law enforcement and the DNI to censor content and affect elections. Joshie’s take is not serious because it ignores the main and most important facts.
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/12/18/censor-or-else-democratic-members-warn-facebook-not-to-backslide-on-censorship/
With the restoration of free speech protections on Twitter, panic has grown on the left that its control over social media could come to an end. Now, some of the greatest advocates of censorship in Congress are specifically warning Facebook not to follow Twitter in restoring free speech to its platform.
In a chilling letter from Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Andre Carson (D-Ind.), Dathy Castor (D-fla.), and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Facebook was given a not-so-subtle threat that reducing its infamous censorship system will invite congressional action. The letter to Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, is written on congressional stationery “as part of our ongoing oversight efforts.”
Censorship comes at a cost not only to free speech but, clearly, the these companies. Nevertheless, some members of Congress are demanding that Facebook and other companies offer the “last full measure of devotion” to the cause of censorship. Despite the clear preference of the public for more free speech, Facebook is being asked to turn its back on them (and its shareholders) and continue to exclude dissenting views on issues ranging from COVID to climate change.
I’ll just note that climate scientists were the pioneers in this attempt to censor people they disagreed with. It’s a dangerous precedent because what happens is that once the climate change crisis idea gets going, there is a competition of sorts by people who know nothing about the subject to spread and amplify the alarm. The loudest and most shrill voices get more attention.
Readers might also like:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/11/what-happened-to-jonathan-turley-really.html
We can all be glad that Freedom Fighters find respite in freeze peaches.
Come on, What you cite is content free rhetorical posturing. It’s what the media tries to do to anyone who deviates from the approved narrative.
Willard –
Did you see this?:
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-983747
From back in the day when libz were marginalized.
Yes, I did.
In return:
http://www.critical-theory.com/chomskyburns/
> do care
Do *not* care, it should go without saying.
Joshua, What you “pointed out” is totally irrelevant to the main points here. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was deleted as a fallacious adhominum attack. The hypocracy thing is the last refuge of propagandists when you have nothing on the substance.
You need to try harder to make a substantive contribution. You have so discredited yourself over the last decade that you are not taken seriously by Judith or really anyone else.
David –
Did you ask Judith to delete my comment that pointed out Glenn’s hypocricy?
No one asked Judith to delete your comments. Judith is sick of your trolling and bickering, which multiplies by bringing out the worst n other commenters. I have been deleting many comments these last few days that do not contribute to constructive (or at least interesting) dialog here
Joshua, You are paranoid in addition to being a doofus. Get lost.
Joshua, This last comment is a perfect encapsulation of your track record.
You just lied about what I have said about Weiss and Taibbi. I have not lionized them. They are doing real journalism which has virtually vanished in the mainstream media. You smear them as “Musk scribes” which is a lie and is also your standard method, you try to discredit not on the facts but based on childish smears and name calling.
Then you do the same thing to Judith by using childish name calling.
Your problem is that your intellect is weak and reactive. This is not an attack, its a fact. This is perhaps why you can’t see the difference between a “personal attack” and a factual statement or opinion.
There are plenty of other blogs you could comment at. Why do you choose one whose proprietor you like to call names and don’t like very much? This goes beyond weak-minded and calls into question your integrity and judgment. Perhaps you know that here there is a much higher level of tolerance of your usually fact free views.
You are just so transparently emotionally driven that you never see this inconsistency and yes hypocricy. Yet you attack other people and worse misrepresent what they say. Shame on you.
You are lucky you have not been banned.
And lest anyone forget, Judith is in good company among your harassment targets. You have pointlessly attacked Nic Lewis for being less wrong than other “experts” about covid and doing some very interesting work. You have attacked John Ioannidis work mostly elsewhere with your usually complete ignorant of the science style.
I appears that your harassment targets are an august group and I am proud to be in this group.
Finally, your focus on irrelevant “inconsistencies” among skeptics is meaningless really. You can’t focus on the substance because that would require intellectual discipline.
I just want to point out that Judith’s blog is indeed as close to an open forum as you will find. You leverage that to distract and to generate some weird corrupt form of personal satisfaction (at least that’s my best guess).
Rhetorical and meaningless posturing.
David the Hall Monitor has issued his bat signal.
Denizens are now safe.
And the true reporting continues.
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/fbi-behind-twitters-censorship-of?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=279400&post_id=91744587&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email
Conclusion:
In response to the Twitter Files revelation of high-level FBI agents at Twitter, Rep. Jim Jordan said, “I have concerns about whether the government was running a misinformation operation on We the People.”
Anyone who reads the Twitter Files, regardless of their political orientation, should share those concerns.
From the Schellenberger piece:
In other words, Twitter was a covert contractor to the FBI to carry out a campaign of censorship and spying.
More than half of 17.5 million users who responded to a Twitter poll that asked whether billionaire Elon Musk should step down as head of the social media platform voted Yes when the poll closed on Monday.
There was no immediate announcement from Twitter, or Musk, about whether that would happen, though he said that he would abide by the results. The results of the unscientific online survey, which lasted 12 hours, showed that 57.5 per cent of those who voted wanted him to leave.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/twitter-poll-musk-ceo-1.6690699
This is actually a somethingburger.
Twitter (among other social media companies) cooperating to some degree with pentagon psyops in Arab countries. Seems the scale was small and the participation somewhat proscribed (I.e., giving “vefired” privileges to some fake accounts) but it’s problematic because Twitter has said it wouldn’t allow the platform to be used by governments to conduct propaganda campaigns.
https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/
Elon made no promise about his own person, however:
https://www.newsweek.com/who-nailya-asker-zade-putin-elon-musk-world-cup-1768404
If only Glenn had a private jet, they would have made a perfect group photo.
How about the vastly more important collusion with the Feds to influence the outcome of an election? Perhaps your strong biases prevent you from even acknowledging these facts? Perhaps your political biases are driving your evaluation of the evidence!!
What about whataboutism, David?
Enjoy:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03035-4
This is a giant nothingburger Willy besides being “whataboutism” and off topic. Scott Atlas’ book amplifies many of my points below. You haven’t read it I’m quite sure.
In fact given the terrible track record of the “science” on covid, I wouldn’t trust any government public health “scientist.” Just a few of the lies.
1. Vaccination will “stop the virus.” Vaccinated people get infected and spread the virus and after 9 months are actually more likely to catch covid as the unvaccinated according to a large Swedish study.
2. Children should get vaccinated with the mRNA covid vaccine. There is now a large body of evidence that children are on balance harmed by vaccination. This recommendation from the CDC is malpractice. In fact, healthy people under 50 have had little to fear from covid from the beginning, a fact de-emphasized by out public health agents of disinformation.
3. Mask mandates are good. There is only very weak scientific evidence surgical masks work against covid.
4. Shutdowns work. Once again, there is no good evidence they worked.
5. School closures are good. In fact, there is a lot of evidence children were harmed by these closures. Studies in Germany failed to document many cases of a teacher being infected by a student.
And the public knows this too. That’s why the new vaccine “booster” has seen terrible uptake.
I almost forgot to mention that several top scientists on the CDC vaccine approval committee resigned I think in 2021 over the shoddy approval process for the covid vaccines.
All of this was accompanied by shameless lying and censoring by the media and big tech. Jay Battacharia is a prime example but there were many others.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9947445/Two-FDA-vaccine-regulators-RESIGN-clashing-WH-COVID-boosters.html
TL;DR, David dear.
You might profit from a refresher:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_administration_political_interference_with_science_agencies
Would you say that this was a good prediction from Atlas and teh Donald? I would say it was .500. A coin toss would have done the same.
Another giant nothingberger from the king of obfuscation. The President has ultimate power to set policy and appoint his advisors. Atlas’ recommendations agreed with WHO guidance pre-pandemic and the scientific literature. Masks are worthless except for N95’s but compliance has been low on wearing those even among health care workers. That’s because of potentially serious side effects such as hypoxia. Social distancing is also worthless. It was always going to be true that essentially everyone was going to be exposed to covid. Anything else was always a lie.
The pandemic was not over in 2020, but everyone who predicted anything about covid was mostly wrong, often dramatically so. “The science” was almost always wrong and they imposed huge costs on mostly working class people, like the truckers in Canada. White collar obfuscators such as yourself were able to phone in and keep their jobs.
W
I know you have had your heart set on succeeding Elon as CEO of Twitter, so I hope this doesn’t upset you too much.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FkgP0uAWAAQaa6n?format=jpg&name=medium
Condoleezza disagrees with your softballing, David:
https://news.stanford.edu/2020/11/20/faculty-senate-condemns-actions-hoover-fellow-scott-atlas/
Seems to me that you are taking the wrong side of the hawkish bet.
Also, your claim about masking goes against the WHO and the CDC, btw. Is it because of your expertise in fluid dynamics?
Meanwhile, please enjoy some Musk Money:
Rice is not a scientist and you aren’t either.
The literature shows an at best very weak effect from masking. Look it up if you are capable of even reading scientific literature.
Condoleezza is or was Atlas’ boss at their neocon think tank, David, and applied maths does not make you a virus guru.
If there is one thing you need to take out of this silly episode, it is that we write ad hominem, not adhominum.
This condemnation by Stanford of Atlas is more proof that Covid19 ushered in a new censorship regime in which there are career consequences for deviating from the public health establishment line. I referenced and quoted below from a paper on this subject. This regime has devoted storm troopers in the science establishment and academia.
Indeed, David. Everything confirms what you knew all along:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condoleezza_Rice
*That* Condoleezza.
Victor Venema may have had a point when he said that there is little one can do with troglodytes.
May he Rest In Peace:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2022/12/24/victor-venema/
What you are doing here Willard is deflecting from the scientific issues such as mask effectiveness. Atlas was clearly right on this and the authoritarian covid secret police had to punish him for dissenting. It is and indeed was clear that everyone would eventually get exposed to covid and that social distancing generally wouldn’t affect this outcome.
Reading Atlas’s book, the bottom line was that Fauci, Redfield and Birx acted as a unit, not based on any scientific reporting or study of models but simply as a political consensus that was reached in the dark outside of the task force sessions. They used their majority to give task force leader Pence no choice but to go along or over-rule “the experts.” Pence being a VP was not in a strong enough position to challenge Fauci and subject the White House to media controversy. This was notwithstanding that Pence could have gone to Trump and asked him overrule Fauci. We may never know if this happened. My guess is that Pence was not that bold.
Atlas wrote that Birx’s basic premise was to slow the spread by monitoring infections and react with shut downs. Her concern included asymptomatic infections as much as deadly ones. Atlas believed that the single focus should be on protecting the vulnerable and concentrate testing on only in the aim of protecting the vulnerable, and not focusing on shut down criteria. Ron DeSantis met personally with Atlas before he was asked to join the presidential task force by Kushner and implemented Atlas’s policy.
That is not a bottom line, Ron.
Here is a bottom line:
https://www.businessinsider.com/scott-atlas-appeared-on-russian-propaganda-outlet-and-slammed-lockdowns-2020-11
Keep dancing, tricky troglodytes!
On masks.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987720317126
That paper linked to by dpy6629 is not what it seems.
First, it’s related to performing exercise while wearing a mask. Second, the only mention of a criticism of wearing masks generally is a quote cited as being from a paper by “Perencevich et al, 2020”. However, the link for the quote is an opinion piece (I’m presuming because the link is broken and a search of the linked website came back with no results) in the Sacramento Bee online newspaper. Yes, a scientific paper cited a newspaper opinion piece!
A search for the actual quote came back with no results for me (apart from the above sources) and the only 2 relevant papers with the name Perencevich in 2020 did not contain the quote and, in fact, the papers were pro-mask wearing.
How could someone like dpy6629 use such a source? He wants to believe but doesn’t want to check? Or facts are not important, only politically-aligned assertions. I find it all very strange.
To actually find out the facts and figures, I would recommend this link which provides a stack of information and linked papers. However, it does contain the same Perencevich quote, so the ideologically inclined will be happy!
https://werstupid.com/blog/do-we-all-need-to-wear-masks
(Great website name too! Perhaps we can all say that to ourselves now and again, especially to encourage us to check our beliefs and what we think we know)
Mr Murphy
Try to research observational studies on effectiveness of face masks against covid. You will find that your search will be redirected to results of studies on the theoretical efficiencies of masks to trap particles in actual use
The largest observational study on the effectiveness of masks in India found that they were only very slightly effective in preventing covid infections. This study did not take into account any of the negative aspects of wearing a mask much less being forced to wear a mask.
JM, If you look at all the research prior to covid, it showed a negligible effect of surgical masks on the spread of influenza. In fact the WHO recommended against mask mandates.
As pointed out by Rob, recent research shows the same thing with regard to COVID.
You are here employing a classic deflection tactic. You attack one paper to discredit an entire body of research which you haven’t read.
On top of everything else it appears that the CDC was lying about their own “research” on masks.
https://reason.com/2022/02/07/that-study-of-face-masks-does-not-show-what-the-cdc-claims/
dpy6629 | December 23, 2022 at 1:02 pm | Reply
“On top of everything else it appears that the CDC was lying about their own “research” on masks.”
FWIW – the CDC wbsite lists approx 40 studies showing /claiming masks work and/or effective.
Out of the approx 40 studies, I reviewed/read 6 or 7 of the studies. All six of those studies I looked at had serious flaws.
Kansas counties with /with mask mandates
Arizona School mask v non mask
Bangladish study
Boston mask/non mask schools
Here’s another one which references the Bangladesh study.
http://www.theinternationalchronicles.com/2022/06/22/medical-study-are-masks-actually-effective-against-covid/
Rob –
Observational studies of mask wearing have significant limitations in their informativeness regarding mask usage (as they do with any kind of causal inferences). That said, there is quite a bit of diversity in the findings of observational studies.
You might find the discussion here interesting.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/12/14/lack-of-correlation-between-school-mask-mandates-and-paediatric-covid-19-cases-in-a-large-cohort/
I agee with Andrew’s view that observational epidemiological at the population level has limited utility regarding assessing masks usage/mandates.
And mask-wearing is incredibly difficult to study from real world RCTs due to a variety of factors, not the leaaf controlling for compliance/usage and the well-known difficult of self-report data.
As you will see in any number of follow-on analysis of that RCT you referenced (and indeed what the authors themselves had to say about the limitations.
But if coursezhiire entitled to be certain in your views if you’d like.
For me, the bottom line is that there’s quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the impact of mask-wearing at the community level. Seeing that uncertainty, my conclusion is that there’s the potential for a population-level compounding of marginal risk reduction at the individual level. Thus, as a matter of risk reduction.in a context of high-level (perhaps low probability) pote fjsl damage (at the community level), I think it makes sense to for people to wear masks, notably in crowded inside spaces, particularly when there’s sub-optimal ventilation. That said, I think anyone who claims to know with much certainty on either side is likely just engaged in confirming biases. Given the way mask-wearing has become politicized in this country, I think we’d be better off spending resources on improving ventilation.
And it appears that mandating boosters for college students is unethical. Another giant fail by the CDC.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Rob –
Observational studies of mask wearing probably have significant limitations in their informativeness regarding mask usage (as they do with any kind of causal inferences). That said, there is quite a bit of diversity in the findings of observational studies.
You might find the discussion here interesting.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/12/14/lack-of-correlation-between-school-mask-mandates-and-paediatric-covid-19-cases-in-a-large-cohort/
I agree with Andrew’s view that observational epidemiological at the population level has limited utility regarding assessing masks usage/mandates.
For me, the bottom line is that there’s quite a bit of uncertainty regarding the impact of mask-wearing at the community level. Seeing that uncertainty, my conclusion is that there’s the potential for a population-level compounding of marginal risk reduction at the individual level. Thus, as a matter of risk reduction.in a context of high-level (perhaps low probability) potential damage (at the community level), I think it makes sense to for people to wear masks, notably in crowded inside spaces, particularly when there’s sub-optimal ventilation. That said, I think anyone who claims to know with much certainty on either side is likely just engaged in confirming biases. Given the way mask-wearing has become politicized in this country, I think we’d be better off spending resources on improving ventilation.
Joshua
I disagree that observational studies have significant limitations in general. Effective studies are difficult to conduct but are the most representative when done properly.
The “study” you linked was not done properly to form conclusions on effectivity. It was looking at macro data at a county level and then trying to form conclusions. A more useful approach is to compare individuals who use vs do not. The problem is these studies are difficult to conduct and need to be large and coordinated. They provide the most representative results of how well masks work in the real world.
Rob –
It’s generally accepted by epidemiologists that observational studies are limited in that they can show correlation, but are insufficient for establishing causality. You’re certainly entitled to view it differently, of course. I would suggest Bradford Hill criteria as a search item for approaching the topic.
What I think would be interesting would be for you to go over to Andrew’s blog and put up a comment with your opinion on the sufficiency of (properly done) observational levels in the context of mask-wearing and mask-mandates. You might get some interesting responses.
At any rate, the results from observational studies are all over the map. So even if you think observational studies are sufficient for drawing conclusions about masks, it seems to me you’d have some trouble figuring out which way to go.
Rob –
Don’t know if you’re interested, but independently of whether you’d like to comment, there is some discussion at that link regarding the sufficiency of observational studies for drawing epidemiological conclusions.
Again, I disagree with your conclusions about observational studies in general. I also disagree with your conclusion about effectivity.
Masks seem to have a very slight positive benefit in preventing infection. (as I wrote 2 years ago here), They also have negative consequences so their use should imo be measured.
Rob –
> Again, I disagree with your conclusions about observational studies in general
Just to be clear, this isn’t “my” conclusions. The insufficiency of observational studies for drawing conclusions about causality is fundamental to epidemiology. Virtually any observational study conducted by epidemiologists will include a caveat that their work is insufficient for drawing conclusions about causality.
You’re entitled to disagree, of course, but if you don’t already know the reasons why they say that you might want to research it a bit.
The point here is the accepted standard for medications and things like mask mandates that have potential harms is double blind studies that show a statistically significant benefit that outweighs the harm. There were quite a few of those before covid and the WHO based their recommendation against mask mandates on that science.
This was all thrown out by our authoritarian “experts” and “leaders” in blue states anyway. The lying is inexcusable don’t you think? A lot of harm was done to children in terms of their development and there were a lot of serious side effects from the idiotic vaccine mandates.
One last comment –
Imo, whether it’s an RCT or an observational study, longitudinal rather than just cross-sectional data are key for drawing conclusions about causality, and theorizing about and testing theories about associated mechanisms of causality are critical. Again, the Hill criteria, I think, are important to address.
But I’m certainly no expert and as I’m sure you know my friends here regularly demonstrate I’m also not very bright.
“Conclusions: The association between school mask mandates and cases did not persist in the extended sample. Observational studies of interventions are prone to multiple biases and provide insufficient evidence for recommending mask mandates.”
So then we have multiple sources saying there is no evidence for mask mandates. So then why did the CDC do it and even misrepresent their badly flawed study to justify it? This is just malpractice. And masks are part of a pattern of malpractice that was supported by ignorant politicians of Joshua’s persuasion who showed a disturbing authoritarianism, especially with regard to vaccine mandates that actually did a lot of harm.
I think this is a reasonable take on Musk.
https://nonzero.substack.com/p/the-misunderstanding-of-elon-musk?utm_medium=email
This is a masterpiece of deflection. It focuses on Musk himself while ignoring the biggest scandal of the last 100 years. But this is Josh’s thought process, unfocused, focusing on minutia, while ignoring the elephant in the room. It must be wonderful to be in possession of such a trivial intellect.
I’ve come to the conclusion it is far better to let Josh have his say and don’t respond. The back and forth with him just clutters the blog with trash.
Probably. The problem is when he misrepresents what others say or wrongly attacks “skeptics” or the blog, Judith, or her moderation policy. Sometimes, it is necessary to counter misinformation. What truly surprises me is that he has this amount of spare time. He must not have much of a life assuming he works full time.
Judith, I think there is a need for some science teaching resources that get to grips with complex systems and the critical thinking needed for good science – especially in politically controversial areas. I get the impression that many teachers even in Year 11/12 are happy to play An Inconvenient Truth and allow students to work within that paradigm without asking basic questions such as how do we know that what we are told is true, how we would go about checking or refuting, and not being able to spot the typical flawed logic that are used in rhetorical argument but should not be part of the scientific process. It could be something that you could collaborate with the likes of Heather Heying if you are looking for a challenge that could really benefit the next generation of science students.
“…teaching resources…being able to spot the typical flawed logic…”
I absolutely agree. In the age of carefully crafted propaganda coming from every direction, even from within the classroom upcoming generations need first and foremost tools to be able to navigate fact from narrative. Courses in propaganda, common logical fallacies, debate and scientific method should start as early as middle school and repeat every other year thereafter.
It appears that the CDC continues to double down on its vaccine misinformation. I was just on the phone with Social Security and they had a message playing saying the best way to protect yourself from covid is to get another booster despite evidence the latest booster is only marginally effective and quite short lived. Of course, no mention of serious side effects.
For the CDC, Safety First primarily means their own.
I have to say I have never engaged in Twitter whatsoever, and I do not feel any less informed than anyone as a result. It is a place for soundbites, for smearing and slurring, for trolling. You can succinctly mouth conclusions and absolutely cannot provide evidence-based argument.
It’s a place for feelings, not for scientific debate.
What’s really sad is that a younger generation seriously see Twitter as akin to a 21st century library. I see it rather like an informational porn shop, aiming to titillate but not necessarily to inform. And certainly to blackmail and threaten those porno users who don’t toe the line…..
If I were you, Prof Curry, I would inveigle yourself an invite up to Maine to have a chat with Tucker Carlson. Whether you agree with all he says or not, he is an incredibly successful communicator using modern media and for him, Twitter is mostly an advertising space for his more meaty content.
You’ll never be a competitor of his, so you and he might be able to help each other: you give him expert input on climate issues; he help you to hone your skills in how to use Podcasts and other channels to reach out to audiences.
I would expect Tucker to be eager to interview Judith.
I think she should compose a four-minute monologue for Tucker on some basic political points (that he would stylistically edit) and then have her on to confirm and elaborate for another 4 minutes on the state of the actual science on those points. This is the formula Tucker seems to very effective with. Judith was on Tucker Carlsen in 2015 but he did not have any knowledge prepared and asked a very open ended question. It did not seem coordinated.
Correction: I must have missed this one on Tucker right when Judith was leaving GA Tech. It is rather better than the one I recalled and Tucker at the end suggests they do a series together on what we know and don’t know about climate.
From 2 years ago with a podcaster Judith does a rare reveal of the evolution of her fallout with the consensus at minute 16:10 here. She says that it started in 2003 when she sat on IPCC committees and noticed that scientific uncertainties were being glossed over. Then with her co-authoring of Webster (2005) she was taken aback at the throngs of climate activists ready to elevate her for supporting the claim that cyclones are becoming more powerful, an alarm she now refutes. She mentions participating in the skeptic climate blogs. I remember seeing her debates with Roger Pielke Jr. in the Climateaudit.org archives 2005-2008 and being fascinated at witnessing her position evolving. Then in 2009 the Climategate emails appalled her, she told the interviewer.
Dr. Curry, I find this part of your story fascinating and I think others would too. I would suggest reciting the particular Climategate quotes. This is old news for you but is a rarely told story for the masses, which is mostly whitewashed into oblivion on Wikipedia.
If one searches “Climategate” on Youtube the top two results debunk the claim of scandal. There are only a few results now that tell the the truth and result #11 is Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining to the CNN audience that the wide body of scientists all support in one direction that humans are causing an alarming effect on the climate. He belittles any politicians (conservatives) that would listen to one outlier skeptic. He points to the recent Florida hurricane as “a wakeup call” to snap out of our inaction. He then underscores his point of the power of listening to science in pointing to how we can now model the projected hurricane path and save lives. He closes on warning that we have to act now because we can’t move our cities twenty miles further inland in time to prevent massive coastal global catastrophe from sea flooding.
The question is: Should Judith be eager to be interviewed by Tucker. In recent legal depositions, Tucker said he never believed Sidney Powell’s claims about Dominion Voting systems FOR A SECOND, but he was eager have her on his show to help Trump contest the election. Of course, Sidney Powell has told us that her claims about Dominion Voting machines were not to be taken seriously. Fox News is a great place for global warming den1ers and election den1ers, but I’m not sure about a scientist with a more nuanced scientific explanation for what’s wrong with the IPCC consensus.
Franktoo – Carlson let Powell have her say. It’s free speech and honest reporting. By allowing her to speak, he was “reporting” in a sense what she said. Carlson apparently is OK with allowing free speech, then letting the viewers make up their own minds. IMO, this is how discourse should work.
Jim –
I see you’re doing your but to spread good cheer on Christmas morning.
> Carlson apparently is OK with allowing free speech, then letting the viewers make up their own minds. IMO, this is how discourse should work.
Throughout the case, Fox has asked the court to keep almost everything in the case pertaining to its inner workings under seal.
Matt Taibbi has some reflections on the last month. Well worth reading. Apparently there is more to come.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/notes-on-a-friday-night
A group of us spent the last weeks reading thousands of documents. For me a lot of that time was spent learning how Twitter functioned, specifically its relationships with government. How weird is modern-day America? Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report.
I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.
One happy-ish thought at month’s end:
Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?
I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.
From Taibbi’s summary thread this morning.
4. The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.
I’m sure all decent and honest people would be appalled and see the need for change. But based on what is happening here in terms of the flood of misinformation and obfuscation that is clearly not the case. You are either an authoritarian at heart or you are not. You can’t split this down the middle as an “all sides” problem.
Another excerpt:
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
3h
16.The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.
Matt Taibbi
@mtaibbi
·
2h
17. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government.
Yes, David. However, if the government was providing accurate information to internet platforms that were eager for such information to prevent a repeat of Russian abuses in 2016, it isn’t obvious yet to me that either party did anything illegal or even immoral. This is a common problem in the real world: Newspapers with political biases receive information from government officials with similar biases. For example, take the WSJ’s Kimberley Strassel’s access to the Trump DoJ and Republicans on the House intelligence committee.
In the real world, the IRA troll farm and other Russian sources are still putting out vast amounts of disinformation According to the intelligence community, there was a major conduit through Ukrainians to Giuliani that contributed to Trump’s attempted extortion of Zelenskyy and impeachment.
Finally, given that the Trump-appointed AUSA for Delaware has been investigation Hunter Biden for 4 years without filing getting close to charges (except taxes), I suspect the importance of the laptop has been greatly exaggerated. That doesn’t mean I be unhappy to see Hunter properly convicted for any crimes he did commit. The stench is overwhelming. Unfortunately, many things that stink are not illegal.
What did the Russians do in 2016 besides give a lot of money to Democrats? Search Sberbank and Podesta if you are clueless as to what I’m talking about.
I am glad you ask, Steven:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections
If you want to sea lion furthermore, don’t hesitate!
Willard
Do you see a correlation between intelligence officials that thought Russians were behind 2016 election interference and in 2020 officials who thought Russians were high behind Hunter Biden propaganda
Rob,
I do see a correlation between leading questions and sealioning. It usually occurs when an apprentice baiter fails to distinguish the two. You might like:
https://www.thebulwark.com/fox-news-putin-propaganda-primetime/
Please, very please, do ask me about Ukraine.
Christmas would not be complete without paranoid chaps ranting about Joe.
So Willard still believes the Trump-Russian collusion hoax despite the obvious problems when you follow the money, and he calls me a conspiracy theorist! LMAO!
So, Steven believes that mind probing will cover for his blunder:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/18/gop-operative-convicted-of-funneling-russian-donation-to-trumps-2016-campaign-.html
Has Steven found back the documents teh Donald fled the Whitehouse with in Forida?
25K? Podesta was just one of several Democrat lobbyists receiving large sums of money from the Russians and giving it primarily to Democrats and he got at least $170,000 just from Sberbank. The entire Russian collusion crap was just that, nothing but crap.
Wikipaedia was one of the entities the FBI was calling on to censor content so Willard’s citation is not worth the time it took him to type it. Wiki is well known to be quite unreliable being crowd sourced and not reviewed except by unqualified strangers on the internet.
Russian “interference in 2016” was mostly made up by the Hillary campaign and the corrupt FBI. For example the alpha bank hoax. Likewise with the dossier. In any case, there are always attempts to interfere in elections. The FBI clearly suppressed information to interfere in the 2020 election. And it was very effective as 6% of Biden voters when polled said they would have voted differently if they had known about the laptop scandal.
Frank has been deeply confused on this for a long time. He says for example that Crossfire Hurricane was adequately predicated when it started. This is irrelevant. There is still no proof it was the Russians that hacked the DNC. Quickly, the investigation morphed into a Russian collusion one based almost entirely on the fraudulent Steele dossier. It was a sham and those running it knew it. It is dishonest to mention the former without discussing the latter.
Frank also has vastly too much faith in the US Attorney in Delaware. We know for sure that many crimes were committed, from lying on a firearms application, to major drug use, large scale tax evasion, and almost certainly money laundering, and influence peddling. I trust Bobolinski a lot more because he has no motive other than patriotism.
And Frank I don’t think you have read much on the Twitter Files.
1. Virtually all the things the FBI flagged to Twitter were Americans and their tweets, not foreigners or bots.
2. Twitter was looking hard for “interference” and was constantly prompted by the FBI to find it and in my reading so far was unable to find any. It was almost as if the FBI knew that what it was doing was illegal and was searching for an excuse to fool naive people like Frank.
You talk about the Ukrainian connection to Guiliani. That has nothing to do with 2022. You trying to link the two is dishonest.
In this comment thread, there is absolutely no evidence of foreign interference that authoritarian supporting people are trying to invent to justify something that is illegal. The supreme court has ruled on this. Government cannot deputize private entities to do what it cannot do itself. Censoring speech is illegal for government to do, therefore it is illegal to work with Twitter to do it.
There is the further problem of CIA involvement. The CIA is forbidden by law from operating on US soil.
Further, we have still not gotten the files on the CDC interference to squash scientific dissent (which was mostly true) and to support the CDC line which was mostly either wrong or pseudo-science. Mask mandates, vaccination will stop the virus, children should wear masks and get vaccinated, shutdowns work, etc. etc. The list of lies is long.
BTW, Biden’s covid tzar just admitted that there is no scientific evidence that masks work for viruses. He is instead advocating on improving indoor air quality presumably by better filtration and more air circulation.
I really wish that Frank and WeeLard would actually read some of the voluminous source material in the Twitter files so they could contribute something besides deflection and falsehoods laundered through Wiki.
Wikipaedia is a wholy unreliable source being crowd sourced from people with no verifiable credentials of any kind.
I have yet to see any proof of impactful Russian interference in 2016. Vastly more troubling is the Hillary campaign/FBI collusion to do so through wholely fraudulent sources such as the Steele Dossier. Don’t cite deep state “sources” either. They have proven themselves to be liars. Brennan is a prime example of a serial liar. I guess no one should be surprised as the job of a spy is to lie.
I also haven’t seen anything that shows that the Russians hacked the DNC. The server was never turned over to the FBI. Hillary’s campaign paid some 2nd rate firm to evaluate it. Perhaps this firm did what Steele did, viz., give Hillary the fraudulent talking point she wanted.
it would be most helpful Frank and WeeLard if you would read the Twitter files. A couple of facts stand out.
1. Virtually all the content the FBI flagged was from Americans.
2. The FBI was almost begging Twitter to identify Russian interference leading up to 2022 election and Twitter did not find any thing significant. It’s almost as if the FBI knew they were doing something illegal and were trying to find a fig leaf to use with gullible authoritarian supporting outsiders.
3. The main consequential interference in 2020 was the suppression of the laptop story and the Bobolinski story. That was done in collusion with the FBI and the “intelligence community.” Plenty of lies were spread by the professional liars in the CIA and former professional liars like Brennan and Clapper. Polling shows that 6% of those who voted Biden would not have done so if they had known.
The Supreme Court has been clear. It is illegal for the government to deputize private entities to do things the government can’t do. Some of us value the first amendment.
We really need to get out of the cycle of lies and propaganda. There is always “interference” in elections some of it foreign in origin. Our governmene interferes in elections overseas by spreading disinformation. Obama did it in an Israeli election.This reminds me a little of the red scare in the 1950’s. There were quite a few Communists in the government, but not enough to really change anything.
Wikipaedia is a corrupt source of information. It is crowd sourced under the direction of “moderators” of unknown qualifications. Perhaps what WeeLard cites really came from a foreign attempt to influence our elections. No one knows. That Wee cites it shows his very low standards.
Yes, Steven, minimization would have been better than pure gaslighting:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-bannon-associates-factbox-idUSKBN25G1YU
Be seeing you.
It’s pretty clear Frank and Wee have not read the TWitter files.
1. Virtually all the information flagged buy government actors was from Americans.
2. The FBI pushed relentlessly for Twitter for find foreign interference and Twitter couldn’t do so. Was the FBI seeking a fig leaf to fool their authoritarian partisan supporters into supporting this violation of the Constitution?
3. The most important election interference was suppressing the laptop and the Bobolibski stories. Those thing pushed Biden over the top by polling data.
Willard, your explanation for how Russia was trying to get Trump elected while giving all their money to Democrats is what, exactly?
I am sorry you got to stay thirsty, Steven, but sea lions always do,
It’s obvious our Hall Monitor has lived under a Freedom Fighter echo chamber for too long:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63882140
No explanation for the Russians funding Democrats while still believing in your little conspiracy theory about Trump? Stay on topic.
Gerald Baker of the WSJ writes:
“The Twitter Files have exposed how a powerful class of like-minded people control and limit the flow of information to advantage their monolithically progressive agenda.
The Twitter Files tell us nothing new. There’s no shocking revelation in there about government censorship or covert manipulation by political campaigns. They merely bring to the surface the internal deliberations of a company dealing with complex issues in ways consistent with its values.
If you think the first paragraph is true, you must be a tinfoil-hat wearing member of the vast right-wing conspiracy destroying our democracy. If you think the second is true, you’re a credulous apologist for the elite left-wing ideologues destroying our democracy.
If you think both are true, congratulations. You’re a reader of uncommon genius and perspicacity.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-files-revelations-are-instructive-but-not-surprising-media-cultural-elites-misinformation-disagreement-musk-11670856198
So Frank, are you fine with the FBI and the Intelligence Community getting media companies to censor true information to influence an election?
Baker of the WSJ may already know about the Twitter collusion with the FBI. Most Americans don’t. I’d be curious if Baker agrees with the Supreme Court that what happened is illegal?
In any case, you didn’t respond to any of my detailed points. I guess you are then acknowledging them to be true.
I think the Covid Twitter files may be even more interesting. People like Jay Battacharia were banned for speaking their evidence based opinion on covid policy. Did the CDC or the FBI play a role in this censorship?
Another source says Frank is wrong about the CDC recommendation to vaccinate children.
DR. MARTY MAKARY: If a child has a special medical condition, those are the ones who show it. Those are the children who come to the hospital with COVID complications. If the child has not had COVID in the past, then there may be a case there and a healthy child. It’s not compelling, but certainly the kid with a special medical condition who does not have natural immunity. Now, if the FDA is trying to take its already shattered reputation with the public and make it even worse, they’re doing that today.
They’re about to authorize this COVID vaccine for 16 million children, 90-plus percent of whom have already had COVID, based on a small study of kids who did not have COVID. That was the condition to be in that study. So ignoring natural immunity is actually having significant implications now. And even that small study that showed that it works in kids, shows it didn’t work very well, as low as 30% effective in the first few months. And that goes down the drain after a few months.
Dr. Marty Makary is a top surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins U Hosp. His bio page there does not even mentioned that he has been the editor-in-chief of Medpage Today, a medical newsletter I have been reading for 15 years. He is a fearless maverick that calls the shots exactly as he see them, even at the cost of backlash from the national health establishment and vulnerability to his prominent career standing. He is a genuine hero in my book, as is Judith Curry. Here is a page of his recent editorials on covid policy and healthcare. They are all excellent.
Ron -.
I must say, that was an top notch appeal to Markary’s authority.
> He is a fearless maverick that calls the shots exactly as he see them.
Unfortunately not a few of those shots he’s called have been notably wrong. Prolly the most infamous was that medical error-the third leading cause of death in the US., but some of his stinkers on COVID were arguably just as bad.
.
But your faith in and loyalty to his lack of bias is admirable – even if it’s another example of a “skeptic” not being particularly skeptical about scientists with whom they share ideological orientation.
.
Ron –
BTW – this was one of my favorites.
We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April
Covid cases have dropped 77% in six weeks. Experts should level with the public about the good news
That would be April of 2021
Prolly just a coincidence that you’d have so much faith in someone who was almost as wrong as Nic on the very same topic.
Joshy the childish ankle biter is back. Everyone made big mistakes in predicting this epidemic. Makary is no exception and that in no way should prejudice evaluation of his opinion on childhood vaccination. Your role is peurile at best and makes no contribution to showing us any facts and data concerning the topic.
Do you support the CDC recommendaton?
Why would I need to explain your conspiracy theory, Sealion?
I wonder when our Hall Monitor will reach that stage:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-clements/
Do you?
Joshua, unlike you, Makary is not wrong on every topic I have heard him speak or write on and he does very little personal attacks. Instead he focuses on policy. His projection on herd immunity, if it was early 2021, was surely based on the advertisement of 90% vaccine effectiveness. The rollout was projected to be 80% complete by April 2021. He apparently was in the dark along with the rest of us on the false vaccine promise.
I would not say that authority is irrelevant to expertise. It’s just no guarantee. I do not know Makary’s personal politics or ideology. For all I know he is like Musk, Taibbi, Gabbard, Greenwald, Weiss, Turley and Dershowitz, a liberal that is willing to speak out against the tribe as it heads off the rails.
Ron –
> Makary is not wrong on every topic I have heard him speak or write on and he does very little personal attacks.
The main problem with his statement on herd immunity, that reflected no acknowledgement of the obvious uncertainties, was that he went on to opine with great certainty on something he couldn’t have known about, in a way that was obviously paranoid and which was sure to undermine public confidence in public health officials.
Experts should level with the public about the good news.
So there he goes from all the certainties involved to conclude that “experts” were being deceptive about herd immunity, to reinforced the idea that “experts” weren’t to be trusted, that “experts” were trying to scare the public. And there he knowingly fomented all the associated paranoia and tribalism among people who are looking to COVID to reinforce ideological orientation.
> His projection on herd immunity, if it was early 2021, was surely based on the advertisement of 90% vaccine effectiveness.
His projection was obviously wrong AT THE TIME, irrespective of what one knew about the durability of vaccination-induced immunity. His numbers simply didn’t add up, and would have required there to have been a population infection rate of over 100% in the US at the time. His numbers were based to a large degree on an obviously low (and wrong) IFR.
But it is fun to watch you invent a reason for why he was wrong, one that places the blame for his failed analysis on other people. That’s EXACTLY what we would expect if you have some kind of allegiance to the scientist as an individual rather than the science in itself. That was exactly my point.
So thanks for making it.
Ron –
I’ll also note that with Makary’s widely publicized and sensationalist but erroneous assertion that medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US, it wasn’tedely that it was wrong that’s the problem. The problem is that he’s promoting sensationalist claims that are based on shoddy science.
Of course that doesn’t imply that he’s wrong about everything or that he has nothing of use to contribute.
And yes, I agee that “expertise” is an important factorz the problem is when people use expertise as if it’s dispositive about the veracity of someone’s work.
Joshua, you are accusing Makary making uninformed and irresponsible statements without linking to those statements. You have been here long enough to know better.
But you bring up an interesting overall dynamic. You wrote: “So there he goes from all the certainties involved to conclude that “experts” were being deceptive about herd immunity, to reinforced the idea that “experts” weren’t to be trusted, that “experts” were trying to scare the public.”
You are mindreading here.
However, there is no question that “experts” have misbehaved. We are only in dispute as to which experts were worse. But your most interesting point is that experts should be unified as not to spread the idea that experts weren’t to be trusted. This is a fundamental dilemma that needs a whole post just devoted to it IMO. When does an expert weigh the importance of what they believe is the truth getting expressed versus the value of maintaining the integrity of the institution? Is the institution better protected by allowing robust debate versus speaking with one voice? Real questions. Historical FBI patriarch J. Edgar Hoover’s often cautioned his special agents, “Don’t embarrass the bureau.”
Joshy, you are just repeating yourself. You didn’t respond on the substance of vaccinating children. It is fallacious to attack someone’s credibility on a separate issue, an issue where everyone was wrong by the way. By your puerile standard, no public health expert is trustworthy.
And your childish point about undermining faith in “experts” is laughable. Given their terrible track record, by comparison Makary was very accurate, the “experts” deserve public disapproval and indeed ridicule.
Can you name one important issue where the “experts” were right?
Ron –
> Joshua, you are accusing Makary making uninformed and irresponsible statements without linking to those statements.
I quoted his statement. That it was ill-informed was self-evident as it relied on mind-probing. Unless you think he really has mind-probing skills. Google the quote if interested. It was a WSJ article.
Willard, if you can’t explain the money but you bother to use the Mueller report as a reference would you like to explain why the unregistered Russian agent that there was out there, Podesta, was allowed to just quietly leave instead of having to sell his house to pay legal bills like if he had been working for Trump? I think a sea lion asks for evidence. I’m asking for your explanation of evidence contrary to your views. Certainly you know the difference. Not a big cat if you don’t take things on directly. Just a noisy little kitten getting underfoot.
No need for anything else than answer your first question, dear Sealion. If you want a sammich, you know what to do.
Enjoy Elon eating popcorn while reading Medvedev’s Sci-Fi book proposal:
https://www.newsweek.com/medvedevs-wild-2023-predictions-include-elon-musk-us-president-1769667
Is your musket ready?
Meow.
https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1606804252063850496?s=20&t=wuyXJqjsm8HYOj9uuIuj2g
No, Trump is right and Biden is senile and demonizing half the country. You have no memory and no grasp on the facts revealed in the Twitter Files.
dpy: Florida’s “Petition for Order to Impanel a Statewide Grand Jury” justifying an attempt to indict vaccine makers on CRIMINAL CHARGES can be found at the link below. 90% appears false to me.
https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Vaccine-Grand-Jury-Petition.pdf
For example, Items 11 and 12 complain that “on November 30, 2020, the Chief Executive Officer of Moderna told the public that a study “confirms the ability of our vaccine to prevent COVID-19 disease with 94.1% efficacy” and that “Pfizer similarly stated that its vaccine was “highly effective with 91.3% vaccine efficacy observed against COVID-19 … through up to six months after the second dose” These are the published findings of human clinical trials that were independently analyzed by the FDA. Now it is true that vaccine efficacy is defined in terms of the reduction in infections serious enough to warrant a PC test – not in terms of reduction of transmission. Some vaccinees (and placebo controls) may have suffered asymptomatic or mild cases that were not detected by PCR. And while these subjects might have transmitted COVID to others, it is well known that seriously symptomatic and pre-symptomatic patients are responsible for most transmission. The distinction between reduced infection and reduced transmission is important because in Items 5-10, Florida asserts wrongdoing:
5) “The federal government, medical associations, and other experts have created an expectation that receiving a COVID-19 vaccine is an ethical or civic duty and that choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is selfish and harmful to others”
6) …”some Floridians made the choice to receive the COVID-19 vaccine because they believed that receiving the vaccine would prevent them from spreading COVID-19 to others.”
Studies have proven that vaccination has reduced transmission in the COMMUNITY. The best evidence comes from Israel, which vaccinated 50% of their population by March 1. When combined with natural immunity, this was enough to create an effective state of her immunity that reduced the number of cases nearly 1000-fold over the next three months. That ended with the arrival of the Delta variant. The US didn’t reach 50% vaccination until mid-May, so the decline in cases was only 10-fold before Delta arrived. (Infection had been detected in about 10% of the population of both countries as vaccination got underway, assumed to have given about 40% of the population natural immunity at the time, but that has been adjusted down to about 20% today.) Beyond any doubt, vaccination reduced transmission in the community, thereby protecting those who were not vaccinated.
Similar studies showing a reduction in community transmission by giving everyone PCR tests were down in the UK after only a single dose of Pfizer or the less efficacious AZ vaccine. The UK gambled and gave doses three months apart, allowing them to give more people limited protection sooner.
Items 18&19 absurdly complain that he vaccine was marketed before before there was proof that vaccines reduced transmission in the community and that vaccines did “not fully prevent transmission” in the community. Of course, clinical trials showed only 95% reduction in detected infections, not 100%. Clearly the authors of these complains don’t understand the mathematics of exponential growth and decrease in case loads. Even a 20% reduction of the reproduction rate from 1.0 to 0.8 will bring a pandemic to a halt: 90% reduction in cases in less than two months and 99% in four months.
Item 17 complains that the protection from infection after vaccination would “potentially” last a “couple” of years, but not even one year later, manufacturers were calling for boosters. They don’t mention that the more transmissible Delta variant with resistance to both natural and vaccine-induced immunity appeared during this period and more variants of concern were on the horizon. The data in hand at the time showed the alpha variant would be controlled for several years at the rate the level of antibodies had been dropping.
After Delta and Omicron arrived, vaccination reduced infection about 75% soon after getting a booster, but much of that protection faded over about six month because the antibodies produced by vaccination didn’t neutralize these variants as well as they did earlier variants. IIRC, the protection afforded by natural infection in 2020 was negligible by the time Omicron arrived. One could argue that the Biden administration was too aggressive trying to impose vaccine mandates once it was clear that vaccination wasn’t as effective at reducing transmission against the new variants. However, deciding when a vaccine should and should not be mandatory is a question to be resolve by the politics, not a lawsuit agains vaccine manufacturers.
The problem of myocarditis in young men is a serious one and the risks and benefits of vaccination this population were carefully analyzed by the FDA before approval. To the best of my knowledge, no one has died directly from myocarditis, but some with serious existing conditions have died with myocarditis. The problem is that COVID also causes myocarditis in young men for exactly the same reason vaccination does: antibodies that attack heart tissue are made in both cases. From my perspective, it is almost undoubtably safer to produce those antibodies from a well controlled localized site in your arm than during an uncontrolled infection that invades lung, heart and nerves.
Finally we have Florida’s unpublished and un-peer-review report showing that people are at increased risk of cardiac-related death in the month after vaccination using the self-controlled case series method. However, Lapado may have forgotten to correct for the fact that most people received two doses of vaccine and were exposed to the normal risk of cardiac death for two months after vaccination! A long discussion of the Florida study is included at the fact-check link below. An expert on the self-controlled case series method Lapado cites in four of six references (Whitaker) has adapted the method for two-dose COVID vaccines and thinks the study is wrong. Apparently it is contradicted by other studies of COVID vaccine safety performed using the same method. A full understanding of the Florida study may not be in hand, but the best ways to resolve scientific disagreement is not in front of a grand jury of non-experts .
https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20221007-guidance-mrna-covid19-vaccines-analysis.pdf
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/10/scicheck-floridas-covid-19-vaccination-analysis-is-flawed-experts-say/
Thus I fear DeSantis may be as much of a sucker for conspiracy theories asTrump is. (He obviously doesn’t have some of Trump’s other weaknesses.)
“Some vaccinees (and placebo controls) may have suffered asymptomatic or mild cases that were not detected by PCR. ”
If it were not for the PCR test being able to detect asymptomatic cases we would not know of them.
Ron: The detection of asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic infections and transmission by such people is challenging because you need to screen an entire community to detect it. The British have done excellent work in this area. IIRC, they were surveying the vast majority of the nurses in the country about their symptoms and then screening them regularly by PCR, both before and after vaccination. (People report substantially more symptoms after being told they tested positive than before.) And they have regularly screened all of the participants in some clinical trials to detect asymptomatic infections. IIRC, the Oxford/AZ vaccine was only 30% effective at reducing all detectable infections and near 0% in another trial when the alpha variant was circulating. Basically, the AZ vaccine made almost all infections milder and less detectable, but failed to eliminate even half of infections when everyone was tested by PCR.
It is interesting to note that while the sponsors of this vaccine were doing these interesting studies, they never accumulated a package of clinical trial data that allowed the FDA to grant emergency approval for the use of that [DNA] vaccine in the US. (Oxford had grandiose visions of producing a practical cheap vaccine that would vaccinate the whole world.) One problem is that the first dose of the viral vector used to deliver a gene for expressing spike protein sometimes creates an immune response that makes the second dose less effective. A single dose of both the AZ and mRNA vaccines afforded about 70% protection (often crudely measured between doses), but the second dose of AZ didn’t cause much improvement. The J&J DNA vaccine that was approved by the FDA originally was a single dose vaccine. The vaccine approval process and rollout in the UK was a real gamble, while the US IMO maintained its normal rigorous standards. We produced the best vaccines and the worst vaccine hesitancy.
Despite all of the above caveats, even one dose of the UK vaccines were clearly proven to reduce infection and transmission in the community. The reason is fairly simple. If you have a stable pandemic with a reproduction rate of 1.0 and you reduce transmission by only 20%, after 10 transmission chains (about two months with the alpha variant), mathematically there should be 90% fewer infections (1-0.8^10). In another two months 99%. The problem is that once you achieved that much reduction, people stop social distancing and wearing masks and the reproduction rate rises. On paper you can get dramatic improvement over time from modest reductions in transmission using masks, social distancing or lousy vaccines, but the benefits don’t last. They all “work” but the public doesn’t see success. All of the US’s NPI’s quickly brought the reproduction rate down from a disastrous 3.5 in March of 2020 to near 1, but there was no appetite in the US for doing a little more. Germany dropped their infections by 90% by mid-summer. Then the alpha variant arrived in fall and quickly overwhelmed everyone.
The FDA’s initial standard for emergency approval of a vaccine was only at least a 50% reduction in infections – which when you add immunity from natural infections might get to herd immunity if everyone were vaccinated. In Africa, a malaria vaccine that is only 35% effective is beginning to be used.
All of this Frank is largely irrelevant. Everyone was going to get exposed to covid and that has pretty much taken place. The vaccines may have helped some vulnerable people but there was never any evidence they would help the under 18 cohort. This is 75 million people in the US and as of last fall there were fewer than 400 deaths “with” covid in this group. Most of those were already in the hospital with things like cancer. Marty Makary has talked about this data often. It was obvious from the very beginning that covid was killing almost exclusively the very elderly or the very ill. The US suffered more than Sweden probably because our obesity rate is 40% whereas in Sweden if memory serves, it is 11%.
The fact is that every successive booster has been less effective than the previous one. We reached a point of diminishing returns a long time ago. So then why does the CDC continue to advocate a drug that has only a small benefit? They have lied to us on almost every important issue from the beginning.
BTW, The same Swedish study I mentioned earlier showed that the effectiveness against serious covid was not 95% as Pfeizer claimed, but closer to 85% and it started to decline pretty quickly. So your assertion about controlling spread of the virus might be true in the very short term, but had no effect on the ultimate outcome. All of the focus on minutae just serves to focus on the trees and not the forest.
I personally am glad to see DeSantis empaneling the Grand Jury. It’s the only we are going to get the truth. There has been really an unprecedented campaign of censorship and cancellation around covid that hasn’t even happened in wartime really. And the public health establishment has forfeited any credibility they might have had. Perhaps Frank, you approve of this. But it is a crime in my view. It prevented a robust public debate about the science and led to a climate of fear and panic driven by a corrupt media.
Frank, the PCR test was extremely sensitive, so much so that by the end of 2021 the CDC were recommending not to used to verify recovery but to instead rely upon the less sensitive antigen (quick) test.
The RNA vaccine’s rollout advertisement of being in the 90% effectiveness range against infection (and transmission) was very questionable in hindsight. It certainly did not hold true for the variants that were dominant by the time of the 2021 rollout. More troubling is the high rate of severe side effects, especially in young people that had no danger from the virus nor were primary spreaders if infected.
Asymptomatic infections as a vector of transmission was negligible, which also made the school closure policy unnecessary. Whereas nursing homes were tinder boxes, schools were marshlands. The policy of putting most all resources into protecting nursing homes and the vulnerable would have been the best policy as shown by Florida and Georgia’s anti-Fauci approaches.
Considering the low level of danger of the virus to young and healthy people, and the low level of danger this group posed to the elderly, and considering the level of permanent heart damage to some young people, government mandates or vaccination passports were completely out of line. Again the anti-Fauci policies of FL and GA proved to be wise revolts against “the experts.”
Lest anyone be fooled by Frank’s undue deference to our vaccine “authorities”, apparently the two top and senior FDA vaccine regulators disagreed with the vaccine recommendations strongly enough to resign over it.
https://nypost.com/2021/09/01/two-senior-fda-officials-resign-over-biden-administration-booster-shot-plan/
Frank –
> Thus I fear DeSantis may be as much of a sucker for conspiracy theories asTrump is. (He obviously doesn’t have some of Trump’s other weaknesses.)
I suggest you be more skeptical. I don’t think that either of them are “suckers,” but instead that both of them find conspiracy theories convenient to exploit for political expediency and personal benefit.
Just consider what you noted above – that Tucker (and Sean) didn’t believe Sydney’s nutty claims – but found her claims convenient for enhancing their audiences and pursuing their political goals.
What’s always so amusing to me about so-called “skeptics” is that they’re so credulous about politicians and TV stars when doing so confirms their.biases. It’s part of what I love about them so much.
Joshua
Consider this to be my Christmas gift to you. As my quote below says, it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled. I’m wondering if you bit on a tasty delight that most leftwingers probably have been fooled about. As noted previously Biden has snowed the public into believing that in his IRA, the rich will pay their fair share in taxes. I guess increasing the taxes of earners of + $1 M from $985B to $987B by 2027 would qualify, since that is the only increase in taxes for the rich.
The MSM has been running stories non stop that the Omnibus bill of $1.7 Trillion has passed Congress. Many believe that is the total amount to be spent this coming year. And a subset of that many are upset to think Congress would actually spend $1.7 Trillion of their hard earned money in a single year.
I don’t have the heart to tell them that $1.7 Trillion is not even 1/3 of the actual total amount to be spent in FY23.
It’s actually going to be $6 Trillion +.
I didn’t want you to be one of those who have been fooled in a colossal con job, and that is why I am letting you in on this secret. Merry Christmas.
Kid –
I think that “fare share of taxes” is inherently subjective. So I don’t really have much in the way of thoughts operating from that baseline.
I happen to think that rather heavily progressive taxation makes good economic sense, but I recognize that it’s a question that’s every difficult to evaluate empirically.
Josh: Perhaps you are correct about political expediency. However, in Trump’s case, “truth” was always whatever he needed it to be. When Trump sued a reporter for under-reporting his wealth, he was deposed and asked under oath was his wealth was. He replied that the answer varied from day-to-day depending on how he felt about the value of his properties and especially the value of the “Trump brand”. The Jan6 committee established that Trump was clearly told by nearly everyone in his campaign that he had lost and that occasionally he took actions that reflected that reality. For example, IIRC he ordered a pullout of all troops from Afghanistan to be completed by January 20, 2021. However, whatever he may have believed in the first weeks after the election while he was losing every court case, he soon convinced himself that the election was stolen.
Now maybe I’m too much of a scientist who believes in following the data and fighting confirmation bias and all politicians are doing exactly what Trump did only less publicly. However, I think the success of Trump’s lies has emboldened all politicians follow their gut not their brains.
Frank –
> Josh: Perhaps you are correct about political expediency. However, in Trump’s case, “truth” was always whatever he needed it to be.
For understanding Trump, I always go back to his long association with Roy Cohn, and what Cohn and Roger Stone and Trump explicitly described as their formula for winning friends in influencing people: lie, lie hard, lie often, and keep doubling down on the lies no matter what. They explicitly described that strategy and with that in mind it’s easy to see how they employ it. Critical is that you lie about the very things that you’re accused of lying about – for example if you’re accused of lying you call the person accusing you, of lying. They didn’t try to hide that policy; they were explicit about it.
> and all politicians are doing exactly what Trump did only less publicly.
I pretty much agree with that. I’m sure that not all politicians lie as frequently as Trump, but certainly many do.
Still, the question for me has always been whether Trump ir really different in how much he lies, or whether he’s just more open about his lying. The case might be made that he’s less deceptive or less open about his lying. In a sense the argument could be made that he’s more honest about his dishonesty.
I”m not completely sold on the answer to that question. Certainly there’s a long history of politicians lying and some of them have lied about things that are just as substantive as what Trump has regularly lied about (say, Johnson lying about the Vietnam War). But I do think that Trump has been ore deliberate in his strategy to achieve his goals by lying, and I do think that has a negative impact more generally on our society.
> However, I think the success of Trump’s lies has emboldened all politicians follow their gut not their brains.
Yes, I think that’s essentially what I was saying.
Frank –
> Josh: Perhaps you are correct about political expediency. However, in Trump’s case, “truth” was always whatever he needed it to be.
For understanding Trump, I always go back to his long association with Roy Cohn, and what Cohn and Roger Stone and Trump explicitly described as their formula for winning friends in influencing people: l*e, l*e hard, l*e often, and keep doubling down on the l*es no matter what. They explicitly described that strategy and with that in mind it’s easy to see how they employ it. Critical is that you l*e about the very things that you’re accused of ly*ng about – for example if you’re accused of ly*ng you accuse the person accusing you, of ly*ng. They didn’t try to hide that policy; they were explicit about it.
> and all politicians are doing exactly what Trump did only less publicly.
I pretty much agree with that. I’m sure that not all politicians l*e as frequently as Trump, but certainly many do.
Still, the question for me has always been whether Trump is really different in how much he l*es, or whether he’s just more open about his ly*ng. The case might be made that he’s less deceptive or more open about his ly*ng. In a sense the argument could be made that he’s more honest about his dishonesty.
I”m not completely sold on the answer to that question. Certainly there’s a long history of politicians ly*ng and some of them have l*ed about things that are at least as substantive as what Trump has regularly l*ed about (say, Johnson ly*ng about the Vietnam War). But I do think that Trump has been more deliberate and explictly in his strategy to achieve his goals by ly*ng, and I do think that has a negative impact more generally on our society.
> However, I think the success of Trump’s l*es has emboldened all politicians follow their gut not their brains.
Yes, I think that’s essentially what I was saying.
Joshua: “In a sense the argument could be made that he’s more honest about his dishonesty.”
It’s called sarcasm.
The press and TDS sufferers didn’t waste any opportunities to create fake narratives about “Trump’s lies.” Every politician tries to control their messaging to some extent. Trump was absolutely transparent as to where he stood and the policies he supported compared to any politician one can name.
For example, Biden’s main point in his inauguration was that he would put his heart and soul into unifying the country. If that was true then that feeling passed by the time he woke up the next morning and signed a stack of executive orders three feet high, killing energy independence, dismantling the border and castrating ICE.
WeeLard, you are such an obvious tool and obfuscator that its trivial to show you are not being truthful. I don’t think Makary and I disagree much on masking at least not recently.
MARTY MAKARY: I’d love to see the data. And remember, Dr. Fauci is one who claims that he needs to see the data. But yet at the same time, sometimes the argument is used that things are just common sense. So we need to do it. You can’t flip back and forth to saying in a scientific way that certain things are common sense. Therefore, we need everyone to do it versus we need data for everyone to do it. I’d love to see the data.
Look, kids who are healthy are extremely low risk and constitute such a small minority of overall cases. 0.05 percent, that’s five-hundredths of one percent. Even though they’re 20 percent of the U.S. population. We’ve lost all sense of risk. It’s distorted. More kids die from the common cold. They need to be careful, especially if they have comorbid conditions. But there’s no data to support what Dr. Fauci is saying.
And for Frank, who seems to be very naively accepting of public health authorities, the CDC has produced some of the most garbage science of anyone during the pandemic.
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/melanie-arter/dr-marty-makary-accuses-cdc-using-scientific-research-political
David our Hall Monitor will appreciate this note from Marty;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7023959/#!po=7.14286
As Jim might say, this is the price we pay for FREEDOM.
Frank says: Studies have proven that vaccination has reduced transmission in the COMMUNITY.
You seem to be as good at half-truths as you claim Trump is. A large Swedish study showed last year that 9 months after vaccination effectiveness against symptomatic covid declined to -25% even though the confidence interval did include zero. Effectiveness agains serious covid declined to 25% even though the confidence interval was larger. Perhaps there is a signifiicant effect right after vaccination but you cited nothing to prove it except citing statistics that are not a “study” but just your interpretation.
It is not clear that if vaccines had any utility and they probably did for vulnerable people, they no longer do. The latest bivalent booster seems to be only marginally effective and only for a couple of months.
I must say Frank, you are for me a way to determine what is false concerning covid. If Frank says it, it can’t be the whole story because Frank is all in on the CDC and public health establishment’s lies. Masks, school closures, shutdowns, mass vaccination would “stop” the virus. All official lies.
I find it discouraging that you say that the FDA looked carefully at vaccination of children before sanctioning it. You are wrong about that. Several of the senior people on their vaccination committee quit I think last fall because they thought the FDA was not listing to the science but instead political narratives. I cited it elsewhere in this comment thread.
Likewise your assertions about covid infection causing myocarditis looks evident free to me and based on a crude narrative about spike protein that I’m sure is your own special invention.
Frank,
Why would our Hall Monitor believe anything a molecular neurobiologist would say?
Freedom matters.
molecular neurobiology is far removed from virology or epidemiology. Frank is obviously wrong on most of what he said here and I cited proof that is easy to find. Google the Swedish vaccine study.
Your contribution here WeeLard has been wholely negative and you pointed to garbage sources to muddy the waters.
I prefer real experts who can explain clearly what they believe.
Another source says Frank is wrong about the CDC recommendation to vaccinate children.
DR. MARTY MAKARY: If a child has a special medical condition, those are the ones who show it. Those are the children who come to the hospital with COVID complications. If the child has not had COVID in the past, then there may be a case there and a healthy child. It’s not compelling, but certainly the kid with a special medical condition who does not have natural immunity. Now, if the FDA is trying to take its already shattered reputation with the public and make it even worse, they’re doing that today.
They’re about to authorize this COVID vaccine for 16 million children, 90-plus percent of whom have already had COVID, based on a small study of kids who did not have COVID. That was the condition to be in that study. So ignoring natural immunity is actually having significant implications now. And even that small study that showed that it works in kids, shows it didn’t work very well, as low as 30% effective in the first few months. And that goes down the drain after a few months.
Being a molecular neurobiologist is less authoritative than being an oncology surgeon, which is of course way less authoritative than being a hall monitor.
Makary has an interesting view on masks, which seems to contrast with our hall monitor’s.
Perhaps Denizens ought to stop outsourcing their authority and let our hall monitor tell it like it is.
More on Makary on masks. I don’t see any disagreement here either. Perhaps WeeLard just make that up.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11028713/Johns-Hopkins-expert-slams-White-House-Covid-chief-recommending-masks-indoors.html
This ended up in the wrong place. Willard is up to his usual obfuscation and inventing things.
MARTY MAKARY: I’d love to see the data. And remember, Dr. Fauci is one who claims that he needs to see the data. But yet at the same time, sometimes the argument is used that things are just common sense. So we need to do it. You can’t flip back and forth to saying in a scientific way that certain things are common sense. Therefore, we need everyone to do it versus we need data for everyone to do it. I’d love to see the data.
Look, kids who are healthy are extremely low risk and constitute such a small minority of overall cases. 0.05 percent, that’s five-hundredths of one percent. Even though they’re 20 percent of the U.S. population. We’ve lost all sense of risk. It’s distorted. More kids die from the common cold. They need to be careful, especially if they have comorbid conditions. But there’s no data to support what Dr. Fauci is saying.
And for Frank, who seems to be very naively accepting of public health authorities, the CDC has produced some of the most garbage science of anyone during the pandemic.
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/melanie-arter/dr-marty-makary-accuses-cdc-using-scientific-research-political
[MARTY] We need universal masking.
[HALL MONITOR] Masks are worthless
WeeLard, You are just lying here. I never said “masks are worthless.” I believe the science is clear, cloth masks including surgical masks are useless against viruses. N95 masks have some good evidence for reducing transmission but achieving compliance is difficult.
You of course supply no source for your alleged Makary statement or when it was made. I qouted directly from him.
David the Hall Monitor might also like this hot take from one of Marty’s coauthors:
[DORRY] Racist conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson, and those who legitimize them with a wide reaching microphone, need to be held accountable when someone ingests their garbage and kills innocent people. Speech can be free but cannot be without consequence.
Source: https://twitter.com/Dorry_Segev/status/1525966690927771648
dpy: I don’t [intentionally] deal in half-truths and omit caveats. Perhaps you don’t read carefully. The Florida “indictment” wrongly charged that vaccination didn’t reduce transmission in the community from the start. Concerning the reduced efficacy against Delta and Omicron, I wrote:
“After Delta and Omicron arrived, vaccination reduced infection about 75% soon after getting a booster, but much of that protection faded over about six month because the antibodies produced by vaccination didn’t neutralize these variants as well as they did earlier variants.” … “One could argue that the Biden administration was too aggressive trying to impose vaccine mandates once it was clear that vaccination wasn’t as effective at reducing transmission against the new variants.”
This doesn’t seem inconsistent with your claims about a Swedish study of declining vaccine efficacy. I looked at two “Swedish vaccine studies” and found that the pre-print of the most likely candidate (submitted to Lancet) had been withdrawn and a second study that discussed breakthrough infections after boosters in (high risk) healthcare workers, but not vaccine efficacy. A summary of the paper claimed: “However, protection against severe illness appears to be maintained.” but also says “vaccine effectiveness was lower and waned faster among men and older individuals. Vaccine effectiveness against severe COVID-19 [in this subpopulation] waned from 89% at day 15-30 to 42% from day 181 onwards.”
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20211117/Nationwide-Swedish-study-strengthens-evidence-for-a-third-booster-COVID-vaccine-dose.aspx
I resent the implication that I have significantly mislead anyone with my above statement. It would be nice if I had time to provide a citation every time l claimed that Florida WAS MISREPRESENTING the true situation, but there were too many misrepresentation to deal with all of them properly. I note that you didn’t bother the try to defend any of the claims Florida made.
I don’t know if the protection against serious illness is mediated by neutralizing antibodies or T-cells. IIRC, some believe T-cells are important and that protection against serious illness declines more slowly than protection against infection that is mediated by neutralizing antibodies. I don’t claim to have a definitive answer about the decline in protection from serious illness.
We should look at pre-politically-polarized-pandemic policy to see: a) which vaccines were “mandatory” – because they completely or nearly eliminate transmission in the community and b) which are recommended – because they provide individuals with useful protection. IMO, Flu vaccines, shingrex, and COVID vaccines against new variants are/should be recommended. Most childhood vaccines AND mRNA vaccine against the alpha variant are/should be mandatory or coerced because they do eliminate disease in the community (as the mRNA vaccine did in Israel and would have done in the US if Delta hadn’t arrived).
It is UNFORTUNATE that the community benefit (reduced transmission) from vaccination has decreased with new variants and fades in perhaps six month after boosters and FABULOUS that vaccination with boosters still provides people with 5-10 fold protection against serious illness when they get infected.
I don’t get my Information straight from the CDC. I follow links from general sources to the publication as see what the data really says to me. I find the CDC’s website hard to use and relatively useless.
The ignorant think masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccines don’t “work” because they didn’t end the pandemic in the US. Well, they did work in some countries, which proves they CAN work. The ignorant don’t realize that the reproduction rate (how many new individuals are infected on the average by each currently-infected individual) is the key parameter that defines whether and how well an intervention “works” (but does not provide a cost/benefit analysis associated with “working”). If you look at the data, from May 2020 until the arrival of Delta in July 2021, the US reproduction rate remained between 0.7 and 1.3 (and hugely below the 3.5 of March 2020 that produced a 4000-fold increase in cases). In other words, if we could have simply reduced transmission 30% by wearing masks or social distancing or working from home, the pandemic would have remained stable or shrunk over this period. In the spring of 2021, detected infection of vaccinees was down 90% and transmission from those with “silent infections” was much lower than it would have been. Unfortunately, we didn’t clearly see the benefits of vaccination because opportunistic politicians like DeSantis were telling us to return to normal – before Florida had even completed vaccinating their vulnerable! Cases in the US rose modestly from late February to mid-April presumably because people stopped wearing mask and social distancing, even though most vaccinations were administered then. Only after we also reached 50% vaccination did cases decline until Delta. And no, I didn’t reach these conclusions from reading the CDC. I spend hours pouring over data at ourworldindata.org and elsewhere trying to understand what was happening and trying to detect slowing from approaching herd immunity.
There were resignations at the FDA over the Biden administration publicly discussing when boosters would be available BEFORE they had been approved. Great! The FDA isn’t a rubber stamp for Biden’s COVID “czar”! There were resignations when the FDA approved anti-plaque antibodies for Alzheimers disease, when the advisory committee correctly said the data on efficacy was inadequate, but I would personally take this treatment despite these limitations. IMO, These antibodies clearly “work”, but the problem is identifying patients who need treatment early enough to prevent irreversible damage. The advisory committee correctly believed the sponsors hadn’t defined a patient population who would unambiguously benefit from the treatment – which had significant risks. To the best of my knowledge, there were no resignations over approving vaccines for children 5-11, just a close call. Vaccines that are a close call shouldn’t be mandatory, but the FDA shouldn’t prevent their sale simply because it was a close call.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/27/an-fda-adviser-said-we-need-give-kids-vaccines-fully-understand-their-safety-heres-crucial-context/
With children at little risk from COVID, I was personally skeptical about vaccinating them, especially with little and transitory benefit in terms of reducing transmission. So I did some research. I learned from my reading that Omicron is tougher on kids than earlier variants (its mechanism of invading cells is somewhat different) and calculated that 1% ! of children who tested positive during the Omicron surge were sick enough to be hospitalized, though few died. Many childhood illnesses eliminated by vaccination didn’t kill that large a fraction of children (measles 0.2%), but only anti-vaxxers question the value of measles vaccine.
I think you are right that we have lost our sense of risk, but this is true on both sides. I was living near and then with a 90+ year old mother-in-law during the pandemic, and that really distorts one’s perspective. Watching the death toll from COVID in every paper in the country mount daily, but not the death toll from heart disease, cancer, accidents, crime, drugs, etc is also distorting. For my personal therapy, I’ve been constantly comparing the risk from COVID to the risk from seasonal influenza, which previously didn’t justify any precautions for me. (I decided I better get the flu vaccine after flu sent me to the emergency room a few years ago.) In 2020, the risk of dying for those over 55 was about 20-fold greater at the same age from a COVID infection than a flu infection (and masks and social distancing had eliminated seasonal influenza). In 2022, the likelihood of death is about the same per infection for both, thanks to vaccination, naturally acquired immunity, a less deadly variant and Paxlovid and therapeutic antibodies (which are grossly under-used). However, omicron is so transmissible that it is currently killing about 4 times as many as influenza. By wearing a mask and planning to run for Paxlovid at the first sign of trouble, I can set my very real paranoia aside and feel I am as safe as before the pandemic.
I’m not sure what garbage science you think has come from the CDC. The garbage science came from those advocating HCQ and ivermectin based on third-world studies without proper controls! The garbage science came from Professor B and his prediction of a maximum of 20,000 deaths, Dr. Markary’s late Feb 2021 prediction that the pandemic would be over by March, and the GBD proposing a policy of protecting the vulnerable with no way to protect the vulnerable until a vaccine arrived! Now the garbage is coming from the state of Florida. Yes, the CDC did a horrendous job of developing a test and handling the issue of air-borne transmission and initially the benefits of masks. The evidence for zoonosis has been increasing, though the failure to unambiguously detect an infected intermediate species justified more careful consideration of the lab leak hypothesis. And with 20/20 hindsight, we should have put on an Election Night-sized TV spectacle involving some skeptics for the unblinding of mRNA clinical trials (both efficacy and safety).
I think your implication that the Florida SG was wrong seemed based only on a fact check of his stusy. I cited another study showing the same thing and saying it was unethical to vaccinate children. It’s part of a pattern of you citing CDC friendly data and omitting more reliable info. Perhaps you have been fooled by the massive campaign of censorship revealed today by Weiss or the massive body of pseudo science. The cdc is a leading source for this pseudo- science.
I referenced in response to WeeLard something from Makary going through the shameful record in some detail.
Frank –
> I don’t know if the protection against serious illness is mediated by neutralizing antibodies or T-cells. IIRC, some believe T-cells are important and that protection against serious illness declines more slowly than protection against infection that is mediated by neutralizing antibodies.
You might find this of interest:
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1587468178396807174?s=20&t=UHpekNAL4_iPS6AqIuMefQ
Your comment is quite confusing to me. You say “some believe” that T-cells are important? There seems to be very widespread acceptance of that. You seem to suggest there’s much uncertainty about whether protection against serious illness (T cell immunity) declines more slowly than protection against infection? That doesn’t seem to be in much doubt either. And as the Tweet I linked suggests, nAbs that protect against infection may well also contribute to protection against serious COVID.
I think the main issue here is that it was probably unlikely from the start that intramuscular injections would create long-lasting mucosal immunity against a respiratory virus (especially against one that would be expected to mutate into new variants). Walensky has said that mistakes were made in conveying too much optimism in that regard. AFAIK, there was not previous history of such a development taking place. Although the vaccines did provide protection against infection (and transmission) initially (and still do probably to some degree even after the main benefit in that regard wanes), it seems to me the pre-existing science would have indicated that effect would likely wane fairly quickly.
Frank look at the graphs at the end of the preprint.. like so many authors who have been intimidated by the Covid gestapo their words don’t effect their data I noted this at the time. Given the garbage and fraudulent papers you show an unusual deference and faith in the cdc data and narratives
WeeLard deflects to his favorite witch Fox News which he tries to burn. But the wood is soaked with water and Wee’s own Lard
Frank, Ioannidis had a great essay in tablet in August laying out how science had been alarmingly degraded during the pandemic. I fear you have been oblivious to the corrupt narratives and garbage science from our public health ‘leaders.’ And seem to be doing the work of the censors or at least not being skeptical or award that many many good scientists views are absent from your view
Frank –
Also:
> I learned from my reading that Omicron is tougher on kids than earlier variants (its mechanism of invading cells is somewhat different) and calculated that 1% ! of children who tested positive during the Omicron surge were sick enough to be hospitalized, though few died.
Long COVID is also an issue relevant to infections in children, and there seems to be some evidence that vaccination may help protect against long COVID.
and:
> In 2022, the likelihood of death is about the same per infection for both, thanks to vaccination, naturally acquired immunity, a less deadly variant and Paxlovid
FWIW, I think the relative virulence of Omicron – compared to pre-Delta variants – is still somewhat up in the air. There seems to be some evidence that it is less virulent and some that it isn’t. This study suggesting it’s on a par with ancestral lineages has some major limitations, but perhaps it’s of value:
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciac957/6931752?login=false
Also,
> and therapeutic antibodies (which are grossly under-used).
Is this in reference to the monoclonal antibody treatments? My impression is that their efficacy has significantly decreased as treatments for Omicron.
It must have been a while since our Hall Minotaur (for once the autocorrect is useful!) has cooked anything else than ramens for lard is a fire hazard. Since he does not even recall having deemed masks worthless IN THIS VERY THREAD, we might need to thread lightly:
https://www.physiciansweekly.com/in-conspiracy-we-trust
Perhaps David should offer his services to Vinay.
you are lying Willard or at least misrepresenting my long held position. I have always said that cloth masks are worthless and N95 have a benefit. Perhaps you are cherry picking from my long record on this. But that is what propagandists and obscurants do.
No comment is needed on your BS quote. You cherry pick in virtually all your opus of Lard and WeeWee here.
David,
There are seven occurrences of “worthless” in this thread besides the one In this sentence. It is really not hard for anyone to see what you said. The only thing that is more worthless than your shirt ripping is your Hall Minotaur act.
You got caught between having to root for Atlas or Makary, whose opinion you would have any problem to find had you any research skills. It is no big deal. Once again you are trying to start a food fight for no good reason.
Here, enjoy some Elon drama:
https://fortune.com/2022/12/18/twitter-suspends-paul-graham-venture-capitalist-supportive-of-elon-musk-after-he-tweets-about-mastodon-link/
Follow @bestofdyingtwit for more!
irrelevant, immaterial, and obfuscation. To find anything positive in this game shows a deep lack of ethics and a need to get feedback from someone (you Wee) who couldn’t generate it in a constructive way because you have nothing real to say.
What game would that be, Hall Minotaur – the one where I reach the centre of you maze? You are not ready. More importantly, you need better role models:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/26/is-2022-the-year-we-all-finally-got-over-narcissists-00075270
You should get yourself one, laser-eyes go well on red-pilled troglodytes.
“ It’s Easier To Fool People Than To Convince Them That They’ve Been Fooled”
Attribution Mark Twain. If he didn’t actually say it, he should have.
Merry Christmas. The miserable cold has moved off to the east. Now it’s just cold.
…
The FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million to censor conservatives.
The FBI pressured Twitter to give them information that would legally require warrants, though they did not have warrants.
Leading up to the 2020 election, the FBI would eventually hold weekly meetings with Twitter and tell them whose tweets to squelch and which accounts they wanted to be suspended. Almost all were those of conservatives.
The FBI knew the Hunter Biden laptop story was real, they knew it was coming out — weeks before the 2020 election — and they told Big Tech to expect a “Russian disinformation” drop and squelch the story. That means the FBI corrupted the election to help Joe “totally showered with his daughter, Ashley” Biden.
There are so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they have their own Slack channel.
…
The FBI was a portal, specifically the San Francisco office, for other government agencies to get to Twitter to surveil and censor Americans.
Hiding under the title of Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), actors from local police departments to the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA were watching and censoring Americans — not foreigners.
Twitter wasn’t the only Big Tech firm hip-deep in spooks. The feds had their fingers in Verizon, Reddit, Facebook, Microsoft, and, for some reason, Pinterest.
As the 2020 election neared, the FBI-FITF assailed Twitter with hundreds of requests to censor Twitter accounts and tweets. There were so many requests that Twitter execs had to come up with a system to prioritize them.
FBI employees were tasked with doing word searches on Twitter, looking for violations of Twitter policies — instead of chasing actual criminals.
The FBI had roughly 80 agents working with Big Tech companies. It is unclear how many members of the DOD, CIA, etc. were involved
…
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2022/12/24/why-you-need-to-start-paying-attention-to-the-twitter-files-n1656136
Yes Jim, its unprecedented. Previously, they just leaked to the media to do their dirty work.
Kiss a whale for Christmas (a quick video)
https://twitter.com/TansuYegen/status/1605812328196251648?s=20&t=O5AUEElA9PIhCIt1GEF51A
Here’s to a Whale of a New Year. Go skeptics!
This was sequestered for quite a while.
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984030
Not since the verbal miscues of George W. Bush 20 years ago has America had as blunder-prone a president as Joe Biden.
The 46th president’s record of slip-ups dates back for decades, and he even called himself a “gaffe machine” long before taking office. As such, 2022 was no exception to the rule, with Biden issuing verbal slip-ups on a near-weekly basis.
‘MATH IS HARD’: BIDEN HAS ‘TWO WORDS: MADE IN AMERICA’
Though there are too many to recount on such a short list, the Washington Examiner dug through and found what we felt were the top 10 Biden blunders of the year. In no particular order, they are as follows.
“Repeat the line”
The president endured a major teleprompter fail in July when he accidentally read instructions rather than doing what those instructions told him to do.
“End of quote. Repeat the line,” he said at a White House event.
…
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/biden-top-10-gaffes-of-2022
Big Tech firms have become instruments to suppress human and civil rights worldwide, says cybersecurity expert Rex Lee.
“They now become arms of the government [agencies], no different than an informant who is informing on people to a secret police force,” Lee, a security adviser at My Smart Privacy, told “China in Focus” on NTD News, the sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/big-tech-is-eliminating-human-and-civil-rights-by-proxy-security-expert_4940278.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=BonginoReport
Cold kills …
BUFFALO, N.Y. — The death toll from a pre-Christmas blizzard that paralyzed the Buffalo area and much of the country has risen to 27 in western New York authorities said Monday as the region dug out from one of the worst weather-related disasters in its history.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/26/deaths-western-new-york-massive-storm-00075599
I think we need to summarize in one place the voluminous list of cherry picking and unawareness shown in these comments.
1. Childhood vaccination is not a good idea.
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Yet Frank you tried to discredit the Florida SG by linking a fact check of his study. There may be ways to improve this study but the result is supported by other studies so the Florida SG is probably correct. You didn’t mention this context.
2. You are easily upset about the Florida grand jury. Yet there is a lot of evidence of large payments going from Big Pharma to our public health officials. Their pro vaccine dogma and pseudo-science defies logic. There is no reason for someone previously infected to get vaccinated. This is settled science, but our CDC phonies implied otherwise. Yet through mandates, we forced millions to take an experimental drug they didn’t want to take. That bothers me and it should bother you.
3. Garbage science from the CDC. Read this carefully as it lists a number of CDC studies that used very poor methods and justified policies when many other other non-CDC studies showed opposite conclusions.
https://www.cnsnews.com/article/washington/melanie-arter/dr-marty-makary-accuses-cdc-using-scientific-research-political
And this from Ioannidis is chilling:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic-science
4. We are in a censorship and cancellation regime unprecedented even in wartime. This may explain Frank why you are unaware of so much solid science and tend to succumb to CDC pseudo-science.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36340971/
https://substack.com/profile/1488199-david-zweig?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1606701397109796866.html
As to vaccine effectiveness at preventing transmission, I said there was a short term effect that had little effect on the final course of the pandemic. You quoted from the Swedish study without looking at the data. What you quoted is not an accurate representation of the data. After 9 months, effectiveness against symptomatic covid was -25%. It’s possible the vaccinated may have prolonged the epidemic.
There may be hope for you Frank, in that you may just be sheltered from sources like substack. Read the Ioannidis piece. He had another paper on Zombie studies which have become common since the pandemic.
Here’s a paragraph from ioannidis’ essay.
“Heated but healthy scientific debates are welcome. Serious critics are our greatest benefactors. John Tukey once said that the collective noun for a group of statisticians is a quarrel. This applies to other scientists, too. But “we are at war” led to a step beyond: This is a dirty war, one without dignity. Opponents were threatened, abused, and bullied by cancel culture campaigns in social media, hit stories in mainstream media, and bestsellers written by zealots. Statements were distorted, turned into straw men, and ridiculed. Wikipedia pages were vandalized. Reputations were systematically devastated and destroyed. Many brilliant scientists were abused and received threats during the pandemic, intended to make them and their families miserable.”
Long Island Rep.-elect George Santos came clean to The Post on Monday, admitting that he lied on the campaign trail about his education and work experience — but insisting that the controversy won’t deter him from serving out his two-year term in Congress.
“I am not a criminal,” Santos said at one point during his exclusive interview. “This [controversy] will not deter me from having good legislative success. I will be effective. I will be good.”
https://nypost.com/2022/12/26/rep-elect-george-santos-admits-fabricating-key-details-of-his-bio/
George is not a crook!
My guess is that even this guy is underestimating the cost of “going green.” We in the US need to ignore the Climate Doomers! (And vote them out, no matter what the political party.)
The shift to green energy may be “inflationary and even slightly stagflationary,” Bank of France Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau said Friday, speaking virtually on a panel at a central bank conference in Bangkok
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-02/global-central-banks-brace-for-greenflation-and-climate-change
Critical energy shortages brought on by the Climate Doomers. The price cap will likely further limit the supply of energy to Europe. It didn’t work for Nixon, and it won’t work for Europe.
The European Union’s energy crisis is expected to continue into 2023 as gas supplies have been cut by more than 80%, prompting the 27-nation bloc’s energy ministers to agree on Dec. 19 to a gas price cap.
Starting Feb. 15, a cap will be triggered if gas prices exceed 180 euros ($190) per megawatt hour for three days. Reuters reported that when the cap is triggered, “trades would not be permitted on the front-month, three-month and front-year TTF contracts at a price more than 35 euros($37.24)/MWh above the reference LNG price.”
The move, which is meant to ease financial pressure on energy consumers, comes as Europe has faced $1 trillion in energy costs in the months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The EU imported about 30% of its gas supply from Russia in 2021.
Russia called the cap an attack on market pricing. “This is a violation of the market price-setting, an infringement on market processes, any reference to a cap is unacceptable,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to Moscow-based Interfax news agency.
https://www.ibtimes.com/eu-energy-crisis-going-get-worse-before-it-gets-better-that-might-good-thing-3650301
Climate Change virtue signalling may be good for the social calendar of some, but when push comes to shove, fossil fuels win out over Green genuflection.
Oil took over from natural gas as the leading fuel for power plants in New England, a significant switch that signals how the grid is desperately trying to keep the lights on in the face of a winter massive storm.
The six-state grid relied on oil for at least a third of its power generation and for as much as 40% at times on Saturday, ISO New England data show. Natural gas provided as little as 15% by mid-afternoon.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-24/storm-elliott-news-oil-is-main-fuel-for-power-plants-in-new-england
It turns out that three members of the Climate Action Council (propounders of the Scoping Plan) dissented from issuance of the Plan. One of those, a guy named Gavin Donohue, is at least partially alert to the consumer cost issue. His statement dissenting from the Scoping Plan can be found here. Among other things, he had this to say on the cost issue:
It is irresponsible to put out a plan to achieve the CLCPA’s goals while at the same time preventing New Yorkers from understanding the impact on their energy bills and the economy. We are in a period when electricity bills are expected to increase by 30-40% and the Plan’s lack of mentioning on how it will impact ratepayers is disappointing and a missed opportunity. The Plan lacks an independent, transparent, unbiased, comprehensive consumer cost impact analysis and quantification of the expense that will ultimately be borne by New York’s residents through increased fees, taxes, and energy bills. For the past two years, I have asked for this cost analysis.
Lack of consideration of potential consumer cost impacts is “disappointing” and a “missed opportunity.” That’s certainly a polite way of putting it. More accurate would be completely incompetent and irresponsible.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/26/bring-on-the-electricity-cost-crisis/
Two comments in limbo.
From Glenn Greenwald’s latest on the Biden laptop story:
That’s why the proof of authenticity was there not 18 months later, but from the very beginning. So, when these media outlets ran around spreading the CIA lie that this was “Russian disinformation”, it wasn’t just that it was baseless. It was that they were actively lying because the evidence was all right in front of them. I was pointing it out at the time, as were others, and they purposely turned away from it so that they could lie to the public because they were petrified that this reporting would undermine Joe Biden’s chances to win. So that’s one point I want to make. This is not an accidental case of journalistic ineptitude. It is a case of corporate media outlets uniting with the CIA and the intelligence agencies to lie on purpose.
David, why is it do you think that the left is willing to believe that big tobacco was willing to cover up the deadliness and addictiveness of smoking, (a belief I share), and also that big oil was willing to cover up their knowledge that burning fossil fuel would doom the planet (a belief I do not have), but that it is out of the question that big pharma would rather not want to know if vaccines might cause neurodevelopmental disorders? They are all conspiracies of industry and to some level of government corruption through revolving doors. Only one of the three is unthinkable except to a parent that comes home from the doctor and their toddler no longer walks and talks.
Ron –
> that it is out of the question that big pharma would rather not want to know if vaccines might cause neurodevelopmental disorders?
That is a classic failure in perspective taking. “The left” believes that big pharma conspired in the opiod crisis.
But your belief is that it’s plausible that doctors, researchers, and public health officials all over the world are conspiring to hide immense harm to many, many children and their families with indifference to all the suffering they’re causing – and now you’re adding that millions and millions of your fellow Americans don”t even want to know if vaccines cause neurodevelopmental disorders?
Yeah, I think that “the left” does have some difficulty believing that your conspiracy is plausible.
And I think you’re wrong that millions and millions of your fellow citizens on the left don’t want to know if vaccines are causing great harm. .
And there is a relatively small number of people who think your views are plausible and they range across the political spectrum. Views on vaccines doesn’t show much of a political signal. So millions of people on “the right” don’t see it the way you do either. But it’s interesting that you don’t think their disagreement is with you mean that “the right” doesn’t want to know if vaccines harm people.
Once again, it seems you’ve run afoul of the fundamental attribution error.
But you’re certainly entitled to your views.
Ron –
I think that “the left” does have some difficulty believing that your conspiracy is plausible.
And I think you’re wrong that millions and millions of your fellow citizens on the left don’t want to know if vaccines are causing great harm. .
And there is a relatively small number of people who think your views are plausible and they range across the political spectrum. Views on vaccines doesn’t show much of a political signal. So millions of people on “the right” don’t see it the way you do either. But it’s interesting that you don’t think their disagreement means that “the right” doesn’t want to know if vaccines harm people.
Once again, it seems you’ve run afoul of the fundamental attribution error.
But you’re certainly entitled to your views.
There’s another aspect of your argument that fails, also.
Your conspiracy doesn’t only involve big pharma. It involves medical professionals and researchers and public health officials all over the world. “The left” doesn’t particularly have a hard time believing that big pharma caused massive harm with opiods. The don’t find bug pharma more trustworthy than bug tobacco. It’s your inclusion of so many more people from so many different sectors from so many different countries that increases the implausibility of your conspiracy theory. It’s funny that you can’t even see that.
You are correct Joshua that there is little political party correlation with vaccine safety concern before the covid vaccine. I pointed this out earlier as a possible explanation for its non-acceptance due to no political camp that is motivated to grab the flag.
Isn’t it mindboggling to you to think that the covid vaccine safety concerns follow party lines, presumably due to Fauci -Trump and partisan dynamics? Doesn’t that in itself reveal anything? Could it be that the attitudes could be exactly reversed if Trump won in 2020, fired Fauci and mandated the vaccine? Kamala said in October 2020 that she would never trust a Trump vaccine. She would certainly have picked up the anti-vaxx flag.
Team Ron. It boggles the mind to notice the correlation between Freedom Fighters and anti-vaxxers, something we could observe for the last three years or so on this website.
Since you are trying to guesstimate costs:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5789217/
Many Freedom Fighters are also TERFs, incidentally.
Ron –
> Isn’t it mindboggling to you to think that the covid vaccine safety concerns follow party lines, presumably due to Fauci -Trump and partisan dynamics? Doesn’t that in itself reveal anything?
At long last, something that we sort of agree upon.
Although I wouldn’t call it mind-boggling, exactly, because it’s essentially the same dynamic that has played out with climate change and many other of myriad proxy tribalistic battles. I will acknowledge some surprise. If you had asked me beforehand if I would predict that there would be a tribal signal in views on vaccines, even to the extent that we’d see a differential in deaths by stratifying by political orientation across states, I wouldn’t likely have done so. It’s a “surprised but not shocked” kind of situation.
It’s a sad state of affairs and I think it’s only likely to get worse. Public health has now become completely aggregated with tribalism. We could see the roots of this development with the Ebola outbreak. Do you remember the Trump tweets about Ebola and the political grandstanding on that issue against public health officials? The foundation was there and in hindsight it should have been obvious this would happen but indeed Trump was a kind of accelerant.
And the partisan drivers are growing in force. The whole Musk/Twitter drama is a perfect amplifier. People at Twitter felt a responsibility to safeguard public benefit, and so did our government, but the manner in which they did so could not be disaggregated from a political agenda in our current environment. They weren’t blameless, imo, and neither are those who felt politically discriminated against, but the fact that people are looking to assign blame more so than deal with the intrinsic issues with social media, or resolve the problems, is a bad sign of what might happen in the next pandemic.
I resist a “kids today” attitude, as I think it’s mostly a function of recency bias and other cognitive biases. I remember thinking things were on a bad path previously. But it’s hard to be optimistic. Maybe AI will bail us out.
Willard, biochemistry is more complex than you can even imagine. The discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick 70 some years ago compared to the complexity of epigenetic regulation of the expression of DNA is like the discovery of money is to economics. And just like some economic interventions have the intended result, the vast majority have unintended consequences. This does not mean I am against all regulation. It just means that even without corrupt motives regulation is only proven effective over time.
Many drugs and vaccines have unintended consequences as well. The methyl mercury that accompanied childhood inoculations was not meant to have a benefit to the child except for allowing the vaccine makers to have a longer shelf life for their products. They reasoned that the mercury was bound strongly enough that the body could eventually eliminated it in tact without the mercury absorbing into the system. They guessed wrong. But there is no way to even have a clue of the damage without careful and expensive study. Who is going to pay for that? They have now taken mercury out of childhood vaccines after decades of resisting the lobbying of activists. And people like Dr. Offit crow that there is still a growing incidence of autism so those stupid activists made us take out the mercury for nothing.
You have great confidence in big establishments. That is natural. You know there are bad guys but to believe there are thousands of bad guys all conspiring is delusional. Institutional branding is something to respect and protect. This is mostly true. But history is full of exceptions. Johnson and Johnson was one of the most trusted brands in the world. But thousands of employees did not ever wonder if asbestos in baby powder might be a concern. https://www.asbestos.com/companies/johnson-johnson/
I forgot to explain that epigenetics is how the genes get expressed (turned on and off). It’s also hereditary, but unlike genetics, is also an environmentally influenced mechanism for retaining information. Memories in one’s brain are recorded through an epigenetic system. There is even evidence that epigenetic recordings can pass fears or instincts to the next generation.
I believe that the mechanism of most diseases involve malfunctions of the complex epigenetic pathways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Joshua: “At long last, something that we sort of agree upon.”
I hope you think that is a good thing. Because it could lead to agreement on further conclusions from that premise, which might lead to revelations that one of us would have have to swallow, thereby opening the possibility that we might be biased on other ideas, which would destroy our credibility and shatter our infallibility and allow wrongthinkers as not to be irredeemable.
Thanks, Ron. In return:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02989-9
Something tells me that your admiration for Paul Offit knows no bounds.
The emphasized bit is for your accounting ledger, it should go without saying,
Willard, did you watch the Vaxxed movie? If not then you are trusting to hear both sides of the case presented by one side’s attorney. Would go along with this if you sat on a jury? I hope not. https://rumble.com/v1x0jwa-vaxxed-the-movie.html
I went back to your link and searched DeStefano and I got no hits. This seminal study to clear MMR from autism should be the central point of such an article but it is omitted. Why?
Thank you for your question, Ron. It means you are still thinking I’m an idiot. Do you recall when I was asking you to dust up your concept of environment? Now is the time to put it to work:
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-017-0121-4
You know what thimerosal exposure means, right?
Your baits are getting weaker, Ron.
Second try:
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-017-0121-4
Do you know what thimerosal exposure means by any chance?
Thimerosal is the organometallic mercury that was used as a preservative in vaccines until about 2001.
Here is what author Anne Dachel said about what the NYT and MSM review of Vaxxed really should have been:
“We’ve been helping to cover up the link between an unsafe, unchecked vaccine schedule and autism for so long, we can’t suddenly start to legitimately report on this topic.
We’re so dependent on advertising revenue from the pharmaceutical industry that we won’t say anything that could jeopardize that income.
For these reasons and others….
We won’t look into the conflicts of interest of the experts we cite who deny a link between autism and vaccines.
We won’t interview Dr. Wakefield and let him defend himself over the charges that have been made against him. Instead, we’ll constantly talk ABOUT him, never WITH him.
We will never interview any of the parents of the study that Wakefield wrote about in his 1998 Lancet piece.
We won’t talk to any of the experts mentioned in the film “Vaxxed.” That includes Dr. Rachel Ross, former U.S. Representative Dr. Dave Weldon, Noble Prize winner Dr. Luc Montagnier, Dr. Doreen Granpeesheh, MIT professor Dr. Stephanie Seneff, or Dr. Jim Sears.
We won’t ask the Centers for Disease Control why they’ve never called for a simple study of fully vaccinated and never vaccinated kids to compare their autism rates, even though we all know it could settle the controversy instantly.
We will absolutely never talk about the independent science out there that challenges all the pharma-funded studies we constantly cite in our stories.
We will continue to blame actress Jenny McCarthy for stirring up concern over vaccines and autism.
We will universally label a film about a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who says his agency destroyed critical research data as simply “anti-vaccine.”
We will never mention the fact that the same British government that removed Dr. Wakefield’s medical license, also indemnified the maker of the MMR vaccine, so they’re the ones liable if a link between that vaccine and autism is publicly recognized.
We certainly won’t ask Dr. Jon Poling, the father of Hannah Poling, about the fact that the federal government conceded her claim that the vaccinations she received caused her autism.
And we won’t discuss the fact that no one is liable for a vaccine injury since doctors and vaccine makers have been indemnified by the federal government, and therefore there is no real incentive to produce truly safe vaccines.
We’re sorry, but the consequences that would result if we honestly and thoroughly covered this controversy are simply unimaginable. Who would be held responsible for such a horrible mistake? What if an uncheck, unsafe, liability free vaccine schedule were doing incredible damage to children everywhere? We simply can’t consider that possibility.
It’s so much easier to ask the agency with vast money ties to the vaccine makers if their vaccines are safe. It’s so convenient to say that all the autism is the result of “better diagnosing” and “an expanded definition” and not mention that the diagnosis was widened back in 1994 and what followed was a continual, steady increase for the next 20 years.”
Right on, Ron – thimerosal:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/index.html
And you almost mention the E word, as predicted.
Reasonable people try to find reasonable solutions, they do not whine about the right of people to vote with their feet, including scientists. You are defending Freedom as well as you stan for INTEGRITY ™.
Do continue.
Willard cited quote “MMR-vaccine coverage in the United Kingdom fell to around 80% in the mid-2000s (from the necessary 95%), leading to outbreaks.”
The movie Vaxxed opens to news talking heads reporting of measles outbreaks. MMR is four vaccines in one shot, measles, mumps, rubella (German measles) and chicken pox. I would rather have my child have all four of these rather than a 1:50 chance of living a life of mental and emotional incapacity and gastro pains. I had two out of the four and I barely remember them except for not being to go out an play with friends. Today there is 10 cases of Rubella in the USA on average per year, even with our anti-vaxx and illegal immigration crisis.
Let me give you the hypothetical that Trump had appointed an Exon executive as the head of the EPA or DoE rather than as SoS. And after their service they went back to a higher job at Exon. Would you be fine with that?
What about the same hypothetical but the head of the CDC or FDA or NAIAD goes to work at top job in big pharma? Is that different? How so?
Speaking of vaxes – here we have the leading light of pro-Ivermectin advocacy.
https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1606830454006587393?t=v0R3_ULc6Q8Xq2Yk1BR_rw&s=19
Ron – did you look for any counterarguments to Dachel before you quoted her at length? I’m asking for my study of the mechanics of “skepticism.”
“…did you look for any counterarguments to Dachel before you quoted her at length?”
I had come to the same questions and thought independently before quoting Dachel. Did you get to the part of the movie where the Nobel Prize winning scientist who discovered HIV, Dr. Luc Montagnier, supports Wakefield?
Willard, regarding thimerosal here is a paper that shows its neurotoxicity. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0161813X04001147
There are many other components to the dozens of chemical brews that are routinely injected into our toddlers. Here is the current vaccine schedule for the USA minus the three covid shots they want to add. http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/ip/images/document%20first%20pages/IZ%20schedule.jpg
Ron,
Please don’t tell me you did not know about Luc:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier
Things are supposed to travel quicker across the pond nowadays! You might as well do a shout out to Linus Pauling. That way the connection between the Denizens at Judy’s and the cranks at Roy’s will be complete.
Ron –
> I had come to the same questions and thought independently before quoting Dachel.
Are you going to answer my question? I asked bscizsd I’d expect a skeptic to look for countering perspectives before quoting someone at length like that.
> Did you get to the part of the movie where the Nobel Prize winning scientist who discovered HIV, Dr. Luc Montagnier, supports Wakefield.
No. (But nice appeal to authority.). I watched enough of the movie to ascertain that it’s a hard sell, not something that scientifically looks at the various aspects of issues. At that point I’m not particularly interested. That sort of one-sided presentation is only useful for me if I’ve already got an informed perspective and want to know potential counterarguments. If I’m just gathering information them an unreliable source isn’t particularly useful.
Willard: “Please don’t tell me you did not know about Luc…”
Yes, he is a conspiracy nut who believed that SARS2 came from a Chinese lab before the enforced consensus had collapsed. I’m sure you have my comments on the same points early on in the pandemic, yourself believing strongly in the fraudulent consensus, and holding them in your dossier for the right time.
This brings to mind the question of how many collapses of enforced consensus do you have to witness before you start thinking that censoring knowledge might not be a good idea, and America’s founding ideals of freedom merit some respect?
Joshua: “Are you going to answer my question?”
I did not research her because unlike you I rely on the soundness of facts, reason and logic over authority, especially on ideas that do not require authority. Did you research Offit? Probably not. You called him an unbiased broker IIRC. Offit’s claim that what we know about autism precludes the vaccine connection is a pure lie. But he uses his authority, knowing his interviewer would not press for an explanation. He knows that neurobiologists will hear him lying but would never challenge him because they don’t want to open trouble for themselves and also “for the sake of public confidence.”
When I saw Fauci asked by a reporter at the first White House briefing if covid could have come from the lab he answered the similarly to Offit: “we know from the virus’s structure” that it definitely did not come from a lab. He boldly lied. His first action (we know now) after finding out the virus likely came from the Wuhan lab he funding was to corral all the virologists into writing a letter to the Lancet debunking the possibility of lab origin. They repeated the phrase “conspiracy theory” three times in the text.
You love Fauci and Offit and they love you.
Ron presents lots of links for where his suspicions of vaccination comes from. Josh takes 10 paragraphs to say he doesn’t like the optics of what Ron links and will not look at anything of substance.
This is very simple really. Noone should force someone else to take a medication or treatment they don’t want to take. In a free country, that’s pretty fundamental.
I think generally vaccination seems to be effective even though long term side effects need to be carefully monitored and documented. That was not done with the covid vaccines as the trials were terminated after 90 days. Two top vaccine scientists at the FDA quit over the shoddy approval for these vaccines. There is plenty of room for honest disagreement with the official dogma that everyone needs to get these vaccines. Those with natural immunity do not need them. Healthy people under 50 don’t either.
You will note that no one is defending the CDC, even the usually respectful to authority Frank. That’s because they (the CDC) have been very negligent and harmed a lot of people.
Our Hall Monitor can’t bring himself to throw Ron under the bus for being the purest anti-vaxxer we may have seen so far, so he must continue to pursue his favorite whipping boy.
Considering that he still cannot even acknowledge that the infamous tweet J he keeps criticizing comes from an author our Hall Monitor cited himself, this is only par for the course.
When will it be when he will learn about Jill James – will he try to minimize Ron’s denial furthermore, will he himself become anti-vaxx curious, will he double down his ankle biting, will he keep ignoring trying to play the ref?
Prolly all of the above!
https://twitter.com/RschoonRudy/status/1606997926357655552?t=uTV4UOFZGoOhN9m0qh3tWg&s=03
Joshua, I hear you saying I am anti-vaxx. That is an untrue conclusion you have drawn despite all of my statements showing faith in vaccines when the risk is deemed appropriate. I got the mRNA vaccine as soon as I could and got boosted 9 months later. You want to paint me as a religious or paranoid “anti-vaxxer” because I see government wrongdoing and dishonesty regarding the Wakefield findings. This is after you jumped to ill-informed conclusions that I believed there was strong evidence of Wuhan lab dishonesty and tangible investigative evidence of a lab leak origin of covid while you were investigating me, David and Nic, rather than looking at evidence independently. All that because it seems like you foolishly are willing to follow any authority blindly was you get invested in their dogma, which requires only your political party affiliation.
You essentially agreed with me that had your political party been suspicious of the mRNA vaccine you would have been as well. I try not to operate in that fashion though I realize I am under the same natural inclinations to do so.
Even Paul Offit is against giving children the mRNA vaccine, and he is the greatest champion of vaccines and dragon slayer of any of those who question if enough safety investigation has been done.
Can’t you agree with Paul Offit on this point over your political loyalties?
Joshua, my replies to you yesterday and this morning are in moderation. Meanwhile I found another autism investigator that supported Wakefield’s hypothesis, both before and after Wakefield (1998). Here is his paper Gupta (2000) in the Journal of Autism and Developmental disorders. Gupta has authored or coauthored over 1700 papers. His conclusion is that there is strong evidence of immune system disorder connected with autism. He concludes: “Although a number of biological agents have been used, few well-designed studies using adequate numbers of patients exist. There is a reasonable rationale for the use of immunomodulatory approaches.”
Here is a slew of similar papers.
This seems to refute Paul Offit’s NPR interview assurance about what “we know” about autism.
Ron –
I just wrote a longer response that got lost in the ethersphere. Oh well.
I’m certainly not equipped to evaluate technical arguments about the etiology of autism or whether immunological theories of causality whereby vaccines (as opposed to myriad other potentially relevant variables) mediate that causality, stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Since you seem to think that Gupta’s paper supports Wakefield’s theories about vaccine causality, it might be interesting if you had a link to something whereby Gupta says clearly something on the order of “vaccines cause autism” and where in easy to understand terms, he engages with the arguments that vaccines don’t cause autism. Ideally, it would be something that is more current than something from 20 years ago.
Better yet – as I’m a big fan of Bradfod’s Criteria of causality, if you had a relatively easy to understand argument for vaccine-linked causality that meet those criteria it would be useful.
Meanwhile, could. I’m curious if (1) you could answer my previous question and relatedly (2) did you read technical material that interrogates Gupta’s scientific conclusions presented in that paper?
Meanwhile, this might be interesting:
https://primaryimmune.org/video/immunizations-risks-benefits
I’m not going to watch the video but since he’s discussing the risks and benefits of vaccines, and since it would seem if he thinks vaccines cause autism he would explicitly mention that as a risk since it would be such a consequential outcome, then you might want to watch and if you do please let me know what he says about vaccines causing autism.
Also, I find this interesting. Let me know if you do also.
At the following link:
https://www.fredericknewspost.com/archives/vaccines-and-autism/article_c41ebfbb-21ce-5107-acc6-dfe750981d30.html
They quote Gupta as saying:
but they don’t quote him saying anything in particular about vaccines causing autism. Must have been an oversight that I’m sure you’ll be able to correct for since you also cite Gupta as supporting the etiology of vaccines mediating the causal link between the immune system and autism.
Since it looks like Frank is not around I will do a non-jargon explanation of the scientific evidence for suspicion on vaccines as a causative agent for neurodevelopmental effects.
The most difficult to understand illnesses we face today have a common thread, they all are connected to epigenetics, which are the mechanisms in which an organism controls the signaling for when to pull out the DNA instructions and start making something. These mechanisms are made up of complex pathways that are both hereditary and environmentally influenced. Cancer, MS, ALS, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and autism are epigenetic disorders.
A core epigenetic mechanism is the methylation of CPG islands in the DNA through the trans sulfuration pathway (TSP). Two important components of that pathway are vitamins B9 and B12. Deficiency in B9, B12, and D3 have been linked to all the diseases I mentioned (though that is certainly not the only component).
Wakefield (1998) reported that although all 12 of the autistic subjects had normal serum B12, all had a significant deficiency in active B12 which is determined by the pathway marker in producing SAMe, the critical product of TSP, a component for tissue growth. When it was discovered that organic mercury (Thimerosal) interfered with that pathway it was taken out of vaccines, although this did not change autism’s growing trend, and the MMR vaccine never used Thimerosal. So mercury was not the main cause. As I said the pathway is complex and defends on every i being dotted and every t getting crossed in order to not have disease.
Rett syndrome (ASD) is linked to a defective gene in that pathway. One diagnostic marker for autism is a low level of SAMe and elevated precursor called homocysteine. If this pathway is disrupted at a point of early child development the effects are permanent. Pregnant mothers are encouraged now to take vitamins, particularly B9 and B12.
The TSP is also how the body detoxifies free radicals (oxidants). There is thought that autism is linked to oxidative load. Vaccines or any foreign materials introduced to the body could potentially increase oxidative load.
The suspicion of vaccines on autism and perhaps other developmental problems is certainly within the realm of being investigated and not something born of religiosity or bias.
Agreed, Ron. The vaxxing issue is something that has been investigated.
It is now disproven.
No need to dumb down what you obviously got through anti-vaxx channels. You simply are conflating a model whereby environmental factors (comprised here as *anything* outside the genetic code) could play a role in the neurodivergence formation and the vaxx issue. Which is understandable since the vaxx issue has been disproven.
As the One of N name should tell you, the studies you and other despairing parents rely on suffer from very little power. It is OK to kick things down the road and say we need more research and everything is so complicated. To harp about INTEGRITY ™ while claiming that Wakefield did nothing wrong is not.
“It is now disproven.”
1) They do not know why autism is still increasing in prevalence while we speak.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2777821
2) It is changing even by race without explanation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5919599/
3) The study the CDC designed specifically to prove Wakefield wrong, actually proved him right. But you and the public don’t know that because the study was falsified according to the man in charge of its data. I wouldn’t know this if I hadn’t heard about the movie when it was being banned and decided I wanted to see what I am not supposed to see.
4) I agree with you that I am in an outlier group that believes a prominent doctor like Wakefield could be destroyed by smears motivated by industry and establishment influence and a scientific community intimidated.
Ironically, if my group grows your freedoms and health will be better protected. Smears and censorship will become less tolerated.
We see with the Twitter files evidence of what we suspected, that your group is being maintained by an unwholly marriage of the intelligence community with social media and likely legacy media as well.
Do you still believe the story that Susan Rice presented for the events in Benghazi? Do you still think that Fusion GPS happened upon intelligence that Trump and his campaign were colluding with Putin after a rightwing newspaper hired them? Do you believe that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian plant? Each of these bold lies take years to unpeel and involve hundreds of people in the most powerful positions of government. Thanks to a compromised media there are large percentages of the population that never hears those lies corrected.
Compared to the recent events it seems very plausible that the CDC could bribe Thompson into shutting up and taking his job back with a fat promotion and funding to just forget about the whole DeStefano thing. Or, he could face an investigation (on him).
“It is now disproven.” Thanks.
Sure, Ron:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5489284/
I am sure our Hall Monitor appreciates your dedication to the Fight for Freedom. You are the Yang to his Yin, or the other way around.
More from Glenn;
And so, over and over, what we see is that these Security State operatives have ingrained themselves within not just Twitter, but Facebook and Google and every other agency. Just like the way you look at corporate media and up and down their payroll, you see former directors of the CIA and the FBI and the NSA and the Justice Department, so, too, do you see that within big tech now? It isn’t only Facebook and the Security State, but also the corporate media, which, as I said, were crucially complicit in all of this. And that’s because they took the lead in ratifying and spreading the lie that this was “Russian disinformation”.
And here’s the first journalist who did it, Natasha Bertrand, who got promoted to CNN almost immediately after, on October 19, just four days after the first New York Post story, she published this article with the headline: “Hunter Biden: The Story is Russian Disinformation; Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say”.
Again, we all know it’s a lie that never happened. Politico never went back to account for why they published this story days before the election, why they never retracted it while they never explained it. And most corporate media outlets did exactly this. They were completely complicit in this fraud and this interference in our elections. And that’s why they want to malign and ignore Twitter Files because it reveals a crime in which they were crucial players. I mean, a crime metaphorically.
From teh Donald’s files:
https://people.com/politics/trump-white-house-drafted-memo-calling-for-staffers-who-didnt-believe-election-fraud-fired/
Team INTEGRITY ™ might wish to chime in.
Meanwhile in Russia, state TV propagandists are brainstorming about cultivating relations with the likes of Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard, in order to further Russia’s interests through “private diplomacy.” Host Vladimir Solovyov proposes Dmitry Medvedev as the intermediary.
https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1581052534785200129
Vintage October.
Irrelevant Russia bashing. Does anyone care? I forgot that WeeLard thinks Wiki and Twitter are great sources of trustworthy information.
Adhominumadhominumadhominumadhominumadhominum.
Our Hall Monitor ought to take heed:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-restores-suicide-prevention-feature-after-reuters-report-2022-12-24/
Some excel better than him at playing the ref.
WeeWee whizes a fire hydrant and thinks its important for everyone to smell it.
dpy writes about the Great Dr. Makary:
“Another source says Frank is wrong about the CDC recommendation to vaccinate children.
DR. MARTY MAKARY wrote: “If a child has a special medical condition, those are the ones who show it. Those are the children who come to the hospital with COVID complications. If the child has not had COVID in the past, then there may be a case there and a healthy child. It’s not compelling, but certainly the kid with a special medical condition who does not have natural immunity. Now, if the FDA is trying to take its already shattered reputation with the public and make it even worse, they’re doing that today.
They’re about to authorize this COVID vaccine for 16 million children, 90-plus percent of whom have already had COVID, based on a small study of kids who did not have COVID. That was the condition to be in that study. So ignoring natural immunity is actually having significant implications now. And even that small study that showed that it works in kids, shows it didn’t work very well, as low as 30% effective in the first few months. And that goes down the drain after a few months.”
Now this is the same Dr. Makary who wrote an op-ed in the WSJ on Feb 20, 2021 saying we”ll have herd immunity by April from vaccination and infection. (It was so bad, I wrote a letter to the editor.) He was wrong, cases rose modestly (31%) from mid March until mid-May despite the number of fully vaccinated rising from 7% to 30% and the percentage having received at least one dose rising from 14% to 40%. This prediction was almost as bad as Dr. B’s – and for exactly the same reason: Dr. Makary had overestimated the ratio of total infections to infections detected by PCR at 6.5:1. To add insult to injury, Facebook banned forwarding the article as “vaccine disinformation” citing a consensus estimate of 4:1 (which turned out to be too high). And then the WSJ had the audacity to complain about censorship at a point when it was obvious Dr. Makary’s estimate was proving wrong. Dr. Makary had admitted he used a “personal estimate” in his article, a time weighted average ratio, a silly mistake. The right ratio comes from dividing the latest seropositivity results by the total number of detected infections at the time of the survey!
Below is a review of seropositivity surveys from 2020 that Nic pointed me towards, and you see the initial high estimate of around 10:1 was down to about 3.2:1 by fall. After that the CDC used seropositivity survey data to calibrate a model that converted seropositivity data from blood banks into seropositivity in the population as a whole. I don’t know where that data was published and the CDC has revised their estimated downward. Looking back, I also see that Dr. Makary overestimated by a factor of about 2 how may people would be vaccinated between the time he wrote and the end of March. The widely respected Scott Gottlieb immediately discounted Makary’s projections.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/articlepdf/2774584/angulo_2021_oi_201025_1608585423.06959.pdf
https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fact-checking-facebooks-fact-checkers-11614987375
https://www.markettradingessentials.com/2021/02/dr-scott-gottlieb-says-an-estimate-for-herd-immunity-by-april-too-aggressive-but-directionally-right/
Now dpy wants me to believe that Dr. Makary is delivering correct information when he says that vaccines were only tested in children that hadn’t suffered an earlier COVID infection and the FDA had then approved them for all children, 90% of whom had probably been infected with COVID. The ignorance in this statement is appalling. If you want approval to give a vaccine to all children regardless of whether they have had COVID, then you MUST run a clinical trial with the same population of children, not just those who haven’t had COVID. This is the most fundamental principle of drug development – you get approval to treat the same patient population you used in your clinical trial!
Here are the exclusion criteria for one of the trials involving children:
Exclusion criteria
1. Had a known history of SARS-CoV-2 infection WITHIN TWO WEEKS prior to administration of IP or known close contact with anyone with laboratory confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID- 19 WITHIN TWO WEEKS prior to administration of IP.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2203315/suppl_file/nejmoa2203315_appendix.pdf
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2203315
When you read some insane claim these days from someone who is outside the consensus, you really need to do your own fact-checking. Especially when they have made scandalous mistakes before and are now presumably associated with an insane lawsuit by the state of Florida. Just as with climate change, you can’t trust those with political motivations.
I appreciate the response Frank but its more of your government authority worship, deflection and ad hominum arguments. Everyone has made mistakes with regard to the pandemic. That in no way detracts from the peer reviewed paper I posted above showing that vaccinating children is unethical. Makary is only one of many authors. You should try to dig up some dirt on all of them. I don’t think you responded to the paper. Instead a long winded straining of the record for some errors. This is what Joshy does and it surprises me that you as a supposedly serious scientist would stoop to this.
Also, you failed to mention that Denmark or Norway (my memory is inexact) for example no longer advises vaccination of healthy young people. Perhaps you can dig up dirt on them too.
The pandemic Frank I’m afraid has affected your judgment and ability to think critically. The CDC has a long track record of pseudo-science. Masks, school closures, lockdowns, vaccination of those previously infected, childhood vaccination. They lied about some of these, misrepresented their own studies, and refused to release their data. Many other countries didn’t make these mistakes. Schools were not closed in most of Europe for example.
The climate analogy would say the the CDC is analogous to the EPA. Both have seriously compromised themselves by reliance on pseudo-science.
And the “studies” of these vaccines have not met the usual standards for granting approval either. You never mentioned that two of the top vaccine experts at the CDC resigned in protest of the FDA’s in appropriate moves to push approval through. The Pfeizer study was effectively terminated after 90 days by vaccinating everyone. So we have absolutely NO scientifically rigorous data about long term side effects.
Frank, if you support giving young healthy kids that mostly are already immune to Covid three more shots in their already packed vaccine schedule then you are more pro-vaccine than the industry’s professional soother of vaccine safety concerns, Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hosp. of UPenn. He wrote at least one book on vaccine hesitancy dangers. He told This Week in Virology that he was not recommending the child’s Covid series.
BTW, are you well versed on epigenetics and the trans sulfuration pathway and methylation pathways? I want to run by some facts that don’t make sense to me about the research path for autism. I don’t see how child vaccines have been cleared when there is powerful circumstantial evidence that hasn’t been addressed.
The other thing that Ioannidis points out and it is obvious and that you didn’t respond to this is that science is being used as an excuse for political narratives that are not supported by the science. The public record you rely on is a little like relying on Russian state media. It’s been censored so that it conforms to political narratives. The Twitter files prove that. Do you approve of Twitter colluding with the FBI to censor correct scientific information or to interfere in an election? That’s what we used to think happened only in Russia.
You need to dig in a little and read some things from non-concensus scientists (whatever that means). Some of the best don’t support the concensus. Kuldorff from Harvard (censored by twitter), Battacharia from Stanford (banned from Twitter), Ioannidis (subject to a political smear and threat campaign for being mostly right but too famous to dismiss as a crank). Oh yes and I forgot quite a few public health divisions in Europe.
In fact there is no “concensus,” just a bunch of concensus enforcing politically motivated bullies who make the public record that you apparently trust badly skewed and often wrong.
dpy: I haven’t been following what Ioannidis has been saying lately. However, it is absurd for you to cite his claims of “political narratives not supported by the science” when his science concluded that COVID was no more deadly than seasonal influenza. Actually, IIRC his analysis was consistent with a wide range of possible IFRs, and he favored a lower IFR. That’s as absurd as listening to those who are still citing RCP 8.5 when discussing future climate change.
I’m trying to read the widely respected Scott Gottlieb’s book, who apparently thinks we should have managed to contain SARS2 (as was done with SARS1 and MERS). And he wants us to be prepared for the next outbreak, which could be more deadly or more dangerous to children.
Joshua wrote: “I think the relative virulence of Omicron – compared to pre-Delta variants – is still somewhat up in the air. There seems to be some evidence that it is less virulent and some that it isn’t. This study suggesting it’s on a par with ancestral lineages has some major limitations, but perhaps it’s of value:
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciac957/6931752?login=false
Today we are having a more difficult time quantifying this pandemic because milder infections and rapid tests are reducing the fraction of infections that we detect by PCR. At ourworldindata.org, you can see that Denmark’s testing network found that 45% of Danes were infected during the three month Omicron surge in early 2022, but only 10% were infected in the US. However, the death rate was about he same in both countries. So either the US health care system incompetent at preventing deaths, or the Danes did a vastly better job of detecting infections – and they certainly missed may mild or asymptomatic infections. So it’s my PERSONAL working hypothesis that omicron raged in both countries (and likely everywhere else) until herd immunity was approached or reached everywhere. Newer variants “outcompeted” the original omicron variant only because there were so few people left to be infected. So the IFR for Omicron must be vastly lower than earlier variants, even if we can’t see this in the CRF.
Either a Nature or Science summary article had a link to (God forgive me) a Twitter Post showing had the pandemic IFR PLOTTED VS AGE had changed dramatically between 2020 and early 2022 and compared that with influenza. (I assume these high quality graphs were part of a presentation or publication.) In 2020, the risk of dying from a COVID infection was 16-fold the risk of dying from an influenza infection at the same age for those over 60. The “excess risk” from COVID compared to influenza dropped with age and was negligible by 30. In 2022, the IFR for all ages was the same for COVID and influenza. (I’m personally obsessed with comparisons with influenza, because I didn’t alter my life to avoid the risk of influenza, so it’s paranoid to alter my life to avoid the risk of COVID today, but it was sane to do so in 2020. Actually, the increased transmissibility of Omicron vs influenza is producing about 4-fold more Omicron cases (equally deadly cases per infection, so more concern about COVID is still not a sign of paranoia.
For those over 60, the IFR for COVID has dropped 16-fold because of: vaccination, resistance from natural infection, the reduced innate deadliness of Omicron and [somewhat under-utilized] therapies such as Paxlovid and monoclonal antibodies. The likelihood of infection gone up because of higher transmissibility. IMO, this analysis provides the better picture of how pandemic evolved than ones that focus on only one parameter and don’t explicit deal with the issue of age.
Drug companies can always select the more potent neutralizing antibodies from a large number of blood sample and create a useful therapeutic monoclonal antibody or a mixture of several such antibodies. However, resistance has developed in less than a year, and their approval has then been revoked. With the fast evolution of omicron sub-variants and Paxlovid, I don’t know if there still is a market for these monoclonal antibodies, but we may need them as the value of mRNA boosters is clearly diminishing. “Original antigenic sin” is preventing evolution of better mRNA vaccines, but I’m hoping the human immune system is a source evolving therapeutic antibodies. Experience with HIV shows that resistance can be an enormous problem with mono-therapies like Paxlovid. If I were Pfizer, I’d love to see Paxlovid given in combination with an effective monoclonal antibody or second drug with a different mechanism.
Frank –
As near as I can tell yuoi didn’t address point or what was discussed in the article I linked.
My point being that because of increased immunity it is very difficult to tell to what extent the decrease in IFR is attributable to an intrinsically less virulent variant.
What you really need to make that determination is lab-based evidence. IIIRC, early in there was some evidence that omicron was less able to reproduce in the lungs compared to earlier variants but I haven’t seen much about that lately.
As the pandemic has gone in, I have become more and more convinced that it’s not a great idea to use population-level epidemiological evidence to try to reverse engineer theories about the biological attributes of COVID without supporting lab-based empirical science.
Well my best friend and his wife were infected with covid just last month and suffered only a mild illness. They were vaccinated in spring of 2021 when I was. It’s been almost 18 months and we know that the effectiveness of vaccination against covid (even serious covid) by this time is probably nill. It’s only 1 case, but my friend is 70. neither of them had had covid before this. Many many people on my street and especially their kids got covid about a year ago. No one was seriously ill.
dpy, Ron and friends: I never understood why the climate change consensus continued to stand behind Michael Mann, even though his reconstructions were so clearly wrong and biased. And then along came climategate. WIth post after post, Steven McIntyre destroyed their credibility. Likewise, I can’t see why the you and the right continue to ignore the gross flaws with their heroes: Professor B., Makary, and Lapado. (I’m not a fan of the left, but Trumpism did destroy may faith in the right.) Ioannidis tried to tell us COVID was no more deadly than ordinary seasonal influenza! Seasonal influenza kills an average of 37,000 Americans a year. More than half million Americans died of COVID in the first year – DESPITE effective measures (masks, social distancing and working from home) that TOTALLY ELIMINATED seasonal influenza in the winter of 20-21! Wrong is wrong! When they can admit it, I’ll listen. The inability to admit scientific errors shows these guy are more politicians than scientists. When you admit their errors before citing what they now say, I’ll listen to you too, because you will have proven that you are approaching their claims with appropriate scientific skepticism. Isn’t it embarrassing to cite Makary saying vaccine trials used only children who previously hadn’t been infected with COVID when it should have been obvious from the start he MUST BE WRONG? Isn’t the word for this gullible? Of course you accuse me of being gullible too, but you rarely cite specifics.
Yes, I can look at Europe and wonder why they aren’t as aggressively vaccinating children as the US. And I can read interviews in Science and Nature with vaccine scientists deciding whether to vaccinate their own children. It’s a tough choice: The benefits are low and the risks are probably lower. In such cases, there is a big temptation to do nothing. And to my knowledge, the government isn’t pushing hard on vaccinating children. They have made vaccine available for families and their doctors who want it. What I don’t want to do is listen to claims that childhood vaccination is UNETHICAL from someone who doesn’t even understand how the trials were run.
Furthermore, remember that the friends and families of the doctors who recommended approving these vaccines and the FDA scientists and doctors who officially approve them will likely be getting these vaccines. During the day-long public approval process, time is normally set aside for input from the public. If Dr. Makary and friends had wanted to express their concerns, I’m sure someone from their group would have been heard.
Frank, in focusing in on Makary’s alleged misstatement on the selection criteria of the childhood covid vaccine trials I think you are missing the forest. There is no good reason to vaccinate children for covid. You say the risk is so negligible as to be discounted against the meager gain of 30% reduction for what in children is typically a cold.
You must remember that any knowledge that you have about the risks of vaccines comes from either the maker of the vaccine or of the government agency that works so closely with the vaccine makers that they can have a revolving door of employment between them.
I’m sure you never watched this movie since if was banned the day it was released. But thankfully someone loaded it up here for you to see. I found it only by using Duckduckgo; it’s not in Google. https://rumble.com/v1x0jwa-vaxxed-the-movie.html
The movie begins with clips of all the news media reporting measles outbreaks (a mild childhood disease), then it cuts to fingers typing a confession of betrayal of the public trust. The text is from an actual email sent from William Thompson, coauther of the seminal CDC study clearing Merck’s MMR vaccine as a possible contributor to autism. Thompson is sending it to Brian Hooker, an autism researcher and father of an autistic child, whom contacted Thompson over 40 times by phone in several hours of conversation that peeled the onion of coverup from what the CDC did.
A Lancet paper came out in 1998 linking the MMR vaccine to autism. This was only a year after congress ordered a study that found mercury from the expanding childhood number of vaccines was accumulating to an amount that was considered safe for adults. The industry and CDC had assured the mercury was harmless and not metabolized. This also was proven false. So under the background of a suspicion that nerotoxic mercury was causing autism the CDC was now faced with Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s case study of 12 autistic children who had the similar onset of gastro and cognitive disorder, 8 of which were after receiving the MMR.
The CDC responded by designing a study to prove Wakefield’s fear unfounded, DeStefano (2004). By 2001 all the data was in and to their horror there was a statistically significant signal connecting the MMR to autism. You and I did not hear about this since instead of publishing they spent two years redesigning the study to eliminate the signal, but to no avail. Finally, they changed the candidate criteria post facto to eliminate half the data, which diluted the signal below the 95% certainty threshold. They knew it was wrong and thus ordered all the coauthors into a remote location where they were to literally throw their data into a trash can. William Thompson secretly kept a copy and ten years later revealed it to Hooker and told him how to make a citizens request and the file number at the CDC.
Hooker brought this information to the public but met a press in 2014-15 that were uninterested in publishing the story. Wakefield, meanwhile stripped fully discredited, chased out of his home country and stripped of his medical credentials, directed the movie to redeem the truth. He found the media still uninterested in 2016 and the movie, which is extremely compelling, with clips of the recorded conversations of Thompson and Hooker, is as rare to be found as small pox.
Thompson was briefly suspended with government whistleblower protections, which are slim, but was easily coaxed back to his job at the CDC with promise of lots of research money and no hard feelings (if he kept quiet).
The CDC director that ordered the 2004 coverup was long gone by 2015, scooped up by Merck, the maker of the MMR, as president of their vaccine department.
I don’t know if vaccines contribute to autism. It is clear from the literature that some of the cases are due to genetic defects. But the defect is involved with the epigenetic trans sulfuration pathway. This opens up the possibility for environmental causes that interfere with the same pathway.
Frank, to provide the debunking side of the whistleblowing on the CDC’s DeStefano (2004) study to debunk autism link to vaccines here is the Washington Post’s sooth to not worry your pretty little head about it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/05/25/7-things-about-vaccines-and-autism-that-the-movie-vaxxed-wont-tell-you/
Point 1/7) Measles, mumps, German measles and chicken pox are all terrible diseases that the MMR(v) protects kids from. Important and trusted scientists have debunked any harms caused by the MMR. Also, the 1998 paper that made the connection is now retracted and author thrown out of medicine and ten of the papers co-authors denounce the paper.
(WaPo neglects to mention that two co-authors refused to denounce the paper, spent years fighting to get their names cleared until successfully winning court judgments finding they were wrongfully punished. Also, Wakefield sued the BMJ and their private investigator Deer, who was paid for 7-10 years exclusively to investigate Wakefield and the study to find conflicts and flaws, all of which Wakefield denies.)
Point 2/7) The discredited Wakefield is the director of Vaxxed.
Point 3/7) Actor Robert DeNiro, who has an autistic son, originally lobbied to have the film featured in his Tribeca festival but later had a change of heart. (In his live interview on Today (here a 2:25) DeNiro said that he fully supports the film and another one like it coming out but he ultimately does not control the festival. He also said that his wife saw his child regress into autism after getting a vaccination. (Apparently he was not home at the time.)
4/7) The senior scientist at the CDC “Thompson has remained silent on the matter…” (Not said: He was reeled back into the CDC from whistleblower status with ample funding to do studies to debunk his own and to put his conscience to rest.)
5/7) Donald Trump has a theory on vaccines and autism.
6/7) The skyrocketing increase in ASD is due to better awareness and diagnosis. (WaPo did not mention the full trend of autism goes from 1:10,000 to 1:45 from 1960 to 2020.
7/7) The kindest movie critic will say the parents in the movie are believable. Other critics call the movie a horror show. (So don’t watch it if anyone tries to tell you about it.)
Ron: Before spreading this potential DISINFORMATION, did you look into the other side of the story? Such as who directed the movie?
One possibility may be that a common flaw in research that Ioannidis pointed out, but which the FDA has long known about. If you take the treatment group in a large study, one can partition that treatment group into an almost infinite number of sub-groups. If you analyze enough of those sub-groups, you will find – purely by chance – a sub-group where your drug has efficacy or a side effect that appears to be significant at the 95% confidence level. If you look at roughly such 20 subgroups, you expect to find one sub-group on the average. (My comments are based on claims about autism only in black males vaccinated at a particular time.) Ioannidis reminded us that tests for statistical significance need to be corrected for the number of sub-populations tested.
If you run a clinical trial and show the FDA that a sub-population of the treatment group shows the meets the standard mutually-agreed upon before the trial begins, the FDA is likely to tell you GREAT. Now go run a clinical trial using only that sub-population. About once a year, the WSJ would whine that the bid bad FDA had bankrupt another entrepreneurial start up by demanding an “unnecessary” additional trial they couldn’t afford, when in reality there are dozens of hungry larger companies with poor pipelines desperate to buy a promising project with a high probability of success.
Consider a trial of 1000 patients and you needed 50% success for approval. 500 were men and only 10 responded. 500 were women and 300 responded. You go to the literature and find a convincing reason why women responded and men didn’t, and you ask for approval to treat women (60% of whom responded). The FDA likely says go run a new trial with only women and see if 50% responded. If your rational for why only women respond was convincing, why didn’t didn’t you run your trial with only women in the first place? Remember, your 1000 original patients could have been partitioned into an almost infinite number of subgroups: older than age X, serious ill, less seriously ill, blood type, slow metabolizer, fast metabolizer, those making more or less of a particular metabolite, children who haven’t had COVID …. So if someone found a relationship between vaccination and autism in some sub-population of the data that appears statistically significant by itself, it may not be significant when properly analyzed as a sub-population. Lots of people have trouble accepting this. Read Ioannidis.
BTW, MMR vaccine never had any mercury preservative, but influenza vaccine did.
“Before spreading this potential DISINFORMATION, did you look into the other side of the story? Such as who directed the movie?”
Frank, I researched this issue after seeing the movie in 2016 but made a much deeper dive this last week. I hear what you are saying and yes I have been searching skeptically on both sides. It’s much easier, by the way, to see the anti-Wakefield side since Google and Youtube have taken your concern to heart.
I understand what you are saying about subgroups. I was a big biotech investor in the 2000s and saw exactly the re-analysis scrounging for signals of efficacy in subgroups. In the DeStefano case, if you watch to 90 film you will see that Thompson explained to Hooker that they spent two years trying to change the end points to make the signal go away and finally deleted half the data. In your example the correct thing they should have done is conduct another study. But they didn’t. They claimed vindication for the MMR falsely. There are other studies and there may well be not MMR-autism signal. Or they could have quietly changed the vaccine.
BTW, I never said they never used thimerosal in MMR because read early on they only used it in dead virus vaccines, not in live attenuated ones. Mercury may not be the cause of autism either but they didn’t know that in 1998. It certainly was doing harm they realized only after being forced by congress to study it. They thought the body would eliminate ethylmercury without toxicity. They were wrong. It accumulated to levels higher than were safe in adults weighing 10 times more. Also, it was being changed to methylmercury which is a known neurotoxin, which is why they didn’t use it in the first place. So the mercury only shaved off some IQ points but nothing serious and immediate like autism.
Watch the movie and read some of my comment strings above with Willard and Joshua. When you are up to speed I would like to have a discussion on the possible mechanisms of the disease based on the research to date. My aim is to see if you would concur that the statements by the officials that “what we know about autism eliminates vaccines.”
Frank, I have a longer answer to your comment to me in mod since yesterday. Yes, I am aware of the irresponsibility of spreading misinformation. Yes, I diligently check both sides as in my comment above pointing to the WaPo critique of “Vaxxed.”
Please consider that many people might use the controversial nature of a subject to opt out of speaking on it. That is fine, and you are welcome to take that avenue with my understanding. Please be aware that silencing others who have something to say on such a topic is can also be potentially irresponsible in that it impedes the progress of knowledge through debate. So there is a Yin Yang so to speak.
I would love to have a high level discussion after you do some reading of my comments and hopefully watch the movie so you can hear the CDC whistleblower with your own ears since it is kind of unbelievable that it happened, which is what he says too.
Frank,
Here is the William Thompson talking point:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5489284/
Also, if you want to know why Ron speaks of trans sulfuration pathway, he is alluding to Stéphanie Seneff, an electrical engineer or a computer scientist turned autism crusader. She is responsible for the glysophate causes autism hypothesis parents rely on to support their dream that their kids could be cured.
It is that deep.
Willard: “…he [Ron] is alluding to Stéphanie Seneff, an electrical engineer or a computer scientist turned autism crusader.”
I never heard of Seneff but will give her a listen now that Willard says she’s not to be heard. BTW, Willard, the trans sulfaration pathway is used in every cell in the body but it is particularly important in developing nerve cells since they do not easily regenerate if a lot are dying.
Rett Syndrome is a genetic defect in the leg of the X chromosome that is missing from the complimentary Y one. This is why only girls have Retts. Boy’s die in the womb for lack of the critical MECP2 protein lost by the defect. It is a critical part of the methylation pathway which is connected to the trans sulfaration pathway. Interestingly, vitamin B12 is also critical for methylation and TSP pathways. All of Wakefield’s autistic subjects were deficient in active B12 by it’s marker, methylmalonic acid in urine, but showed normal levels of B12 in their blood, indicating a misfunctioning TSP.
Autism favors boys to girls 4:1 for yet unknown cause. It is my guess that autism is related to any breakdown in the TSP or methylation pathway during a critical developmental time, like say 12-24 month-old. It may most often relate to the MECP2 gene that girls have two copies of in case one is weak, explaining the 4:1 ratio. This is unpublished and purely my thinking and that is why I wanted to have Frank’s opinion.
Here is a paper from an autism investigator that had the same hunches I did on the clues pointing to the TSP and methylation pathways which control detoxification as well themselves being vulnerable to breakdown from oxidative overload (toxins).
“Numerous biological dysfunctions are observed in processes
associated with ASDs, including reactive limited production of
glutathione [which is the trans sulfuration pathway], oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, decreased methylation, intestinal impaired permeability and dysbiosis, and innate and adaptive immune dysregulation. Thimerosal reduces the expression of methionine [which also is in the trans sulfuration pathway], critical for proper methylation [7]. This is especially relevant given CDC’s recommendation of influenza vaccination during pregnancy.” [insertions by me]
-Lyons-Weiler J (2018) “Autism is an Acquired Cellular Detoxification Deficiency Syndrome with Heterogeneous Genetic Predisposition.”
Pregnant mothers get the flu shot with mercury and often a rubella shot if previous vaccination is unknown.
Ron,
This is getting curiouser and curiouser:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lyons-Weiler
Are you sure you are not new to Vaxxball? Lawsuits cost money. James’ misleading claims have material consequences.
Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, “and then,” thought she, “what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there’s any one left alive!”
Wikipedia on Dr. Peter A. McCullough:
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, McCullough advocated for early treatment using the discredited treatments hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin,[24][25][23] criticized the response of the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration,[24] dissented from public health recommendations,[26][23][27] and contributed to COVID-19 misinformation.[28][29][30]
Wikipedia on Judith A. Curry:
“Curry has become known by some as a contrarian scientist hosting a blog which is part of the climate change denial blogosphere…
Despite the broad consensus among climate scientists that climate change requires urgent action, Curry has testified to the United States Congress that, in her opinion, there is so much uncertainty about natural climate variation that trying to reduce emissions may be pointless.”
Indeed, Ron.
You gotta have them all:
https://cardiovascularbusiness.com/topics/clinical/covid-19/cardiologist-covid-19-sued-former-employer
I am unsure how you can keep abreast of all these dossiers. One day you research deep antivaxx exotica, seemingly for the first time. The other you follow the breadcrumbs of your favorite antivaxx infomercial. All the while you work on you your military buffness at Lucia’s.
Well played!
Willard, I appreciate your acting as a foil. But there are good people on your side of the argument I’m sure that feel embarrassed to have you as their voice. Your beliefs are empty of factual reasoning. All justifications for belief come from ad hom. All that’s needed is to scrub for some dirt, either against and individual’s past misstatement, (alleged misstatements will due), someone’s interest in any controversial topic or affiliation with any person of organization whom has engaged in any of the above.
For example, this whole topic of vaccinating newborns as a possible environmental contributor to autism came from your dossier on something I mentioned about 4-5 years ago. You bring up things, not to further understand truth or facts, but to divert of sabotage discussion. You are an expert on the smear and thanks, BTW, for bringing Wikipedia’s problem to my attention.
w: “I am unsure how you can keep abreast of all these dossiers.”
No I can’t. This is your job, certainly.
w: “One day you research deep antivaxx exotica, seemingly for the first time.”
You know that’s a lie because you kept my comments from 4-5 years ago in your dossier. Also there is a difference between a “deep antivaxx exotica” and a deep dive to revisit ASD growth in prevalence and possible causes.
w: “The other [day] you follow the breadcrumbs of your favorite antivaxx infomercial.” [Not even hiding your smears]
w: “All the while you work on you your military buffness at Lucia’s.”
What’s with the spying on people? Are you a spook?
w: “Well played!”
You accuse others of exactly the bankrupt and less than worthless behavior that you yourself are engaged in.
Willard, what is your so noble goal that justifies all this? What war are you fighting that discount the value of ethics, principles and human decency?
Willard has no worthy goal, Ron. He’s been doing this for at least a decade and refining the meaningless game he invented. He was a fixture at Climate Audit back in its heyday.
McIntyre had a much stricter moderation policy. WeeWeeLard has had to go to blogs with no or only light moderation like Roy Spencer’s.
You are right that it’s a propagandistic persona that he has. There may be something of the spiteful teenager as well. He is just one in an army of storm troopers such as Skeptical Science who have taken on the job of preventing any debate on climate science. Recently, the hot war seems to have cooled, perhaps because the elites are now all in on the climate alarmism and are enforcing censorship without the need to use cancellation tactics or call people names. And it didn’t work. CO2 emissions continue to rise and there is no hint that India and China will take it seriously anytime soon.
Nothing like success to prove that they were wrong all along and have a authoritarian tinge to boot. This is a pattern I’ve noticed on the left. They accuse you of what they are doing.
Willard, you claim I am new (and naïve) to this subject while you have shown zero knowledge of it except that it is on the list of subjects that authorities don’t want to the public to discuss, (and thus justifiably censored).
It is not surprising that you point to an article that was apparently created by a doctor on her own whim without funding who has a similar view of what social responsibility means: make no attempt to know read on the subject itself but condemn anyone who has a nonconforming view to the official dogma.
From her text she read somewhere that the anti-vaxx movement has deep historical routes in superstition, and amplified by the infamous Wakefield 1998 paper that was retracted for claiming vaccines are the cause of autism. She, matter-of-factly, states things up front that are half-truths as her background. She is likely unaware of Thompson’s confession and the mostly successful coverup at the CDC, so I can cut her a bit of slack. But you, knowing what you know, would rather believe dogma than your own eyes and ears. And you accuse me of some type of bias. “Don’t believe anyone over 65” I think is your motto (or under 80 if they are your party’s leaders).
Willard here is the abstract from a similar type paper with much better funding that you should have the practical insight to see is bogus:
“Climate change presents a challenge at multiple levels: It challenges our cognitive abilities because the effect of the accumulation of emissions is difficult to understand. Climate change also challenges many people’s worldview because any climate mitigation regime will have economic and political implications that are incompatible with libertarian ideals of unregulated free markets. These political implications have created an environment of rhetorical adversity in which disinformation abounds, thus compounding the challenges for climate communicators. The existing literature on how to communicate climate change and dispel misinformation converges on several conclusions: First, providing information about climate change, in particular explanations of why it occurs, can enhance people’s acceptance of science. Second, highlighting the scientific consensus can be an effective means to counter misinformation and raise public acceptance. Third, culturally aligned messages and messengers are more likely to be successful. Finally, climate misinformation is best defanged, through a process known as inoculation, before it is encountered, although debunking techniques can also be successful. [indoctrinating children]”
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-090419-102409
— Stephan Lewandowsky
Yes Ron, Lewendowski is a pseudo-scientist. The fact that he continues in good standing in “the science” tells you all you need to know about how corrupt modern science has become. Climate scientists and activists are responsible for starting this trend.
“But Lew” is a bit silly, Ron. To take more than 500 words to say it is even sillier. So it is fair that you get help from our Hall Monitor is only fair. And then more.
That you are new to the anti-vaxx stuff should be obvious. You use all of the various talking points a rookie would use. You act surprised as soon as you get the most basic rebuttal.
I can still appreciate that put into work your experience as a contrarian. Your gaslighting skill, above all, transpires through and through. That does not explain your tilting, however.
You should work on that. Meanwhile, enjoy another tid bit from your new community of restricted interests:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107307
Frank, With respect, you still haven’t responded to the peer reviewed paper I cited. You seem fixated on “errors” of Makary, but the paper has a lot of other authors. Are they also “right wing” people who you seem to hate with a passion that blinds you to anything else.
You didn’t respond to the fact of the resignation of the two top vaccine experts at the CDC and their resignation letters. Perhaps you think you are more of an expert than they are. That’s pretty arrogant.
The reason climate scientists defended Mann is the same reason you defend the CDC and FDA, hatred of the deniers. And their tactics are the same as yours. They try to destroy deniers by citing “errors” that are often irrelevant or minor issues. They did it to Judith, Roy Spencer, John Christy, and many many more. Just as you do it to Makary, Ioannidis, and others. You really need to try harder to get past the hatred and bigotry.
BTW, What you said about Ioannidis is just so biased and out of context. Even Wikipaedia is less biased and hateful than you are.
“In an editorial on STAT published March 17, 2020, Ioannidis wondered whether the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic may be a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco” and asked for obtaining more reliable data to deal with the pandemic.[7] He estimated that the coronavirus could cause 10,000 U.S. deaths if it infected 1% of the U.S. population, and argued that more data was needed to determine how widely the virus would spread.[129][5][7] The virus in fact eventually became widely disseminated, and would cause more than one million deaths in the U.S.[130][129][5] Ioannidis expressed doubt that vaccines or treatments would be developed and tested in time to affect how the pandemic would unfold.[131] Marc Lipsitch, Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, objected to Ioannidis’s characterization of the global response in a reply that was published on STAT the next day after Ioannidis’s.[132] Ioannidis later stated that early in 2020 he wrote about needing more data, without that meaning he was mocking those who worried about COVID-19, and that he was elated with the quick development of vaccines and treatments, and the scientific progress made since 2020.”
If instead of 1% infected, it is essentially 100% (which has almost happened) you get 1 million deaths. Even using our biased method of counting everyone who tested positive and died as a “covid death” that’s almost prescient. On the whole Ioannidis was a lot more accurate than the FDA and CDC.
dpy: I scanned the 600 comment for “the peer reviewed paper [you] cited” and didn’t find it. Sorry. If you are still interested, could you repost it?
https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/12/05/jme-2022-108449?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
All the data is included as supplementary information if you want to check the results.
dpy: Thanks for the link to: “COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: a risk benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities.”
I’d prefer that the title say: “COVID-19 vaccine boosters for young adults: The evolving risk benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities.
In the case of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, the FDA granted emergency marketing approval when these products were useful and has withdrawn market approval when the resistant variants began dominating the pandemic.
Over the last few days, it has dawned on me that the second and third booster did not further raise the previous peak level of neutralizing antibodies that is the FDA’s “surrogate marker” for efficacy in people, but the amount of serum containing antibodies needed to neutralize newer variants has been rising. At some point, it may be appropriate for the FDA to remove approval for the current mRNA vaccines, especially for younger people.
However, it is worth remembering that the unvaccinated and less-boosted are no longer an appropriate control group for determining the utility boosters. They are almost certainly younger, healthier, less likely to be tested by PCR where results enter databases, and they have ALMOST CERTAINLY gained more resistance from natural infection. For the vulnerable, the cost of gaining resistance naturally can be high (a chance of dying). For everyone else, the cost can be a week of nasty infection or possibly hospitalization, though perhaps half escape with asymptomatic or mild infections. At the moment, a gaining protection via booster looks like a fabulous deal to me compared with gaining protection via a natural infection. Nevertheless, increasing resistance to both vaccines and possibly the human immune system is changing the landscape with each new variant. It is conceivable IMO that might reach the end of the line for the current mRNA boosters for some age groups as soon as next fall.
However, your paper is not primarily focused on what the FDA should have approved or needs to withdraw approval from. It is about what the CDC should recommend and private entities should MANDATE for YOUNG ADULTS (not children). I’m certainly not in a position to determine whether they did their cost benefit analysis correctly or if political preferences have influence the assumptions they have made – as I have documented previously for Dr. Makary and others. Does the Journal of Medical Ethics have peer reviewers capable of challenging these assumptions? I see that this journal already has two “Rapid Responses” challenging those assumptions that I assume the authors will address. This is how science is supposed to work, experts debate and often eventually reach a consensus that we call knowledge. Knowledge isn’t what the WSJ has been sharing in its op-eds on pandemic subjects.
Thanks for the analysis. I do believe that the vaccines did benefit vulnerable people in 2021 and possibly early 2022. But I really really object to the mandates which surely are unconstitutional. I also object strongly to the CDC pseudoscience that implied that previous infection was not as effective as vaccination. The paper my sister send (linked below) says otherwise.
I and my wife got vaccinated but I wish I had not done it. I was quite ill for 36 hours after the second dose. I’m in excellent health and haven’t had even a mild cold in a decade. I certainly didn’t get any of the common side effects of the vaccine that I know about, but have had a couple of significant new health problems since getting the vaccine.
Frank –
Seems to me the data are still coming in and the results have quite a range. For example:
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1608915958491680769?t=53BKzFp9b0fy-f5hg68Law&s=19
I’m going to discount the responses. The first is by a bunch of college health care people who say nothing of substance except that hospitalizations are not a good metric for measuring the “impact” of covid. They then launch into a long winded pro forma defense of colleges and themselves. The second doesn’t really say much either.
Summarizing, neither says anything about the data, the methods, or questions the conclusion.
The evidence is coming in. There’s quite a range of findings. Of course some people will ignore some of he evidence, or come up with lame reasons o dismiss some e of the evidence, and focus only on evidence that confirms a bias.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm715152e2.htm?s_cid=mm715152e2_w
“Persons who received the BA.5-containing bivalent booster had better neutralizing activity against all Omicron subvariants (especially against BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1 and XBB) than those who received 1 or 2 monovalent [original] boosters”
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2214293
If results are still coming in why did the FDA approve this booster? I’ve seen some reports that effectiveness is in the range of 30% for the first 60 days. Probably will be nill after 6 months.
DPY – thanks for the link to the covid vaccine booster study for young adults.
the only objection I have of the study is it was pretty much common knowledge that vaccines would not be much of a marginal benefit for the young even before the vaccines were introduced.
Seriously why was a study needed to confirm that vaccines and booster were of little, if any , benefit when it was already reasonably well known.
Frank writes – ” I’m certainly not in a position to determine whether they did their cost benefit analysis correctly”
FWIW – cost benefit analysis is often very misleading.
The correct analysis is marginal cost v marginal benefit.
The over reliance on cost benefit analysis instead of marginal cost v marginal benefit is partially blame for the imposition of ineffective mitigation protocols – along with an irrational assessment of the covid risks.
Josh: A two-fold increase in neutralization (FRMT50GMT) against isn’t likely to translate into a big difference in efficacy in the community.
dpy asked: “If results are still coming in why did the FDA approve this booster?
The FDA approved this bivalent booster because it restores the level of neutralizing antibodies that have been falling since one’s last vaccination or booster. (A third booster using the original vaccine may have been equally effective.) So far we have been offered 2-dose “full vaccination” in the spring of 2021, a first booster in the fall of 2021, a second booster in the spring of 2022 and a third booster (the bivalent one) in the fall of 2022. This is consistent with the gradual fall over six months in antibody levels that provide significant protection to modest protection against Omicron variants. (The panel in Josh’s paper shows peak neutralization power, not how neutralization power declines over time.)
If I were to speculate, 10^3 neutralization power provided the 90+% reduction in infection seen in the first six months of clinical trial that was expected to last for several years. At 10^2 against newer variants, we are seeing “significant protection”. At 10^1 neutralizing power against the newest variants and “fading power” against “newer” variants, we are seeing modest protection. As long as a booster increases neutralizing power into the significant protection range, it will made sense to get a booster – because the cost of acquiring immunity from a natural infection is far higher than the cost of acquiring increased immunity from a booster. The neutralizing power produced by flu vaccines also decline over about 6 months, but that isn’t a problem during the summer.
In dpy’s case, the cost of acquiring immunity from the second dose of a vaccine was “feeling “quite ill for 36 hours” and possibly “a couple of significant new health problems”. When he inevitably gets COVID (because his fallen antibody levels are now providing negligible protection against current circulating strains), it is likely (but not certain) he will be “more than quite ill” for perhaps 100 hours. If any of his new health problems were sparked by a controlled mini-COVID infection mostly localized in this arm they likely but not certainly would have been worse if sparked by an uncontrolled COVID infection that can invade lung, heart and nerve.
Looks like the CDC is now buying into the pseudo-science of “gender theory” for children. This is tragic and may harm a lot of kids who might “choose” “gender affirming care” a euphemism for child abuse. Using Frank’s reasoning this means we should distrust everything the CDC says.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/12/30/the-cdc-wants-to-shame-schools-into-pushing-a-radical-transgender-agenda-on-your-kids-n1657339
Let’s not be silly, dpy. The Biden administration certainly doesn’t consider gender dysphoria to be a disease, so the CDC can’t claim any particular expertise in this area. The Biden administration is merely pushing every the department from the DoD to the Dept of Agriculture to protect the rights of children to have a gender identity that differs from their apparent gender (genotype and phenotype). My best guess is that the hubris of these activists will cause far more problems than they solve and could create an enormous backlash. However, I’m a conservative who believes that revolutionary changes often lead to disaster, while careful smaller steps may successfully provide needed change.
Frank, I found in my autism research that the movement is being directed to see it as not an abnormality, or God forbid a disease, but “neurodiversity.” I’m not making this up. Here is the “In the loop about neurodiversity” website giving autism parents directions to the good charities that accept and support autistic children versus the old bad charities that stigmatize autism by looking for a cause of a cure.
By the way, shoplifting is no longer a crime, it’s reparations. The flood of people crossing our southern border are climate refugees. And inflation is a good thing. And if you disagree with any of these thoughts you are a far right racist and potential terrorist spreading dangerous wrongthink, soon to be outlawed (after Musk is taken care of).
Good grief, Ron.
The idea that autism is *not* a disease dates back to Kanner at least:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-021-04904-1
Back in the days, gays were the targets of the kind of campaign you and our Hall Monitor wish are rooting for.
This is not cool.
Willard, from your linked paper:
“It has now been nearly 80 years since Leo Kanner’s (1943) classic description of infantile autism. Official recognition of this condition took almost 40 years; several lines of evidence became available in the 1970s that demonstrated the validity of the diagnostic concept, clarified early misperceptions about autism, and illustrated the need for clearer approaches to its diagnosis.”
Autism was so rare until the 1970s that it could not even be confirmed as a syndrome as Kanner claimed.
Just 20 more years later there is an epidemic of autism with dozens of autism societies.
Here is one of Wakefield’s coauthors trying to open the scientific communities eyes in a letter to the Lancet in 2004, coincidentally just months after the CDC ordered the blatant falsification of their seminal MMR-autism study, DeStefano (2004), (unbeknownst to the world).
“The evidence to support his claim that there is no link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and regressive autism comes from a large number of studies, too numerous to comprehensively reference here. But all of these studies have only been epidemiological. Perhaps the most interesting was the study by Kaye and colleagues,2 which showed that autism in the UK had increased seven-fold between 1988 (the year MMR was introduced in the UK) and 1999. That study explained the increase away as possibly being “due to increased awareness of the condition among parents and general practitioners, changing diagnostic criteria or environmental factors”, although the authors offered no evidence to support this speculation. There is thus prima facie evidence of an underlying real increase in autism in the UK since 1988.”
Ron,
Autism sure changed since the Golden Years, almost as much as Aspie himself:
https://molecularautism.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13229-018-0208-6
I already answered your whataboutism, btw. The number of autists increased as the diagnosis got refined and the neurodivergence recognized. I could also add the social pressure from parents themselves. It is easier to get services for autists than say ADHD, social communication disorder or even schizophrenia.
Never forget that observational diagnoses are tough to replicate.
Willard, you crack me up. I have been reading papers on Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia non-specific colitis all day seeing the debate of whether autism is associated with it as defrocked Wakefield claimed or whether it was a bogus pretext by an ambulance-chaser collaborating trial expert witness to defraud money from the public treasury.
Meanwhile you are tracking down the National Socialism connection to autism investigators.
Thus your conclusion is that ASD is a parents conspiracy to get extra attention to their behavior challenged children.
Yes, you’re absolutely right; there has been no actual increase in autism, it’s just a fad. The funnier thing is that this is not just you’re argument for not studying causes, it’s all the western governments’.
Here is a list of peer reviewed papers debunking Wakefield (1998 retracted) on the claimed connection of non-specific colitis with regressive autism versus the ones confirming Wakefield:
Debunking:
Buie 2010 (used as citing to remove Wakefield’s credentials as a British physician in 2010)
Partial list supporting Wakefield to 2010 when was struck off:
Sabra 1998
Horvath 1999
Wakefield 2000
Furlano 2001
Torrente 2002
Ashwood 2003
Balzola 2005
Balzola 2005(suppl. 2)
Gonzalez 2005
Wakefield 2005
Balzola 2006
Galiatsatos 2009
Chen 2010
Krigsman 2010
Ron, I haven’t had time to delve into the vaccination controversy. I am however glad that people like Robert Kennedy Jr. are spending a lot of time looking at the issues. I have no confidence in the CDC and FDA which both look incompetent to me.
I do generally believe that human beings are pretty robust with regard to small levels of contamination and toxicity. When I was in college I worked on road construction during the summers. We were exposed to all kinds of toxins including lead in gasoline. We washed our shovels in diesel or gasoline to remove tar and asphalt using our bare hands. I think the location of the garage we worked out of (really a large barn) was declared some kind of a toxic waste site and slated for cleanup.
Ron,
This is getting ridiculous:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Krigsman
Things are not looking great for team INTEGRITY ™!
Please, do continue. Our Hall Monitor has a soft spot for Jr.
DPY, I don’t know a lot about RFK Jr. except that he has been battling for more vaccine safety studies for decades and he has absolutely hated Fauci from way back.
Sorry to hear about your dirty job. I was getting scoliosis at 13 from carrying a heavy newspaper bag over my shoulder every day for two years. The doctor said, “Switch shoulders.” (No lie.)
I found today that The Lancet had contacted the CDC in 1997 before publishing Wakefield and asked for comment. In the same Feb 1998 issue with Wakefield there was a debunking editorial supplied by CDC’s Robert Chen and Frank DeStefano. Yes, that’s the same DeStefano that made it his mission to debunk the MMR-Autism connection regardless of results from his data. Just seeing how the double standards were being applied on the pro-gov, pro-pharma side versus the parents is eerily familiar to recent events. Here is Chen, DeStefano’s reasons for not listening to Wakefield’s paper.
1) Diseases are dangerous, especially Rubella in pregnant mothers, which can cause birth defects and miscarriage.
2) Syndrome studies are fine but one needs an epidemiology study to confirm associations, and there are no studies supporting MMR ties to ASD [until DeStefano’s 2003 trashed canned data].
3) Hundreds of millions of people have gotten vaccines without developing “behavioral problems…If that if MMR vaccine does causes this syndrome, it does so extremely rarely.”
4) “Although Wakefield has reported the detection
of these viruses in patients with inflammatory bowel
disease (IBD), other investigators, using more sensitive
and specific assays, have not been able to reproduce these
findings.6” There is very many studies later that refute this and support Wakefield’s findings of live MMR viruses in their patients. It is theorized by one investigator that it may be from the mother’s vaccination during or post pregnancy. This is interesting to me since we learned from the Covid debate that getting repeated exposure to the same virus or live vaccine in irregular timings could be dangerous.
5) Wakefield’s connection of ASD to bowel disease is yet to be confirmed [It is confirmed.]
6) The public can’t be trusted to sense associations due to bias and fears. Monitoring is best left to the professional at public health through the yellow flag reporting system [I trust them and VAERS less and less and think we need to have an another agency out of CDC and NIH control to collect the data.]
Willard correctly cited that there was a significant drop in parents consenting to the MMR vaccine in the UK after Wakefield 1998. Apparently their media must have covered the story (unlike the US) and this caused a public health control crisis. This was put to rest by a heavily promoted 2004 BBC documentary produced from freelance investigative journalist Brian Deer, whom had been investigating Wakefield since 1998.
Deer found that Wakefield had been hired by the lawyers representing families with autism to testify as an expert regarding their court claims that their children had been injured after receiving the MMR vaccine by proximally regressing into autism and bowel disease. Wakefield was the top London Hospital physician for childhood gastro disorders. Deer also found by interviewing all the parents in Wakefield’s study that there were a couple of discrepancies in the reported data. Patient numbers had been switched in one case and in another the systems were thought by one father to pre-date the MMR shot, contrary to the data.
This discrediting provided all the UK doctors and public relief to disregard Wakefield et al. But Wakefield was continuing his research and they could not stop him by just a BBC documentary. Deer was hired to continue his research for 6 more years combing through each of the child’s medical histories, data Wakefield et al did not even have access to. Deer also investigated all twelve coauthors and the administrators that gave ethical approvals for the diagnostic tests and samples taken from the children. Finally, in 2010 Deer published all his accusations in the British Journal of Medicine (BMJ). This provided the pretext for Wakefield’s removal and the retraction of Wakefield (1998).
Interestingly, the charge that was used for his removal was that ethics boards had not approved of Wakefield’s study’s protocols. And the tests were more invasive than is called for in the standard diagnosis of the bowel complaints. In other words the children were being used as lab animals. This charge was persuasively and successfully debunked by Wakefield’s first coauthor, Simon Murch, who proved they did indeed get the approvals and also that the tests were standard procedure in 1998. Murch, however, did also throw Wakefield under the bus by disavowing any belief in the connection of MMR to ASD. Murch was reinstated.
You forget this bit, Ron:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2003/nov/01/highereducation.medicineandhealth
Would you be so kind as to retrieve this letter for Denizens? All you need is to register to the Lancet.
Thanks in advance.
Willard that article is a great find. Thanks. If you read it critically with the facts you know now you should be able to gain a lot. Give it a try. I will give it a start for you with the paragraph you quoted. Think — did the 61% drop in MMR vaccinations occur only because of ignorant parents, or did the alarm trip to hundreds of pediatricians that personally suspected the possibility of such a nightmare of an unsafe new vaccine? If the later then how is Wakefield the pariah of the “medical community.” Certainly is not appreciated by Merck and the government’s public health community. Perhaps like Lewandowsky wrote about emissions is also true in this case, that autism is too gradual and background issue to easily appreciate its danger. The article further down admits that Wakefield only suggested taking the MMR as 3 separate shots until more safety study was done. In 1998 the pediatricians had that choice but Merck intentionally took it away the next year. The article, ignorant on that point, does not allow the reader to ask the question if that may have led to the 61% drop.
I like how Murch denies that he has been under any pressures. He was brave to say his opinion has never changed on the MMR issue, which means he supported the study knowing the kids had autism and were being looked at as a particular syndrome of ASD connected to bowel disease and MMR. Murch is angered, however, that the MMR issue is interfering with his research on the bowel connection to autism, which he calls proven. It is interesting that Murch had coauthored at least 9 articles on the topic up to the date of the guardian letters and none after. No pressure though, right?
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C8&q=Murch+autism+bowel&btnG=
Murch also strongly defended the ethics charges brought against Wakefield (1998) and Wakefield himself on ethics in his 2004 Lancet letters. Ironically Wakefield was convicted and sentenced by the British Medical Journal and their private investigator, Brian Deer, on the ethics charges and that autism had nothing to do with bowel disease as Wakefield had “fraudulently claimed.” Of course, you see both those things are untrue just by Murch’s letters.
Murch’s career got hit be a train just for being one of the 13 coauthors on Wakefield (1998). But notice he accuse Wakefield of being a professional witness profiting from vaccine injury law suits, as Deer alleged.
From the article Murch says:
“The problem is that he [Wakefield] thinks there is a big conspiracy and people are selling out around him. He thinks if he stands still and holds firm, history will vindicate him”
The reporter notes at the bottom of the article, “He [Murch] has respect for Dr Wakefield’s convictions and did not want to be pitted against him.”
That’s right, respect for his convictions, but dismay at his foolishness for upsetting the medical establishment to pull alarm lever to do more safety testing, though it was warranted. Is this the way you want it to be, for experts never to speak their true thoughts if they conflict with power?
Another gem in the article is that all twelve of the autistic subjects had live MMR virus found in the blood and tissues that should not have been there and matched exactly to the 3 strains of the vaccine. Don’t know what it means but it was a clue that very few likely dared to look at. In the article it’s only referred to without my explanation, which comes from Lancet letters.
That old 2003 newsie is kinda classic, Ron. A full 5 years before my CB time. The only one who may have found it is you.
Here is what your recent walls of words obfuscate:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(04)15715-2/fulltext
Not that I mind your spamming much. On the contrary, the more you do, the less work is needed to see through it all.
What were the “consequent events” again?
W, not sure what your point is about the event being 20 years ago. You found the article and brought it to my attention yesterday. Remember?
It’s no revelation that Wakefield (1998) was retracted. That is the whole point of this discussion. Neither is it that Murch threw Wakefield under the bus, but only on retracted the paper, which a critical thinker would ask why. Let’s see, Murch refuted the ethical violation accusations a spurious, saying they followed the exact 1998 protocols for examining children with these conditions asking for help. And they had all the permissions from parents and the London Free.
Murch had the opportunity by 2004 to see question Wakefield’s integrity but never does. Murch only condemns Wakefield for muddying the water on what Murch considered important clues about autism, the bowel syndrome that Murch had been studying for the five years after the paper that now he has to retract because of political nonsense. That is his only complaint against Wakefield, his naivety about the establishment.
This is the syndrome that Deer claimed in his 2010 literary prosecution was Wakefield’s fabrication out of whole cloth and didn’t exist to get him kicked out of medicine. They BMJ even had a study done to point to that conclusion, yet it flied in the face of 13 studies over twelve years that said the opposite.
Ron,
The point is that I did not “find” the newsie yesterday.
You did.
Because, well, you said it yourself: you researched a bit when you saw the infomercial at first when it came out, but started to research the domain once again since last week.
The “consequences” I was asking you about was the measles outbreaks that coincided with anti-vaxx PR campaigns at the time. It forced researchers to own their mistake. Except for some of them, for whom you white knight as we speak.
You know, your actual performance reminds me of how AT estimated a suggestion of yours about the influence of Jupiter:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/aerosol-forcing/#comment-51468
Now that even Nic overshoot your own sensitivity estimate, I would have thought that you learned to take your time before trying to double guess scientists.
Oh, and have you finally opened your private online club?
I did not receive any invitation.
‘What were the “consequent events” again?’
Feb 1998 – The Lancet publishes Wakefield et al on a syndrome of autism associated with bowel disease (12/12) subjects and proximity to MMR vaccination (8/12) and failure in metabolism of vitamin B12 (12/12). He holds a press conference suggesting the M-M and R be taken as three separate shots until a safety study can be done (to spread out the potential toxicological load).
Feb 1998 – The Lancet carries the CDC’s response next to the paper, downplaying it saying vaccines are safe. They say small studies mean little until an epidemiological study of a few thousand “vaccinated versus unvaccinated” shows a signal of harm. The letter is co-signed by Frank DeStefano, the investigator who the CDC then assigns to design a study to debunk Wakefield. His will compare vaccinated to less vaccinated.
1999 – Merck ends the production of separate M-M-R vaccines, leaving pediatricians only to choose between MMR or nothing. The CDC begin the DeStefano study.
2001 – DeStefano is done collecting data and its first coauthor, William Thompson finds to his horror there is a signal for autism in the MMR. Under CDC director Julie Gerberding the matter is covered up and DeStefano’s team works for two years to redesign the study post hoc to no avail. They finally decide to eliminate half of the data to dilute the signal below the statistical threshold of scientifically reported significance.
2003 – The 12 coauthors are mostly broken from Wakefield to be hung separately. 10 later beg for the paper’s retraction.
2004 – DeStefano is published, clearing MMR and the way to go about destroying Wakefield. Brian Deer airs his BBC documentary smearing Wakefield and the false vaccine scare.
2009 – Julie Gerberding leaves as director of the CDC to become president of Merck’s vaccine division.
2010 – The BMJ publishes Deer’s 10-year investigation into Wakefield, justifying the retraction of the paper and striping him of his medical credential and reputation as a human being. Wakefield sues for defamation from exile in Texas but the suit is dismissed with anti-slap statute.
2013 – Autism researcher and father, Brian Hooker, engages William Thompson in 40 phone calls over several months, recording the last few in which Thompson confesses to the DeStefano (2004) coverup. Thompson directs Hooker to make a citizens request for a particular CDC file number that passes the original MMR data (that he secretly copied) after being ordered tp discard in 2003. Thompson is outed as a whistleblower for a short period of time. But, with no press coverage, he is easily coaxed back into his old job with a promise of research money to prove no MMR link to autism. Thompson confirms a link of thimerosal (mercury), vaccine preservative, to neurological tics that was seen also in another CDC study, Verstraeten et al (2003).
2016 – Vaxxed the movie premiers, telling the DeStefano coverup story and vindicating Wakefield, the director of the film. As luck would have it Robert DiNiro, who has a son with autism, likes the movie and recommends its feature at his Tribeca film festival. However, a firestorm of heat comes down and the festival withdraws the movie as well as almost all theater showings and sales outlets. It remains black listed and void from search on Google, only visible on Duckduckgo.com seach.
The answer was in the quote from the newsie, Ron.
Since you like numbers:
https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(00)02129-2.pdf
This is a preventable disease since the sixties.
Sad.
Yes, we have the technology to do many great things if we can limit the corruption. If one pays for one cure while creating other diseases that’s a problem. The same argument you make for measles vaccine can be made for nuclear energy. We need to do the science and insure safety, not just follow power or consensus.
A functioning press is a pre-requisite for everything else to work, from informed shopping to good policy, justice, voting and health choices.
Ron,
I am glad that you contemplate the possibility of increasing the price of gas high enough to make your plea for nukes more than a silly diversion. Your representation to our Planning Engineer will be a pleasure to follow. Please keep me posted.
In return, here is the crux of the matter regarding Thompson:
https://retractionwatch.com/2014/08/27/journal-takes-down-autism-vaccine-paper-pending-investigation/
You succeeded in mentioning him more than 25 times without quoting him much, if at all.
Considering his official statement, it is not hard to wonder why you prefer to stick to your storyline.
Cheers.
Ron and dpy: Autism and gender dysphoria are not relevant to the question of whether the establishment (CDC and FDA) made better policy recommendations than the seriously flawed opinions of right-wing heroes like Makary and Professor B and whether the Florida lawsuit has any basis in fact. Let’s please return to these subjects.
Frank, You have a double standard in your reasoning. Makary was wrong about a couple of issues and so you don’t trust him about other issues. The CDC and FDA were wrong on at least 4 critical policy issues, they hid their data for their “studies” which in many cases were contradicted by other studies by scientists outside the US. This harmed children and caused huge costs. You still haven’t explained why you have faith in them. I thought, 1 error and you were on Frank’s list of “right wing” tools. The emotional hatred drips from your keyboard.
We now know for example that the school closure was not done based on science but purely because the teacher’s unions demanded it. That’s a politically corrupt CDC. That policy was terrible and most countries didn’t do it because their politicians are more honest than our CDC.
And you are smearing the experts who dissent. Ioannidis is very non-political and an exceptional scientist. Battacharia so far as I can tell is non political. They also agree with many of Makary’s thoughts. How about Kuhldorff at Harvard? What’s wrong with him. Did he once utter a bad word or meet with a “right winger.”
Your silly statement on the vacuous “comments” on the vaccine mandate paper shows you are willing to use any weak reed to cover your biases.
The Florida lawsuit has a strong basis in science. The vaccine mandate paper shows that. The decisions of most European countries on vaccines for children shows this.
You have not cited any science that supports mask mandates for example, probably because most studies found no effect or a very weak one using cloth masks. There is very strong science showing that keeping schools open would not harm teachers, for example done in Germany. Another strike against the CDC.
If you have anything that is valid and not based on emotion, you should give it to us. The fact that you haven’t isn’t a good sign.
Hey Frank, I read Scott Atlas’s “A Plague Upon Our House.” He was a close colleague of Dr. B and essentially supported the GBD policy before the GBD, and got DeSantis on board.
Atlas claimed Birx, Fauci and Redfield were a clique that ruled without compromise or willingness to consider his reports, charts or input as a member of the covid task force. And the only material they presented at meetings was Birx’s charts of testing and percent positives. She made no distinction in policy for protecting those of age or vulnerability. Their anti-GBD policy of seeing no benefit for immunity from infection among the young and healthy naturally carried to the vaccine policy of not recognizing natural immunity as a thing. But this was after Trump and Atlas.
If we had a super easy and app for reporting vaccine and drug side effects that also gave results instantly to the public we would have much more confidence and safer drugs and biologics to boot.
Here’s the results of another study of how sluggish the CDC was to commission and pay for covid research. Another nugget is that a paper by Makary was on the top 3 list of most discussed JAMA papers this year. Probably another one which Frank has not read and will refuse to comment on.
https://www.newsweek.com/fauci-leaves-broken-agency-his-successor-opinion-1770215
“A randomized controlled trial is the gold-standard method to establish a drug’s effectiveness. Yet remarkably, for COVID, we still don’t have randomized trials for so many drug recommendations, including the new bivalent vaccine, COVID vaccine boosters in young people, the optimal vaccine dosing interval, and even the antiviral drug Paxlovid in vaccinated people. More disturbing, our country has been deeply divided for years about whether to mask children. The partisan arguing and harm to children could have been avoided if a proper study settled the science early.”
“The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the most widely circulated medical journal, recently reported its most-discussed articles of 2022. The top three articles were on the discovery of mRNA vaccine particles in breast milk, myocarditis after COVID vaccination, and a study I led at Johns Hopkins on the durability of natural immunity. None of the three were funded by the NIH—all were topics downplayed by Dr. Fauci and other public health officials.”
Which reminds me of perhaps the most fraudulent CDC dictat that everyone needs to get vaccinated, even those who have had covid. And then to mandate these vaccines to keep your job is just a tyrannical violation of the right of each adult individual to decide their own medical treatment.
DPY: The FDA didn’t require randomized controlled trials to demonstrate the efficacy of the “new” bivalent COVID vaccine in the community because we now have a “surrogate marker” fir vaccine efficacy. The use of surrogate markers has a long history in drug development. Reducing blood pressure has been demonstrated reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, so clinical trials only need to show a drug’s ability to reduce blood pressure over a month or two, not reduce stroke or heart attack in clinical trials that require years. The use of surrogate markers isn’t fool proof, but if we required perfection in drug development we wouldn’t have any new drugs.
During 2021, the FDA kept close track the the relationship between breakthrough infections and the ability of vaccine-induced antibodies in serum to neutralize various various in routine in vitro experiments. That allowed the vaccine manufactures to use the level of neutralizing antibodies as a surrogate marker for efficacy in reducing infection (and probably hospitalization and maybe even death). So the bivalent vaccine only needed to be given perhaps 100 volunteers of various ages and the level of their neutralizing antibodies were measured probably two weeks later. And no new side effects from any vaccine have ever developed after something like two weeks (when the immune response is at its peak.) This strategy was agreed upon for the development of “mutated mRNA vaccines to deal with “mutated” viruses by early 2021.
Unfortunately experiments with a “mutated” vaccine to deal with the beta and lambda variants showed that the original vaccine and two mRNA variants were equally effective at boosting levels of neutralization antibodies and those antibodies did best at neutralizing the original variant. This phenomena is called “original antigenic sin”: When the immune system has responded to one antigen by making antibodies, it makes more of the same antibodies, no new antibodies, when confronted with a new but similar antigen. That’s why you never saw a booster specific for Delta or omicron. IMO, the bivalent booster authorized this fall seems to be a desperate measure, because their was not reason based on levels of neutralizing antibodies to expect it to be superior to the original booster.
The article on vaccine particles in breast milk is IMO a nothing-burger. The was no demonstration that the vaccine RNA was still packaged in lipids capable of inducing uptake into cells and expression of a fragment of spike protein. Nor production of antibodies to the spike protein. Now, the really interesting question is “If you are infected with COVID while nursing, can your baby get infected? Surprising, google scholar found many articles on the former subject, but almost none on the latter, the real threat. FWIW, its my understanding that following vaccination the modified spike protein is expressed almost exclusively in the arm near the injection site and in the nearest lymph node. Since PCR can sometimes detect a single mRNA molecule contamination can be a huge problem. If they didn’t use controls to show to the absence of vaccine mRNA in the breast milk of women who had not been vaccinated, then they make not have ruled out contamination as an explanation for their data. The problematic test kits that held up the distribution of PCR test kits in early 2020 was the result of such contamination.
The vaccines were never anything but a short term therapeutic. The Swedish study data (you quoted from the author’s incorrect summary of the data because you are blinded by your emotions) shows that in fact vaccination may have prolonged the pandemic with effectiveness against symptomatic covid declining to -25% at 9 months.
Normally, a drug is approved by the FDA only after a long double blind study to document SAFETY and effectiveness. These precedents were ignored with the mRNA vaccines. The two top vaccine experts at the CDC resigned over this pseudo-scientific approach.
You have evaded and squirmed and obfuscated these facts, Frank.
See further down for another study of Cleveland Clinic employees that tends to support the Swedish study.
Dpy: Those who read Dr. Makary’s “landmark paper” on the “duration of natural immunity will be disappointed. Dr. Makary only measured the length of time antibodies could be detected, but not how long those antibodies provided effective immunity.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788894
Discussion: “Study limitations include lack of direct neutralization assays, the fact that antibody levels alone do not directly equate to immunity” …”Although evidence of natural immunity in unvaccinated healthy US adults up to 20 months after confirmed COVID-19 infection is encouraging, it is unclear how these antibody levels correlate with protection against future SARS-CoV-2 infections, particularly with emerging variants. The public health implications and long-term understanding of these findings merit further consideration.”
There are a number of studies that show that natural immunity is as effective or more so than vaccination. Why do you focus on just one? Perhaps it’s bias.
Sorry dpy. The Supreme Court ruled in the early 20th century that it was constitutional for the state to coerce vaccination. Your right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness doesn’t extend to allowing you to infect your fellow citizens with a dangerous pandemic disease that can be prevented by vaccination. That policy allowed us to wipe out small pox and polio and dramatically reduce a half dozen other childhood illnesses. Since these successes, we have become spoiled.
If you go back further, we gave the government (mostly state governments) great power to combat pandemic disease through quarantine and other measures. This began with quarantining ships suspected of carrying pandemic disease for 40 days. That’s part of English common law that became our common law. You need to remember that in those days, pandemics killed far more people than wars. Quarantine was the only way we had to defend ourselves from something more deadly than war. For that matter, far more soldiers and civilians died of disease DURING WARS than died from guns or other weapons! As one Justice famously said, the constitution isn’t a suicide pact. Giving up the progress we have made via vaccination in the name of a right to personally decide to refuse a safe vaccine sounds like suicide to me.
BTW, you’ve lost your right to: dump raw sewage in the gutter, raise or sell food without intrusive government inspectors (even at a lemonade stand in your front yard), burn your trash, drive a car without a catalytic converter, drive without a seat belt, burn coal without scrubbers and so on. These are all things that are perfectly safe done by individuals or small groups, that are dangerous when done by large numbers today.
Frank, you make a very good case for the need for regulations, and even mandatory vaccination. I do not object to either when done with public consent through secure elections and a transparent government, in other words, informed consent on a community scale.
My alarm bells go off when we have:
1) Scientific investigators persecuted for asking questions that government does not like.
2) Government wrongdoing that is exposed by a whistleblower not covered by the press due to government influence.
3) Government wrongdoing where those responsible get promotions.
4) The intelligence community has such a close relationship with the media that they have a revolving door and offices on both sides.
5) The same as #4 but with big business.
Ron
Well summarized
Frank, I have lost confidence in anything you say. You are just completely ignorant or you are lying about the mandate.
In a 6-3 decision in January 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the vaccination mandate as exceeding OSHA’s authority. However, the Court upheld a similar regulation issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) mandating vaccines for almost all employees at hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care providers that receive federal funds. Regarding the OSHA mandate, in an unsigned opinion the Court noted:
“Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly; requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans — selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees — certainly falls in the latter category.”
https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/insights/articles/is-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-still-in-effect
dpy wrote:
In a 6-3 decision in January 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the vaccination mandate as exceeding OSHA’s authority. However, the Court upheld a similar regulation issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) mandating vaccines for almost all employees at hospitals, nursing homes, and other health care providers that receive federal funds. Regarding the OSHA mandate, in an unsigned opinion the Court noted …
Congress has given OSHA the power to issue regulations concerning workplace safety. The Robert’s court has been challenging challenging the ever-expanding scope of power claimed by regulatory agencies, especially under Dems. The EPA is claiming jurisdiction over seasonal streams and ponds under the Navigable Rivers Act. The EPA claims the power to regulate emission of CO2 under the Clean Air Act, because MA claimed rising sea level with cause damage to property there. The Conservatives on the Court are fighting by with an old concept that was used to in the 1930’s: The Major Questions Doctrine. When an agency wants to expand its authority into major new areas, the Court is demanding evidence that Congress intended to authorize such an expansive interpretation of the power Congress granted that agency. The Court ruled that, when granting OSHA power to regulate workplace safety, Congress had shown any clear intention of allowing them to mandate vaccination – medicine treatment, but they could mandate the use of masks to filter harmful particulates from the air. I personally think these uses of the Major Questions Doctrine are usually great. The libs say the SC is arbitrarily picking and choosing which parts of laws it is willing to see enforced.
None of this says that it would be unconstitutional for CONGRESS or a STATE to pass a law mandating or coercing vaccination. Protecting the population from danger is part of the “police power” generally wielded by states and their is ample precedent showing that pandemic disease is one of the dangers the police power can be used to protect against. Quarantine is the obvious example. In Jacobsen v Massachusetts (1905), the Supreme Court ruled that the power to coerce vaccination was part of a state’s police power
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/197/11/
Now, since this case, the Supreme Court and public opinion have placed more emphasis on individual rights. However, if the country can draft citizens to fight and die in a war to protect the country from a deadly foreign enemy, IMO is can demand that a citizen get vaccinated to protect the country against a more deadly enemy, pandemic disease. More Americans have died in this pandemic than died in WWII and more died of pandemic influenza than in WWI. However, I’m not sure our spoil country will ever again draft citizens to fight or force them to get vaccinated.
My sister who is an MD, sent me this last summer. Tell me again why those who have had covid need to get vaccinated.
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-once-confers-much-greater-immunity-vaccine-vaccination-remains-vital
DPY: No one who had recovered from COVID was forced to get vaccinated. No one was forced to get vaccinated at all, except by their employers (mostly after mid-2021 IIRC). One of the first groups to get the opportunity to be vaccinated was the staff of nursing homes and only 50% of them got vaccinated!
Vaccine developers decided on a two-dose protocol for their mRNA vaccines because it took two doses to produce more neutralizing antibodies than patients who had recovered from COVID possessed. For this reason, it was assumed at the time that vaccination could produce better protection than natural infection. It was also possible the vaccination plus the polyclonal response to natural infections could created superior immunity to both. These may be the reasons why the CDC recommended that even those who had recovered from COVID get vaccinated. At that time, only about 10% of the US population had infections confirmed by PCR, so the amount of vaccine potentially wasted on those who were already immune from detected infections was modest. Perhaps 20-30% more had immunity from undetected infections, but we would have needed to check everyone for seropositivity to save the vaccine used on this group and we didn’t know how robust or long-lasting the protection was from asymptomatic or mild infections.
So the better question might have been: Why is my employer demanding I get vaccinated if I’ve already had COVID? One possible answer is that employers wanted everyone to have the best protection possible to protect all of their other workers.
Did Dr. Makary first bring his concerns privately to decision-makers? If so, he would have heard some good reasons for their policy decision. Perhaps he might have made a different decision in their shoes, but (if his ego were under control) deferring to their opinion would have made a lot of sense. Doing otherwise cast doubt on the credibility of the vaccine and the decision-makers among the public as a whole. In a crisis, people need to trust their leaders, because second-best policy is far better than no effective policy at all. I’ve heard that the single factor in a multi-factorial analysis that best predicted the death rate during the pandemic was the public’s trust in their government. If Dr. Makary did feel that the government’s policy was so bad he must speak out, he could have started by saying the CDC has recommended everyone get vaccinated despite previous infection for sensible reasons A, B and C. However, I think D, E and F are more important. This is how scientists are expected to communicate and eventually produce knowledge. Of course, in our politically polarized world, it would be unthinkable to acknowledge the good points in the enemy’s position. Just as with climate change, politics trumps science. In this case, I think many of these “right-wing scientists” are stuck in their politicized echo chamber and have done some poor work.
“No one who had recovered from COVID was forced to get vaccinated. No one was forced to get vaccinated at all, except by their employers (mostly after mid-2021 IIRC).”
Frank, This sentence from you comment is a perfect example of doublespeak. Employers were threatened by the Feds if they didn’t enforce the illegal mandate with loss of all Federal contracts. Federal employees were forced to get vaccinated.
This was the Feds doing totally and completely and Biden’s incompetence at work.
Franktoo – in response to getting vaxed after having covid “because vaxed provided additional or better protection against covid ”
A) through out the history of vaccines, its rare that a vaccine with produce better immunity than an actual infection
B) Even when a vaccine does provide additional immunity than an actual infection, the marginal increase in immunity protection is trivial.
The demand for vaccination after infection was driven by a combination of fear, poor science, poor knowledge of viral history and possibly by profits gained by the phara companies.
One study in particular that was borderline academic fraud in support of the vax after infection was the kentucky study which a 2.36x greater likelihood of reinfection if not vaxed. That study suffered from numerous flaws
1) using a reinfection pool since the march 2020 vs breakthrough pool since Dec 2020
2) using a bogus “control group” when they had data for the entire infection population for the state of kentucky,
3) short post vax period ( which has been common flaw in all the vax effectiveness studies)
4) A math error in the computation of the increase in probability.
simply put, the drive for vaxing was driven by crappy agenda driven science.
Unfortunately, could be a harbinger of things to come.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/ohio-county-reports-more-than-measles-cases-majority-countrys
@ Willard | December 31, 2022 at 11:49 am |
Back in the days, gays were the targets of the kind of campaign you and our Hall Monitor wish are rooting for.
Willard is quite the propagandist, no?
Willard is a propagandist and accuses others of what he is doing. You will note that WeeWeeLard has not condemned Twitters collusion with the FBI to interfere in elections or to silence true scientific information. Why not WeeWee? Are you an authoritarian? Are you covering this up by accusing others?
A propagandist would spend his day here recycling Newscorp conspiracies or alt-med websites talking points, Jim. Know any denizen who does that? Enjoy this feel good story to close 2022:
https://www.reuters.com/world/romania-detains-ex-kickboxer-andrew-tate-human-trafficking-case-2022-12-30/
Always recycle or compost your pizza boxes.
It’s difficult to find a comment that isn’t yours, Willard.
Jim, WeeWeeLard has spent the last decade developing the philosophy of a game called climateball that is purely rhetorical and instructs you in how to deflect, obfuscate, and attact your opponent personally. In short WeeWee is a professional troll.
No U, dear Jim.
Here is a simple model to analyze the kind of obstruction our newly minted Hall Minotaur tries to throw:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2022/08/01/fail-better/
He could learn to FAIL better, but the learning part of his
Iife is past him.
Wow, Willard, you have been doing gain of function on trolling. You should apply for a government grant.
Jim, Willard’s last link proves that he is a professional obfuscator who knows nothing about science so he focuses on form over substance, an ordinary artifice of those who seek not the truth but their own advantage.
I comment here to learn from others. Willard is too ignorant of science to learn anything here. That he chooses to spend his time in this tells me there is some deep issue there, perhaps no real life outside the internet.
Jim,
As you can see, David pretends he is only here for the science whence he mostly play the Hall Monitor or promote Freedom Fighter websites, the latest being PJ. Hence why he needs to peddle Covid crap at every opportunity. Somehow it makes him feel so sciency.
In other Tate news:
https://torontosun.com/news/world/playboy-model-says-andrew-tate-tried-to-lure-her-to-romanian-lair
Elon was so right to give him a voice!
Ron wrote: “If we had a super easy and app for reporting vaccine and drug side effects that also gave results instantly to the public we would have much more confidence and safer drugs and biologics to boot.”
Ron, I suggest you attempt to estimate how many people would be expected to have died within 1 day or 5 days of an mRNA vaccination during 2021 purely by chance. I did this once, and the number was shockingly high, 10,000 and 50,000 IIRC. Make your own assumptions. Now, a cancer patient on his death bed is not likely to go out and get vaccinated 1 or 5 days before they die of cancer. Those dying of sudden heart attacks or strokes could by chance have died 1 or 5 days afterwards – those with heart disease were prime candidates for vaccination. Now, the public is unable to understand such calculations. Do you really think it makes sense to tell the public that 10,000 people died within 1 day of being vaccinated? And 70,000 within a week? When you know they are going to draw the wrong conclusion?????
The place for you to look and tell the public to look is at the clinical trial data. There you have two groups selected by random assignment with equal chance of having one volunteer die by chance the day after vaccination with vaccine or placebo. Or have any one of several dozen adverse effects caused by chance or vaccine. If any deaths or really serious problems developed, follow up can probably tell us whether a death or serious problem was caused by the vaccine. For mRNA vaccines, we have 10,000 in each group, meaning we have good information on risks that effect 1 in 1000 and dubious information about risks that effect 1 in 10,000 (until we combine multiple trials). From my reading, the best I can tell is that about 1% IIRC more volunteers in the vaccine group compared with the placebo group had “serious, but reversible and non-fatal side effects. It was also interesting reading how many in the placebo group (about 75% total) reported pain at the injection site, a stiff arm, or feeling under the weather after the first injection. Participating in a clinical trial of a new vaccine was a stressful event that had a significant impact on most. The one minor side effect that didn’t show a big placebo effect was fever, the one that is quantitative, not subjective.
I’m not much interested in reading Scott Atlas’s book. Atlas was brought in at a late stage precisely because he was going to tell Trump what he wanted to hear. Given all of the doctors in the country, there were plenty of kook’s who could have been picked to fill that role. I’m not claiming Atlas was a kook; I’m asserting his views were perfectly predictable before he saw what was going on. He was picked by Trump to tell the story he told, and I don’t want to hear that story. Based on the immediate end of uncontrolled exponential pandemic growth within ONE WEEK of lockdowns and the total elimination of seasonal influenza in the winter of 20-21, I’m absolutely convinced some combination of social distancing, masks, closing businesses and working from home WORKED. However, it didn’t work in the US well enough to end the pandemic, but it did so in some Asian countries. In the US, it brought the reproduction rate down to 0.7-1.3 for a year from the disastrous 3.5 in March (doubling every 2.5 days).
Frank asked: “Do you really think it makes sense to tell the public that 10,000 people died within 1 day of being vaccinated?
This is the classic “the masses are a$$es.” There is nothing that cannot be broken down to an understandable GUI. Just put the control number next to the test number. A sixth grader can understand coincidence, that people die every day of natural causes not linked the anomalous event.
“For mRNA vaccines, we have 10,000 in each group, meaning we have good information on risks….’
Pfizer was allowed to sequester their data for 75 years from the public. It had to be sued under FOIA for it to start coming out. What is that about?
“I’m absolutely convinced some combination of social distancing, masks, closing businesses and working from home WORKED.”
Do you think we should be following China’s lockdown policy? Why are they doing it? Why wouldn’t any government follow the same tendencies once they control the media? Is it really for the greater benefit of the population as individuals, or even the state?
Scott Atlas was brought in by Gerald Kushner likely because Trump agreed with his POV and also became suspicious of Fauci and company. According to Atlas, the NIH troika of Fauci, Birx and Redfield were advising states on lockdowns bases on test positivity rates that were snapshots that were 4 weeks out of date. By the time the actions were implemented there was already a development of community immunity developing to crest the curve. This made it look to the troika like the lockdowns were being effective when Atlas argued that in states like Florida the same curve was seen without the interventions.
Here is Marty Makary today in Newsweek:
Fauci Leaves a Broken Agency for His Successor
This is all irrelevant Frank. Essentially everyone has now been exposed to covid. The new variants are 70 times more contagious as chicken pox. You have nothing rigorous to show that lockdowns or remote work “worked.” There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that those states with the most rigorous restrictions did not do a lot better than those which opened up early. Obesity rates appear to be correlated with deaths per capita however.
DPY wrote: You have nothing rigorous to show that lockdowns or remote work “worked.”
This is a problem in many areas of science. We can’t conduct experiments on a second or third planet earth to determine how much spontaneous climate change would have occurred without rising GHG’s or what would have happened if GHGs rose without the cooling effects of aerosols. The government of every developed country took steps to reduce transmission, so we can’t what would happen without them. There are papers that attempt to assess the value of various NPI’s by multiple linear regressions that say which interventions were most valuable, but such analyses aren’t very intuitive or understandable to amateurs.
In the case of the pandemic, we have every reason to believe that the number of cases would have continued to rise exponentially in April of 2020 as they were rising in March in the US and almost every other developed country in the world. The normal number of contacts between people was allowing infected people to transmit the infection to an average of 3.5 new people while they were sick. Look at outworldindata.org. (In Sweden, the reproduction rate was lower for some reason, possibly limited testing.) People weren’t going to magically stop breathing out the infectious aerosols and sprayed droplets that were infected those nearby. There is absolutely no reason to believe this exponential increase (doubling every 2.5 days) wouldn’t have continued until people’s behavior changed – due to government mandate or due to fear. If essential workers (in hospitals and food supply and delivery) stopped working due to panic, we would have far bigger problems than just lockdowns. Many grocery store shelves were already emptying. There is absolutely no doubt that the dramatic change in reproduction rate after March 2020 was due to lockdowns.
If behavior hadn’t been changed by fear or lockdowns, continued exponential growth would have produced roughly 100 million US cases by May 1, 2020. At that point, the reproduction rate would drop to about 2.5 because 1 of those 3.5 new potential victims would be immune (or dead). If authorities in the states that were hit earliest (NY, NJ, MA, CA, and IL?) had waited just one week more to act, their problems would have been 8X bigger.
The absence of influenza (which is transmitted by the same mechanism(s) as COVID) in the winter of 20-21 is proof that measures to restrict transmission of COVID were still working in at this point. It is tough to distinguish between changes in transmission due to voluntary responses based on fear and between government mandated changes.
The abrupt end of the exponential grow a week after lockdown began and the disappearance of seasonal influenza provide unambiguous that NPI’s had a huge impact.
DPY wrote: “There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that those states with the most rigorous restrictions did not do a lot better than those which opened up early.”
Agreed. I find the lack of large benefits for the most stringent states disturbing. This is especially a problem when you look and NY, NJ and others, which may have suffered up to half of their death toll in April 2020, when it was too soon for lockdowns to prevent deaths. It takes about 3 weeks to die from COVID after you are infected and many weeks for lockdowns to reduce the current number of sick people transmitting. If these states drove the reproduction rate down to 0.5 with lockdowns, it would have taken more than 2 weeks for the number of new cases to drop 8-fold (and the number of deaths to drop 8-fold 3 weeks later). I don’t know how low NYC’s reproduction rate actually reached. The Chinese claimed 0.3 during their much more severe two-month lockdown of Wuhan. In the states that were hit hard early, the death toll by the end of April was already mostly unavoidable when lockdowns began. So any fair assessment of the value of more stringent lockdowns needs to start around May 1, 2020, the earliest date more stringent lockdowns could have shown a beneficial impact. You may remember that I posted state data on deaths/100,000 and cases/100,000 about a year ago when the rewards or lack thereof for more stringent lockdowns were being discussed here. A few blue states (VT, OR, WA) did much better, but NY, NJ and MA looked inappropriately bad because of their early unavoidable deaths. Florida – as I expected – did badly in terms of detected cases, but that didn’t result in excessive deaths for some reason. The relationship between stringency of lockdowns and deaths or cases was – from my perspective – distressingly weak. IIRC, the press has shown greater deaths in red states because of less vaccination once vaccination became available.
The other thing that makes this analysis difficult is the role of changing human behavior. When a state’s lax policies produce a large number of hospitalization, hospitals overflow, people get scared and start behaving more cautiously, States that are doing better than average can get complacent, causing their cases to increase. The clearest example of this phenomena I remember is the Dakotas, which we the first to be hit by the surge in the fall of 2020. Despite the absence of any surge in the spring or summer, they shot to the national lead in cumulative case in October 2020. However, their surge was mostly over by Thanksgiving and they had some of the fewest cases in December and January. Seropositivity data showed the surge in the Dakotas was not ended by herd immunity, at most 40% were immune My amateur explanation for this dramatic change is FEAR. The rest of the country, led by the Upper Midwest surged in November and December, but cases fell 80% from mid-January to mid-February, though seropositivity data again showed herd immunity wasn’t responsible. The big exception in the Mid-West was Michigan, the home of that tyrant Gretchen Whitmer. That state suffered a big surge in March and April. Likewise, NJ and NY, which had done great during the winter surge suffered badly about the same time. This was when Makary was telling us the Pandemic would be over by April. Success is means your people are less fearful and less immune, putting your state at greater risk in the future.
Thinking in terms of cause and effect, obesity rates and average age should correlate with deaths per infection.
If seen several articles showing the red states did worse after vaccination became commonplace because fewer Republicans got Vaccinated than Dems.
frank wrote – “In the case of the pandemic, we have every reason to believe that the number of cases would have continued to rise exponentially in April of 2020 as they were rising in March in the US and almost every other developed country in the world.”
Frank – its never happened before during any other pandemic – why would anyone think it would be different this time
As of Nov 2021, the cumulative per capita death rate for the 65+ age group for all states ranged between 1120-1180 per 100k. There were 5 states much lower ( 700-800 range per 100k) which were VT, NH, ME Wa and HI – most likely related to geography. NY & NJ were much higher in the 1350 range.
all the other states were in that very narrow band/range with virtually no difference based on the level of mitigation protocols or the compliance with those mitigation protocols.
When I compiled the comparison, I only used the age 65+ age group since over 85% of the deaths were in that age group and thus the only seriously relevent age group to compare across states.
I will also note that there are several reports showing how much worse the republican states did using ‘age weighted” per capital death measurements. Several of those studies reported per capita death rate differences exceeding 400 deaths per 100k. Those studies are highly questionable – especially considering that in my compilation of data, 43 states had differences less than 80 per 100k in the 65+age group where 85%+ of the deaths occurred.
The point being is that
A) mitigation protocols were highly ineffective / non relevent .
B) a lot of intentionally misleading data/studies / reports are written for very partisan and/or agenda driven purposes.
Frank, You are just denying the seasonality of covid which is very pronounced. This happened in Sweden. By early May 2020 we were nearing the end of the “covid season” so the spread of the virus became sharply curtailed. Then in the fall it came back.
California I believe had pretty strict restrictions throughout the pandemic and there you see a strong seasonality too.
Combined with the fact that states PFR rates are in a pretty tight range with a few exceptions this I think is conclusive that all the masking, social distancing, and closures didn’t do much except cost us at least $6 trillion we don’t have. And now as a result we have the worst inflation in 40 years.
A vastly stronger correlation exists between age profile and obesity rates.
In any case, none of this mattered much. Ultimately everyone would get exposed to covid19. We may have slowed down a bit this process, but at a huge cost. Children I think were damaged the most in their learning and social development. This is a shameful CDC recommendation, i.e., the closure of schools. This alone is a reason to fire all the top people at the CDC who had anything to do with this.
DPY, all good points, but to be fair, there was some benefit of slowing down the virus versus going full GBD from the start, besides giving some time to research (which was mostly squandered by NIH, see Makary’s Newsweek). I do agree it’s questionable how much we slowed down the virus shutting down small business and mandatory masking (like NY, CA) versus voluntary measures (like FL). Frank is right about the effect of distancing had on knocking out the flu for season `20-`21 and attenuated `21-`22. I think a lot of people expected that. People, especially with no quick test, went into immediate isolation upon any first sign of illness. Flu was down in red states as well as blue.
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/FluHospRates.html
The game changer in strategy for benefit of slowing down the virus was the race for vaccines and therapeutics. It gave Op Warp Speed a chance to protect the elderly. Makary even criticized the FDA for the unnecessary delay in Nov 2020. (That one extra month would have been golden.) Also, Makary pushed for spreading out the doses, which would have gotten the single dose in more arms sooner. Spreading out the 1st two RNA jabs is now thought to produce more robust immunity.
Neither I, nor Makary, are anti-vaxx. We are pro-pragmatic use of science, getting politics out of research results and making policy by prudently weighing risks of all consequences.
Ron, I have seen some discussion of what happened to the flu. There are still quite a few viable explanations, one of them being that the people who might have gotten the flu, got covid instead. Or perhaps those with the flu also tested positive for covid and were not tested for the flu.
Ron & DPY –
What happened to the flu during covid?
best explanation is that every year , there is a dominant strain of the flu and a lesser strain of the flu. Covid was just the dominant strain during 2020 & 2021.
Here’s a media report that cites numerous recent papers whose results raise questions about the wisdom of vaccine recommendations.
https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/stacey-lennox/2022/12/31/could-the-covid-jab-make-you-sicker-next-time-you-run-into-the-virus-new-research-says-maybe-n1657182
dpy: The unvaccinated or less boosted are not an appropriate control group for measuring the benefits or vaccination today. They are younger and likely healthier. They are less likely to have infections reported to databases. They are certainly more likely to have acquired immunity from natural infections.
The cost of acquiring natural immunity from an infection can be high, especially for the vulnerable who need that immunity the most. The cost for some is hospitalization or even death. The cost for others is a really bad bad cold and isolation for a week and the fear of infecting family. The lucky ones (less than half) gain immunity from asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic infection without paying a significant price. So far, the cost of acquiring immunity from natural infection is absurdly higher than acquiring immunity from vaccination. The situation is changing, but newer variants are getting better at resisting immunity acquired by either method.
Once again Frank, you cite nothing and make a lot of unsupported assertions. I have cited several studies, especially the Swedish one, which you cited in a way that mislead us. The data show effectiveness against symptomatic covid fell to -25% at 9 months. This suggests vaccination may have prolonged the epidemic.
You also seem to have an unreasonable fear of this virus for some weird reason. Many of my friends have been infected. My best friend is 70 and he and his wife had mild symptoms.
As I say, you seem to be very biased on this subject due to personal circumstances.
dpy: Florida’s public inquisition of vaccine makers and approvers is not just about vaccinating children or the adolescent and young adult males who rarely get myocarditis. There is some room for honest debate about these low risk/low benefit vaccinations. However, these vaccinees are only mentioned in 2 of 35 numbered paragraphs, 20 and 21. This is an all-out attack on the practice of preventing or minimizing COVID by vaccination. Read for yourself:
https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Vaccine-Grand-Jury-Petition.pdf
I’ve detailed quite clearly (with links) where I think Professor B, Makary, Lapado and others (GBD) have gone wrong. I hear vague allegations about what the consensus has done wrong. The CDC screwed up testing early in the pandemic. They did a lousy job recognizing transmission by aerosols and the superiority of N95 masks. But the right isn’t criticizing them for this. Tonight I briefly heard Jim Jordan demanding a witness say the Biden was lying when he said vaccination would protect people from getting infection.
You are lying to yourself here Frank. You can look up the studies yourself showing that natural immunity is more effective than vaccination. I think there was one in Israel for example that my sister sent me. You can look up studies on masks too. There was one in Denmark and a host of pre-covid studies. The WHO pre-pandemic did not recommend mask mandates. I’ve cited a study showing that children are harmed on balance by vaccination. You didn’t really respond except to point to 2 meaningless and self-serving “comments” on the paper. You really need to put aside your political biases that are actually bordering on bigotry.
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-once-confers-much-greater-immunity-vaccine-vaccination-remains-vital
Of course, you see here the narrative pushed strongly that vaccination is a great thing. Ignore the spin and focus on the data.
The kentucky study on the reduction of risk of reinfection vs breakthrough after vaccination is another study that is borderline academic fraud.
When the study came out in the fall of 2021, I requested and received the data used in the study from the CDC. After receiving the data, I emailed back requesting clarification of the data. Noticing some issues in the math, I send a second email requesting additional clarification to which I did not receive a response, I then resend the email, and send separate emails directly to the authors and to the Kentucky DOH, again with no response.
The conclusion of the study was that getting vaccination after infection reduced the risk of reinfection by 2.36.
Several points
a) the time period used for possible reinfection included everyone in kentucky since march 2020 while the breakthrough infection only included those vaxed since Dec 2020, thus using a much greater population time frame for reinfection.
B) the authors used an inappropriate “control group” to artificially show the robustness of the study. A control group which provide no statistical value in that type study.
C) The authors used an invalid denominator in the study.
Other than that, the study was good (lol)
The CDC still has two studies posted on the CDC websites showing the positive benefits of masking. Both of those studies are borderline academic fraud.
The Kansas mask mandate vs non mask mandate by county covering the period June 1 through August 23, 2020 study is near out and out fraud. The study period was cut off at the end of 11 weeks. Beginning in the 12 week until the 18th week when the 11 week study was published, the non mask mandated counties had lower case rates. The authors of the study knew that the results of their study was no longer valid after the 11th week, but the refused to disclose that fact and the refused to update their study.
The Arizona school mask study used non comparable school attendance periods (same calendar time period but different school attendance periods). they failed to disclose the non comparable periods,
Both of those studies would be considered fraud in a normal scientific environment.
While I havent explored other studies in detail, there are 4 other mask studies that are highly flawed.
In sum, most if not all, the pro mask studies dont hold up on examination.
Thanks Joe for keeping track of these studies. I’d forgotten about the Kansas one but you are right, it is fraudulent and the authors dishonest.
Here is the Reddit post on Dr. Curry’s interview with SkyNews:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/comments/z86tpk/theres_no_emergency_dissident_climatologist_dr/
The highest rated comment even after I knocked it down one:
“She’s full of sh!t.
Climate change is happening so fast it’s unbelievable. You’d have to be blind to not notice it.
It is terrifying.”
Ron –
So I have a link relevant to our discussion of the trend you see in our country over time, with respect to a government/media nexus and the stifling of free speech….
You still haven’t answered my questions with regard to that….it would be great if you did, but regardless…
I listened to this today and thought of your views. Now of course the source is maybe among those that you would likely find absolutely among the least trustworthy possible…and I don’t doubt that there’s a “different side” to the one presented at this link. But I do think of American First and Father Coughlin when I think of the US and the nexus between the US government and media and propaganda and freedom of speech….and so I think, despite the source, this might just be something you’d consider even a slight bit relevant to our discussion. I knew vaguely about much of this, but there’s a lot of detail that I never knew anything about previously:
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143078657/rachel-maddow-uncovers-a-wwii-era-plot-against-america-in-ultra
Ron –
Also, another link for you.
https://areomagazine.com/2021/05/28/the-lab-leak-and-other-conspiracy-theories-many-of-which-turned-out-to-be-true/
This is just the left highlighting what fits their narrative, Joshy. In the 1930’s, many intellectuals became disillusioned with capitalism and turned to the ideologies. Communists were more common but some of the Nazi sympathizers were more powerful such as Lindbergh. Neither of these movements had much effect on national politics in the US. WWII pretty much finished Nazism as a viable movement. This is all from Samuel Elliot Morison’s Oxford history.
Why is this important in the slightest?
Actually the Communists did influence the War effort. After the Russia German pact, Stalin instructed the American longshoremen union head to call a strike to hold up lend lease shipments to Britain.
Joshua, you are the second person to speak of Maddow’s WWII deep dive into subversion. I studied this period years ago in my own deep dive, and from the same POV, how we were close to becoming an ally of Germany.
Since you and I already have likely 100+ comments here already I will summarize the best I can in one comment what I think happened then and how it is relevant for now and future.
The Cold War really started in 1917 with the communist revolution in Russia. Big business throughout the west were fearful of a worldwide revolution, with labor unions as the organizing hotbed. By 1918, however, the horror of modern warfare witnessed on the fields of France led the elite consensus that geopolitics must be perused by other means than war. Agents and provocateurs might be able to accomplish the toppling of governments without firing a shot. Germany started the Ausland Organization (later Abwehr) and UK MI-6. The US, however, with our limited government and non-interventionism did little in peacetime “intel ops”. The US industrialists thus took in upon themselves to do intel and the US’s foreign policy was heavily reliant on the industrialists and their agents foreign relationships.
This was a time of weak central governance in the west, the Weimar is a famous failure of infighting. In the US, its low regulation laissez faire era led to a boom followed by bust and depression. Meanwhile Italy and Germany were doing great with strong central governance. In 1934 most of the industrialists were likely happy to see a strong Germany emerge alongside a booming Italy. They would be “bulwarks against communism.” Thee was even thought that this new stronger model was the answer everywhere. Then a few noticed the (Sep 1935 Nuremburg Laws passed taking away rights from the Jews. The Jewish industrialists at least cooled on Mr. H.
Next, he gobbled up his neighbors at a rate of about one per year. By the 1939 Blitzkrieg I would say 80% of the elite in the US were sour on Mr. H. The other 20% were silently neutral, including Henry Ford, the DuPonts, Rockefeller Jr. and others. But after the stunning fall of France in one month in June 1940 the voices for neutrality became louder as FDR began supporting Britain, and thus sucking the US into the conflict (just like WWI). The America First Movement, led by Charles A. Lindbergh and Sen. (D) Burton K Wheeler challenged FDR in a public campaign to stop US from assisting Britain.
At the same time Germany’s Abwehr had been growing a pro-German – pro NAZ! movement among German immigrants in NYC and NJ. The two organizations supported each other in rallies. It was a scary time for Jews in NYC (as well as everyone). It all instantly ended on Dec. 7, 1941 (and days later when Germany declared war on the US).
The lesson is not that fascism has always been strong in America or that we are in a threat today from Trump supporters, whom are anything but fascists. The lesson should be that strong centralized governments are dangerous to liberty, and thus should be no stronger than absolutely necessary to protect rights of the people. Fascism is not left or right. All the tactics used by one side can be used by another, including scapegoating groups to divert from policy failures. Orwell’s 1984 could have been USSR, NAZ! Germany or CCP (or USA, if we lose our way). I hope you and Rachel will see this some day before we pass.
Ron –
I don’t want to be rude, but don’t waste your time summarizing history for me. I’m not going to read it any more than I’m going to read your detailed analysis of epigenetics or you’re treatise on the etiology of autism or the immunology related to vaccines.
If you find that investigation interesting, that’s great. If you find it uninteresting or wrong or biased, that’s fine too. I just put it up because I thought it touched on relevant issues. I’d be happy to discuss THOSE issues, but because I’m mostly in comment jail it’s too much of a pain to do so.
Interestingly, the head of the Abwehr, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, soured on Mr. H. after Dec 7, and was part of the failed assassination plot by Von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise). He was executed by firing squad in July 1944.
Joshua, just read the last paragraph then. I am in comment jail too half the time.
There is more than one understanding of history, even with 95% of the same facts. But you need to learn them and have mutual acknowledgement of them before you can have an interesting discussion about them.
I do find Rachel’s translation of the facts through her lens interesting because I know they are yours now too. Remember, all investigators cherry pick and spin to some degree. I forget what the call that.
Joshy is being rude. What you discuss seems accurate to me. What I object to about Maddow is that it focuses on fascist influence and not the perhaps more widespread Commun!st influence. As you mention some labor unions in the US were quite willing to do Stalin’s bidding, for example holding up lend lease shipments to Britain.
The great Depression caused a lot of American intellectuals to flee to the twin ideological disasters current in Europe at the time. The left wing strain in our intelligensia that has become dominant started at that time.
Ron –
> facts through her lens interesting because I know they are yours now too…
You know no such thing. Or you think you know what you don’t know. Whichever you prefer.
Ron –
One other thing to mention. Although you still haven’t yet said what you’re using for as a starting point for measuring a trend in how government in this country has limited free speech (or what metric pure using to measure), and done so with the cooperation of media – certainly I would think that the blacklists and associated government activity during the Mccarthy Era would be worth consideration.
Ah, for the good old days of blacklists and Father Coughlin, eh?
“You know no such thing. ”
You are right about that. Tell me why you thought your link was interesting and where you disagree with Rachel’s analysis and I will tell you if I think you are right and why.
Otherwise, if you do not disagree with a word she says then I will backtrack to my previous presumption that she just now educated you on America’s 1940-41 political divide.
BTW, have you ever disagreed with Willard on anything? How is it possible to have the identical opinion on every nuance of every topic? I confess, I confuse which one of the two of you I am addressing sometimes.
Ron –
> Tell me why you thought your link was interesting…
I already told you. I thought it was interesting because it overlapped with some of our earlier discussion. I told you that twice. Why do you want to have something like that repeated over and over?
> and where you disagree with Rachel’s analysis and I will tell you if I think you are right and why.
I think that you and I approach this kind of thing quite differently. I don’t “agree” or “disagee” with her analysis. Her analysis is what it is. It’s information to be placed into context with other information.
But I leaned some things. I knew some about Father Coughlin but I didn’t realize just how far his media reach extended with his antisemitic extremism. I knew about America First and its extremism but I didn’t realize how deeply it reached into the halls of Congress. I didn’t realize that Hoover went after the
The Christian Front for sedition. I think all that information intersects with our previous discussion.
And I disagee with Willard on many things. I’m sorry that you can’t tell us apart – but I suspect that’s because (1) you aren’t reading with an open mind and, (2) relatedly, you’re reading with a kind of prejudice where you lump people together into groups merely because they disagee with and, (3) relatedly, you don’t really know what people who disagee with you really believe but instead with misplaced confidence cram them to fit some kind of inaccurate stereotype you carry around in your head. Anyways, enough of this. Like I said, if you didn’t find it interesting, that’s just fine with me.
Thanks for your reply and giving me something to address more tangible than it was “interesting.”
“I knew about America First and its extremism but I didn’t realize how deeply it reached into the halls of Congress. I didn’t realize that Hoover went after The Christian Front for sedition.”
Yes, there was a domestic divide that rivals today’s except more narrowly focused on intervention versus neutrality. However, identity politics and prejudices of the day were all utilized as tools. As a matter of fact the reverse is also true. Many of those promoting prejudices used war fear to further their cause. In fact, I would say that politics itself is a boiling pot of issues that get distorted by spin from all sides in an attempt at gaining support for sundry special interests. And then that boiling pot naturally divides into opposing armies by alliances. This is where you and I came narrowly close to agreement IIRC. It becomes at some point for of a war when people start identifying more with the party (the alliance) than their issues.
BTW, for context, anti-Semitism and racism in general was largely accepted in the 1930s to the end of WWII. The silver lining of the Holocaust was a stark teaching of the ends of such biases. We are improving culturally in a lot of ways. But no progress is a straight line and I think we are backsliding on censorship and blacklisting. We call it being cancelled.
For Frank and Ron. Looks like the dogma on vaccines is starting to appear to be not fully true.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-vaccines-fueling-new-covid-variants-xbb-northeast-antibodies-mutation-strain-immune-imprinting-11672483618?mod=djemalertNEWS
dpy: Haven’t you learned not to trust COVID science published on the WSJ Editorial Page, where elite conservative journalists are allowed to express personal opinions about subjects far outside their competence, without fact-checkers and the standard journalistic practice of presenting both sides of an issue? It was bad enough when Dr. Makary article was banned from Facebook as “vaccine disinformation’, but at least he was highly qualified. Ms. Finley is merely a Stanford journalism major. Have you been trained to salivate on command from the WSJ or apply your innate SKEPTICISM as a scientist. When we are talking about science, both the left and right deserve equal skepticism. I try. I followed Nic’s hypothesis about herd immunity with great interest and keeps looking for evidence to support or contradict it/
Even the title of Finley’s article is misleading: “Are Vaccines Fueling New COVID Variants?” Spontaneous random mutations (not vaccines) fuel new COVID variants and those that are best equipped to deal with the evolving human immune system eventually dominate by survival of the fittest. The antibodies produced by the human immune system have been modified by BOTH natural infections and vaccination. The alpha, beta, delta and other early variants evolved before vaccination was widespread. Delta exploded worldwide because it was able to overcome the antibodies produced by early COVID variants (and partly by increasing vaccination). Omicron exploded even more dramatically because it could overcome the protection produced by all earlier variants including Delta, and by the mRNA and other vaccines (which were by then an important evolutionary factor worldwide). The evolution of new Omicron variants likely has been dominated by the resistance landscape produced by earlier Omicron variants, because only a relatively small fraction of the world’s population has been getting boosters to raise their antibody levels high enough to produce a selection advantage between BA1, BA2, BA5, BQ1 and XBB. Natural immunity is shaping the evolving pandemic far more than vaccination.
Finley writes: “Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus’s rapid evolution.”
Complete idiocy! Repeat vaccinations BOOST falling antibody levels. That can never make people more susceptible to XBB. If a large fraction of the population (including children) were getting boosters, then XBB MIGHT take over by survival of the fittest, but only 15% of Americans have gotten the bivalent booster.
Finley writes: “The same study posits that immune imprinting may be contributing to the viral evolution. Vaccines do a good job of training the immune system to remember and knock out the original Wuhan variant. But when new and markedly different strains come along, the immune system responds less effectively.”
Vaccines AND PREVIOUS INFECTION do a good job of training the immune system to remember and knock out EARLIER variants. “Immune imprinting” aka “original antigenic sin” has been limiting the ability of the immune system to deal with viral mutants for millions of years. This not a problem that occurs only with vaccines, but it can be more carefully characterized with vaccines.
Finley writes: “Bivalent vaccines that target the Wuhan and BA.5 variants (or breakthrough infections with the latter) prompt the immune system to produce antibodies that target viral regions the two strains have in common. In Darwinian terms, mutations that allow the virus to evade common antibodies win out—they make it “fitter. XBB has evolved to elude antibodies induced by the vaccines and breakthrough infections.”
Unfortunately, so few Americans got the bivalent booster that it is a negligible force in shaping the evolving WORLDWIDE pandemic and in the US.
Finley quotes from a Nature study: “Hence, the Nature study suggests, “current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not efficiently prevent the infection of Omicron convergent variants.””
Yes, boosters are having trouble keeping up with evolution. The authors of the Nature study think their “deep mutational scanning methodology might help predict which mutations will be important in future variants of concern and so they can be targeted by new boosters.
Finley writes: “Similarly, a study this month in the journal Cell found that antibody levels of people who had received four shots were 145 times as high against the original Wuhan strain as the XBB variant. A bivalent booster only slightly increased antibodies against XBB. Experts nevertheless claim that boosters improve protection against XBB. That’s disinformation, to use their favored term.”
The XBB and BQ variants that are now dominant in the US where negligible when this fall’s bivalent vaccine was approved. Relatively few people have gotten this booster. Resistance to natural immunity, not the bivalent booster, the main force directing this process. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions Finlay is spreading disinformation!
Finley quoted the Cleveland Clinic study: ….“This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19 …and in addition to a vaccine’s effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.”
However, the less-vaccinated and less-boosted are not an appropriate control group for quantifying the benefits of vaccination: They are younger, less likely to have their infections “confirmed” and recorded, and more likely to have acquired immunity from natural infections. The cost of acquiring immunity from natural infection is high compared with the cost of a booster: a week of serious illness and isolation and, for the vulnerable, and a risk of hospitalization and death! The FDA measures the benefits of vaccination by the increase in the ability of serum from vaccinees to neutralize relevant variants in vitro. When these metrics have shown that therapeutic monoclonal antibodies are no longer useful, their marketing approval has been withdrawn. If the Biden administration doesn’t interfere, the same thing should happen with the current generation of mrNA vaccines.
Finley writes: “Two years ago, vaccines were helpful in reducing severe illness, particularly among the elderly and those with health risks like diabetes and obesity. But experts refuse to concede that boosters have yielded diminishing benefits and may even have made individuals and the population as a whole more vulnerable to new variants like XBB.”
I obviously recognize that boosters are yielding diminishing benefits. It is a flat lie to say the boosters have made anyone more vulnerable to new variants, because their evolution has been dominated by immunity produced by natural infection! In April of 2022, the CDC estimated that 60% of Americans were seropositive and many have suffered multiple infections. IMO, the fact that sub-variants of omicron are replacing each other every few months must be due to a significant fraction of the population becoming infected with each succeeding variation. If 1/3 of the population has been infected with a sub-variant, it can spread only 2/3rds as fast. (The slowdown would be even greater if Nic’s population heterogeneity hypothesis and the pandemic were localized mostly among the reckless and less vaccinated.) So I’d guess that the average American has been infected twice at this point.
Finley: “It might not be a coincidence that XBB surged this fall in Singapore, which has among the highest vaccination and booster rates in the world. Over the past several weeks a XBB strain has become predominant in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts, making up about three-quarters of virus samples that have been genetically sequenced. The variant has been slower to take off in other regions, making up only 6% of the Midwest and about 20% in the South. The Northeast is also the most vaccinated and boosted region in the country.”
Only 41% of New Yorkers 18-64 have gotten any booster and that could have been up to a year ago. Only 15% of Americans have gotten the bivalent booster. Finley continues to exaggerate the role played by vaccination. She would be right in a sane world were everyone followed the CDC’s recommendations/
Finley concluded: “The Biden administration’s monomaniacal focus on vaccines over new treatments has left the highest-risk Americans more vulnerable to new variants. Why doesn’t that seem to worry the experts?”
Finley – and those advising her – have a misplaced obsession with the role vaccination is playing in the evolution of this pandemic, which is mostly being directed by resistance acquired by infection. They fail to recognize why boosters are useful – they usefully raise the level of neutralizing antibodies – and ignore the high costs of acquisition of immunity from infection – serious illness, isolation, hospitalization and death.
> or apply your innate SKEPTICISM as a scientist
That’s funny, Frank.
Anyway…
It’s interesting that for all that I’m reading about a putative increased likelihood of infection among the vaccinated, I haven’t yet seen any kind of comparison to support that claim that was based on case-controlled investigation. Have you seen one?
It’s rather like the claims I’ve been reading so much about how excess mortality is higher in highly vaccinated countries. I have yet to see any of those claims where they were supported by case-controlled studies – and yet the claims are ubiquitous.
It’s not unlike claims made about vaccines and autism – again, where are the case controlled analyses to support a link?
It’s fascinating to watch, but very unfortunate. We’re heading into territory, I worry, where pubic health will be pretty much a free for all. Santorum president and Republicans in control of both houses and a very anti-government agency SCOTUS, for any benefits that might accrue, will definitely be a period where institutions of public health will be dismantled – largely because of the kinds of analyses from the WSJ you so astutely interrogated. It’s hard for me to believe there won’t be a surge in preventable disease.
Also interesting is the nexus between “skepticism” about climate change and this kind of sloppy engagement in public health issues. Reading your comments in these thread, given you’re someone loosely in the “skeptic” camp, has been interesting.
Come on Joshy. Lack of knowledge of science doesn’t tell us there is no evidence. The Swedish study (which is a preprint from last fall) shows effectiveness against symptomatic covid declined to -25% at 9 months after vaccination. The confidence interval did include 0 but I seem to recall just barely. That’s pretty good evidence.
Your fantasies about Santorum as POTUS are wild puerile ravings. The CDC and “the science” caused this chaos by constantly lying to the public and rigging their studies for example the Kansas mask study. Likewise their Arizona school study was fatally flawed. Their approval of the vaccine caused their two top vaccination experts to resign in protest. Total authoritarian pseudo-science or worse fraudulent science. They knew the Kansas data actually showed the opposite of what they wanted.
This chaos was totally caused by the CDC and “the science” who lied about most important issues. Their mask studies (one is still on their site) were known to be wrong when published, especially the Kansas study. What you call “chaos” is really just the normal coarse of correction in a free society. Perhaps you like having law enforcement and the CIA colluding with the press and big tech to shut down people who don’t spout the authoritarian line of the regime. Grow up and try to develop some critical faculties so you can wade through this yourself and evaluate it. Right now, you can’t do that and so focus on minor “errors” which often aren’t errors at all or “inconsistencies.”
Here’s another paper surveying the literature on saturated fat and heart disease. The best studies show there is no causal link. But for 70 years our public health authorities have harmed tens of millions by recruiting food manufacturers to remove saturated fat, often by adding sugars, which are the studies show actually more likely to be the culprit.
The “public health” elites are a total joke and captive by special interests and charismatic academics who lie to them. Science is now big business and dominated by corrupting influences, such as the need for soft money and a desire to have peer approval. The days of the gentleman scientist are gone.
https://journals.lww.com/co-endocrinology/fulltext/2023/02000/a_short_history_of_saturated_fat__the_making_and.10.aspx
Frank, I appreciate that you not only obviously have good technical background, but continue your education through thoughtful analysis, even if I might differ in opinion from it. I have not kept up with latest data except what I hear reported loosely by all sides. Although we differ slightly on opinion of the efficacy of the bivalent booster and continued variant chasing on the same mRNA technology, I am wondering if we agree on some of the larger issues on the state of science and institutions, like the CDC.
Some on this post have expressed the opinion that all scientific consensuses that at favored by the government must be supported, that the output of our institutions is incorruptible and highly infallible. While a agree that dissenting skeptics have a burden of proof, I would also claim that the institutions also carry the obligation of a burden of proof.
I a court of law history has shown the state actors to abuse their power and thus the individual must be protected by obligating the state to carrying the overwhelming share of the burden of proof. The state actor, after all, has little to lose and has access to vast resources to prove their case.
Even with this as a staple of law dating back to British law prior to the founding of the USA, and the vast resources put into capital murder cases, in the 1990s when DNA technology was used to reanalyze bio evidence so many people were found wrongly convicted on death row that the Republican governor of Michigan banned the death penalty there.
Considering this do you agree that individuals should retain the right of informed consent that was established in the 1947 Nuremburg code?
If you support vaccine mandates who do you reconcile it with “informed consent” under that 1947 established convention?
Are you alarmed that the government was directing Twitter’s censorship (and likely others) on science dissenters and dissenting scientists? Does that also violate “informed consent” (as well as the US Constitution’s 1st Amendment protecting freedom of speech and expression).
Ron –
> Some on this post have expressed the opinion that all scientific consensuses that at favored by the government must be supported, that the output of our institutions is incorruptible and highly infallible.
Lol. Remarkable. Now tell me again how you’re interested in good faith discussion.
Ron, Frank has been hiding his cards from us on the CDC and government policy during Covid. He seems aware that the mNRA vaccines are losing their value and that current Covid strains are on par with the flu. My guess is that he is aware of things like the fraudulent CDC Kansas mask study but has a Germanic respect for authority that prevents him from judging correctly. The other thing is that he is obsessed with the “right wing” and how bad they are. It leads him into all kinds of fallacies and biased cherry picking.
The main problem here is that Frank doesn’t respond to citations from the literature except with attacks on the authors for often minor or debatable “mistakes” and quoting authors’ misleading summary of their own data (Swedish study). Even in the sanitized final paper their graph shows effectiveness against covid infection falls to roughly -15% after 9 months. The preprint had -25% for symptomatic covid. In the text of the paper, they only mention 121 day and 180 day time frames and say things like 44% effective from day 180 on. That’s just a misrepresentation of their own data as their graphic shows. Referees must have gotten them to sanitize their conclusions.
Even you Joshy should admit that virtually every committed Democrat in government and the media overwhelmingly pushed the CDC Gospel as if it was revealed scripture.
We know that Big Tech was colluding with the CDC and worse the FBI and CIA to push the suppress any dissent from the government dogmas revealed from heaven by St. Fauci. On virtually every important issue, the dissenters had good points and on a number of them were clearly right all along.
Ron: Most of what I know about the constitution and pandemics comes from listening to podcasts from the National Constitution Center, which often starts with recitation of their charter to educate the country on a NON-PARTISAN BASIS, usually with a fair host, one person from the Federalist Society and one from the liberal equivalent. For one discussion of a pandemic case, one of the guest actually argued the case in front of the Supreme Court (over video of course). Everything is online. The Justices initially deferred to the pandemic experts, but after the Dems taking advantage of their power to disadvantage churches, the mostly Catholic Justices lost patience, especially as it became clear that the crisis wouldn’t end in a few months Most state constitutions have granted the same magnitude of police power to fighting a pandemic that one would use in wartime. This is old law and the Supreme Court began paying much more attention to individual rights beginning in the mid-20th-century.
As for the Nuremberg Code, we test new vaccines and drugs on informed volunteers and only coerce or mandate vaccines once they have been proven to be safe and effective. That is not what the Nazis were doing. Some people think an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) means a drug or vaccine is “experimental”, but this has been standard practice since the AIDS crisis. Normally the FDA requires two large Phase III clinical trials showing a pre-agreed upon amount of efficacy with p less than 0.05 and suitable safety. However, when a life threatening condition with no effective treatment is involved, one such Phase III trial routinely yields a revokable Emergency Use Authorization that depends on “timely” completion of a second Phase III trial. Those have been done for mRNA vaccines. And all new drugs and vaccines are routinely surveilled in “Phase IV” after marketing when it is possible to detect adverse events that occur in 1 per 10,000, 1 per 100,000 or 1 per million. The product’s “Instructions for Physicians” are then modified. Since real patients can sometimes have more problems than those who volunteer and since patients in the real world take drugs for longer than it is feasible to test them, sometimes serious unexpected problems occur. It took a year of drug treatment for patients to begin to show an excess number of heart attacks because it slightly increased coagulation. The system isn’t perfect, but we couldn’t afford a system that was.
Frank, you have expressed support for vaccine mandates, citing legal precedent authorizing local health departments to take action to protect public health. I understand clearly the argument for individuals having the right to be protected from potential infection from other individuals but I sort of disagree with that argument’s logic except in the very narrow circumstance where the same individuals that are most vulnerable are also the same that cannot be protected through vaccination, and instead rely on the herd for protection. And this is largely the justification I heard made the loudest during the height of the pandemic. Is that your argument, or are you broadly for power to central authority over individuals?
I hear others in their comments here echo the news media alarms for measles outbreaks as if they, or their children, are in danger from measles due to the ignorance of superstitious wrong thinkers who opt out of the vaccination program. I agree that there are some children who will be vulnerable to measles even if vaccinated. I also agree that it is conceivable that in a rare case of comorbidity this could lead to the child’s death. But I think that everyone would agree there is also risk of unexpected intolerance to vaccination that could lead to illness or even death.
Joshua wrote: “Lol. Remarkable. Now tell me again how you’re interested in good faith discussion.”
Just tell me what your thinking is. I know this opens you up for criticism of poor reasoning abilities but isn’t that perfectly fair in open and free dialogue? Of course it is. The question is do you support open and free dialogue. I try to reciprocate respect, but coddling? No.
Ron –
> Just tell me what your thinking is….
Consider the process of first characterizing views (wrongly) and then asking what they are.
Ron –
Here’s an article that’s broadly consistent with my perspective and overlaps to some degree with the issues we’ve engaged on (I won’t say discussed) recently (although I think it’s somewhat too categorical and a bit melodramatic/sensationalist).
https://www.levernews.com/the-partisan-ghost-in-the-media-machine/
So here’s an example for why I’m broadly in agreement, but think the conspiratorial narrative in Sirota’s thesis is fundamentally flawed. It’s an example of why I am generally critical of conspiracy theories.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2021/12/14/airline-bailout-covid-flights/
And then Sirota’s thesis isn’t even internally consistent, where first he talks about the librul media and Dem government collusion to protect against regulation and then talks about Dem representatives pushing for regulation.
And by the end, Sirota is reduced to self-fel@ting and hard sell of his product, by painting himself as the champion and savior to protect democracy. It’s all so commonplace and banal.
The same binary thinking I am so critical of at Climate Etc. Why is it so hard for people to get beyond binary thinking?
Joshua, I applaud you for linking to the Levernews article that makes a non-partisan appeal for condemnation of poor airline regulation at DoT to protect travelers. I’m not sure of the point of the WaPo article except how the taxpayers always have to bail out everyone, rich or poor, if they have a political lobby.
I am also not sure when you or someone says they don’t believe in conspiracy theories. The Holocaust was a conspiracy theory for 4 years until after the surrender of Germany, when the victors exposed the monumental atrocity. It was meticulously videoed and documented because they knew it could potentially be unbelievable to future generations.
Note: it was defeated ministers that faced the gallows, not any in power. The only good example of state abuse that got exposes while in power was Watergate. After 50 years historical investigators are still peeling back the secrets of what was truly behind it. Here is James Rosen’s excellent article last summer. It seems it was the CIA, not Nixon, in charge that day at the Watergate. It was a Kompromat op, not evesdropping on McGovern’s pitiful campaign strategies.
I once told you about the now well documented Gulf of Tonkin incident that was the pretext for Johnson’s massive troop invasion of Vietnam and initiating the military’s draft. The skirmish was actually a FUBAR friendly fire incident between the Maddox and the Turner Joy, started by phantom radar returns from white caps during a storm. There was an actual enemy engagement in the area two days earlier but was classified since it involved the US illegally covertly supporting a South Vietnamese gun boat raid on the North. Johnson and SoS McNamara used the second incident as a “Pearl Harbor” nefariously. Was that a conspiracy? How big or bad does it have to be?
From your first link:
Ron –
> I am also not sure when you or someone says they don’t believe in conspiracy theories
Conspiracies happen. I also provided a link to Mkultra.
If you’re going to respond, you really ought to read more carefully. This is like when I answered your question multiple times and then you asked it again. You’re just wasting your time. I know you have hard.(and wrong) priors as to what ii believe but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to update them.
Joshua, I am honestly trying to follow your points in good faith. I thought that since I was presenting a possibility that vaccinating babies is a potential contributor to autism that I was prone to conspiracy ideation because “everyone knows” vaccines are perfectly safe and only parents with autistic children and the quack doctors, taking advantage of parents, promote such crap. Further, I thought you and Willard’s objective was to ridicule the idea and thus ridicule me, which in turn would ridicule any skepticism of what “everyone knows” about CO2 causing droughts and floods and storms and heat waves and polar vortexes and general world chaos.
I missed your pointing out MKUltra. So, you are believing that the CIA had an operation to explore interrogation methods. Well, that’s really undisputed. The conspiracy theory is that Gottlieb also explored creating potential Manchurian candidates. What probability do you believe that could be true? If it is non-zero then it’s a slippery slope into becoming a data point that refutes Lewendowski’s hypothesis.
Ron, Joshy’s link about airline regulation (or lack thereof) is classical bothsiderism. Basically, if you can’t reason through the facts and make a decision you just fall back on “they are all bad.” It’s intellectually lazy and a sign of a weak mind.
From your citation free response Frank, you could have skipped the rhetorical BS in your first paragraph. It appears that in fact, most of what the author says comes from scientific studies. Did you check any of them?
Boosters are over in the US. People know the CDC game and don’t trust their recommendations. You never responded to the fact that the two top CDC vaccine experts on the approval committee resigned in protest to the approvals based on insufficient evidence.
You should also stop misrepresenting what I said. I did not endorse the conclusions in the editorial but thought it might be interesting to people. I have not idea if they are true because I have not had time yet to follow the research. I did know about the Cleveland Clinic study. I doubt you have any evidence about the vaccination patterns among its employees. I also found the Swedish study last January I believe. Vaccination is a short term therapeutic that was useful in 2021 but may no longer be so. You didn’t really disagree with this.
What I do know is that anything the CDC/FDA says on these subjects is to be disbelieved with prejudice. They were very wrong on most pandemic issues and caused a large amount of harm.
Summarizing: You have not refuted anything I’ve said really. Mask mandates, school closures, vaccinating healthy children and young adults, lockdowns, mandatory vaccination for those previously infected, shutting down the vaccine trial after 90 days were errors. You have provided zero evidence these were useful, just your extrapolation of March data that proves nothing. You have used childish personal attacks and fallacious reasoning to try to discredit good scientists. Even here you use selection bias and avoid responding on Kulldorf, Ioannidis, Battacharia, and a host of others. If you are right, they must all be wrong. The odds of that are small in my judgment.
dpy wrote: From your citation free response Frank, you could have skipped the rhetorical BS in your first paragraph. It appears that in fact, most of what the author says comes from scientific studies. Did you check any of them?
Stop the insults. I’ve looked at the links, but had seen some before But they don’t paint the picture that this editorial presents. You ought to know from long personal experience not to trust a Stanford journalism graduate on a scientific subject over me. My science PhD from Stanford and other qualifications trumps hers, just like your expertise in modeling fluid flow trumps that of most others). Even you recognize vaccine boosters are “over in the US”, while Finley claims they are are “fueling new variants”! You can’t have it both ways. When I say that 15% of Americans have had the bivalent booster, you can be sure I looked it up. Otherwise I’ll say “IIRC 15%”.
dpy wrote: “Boosters are over in the US. People know the CDC game and don’t trust their recommendations. You never responded to the fact that the two top CDC vaccine experts on the approval committee resigned in protest to the approvals based on insufficient evidence.
Frank replies: I responded to your claim there were two resignations a year ago over vaccine approvals. The resigners were from the FDA, not the CDC, and occurred mostly because the WH and COVID coordinator were publicly talking about a schedule for administering boosters even before those boosters had even been approved by the FDA. The FDA isn’t a rubber stamp for the administration and shouldn’t be treated like one! The advisory committee approved boosters for those over 65, but not all adults. One of the resigners, published a letter in Lancet explaining his concerns. At the time, it was clear that declining antibody levels were resulting in declining protection against infection, but it wasn’t clear that there was declining protection against severe disease (or whether T-cells continued to protect against that). Since that time, clear evidence of declining protection against severe disease had been obtained and two further rounds of boosters have been approved. There are numerous publications on this subject, but the report issued by the FDA advisory committee after 33 public meetings is perhaps the most comprehensive. Since you think the FDA is untrustworthy, I’ll offer an additional reference from Italy. So events have proven Gruber and Krause were wrong, but I think the incident illustrates the careful and apolitical scrutiny the FDA gives to the need to prove boosters are needed and efficacious. (Since all vaccine side effects are produced by the immune response that peaks in 1-2 weeks, establishing vaccine safety doesn’t require a long period of time.) Given continued evolution of increasingly resistant variants, I’m concerned that restoring peak antibody levels will no longer be enough to make a difference. However, the FDA review indicates that the bivalent boosters were shown to increase neutralization of Omicron 1.6-fold more than the original variant. That is a start, but probably not good enough in the long run.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02046-8/fulltext
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/123144/cdc_123144_DS1.pdf
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj-2021-069052.full
dpy wrote: “You should also stop misrepresenting what I said. I did not endorse the conclusions in the editorial but thought it might be interesting to people. I have not idea if they are true because I have not had time yet to follow the research. I did know about the Cleveland Clinic study. I doubt you have any evidence about the vaccination patterns among its employees. I also found the Swedish study last January I believe. Vaccination is a short term therapeutic that was useful in 2021 but may no longer be so. You didn’t really disagree with this.
Frank: By posting that article here without qualification, you ARE endorsing it. Lies travel faster on the internet BECAUSE people thoughtlessly forward or recommend inflammatory or sensation clickbait (Vaccines Are FUELING New COVID Variants) rather than things they have looked into carefully. Several days ago, I emailed a small group of friends I’ve been advising during the pandemic warning them to expect crazy-sounding stories about more boosters causing more infections and explaining why these articles would be misleading (IMO). Presto, three days later Finlay fulfills my prophesy.
dpy: “What I do know is that anything the CDC/FDA says on these subjects is to be disbelieved with prejudice. They were very wrong on most pandemic issues and caused a large amount of harm.”
The FDA’s outside advisory committees are composed of practicing doctors whose families, friends and patients are going to take the drugs and vaccines they approve. Many of the scientists who work at the FDA see their role as protecting the public from the greed of Big Pharma (See Gruber and Krause). I can’t understand why you would believe they are prejudiced for or against vaccines. Their job is approving drugs and vaccines have been clearly shown to be safe and effective, not mandating who must or should take them. Doctors normally decide that individually for their patients, often even during a pandemic. I’ll agree that the CDC (which is much more politicized) has done a lousy job on many issues during the pandemic, including botched testing, vaccine resistance, lack of emphasis on airborne transmission and quality masks. For example, Walensky has authorized a five-day isolation period widely believed to be inadequate for those recovering from COVID without an antigen test, while the Brits demand a 10-day isolation period or negative antigen tests on two consecutive days beginning on day 5 A 30-something family member visiting for Christmas caught COVID while traveling here and tested positive up to day 9 while here and two others family members positive through day 7 and at least day 9. Studies have shown that live-virus can be cultured from about half of people in this situation. Fauci said Walensky’s much criticized recommendation was a plan for “getting people back to work”. The mask-wearing older generation entering their seventh decade with two vaccinations, three boosters and no infections each appear to have escaped again. Our personal anecdotes are fairly meaningless, but I was shocked by three young people with positive antigen tests for so long after Walensky said they could end isolation.
dpy wrote: Summarizing: You have not refuted anything I’ve said really. Mask mandates, school closures, vaccinating healthy children and young adults, lockdowns, mandatory vaccination for those previously infected, shutting down the vaccine trial after 90 days were errors. You have provided zero evidence these were useful, just your extrapolation of March data that proves nothing. You have used childish personal attacks and fallacious reasoning to try to discredit good scientists. Even here you use selection bias and avoid responding on Kulldorf, Ioannidis, Battacharia, and a host of others. If you are right, they must all be wrong. The odds of that are small in my judgment.
I’ve posted several references showing masks provide protection for those who where them. IF NECESSARY, I – and presumably you – would prefer that authorities impose mask mandates instead of closing schools and businesses. By “necessary”, I meant that the current reproduction rate has hospitals on track to overflow, creating panic and sending patients who might be saved home to die. You may have a different definition of “necessary”, but just about every national leader appears to have decided overflowing hospital would be unacceptable and locked down before things got that bad in the spring of 2020. I – and presumably you – also would prefer mandating that students wear high quality masks in school before closing schools, having teachers unions shut them down over safety, or having scared parents pull their children out of school.
Lifting Universal Masking in Schools. Covid-19 Incidence among Students and Staff (50% reduction) https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029
I’ve explained that vaccination was recommended (but not mandated) for COVID survivors because it provided higher levels of neutralizing antibodies without any significant risk. I’ve admitted that the decision to vaccinate child and young adults was a difficult one because the benefits were low (after losing the possibility of herd immunity) and the risks were lower. Children are not the primary reason for the Florida inquisition.
I’m sorry your heroes were discredited by the things they published in the WSJ and elsewhere that HISTORY HAS SHOWN TO HAVE BEEN INCORRECT or misleading. Given the size of their errors, I’m not surprised that they were censored as spreaders of vaccine disinformation, but I’d prefer that their views be published with short rebuttal or debate explaining why they were likely wrong. Justice Brandeis famously wrote about bad speech: “‘If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression.” However, Twitter, Facebook and the WSJ Editorial Page are not places where debate is encouraged and practical. The WSJ EB is Mount Sinai where conservative wisdom is rendered. Until Trump and COVID, I was a true believer. The disdainful rhetoric in my first paragraph – for which I should probably apologize – is a result of their [documented] betrayal of my trust.
Since you fail to recognize the importance of the sudden drop in the reproduction rate in the US after lockdowns and the absence of influenza in the 20-21 flu season, perhaps you should traveled to China to witness their liberation from the Zero-Covid policy and get a taste of what you missed in April of 2020 due to our lockdowns. The Chinese are missing the full impact due to the reduced deadliness of Omicron and some benefit from lousy vaccines.) The only thing locked down there now is the press, and the silence is deafening.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/27/chinas-overwhelmed-hospitals-turn-away-ambulances-amid-covid-surge/
HALF of the passengers on one flight from China to Italy tested positive and ONE THIRD the passengers on another flight.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/28/half-of-the-passengers-on-2-flights-from-china-had-covid/
Franktoo –
Seriously need to develop skills in analysing the validity and credibility of those studies you cited.
Boston mask study –
A) the period covered was during the declining side of the winter 2021/2022 wave – difficult to ascertain any conclusion on mitigation protocols during the back side of a pandemic wave.
B) The difference in case rates only lasted for a few weeks, then the schools closed for the summer such that the ability to compare rates at the 8-10 week didnt exist. At least that study disclosed the gap closed after a few weeks. Unlike the kansas mask study where the authors cut the study period short to hide the fact that the non mask mandated counties had lower case rates starting at the 11 week period. Note the Kansas mask study was borderline academic fraud.
CDC Nov 2022 vaccine recommendation study that you linked . – Note that the CDC was recommending vaxing children. At this point, it is well known that vaxing children is pointless. That should have been a tipoff of the CDC agenda
Frank – my prior response got stuck in moderation – though I would like to point out a few obvious things.
The first point is when reading a study – you should quickly identify the agenda of the author. From that, make the appropriate discount in assessing the validity of the study.
You cited the Boston mask study with an agenda promoting masking.
A) the study period covered the declining side of the 2021/2022 winter wave. for obvious reasons, it difficult to reach any conclusions on the effect of mitigation during the declining phase of any pandemic wave.
B) the moderate reduction in case rates in the masked schools only lasted for a 5-6 weeks at which point the case rates became comparable at the end of the study period. To the boston study’s credit – they at least acknowledged the waning effectiveness of masking.
That is very contrary to the academic fraud committed in the Kansas county mandate/non mandate mask study. In that study the authors intentionly cut off the study period when the mask mandated counties started having higher case rates.
I have first hand knowledge in that case since they emailed me the excel spreadsheet showing the data through the “cutoff study period date. I had subsequently emailed the authors twice asking about updating the study period since my spot check of 15-20 counties was showing higher case rates.
BTW, DPY, Krause’s article written after he resigned from the FDA expresses the opinion that the mRNA vaccines needed to booster Americans should be used to protect those elsewhere in the world you hadn’t yet been vaccinated.
Frank wrote: “Since all vaccine side effects are produced by the immune response that peaks in 1-2 weeks, establishing vaccine safety doesn’t require a long period of time.”
Dr. Paul Offit, the main proponent of vaccine safety, who once said that even a hundred mandated childhood vaccinations would be safe, didn’t make your 1-2 week argument to discount vaccines contributing to autism. Instead he said, “But it doesn’t even make sense that vaccines would cause autism, given what we know about autism.” BTW, you never responded on your position on that claim.
Is your 1-2 week window claim also apply to myocarditis and any other effects on the immune system other than specific targeted antigen resistance? If so, what is the source of this knowledge?
Frank also wrote: “Until Trump and COVID, I was a true believer.”
Frank, can you explain what you were a believer in and how Trump and Covid changed that belief?
Frank, You are insulting us with your cherry picking. The mask “study” you cite is a retrospective one and there might be many other reasons for an increase in cases. One could also point to the Kansas study that showed that there was no correlation between mask mandates and case numbers. The CDC lied about that study by choosing to tout results for a short period of time. Yet you seem to trust the CDC. The concensus pre-covid was that surgical masks were ineffective against viruses. The large studies since then in Denmark and Bangladesh showed no effect or only a small effect.
I’m really tired Frank of your non-response responses. They are way too long and repetitious and mostly evidence free or cherry picked.
1. The weight of scientific evidence shows surgical and cloth masks are ineffective against influenza and covid.
2. School closures were taken up by the CDC because the teachers unions wanted them. There was zero evidence that was needed and in Europe schools were mostly open.
3. Vaccine mandates were never scientifically justified. Natural immunity was always as good or better than vaccination. The CDC and Fauci lied about this. They claimed that we could “stop” the epidemic if everyone got vaccinated.
4. Vaccinating children for covid19 is unethical. I cited a peer reviewed paper showing this. You responded by smearing one of the many authors. Yet the CDC recommends this. Your response is to claim that CDC and FDA vaccine committees are people too. That’s not a serious response.
5. Your position on spring 2020 is evidence free and based on extrapolation of a trend. Covid, just like influenza, is strongly seasonal. The peak in deaths in 2021 and 2022 is even earlier than in 2020 strongly suggesting that seasonality is the explanation and not the lockdown dogma you have faith in.
6. The evidence was very strong in March 2020 that covid was not a serious issue for healthy people under 50. Lockdowns were always a response based on fear. Florida proves that a policy of protecting the vulnerable can work.
You also keep repeating your smears of good scientists who may have made “errors.” Everyone was wrong about this pandemic.
Predicting or modeling epidemics is a very ill-posed problem. The theory based on “reproduction rates” is garbage because it ignores population heterogeneity as Nic showed in some excellent posts here at Climate etc.
Viral epidemiology is a primitive science based on crude mechanistic narratives that mostly lack quantification. That you take this “science” seriously shows that you don’t understand what science can and cannot do. Just as in fluid mechanics, there are serious theoretical limitations to what science can tell us. A childlike faith in “science” is in fact little more than superstition.
Even worse is the collusion between the CDC and the FBI with big tech to censor opinions that contradict the state dogma on covid. What you read and seem to believe is a highly filtered version of reality.
Joe commented about the agenda of the authors of study showing mask were effective in Boston:
“A) the study period covered the declining side of the 2021/2022 winter wave. for obvious reasons, it difficult to reach any conclusions on the effect of mitigation during the declining phase of any pandemic wave.
B) the moderate reduction in case rates in the masked schools only lasted for a 5-6 weeks at which point the case rates became comparable at the end of the study period. To the boston study’s credit – they at least acknowledged the waning effectiveness of masking.”
The timing of the study was driven by the ending of the state mandate that masks be worn in schools. Most schools dropped a mask mandate while a few schools in poorer areas kept masks for the rest of the school year. This set up a “natural experiment” comparing infections in schools with and without masks. Generally, during the pandemic poorer areas have suffered from most infections, but the paper provided no evidence this was true during this study
If you look at Figure 1, the biggest difference occurred during a surge in cases in May (presumably due to a new sub variant of Omicron). As I read the data, a difference began as soon as the mask mandate was lifted. Yes, the difference wasn’t as big during the last weeks of the study as it had been earlier. If the masks don’t change, their effectiveness doesn’t change! Compliance can go down. Teachers may become less strict as the school year is ending. If the surge declined because many students at the non-masking schools had become resistant, then you would expect the gap to decline. If the surge at the non-masking schools cause parents to take more precautions with their students, the gap would have gone down. What is important is that the difference was huge.
One of the first papers I read about masking shaped my personal view of the subject. (Sorry, I’ve had trouble locating that paper again.) It was a study conducted at a college with students who volunteered to wear surgical masks for six weeks during flu season. Taking all student volunteers as a group (the “intent-to-treat” group), no statistically significant benefit was observed. However, the group that reported the highest compliance (the group that completed the “treatment”) did show a statistically significant reduction in flu (about 50% IIRC). Public health authorities don’t want to mandate interventions that aren’t going to succeed – even if the reason is compliance – so they looked at the “intent-to-treat” analysis and concluded they were not going to recommend masks during the next flu pandemic. When COVID arrived, they applied the same rational and didn’t recommend masks that are in short supply anyway. Then they realize that COVID may provide people with a greater incentive to wear masks and compliance could be less of an issue and make masks effective. What public health officials should have done is speak to individuals: ‘If YOU personally wear masks religiously, YOU will benefit, but certainly not eliminated all chance of transmission. If your government or school or business mandates masks, studies with less deadly flu suggest compliance issues could negate those benefits.’
When I think about masks “working” for me personally, I’m hoping for 50% reduction in transmission to be combined with a 50% reduction through social distancing and a 50% reduction by avoiding crowded, poorly ventilated locations.
Franktoo – take a fuller look at the study – both what was disclosed and what wasnt disclosed. What wasnt disclosed are major clues to the shortcoming and limitations of the study
A) omitted the infection rates prior to feb 2022. Had they included the infection rates starting at the beginning of the 2021/2022 wave, then the relatively minor effect of lifting the mask mandate in the schools would have been more obvious.
B) Again, showing the change in case rates in the declining phase of a wave can be deceptive since minor changes can have the appearance of a much greater effect.
C) relatively poor controls and/or on the consistency of the level of testing. ie data collection bias
D) omission of the any relevent or comprehensive information on case rates in general population. Again the omission hides the effect that can be attributed to masking or non masking.
Lastly I point to the borderline academic fraud in the Kansas mandate/non mask mandate by county study.
Frank, it was not a very good natural experiment if one is able to discount it with several confounding variables. What the mask investigators could have done was create a control group by excusing 1/3 of the students among the mandated mask-wearers, taking turns for one of the three trimesters each, while complying in the other 2/3 remained trimesters. This would be ethical by keeping an equal privilege, at the same time as creating heightened awareness of the importance to the masked students.
With concrete unassailable experimental design people would trust the results. Then Fauci or whomever could point to science, which would fulfill informed consent. Compliance would increase with or without mandates if proved effective.
dpy, Ron and others: Some more comments on vaccines. Warning, I’m not an expert on this subject and relying on my memory, but perhaps I can clear up some controversies. I read a history of Project Lightspeed (which I’m not going to try to go back and find). In the early summer of 2020, after discussions with their vaccine advisory committee, FDA got together with potential vaccine manufacturers and worked out what information would be needed to get a vaccine approved. The key decision was a minimum of 50% reduction in detected infection (which is enough to have a big impact on a pandemic with current reproduction rates of less than 1.5, but not good enough for herd immunity by itself. Such meetings happen during the development of most new drugs, but this was a crucial meeting because it would determine how long the Phase III clinical trials would need to run before approval could be sought (potentially around the 2020 election). Then they sent the entire plan out for public comment (which is not normal). This part of the history is where I first encountered the idea that no vaccine side effects have ever been first detected after the peak immune response around 1-2 weeks. For this reason, the 20,000 volunteers were only going to be followed for safety for a short period (I don’t remember the exact details) before seeking approval for marketing. However, several responses from the scientists complained that a new mechanism of vaccination (mRNA) warranted a longer safety evaluation for credibility. (None of the geniuses that later criticized this choice bothered to provide input.) In the end, they increased the length of the safety evaluation by modest amount (50%?) for half of the volunteers, a compromise, which created less delay than waiting for all. However, in the end, the longer safety period meant that results were not available until after the election (the source of another conspiracy theory). It is also worth remembering that this was a two-dose vaccine, with three or four weeks for safety problems to develop after the first dose and then a safety observation period after the second dose. The only real difference between the first and second dose is that the immune system has been primed to respond (more vigorously) by first dose. If there were some non-immune system toxicity (despite all of the earlier work that had been done in animals and people) originating from the first dose, that toxicity had an extra 3-4 weeks to manifest itself. The original groups of 20,000 volunteers were eventually followed for six months without any new safety hazards being discovered, but the vaccine had been given to millions (including me!) by that point.
The goal of any vaccine is to prompt an immune response and the main risk is that the immune response creates some auto-immune disease – which will obviously start at the peak of the immune response and apparently manifests itself relatively quickly. Vaccines that use inactivated virus or a weakened strain (which can occasionally mutate back to wild-type) also run the risk of causing a real infection – also an immediate response. Newer DNA and mRNA vaccines are designed to not involve materials with potential for being replicated in vivo (causing an infection) and are inherently safer for that reason – and more effective because they present the antigen in its natural state budding out the membrane of cells. Vaccines made of pure viral protein are also less efficacious for this reason, and in the case of Novavax spike protein, hard to manufacturer. Finding an appropriate viral vector to safely deliver the DNA encoding a therapeutic protein or antigen was a major problem in the development of gene therapy for years, but tolerable vectors are now available. mRNA vaccines get rid of the viral vector and involves materials that degraded within days. (DNA sticks around.) So, in the case of mRNA vaccines, everything is gone within a few days, but the immune response, which is down regulated when antigen is gone. The process of up and down regulating immune responses occurs many, many times in a lifetime and only occasionally goes awry (auto-immune diseases), beginning at peak immune response. This, I assume, is the reason the experts were were willing to take a chance on a relatively short safety observation period before giving emergency approval to mRNA vaccines and now mRNA bivalent boosters.
Now Ron is likely to tell me that autism is a side effect of mar vaccination, the ultimate in conspiracy theories given that Wakefield was found to be conspiring with attorneys suing vaccine makers and completely discredited. The fact that Wakefield has now made a movie with SPLICED secretly recorded phone conversations involving one of his scientific investigators (Harrison?) means nothing to me: You’ve got someone who behaved scandalously obviously splicing recorded phone conversations to makes them say something they don’t say without splicing. Why else would he splice? Harrison has promised to publish a scientific paper explaining the situation and I’ll consider what HE has to say.
The first part of your last sentence answers its second part, FrankB. If we had hospital conditions everywhere, we would not call them so. The issue you are tapdancing around is elsewhere.
Why do contrarians sacrifice their common sense to win political brownie points?
This applies to the climate debate, btw. If you feel that the establishment stopped listening to you all, that is on you. It is beyond silly that a PhD cannot understand that one cannot argue for uncertainty and the luckwarmest bound of sensitivity at the same time. Yet here we are.
Same for masks, really.
It’s interesting to me that Frank appeals to the “innate skepticism” of Jeff Id and other specific “skeptics” who, over and over, display a lack of innate skepticism.
What explains that?
Frank wrote: “If there were some non-immune system toxicity… that toxicity had an extra 3-4 weeks to manifest itself.”
Why would that even be necessary if it’s known that all toxicities manifest in 1-2 weeks, as you originally claimed?
F: “The original groups of 20,000 volunteers were eventually followed for six months without any new safety hazards being discovered, but the vaccine had been given to millions (including me!) by that point.”
There is was also a requirement to follow the first 90 days of rollout. This FDA regulation 5.3.6 data got sealed for 75 years! It took a FOIA suit to make them start producing it a year later, here. In the Nov 2021 batch on page 12 that out of 270 pregnant women given the Pfizer shot 32 lost their foetus, either from spontaneous abortion of neonatal death. Two miscarriages survived. This is higher than normal. And, the rest of the 270 cannot not eliminated from having events because they were not followed up on. Out of 42,086 adverse events 1223 were deaths in just the first 90 days with Pfizer mRNA vaccine .
An entire textbook can be filled with the tip of the iceberg of what we know about the immune system. Neurological autoimmune disease is poorly understood. MS is now thought to be linked with a response to the Epstein Barr virus (mononucleosis), which 80% of persons have been exposed to by adulthood. Thus the theory would be that a subset of the population that has a genetic predisposition for the environmental effect of Epstein Barr get MS. But it doesn’t stop there. Smoking, industrial solvents and other environmental exposures are also linked to MS. This is evidence we are dealing with an epigenetic effect. One of my employees has MS and was told by her doctor not to get the mRNA shot, but the J&J-Jansen one instead, and also not to get the booster. She is told to avoid any environmental triggers or even stress. The disease progresses by “episodes” of the immune system attacking spots in the brain, which can happen at any time.
My point is that each individual has a different immune system, not only because of genetic diversity but because of environmental exposure diversity. All these factors play into the response to vaccines. There is no risk free vaccine. All vaccines are toxins. The balance is to have a tolerable amount that the body will recover from with a beneficial memory from the assault. All modern vaccines now contain adjuvants that are not specific antigens but simply toxins that provoke an immune response that hopefully will be directed toward the accompanying antigens. This was discovered when a sloppily manufactured vaccine was remediated from the contaminations and then surprisingly found to be lessefficacious. How many people know this? I didn’t until this week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjuvant
We inject babies with nano-aluminum with most of their vaccines. We used to frequently inject organometallic mercury along with it (as a “preservative”)!
Frank, you are talking outside of your area of knowledge regarding the William Thompson – Brian Hooker conversations recorded by Hooker. The accusation you make that the conversations were spliced dishonestly out of context is unique. Not even the many articles that every sentence is a smear or lie don’t make your claim because they know the tapes exist in the public domain, so that lie would be easily revealed. And, they don’t want to lead people to actually listen to the tapes themselves, which would be very dangerous. They are not indexed on Google but I found them here. They used to be on Youtube 6 years ago when I listened to them after watching the movie, just to remove my own doubts.
If you followed any good portion of my comments over the last 9 days you are able to see through articles like this one. Even Thompson’s congressional cover response, which hugely glosses over the CDC fraud, admits that it happened. Most news articles never mention the congressional inquiry or Thompson’s temporary whistleblower status.
Dr. Thompson supplied Rep. Posey 100,000 pages of documents. Posey read a statement from Dr. Thompson that says, “The co-authors scheduled a meeting to destroy documents related to the study. The remaining four co-authors all met and brought a big garbage can into the meeting room and reviewed and went through all the hard copy documents that we had thought we should discard and put them in a huge garbage can. However, because I assumed that it was illegal and would violate both FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] and DOJ [Department of Justice] requests, I kept hard copies of all documents in my office, and I retain all associated computer files.” https://thinkingmomsrevolution.com/the-thompson-transcripts-shocking-revelations-by-the-cdc-whistleblower/
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/01/cdc-scientist-we-scheduled-meeting-to-destroy-vaccine-autism-study-documents/
Frank, Willard and Joshua are correct. Once a PhD entertains that there is scientific malfeasance going in that is being supported by the establishment you are a de facto conspiracy theorist. So, how can you possibly dispute the integrity of Mann’s Nature trick or any other mainstream confirmed science? Why not just stick with the blue pill?
OTOH, if you do believe Ioannidis that half of peer reviewed science is flawed, or that the media does not investigate honestly and independently, or that the US intel agencies have been increasingly influencing the dissemination of public information with blatant disregard for the First Amendment, then you might be tempted to take the red pill.
I say take neither pill. But until the media revives Joseph Pulitzer’s code of ethics one must do a deep dive of their own investigation before they can stake themselves on anything. Hopefully we turn the trend around or soon that will also be impossible.
Frank, I just listened to part of the first Thompson recording. At 1:29:30 he assures that he will personally turn over all the information he knows the CDC did not comply with Rep. Posey’s request, as well as supply copies to Hooker. At 1:31:18 Thompson says the drug companies are going to destroy him and make him the next Wakefield. Even though he has done nothing wrong he is sure he will be destroyed if he does anything more than supply the documents and go back to being quiet. 1:33 he says everyone in top positions at the CDC are “completely unethical” and will certainly face no accountability for their corruption as he has seen worse malfeasance than the MMR coverup but Hooker tells him he doesn’t need to go into that. (He has enough on his plate.)
https://avalonlibrary.net/?dir=Brian_Hooker_%2B_William_S_Thompson_conversations_%282014%29
Dpy, Ron and others: Some final comments about masks. Somewhere above I wrote a detailed explanation from what would required to prove that masks work as thoroughly as was done initially when vaccines were shown to reduce detected infections by 95% over the first month and 89% over the first six months. Basically you would need a trial comparable to the ones run with vaccines, Drugs are extremely expensive, but they do give drug companies the financial resources to run definitive clinical trials. For the most part, everything done with masks has been second rate. Retrospective analysis a “natural experiment” like the one in Boston schools will never be as convincing the trials used to get drugs approved. Nevertheless – a 50% reduction in infections in the schools that continued requiring masks is a HUGE effect when children only spend about 1/3 of their waking hours in school!
I think we should start with the assumption that N95 masks work for hospitals where the extreme nature of the problem makes makes testing easy. So I think we should start with the fact that N95s are capable of blocking even the smallest infectious COVID particles (aerosolized virus) and sprayed droplets. N95s that aren’t professionally fit can leak air around the edges, but apparently 80-90% of the air passes through the mask instead of around. That may modestly reduce the effectiveness of masks, but it doesn’t mean they don’t work at all. What is your definition of not working? If you can cut the number of infections you are likely to have in half, isn’t that working? (That’s not good enough for a doctor working with COVID patients in a hospital, but that’s good enough for me.
Then we have the issue of cloth masks, which do little to stop transmission via aerosols, but almost certainly stop transmission by sprayed droplets over a few feet. I don’t know what fraction of transmission occurs by sprayed droplets, but the experts probably have an estimate that suggests even cloth masks can be valuable. I do know that aerosols are created by shear forces in the narrowest passageways in the lungs. Early in an infection when people tend to be most infectious, is there much virus deep in the lungs. Omicron replicates more poorly in lungs than earlier variants and may be transmitted more by sprayed droplets than earlier variants.
So if there is an excellent chance of blocking viruses with N95 masks or surgical masks with the same blown polypropylene membrane, why do people so vehemently believe masks don’t “work”? One possibility is that people touch the outer surface of the mask and then infect themselves. Where are the experiments that prove this hypothesis is correct. I’m sure that the smallest particle are adsorbed by the mask and don’t come off, but sprayed droplets could come off the surface. Maybe I should swab a mask and see if I can get a positive antigen test from it. Another possible failure mode is that the electrostatic charge that allows masks to adsorb the smallest aerosols dissipates, and most people wear their masks for too long to be protected from the smallest aerosols. Your comments prompted me to research this subject. No one has much to say about this subject. Maybe we still aren’t producing enough masks to tell everyone to get a fresh one every day.
In summary, I know masks do work under hospital conditions and want to understand if and why they work less effectively elsewhere.
With respect Frank your comment proves my characterization of viral epidemiology as a primitive field that relies on crude mechanistic narratives that lack quantification. Your long dissertation includes no quantification that I can see (correct me if I missed it).
From memory, I recall one good double blind study of hospital workers that did show that N95 masks were somewhat effective against respiratory viral infections. I recall a number around 60%. Interestingly, part time use did not have much of a protective effect. But compliance was not good at around 60%. People simply hate these masks because of side effects and discomfort. They can also cause hypoxia and injuries from fainting, skin irritations, and other issues. My sister who is an opthomologist had the skin irritation problem. But the surgical masks were not very effective in this study. I’ve forgotten the exact number but I think it was less than 20%. Anyway you can find this study I’m sure. It predated covid so it has more credibility. Post covid medical science is totally untrustworthy with the CDC itself using non peer reviewed studies that are pseudo-science.
Before covid, WHO did not recommend mask mandates. What changed?
Further, most people when they put on a surgical mask have gaps above and below the mask that allow even large particles to escape. Through diffusion, these (especially the aerosols) will quickly fill a room or other indoor space. The best solution here is to focus on indoor air quality by using better air filtration systems and increasing air circulation.
If you want to wear a mask, go ahead. I don’t care but I will not wear one myself. If a health care worker tells me to wear one in a hospital, I will comply even though I know it won’t help either me or anyone else. It’s a virtue signaling exercise.
I found the mask study. My memory was not very good. Basically surgical masks were not of statistically significant benefit. Basically, only continuous wearing of an N95 mask had a benefit.
https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.201207-1164oc?fbclid=IwAR1V16krGaBV8_4Uidagxp4qqQ1IObcOKE3vvEWeHhAEi0QfRhHK6m93gV8&
And then there is this very clear statement:
Masks in community settings have no clearly proved efficacy (9–14).
You can look up the citations in the paper itself.
This article (by a journalist but with lots of references to primary sources) lays out how a CDC expert acknowleges on their web site that there is no evidence from random clinical trials that masks work but they then say we need to rely on “mechanistic” pathways that might “work.” Basically, CDC’s masking recommendations never had real scientific support aside from “crude mechanistic narratives without quantification).
Forgot the link.
https://www.city-journal.org/masks-still-dont-work
Ron –
I’m still waiting for you to answer my question.
I already provided a link to MKULTRA, although if course that just one part of what came out with the Church Commission.
Here’s something else for you to include in explaining why “kids today” applies.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131025035711/http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Carl Bernstein is untrustworthy and very biased. He was one of the leading advocates of the Trump Russia collusion hoax. In this he was working hand in glove with the deep state, Clapper, Brennan, and Comey and showed himself to be a perfect example of how the media is the servant of the deep state.
But in fact the collusion between the corporate media and the deep state has gotten much worse than Bernstein says it was in the 1970’s. Is Bernstein or Joshua concerned? They show no evidence of being concerned in the slightest. The Twitter files prove it.
Despite Bernstein being deeply compromised by his biases, there indeed has been a problem with the security state in the USA almost from its inception. During the period 1945 to roughly 1980, there was a lot more patriotism in the country and many oversees reporters no doubt cooperated with the CIA to gather information. I’d be surprised if they were asked to take part in any operations because those could place them in danger. The CIA is not supposed to operate on US soil and I do believe this was a lot more respected during this time than it is now when the FBI has become a domestic version of the CIA with a law enforcement second job.
DPY, I think Joshua might be in agreement with us. There are rare times when this might happen and they should be cherished as one would handle delicate chicks. Carl Bernstein might even be having some silent reservations about supporting what is now revealed to be an intelligence op perpetrated on the US presidency and America herself. This was Bernstein’s nightmare, after all, reading his 1977 muffled alarm on the USIC. I agree that he and others should have been more vocal at the end of the Cold War when the reevaluation of the CIA’s role or necessity should have been done. That did not happen likely due to the relationships the CIA built with the heads of media, academics and think tanks since the 1950s.
Joshua, want me to answer his question regarding what is worse today than it was in the 1960s-70s. I would answer the growth of the US security state in domestic affairs as comparison to foreign affairs. I would argue that neither are productive. Having CIA use civilians routinely to do their work kind of justifies hostage taking by those regimes seen as CIA adversaries, a foreseeable unintended consequence, especially for an “intelligence” organization.
I keep missing Joshua’s link to Mkultra but I presume he agrees that anything that operation did was unjustified by our government in peacetime, along with a large percentage of USIC activities. The Patriot Act has been abused, as predicted at the time it would be. I was maybe for it at the time like most people, thinking that the US had been completely infiltrated by Islamic radicals and their “sleeper cells” as we were told.
Perhaps it’s not too late to reign in the USIC with a new “Church committee” in the GOP run house. Maybe Joshua would be for that.
From the Bernstein article: “DESPITE THE EVIDENCE OF WIDESPREAD CIA USE OF journalists, the Senate Intelligence Committee and its staff decided against questioning any of the reporters, editors, publishers or broadcast executives whose relationships with the Agency are detailed in CIA files.
According to sources in the Senate and the Agency, the use of journalists was one of two areas of inquiry which the CIA went to extraordinary lengths to curtail. The other was the Agency’s continuing and extensive use of academics for recruitment and information gathering purposes.”
Maybe Joshua’s article should be highlighted as exhibit A for the kickoff of the new committee. They could ask, “Are things worse today than in the 1960s-70s.”
Rethinking Bernstein’s position in his 1977 article, he may have only been only against CIA infiltration because he perceived it as right-wing driven. Bernstein might be fine with left-wing authoritarianism. I might never occur to him and many others that when you don’t have a principle involved in your cause than it ceases to be legitimate and is also prone to reversal. In fact, Ronald Reagan argued that there was no difference between left and rightwing authoritarianism. They looked identical and equally lacked principle and legitimacy.
I suspect Ron that the vast majority of the media and academic involvement with the CIA prior to the patriot act was simply information gathering. That is vastly less serious than what we are seeing today with law enforcement and intelligence agencies colluding to affect elections and heavily censor the public square.
Joshua is good at asking questions but doesn’t want to answer any.
Ron –
> Joshua, want me to answer his question regarding what is worse today than it was in the 1960s-70s.
That wasn’t my question. My question was regarding at what point you start outlining some kind of trajectory where we are worse off with regard to these issues (we could lump it under under a directional trend towards an enlarging government/media collaboration for political ends and to “censor” or limit free speech), and what the metric is that you’re using to quantify that trend.
I don’t see such a trajectory existing. I don’t see what we’re seeing today as being materially worse in those respects than what has existed in the past.
This is where I entered in this exchange with you. I keep asking for clarification – which I think should be relatively simple. I keep giving you examples of what I think needs to be reconciled in order to outline the trajectory you spoke of. Yet for all of your responses, I think you’ve introduced much that is not directly relevant, and spent little time trying to answer my questions.
The difficulty here, IMO, is that much of these determinations are subjective. For example, I think that while government entities influencing media is inherently concerning, there are many extenuating aspects that are relevant and important. Context matters. Maybe differences in views would explain why you see a trajectory whereas I don’t. That would be the interesting aspect, IMO, to explore – but only through good faith exchange.
I believe that you’re interested in good faith exchange but I don’t see how you expect to make progress towards that end if you constantly foist views on to me that I don’t hold, don’t answer questions that I’ve repeatedly asked, don’t acknowledge answers to your questions when I give them to you (and just repeat the questions), and have discussion about me with other commenters in a condescending fashion, rather than stick to conversation with me.
If you want to have “presumptions” about what I believe, than ask me about those presumptions to see if they’re accurate.
Those features in your discourse with me that I just mentioned, for me at least, run directly counter to a goal of good faith exchange.
And if you do have questions about my views so you can clarify them, try to declutter them of rhetorical posturing.
Ron –
I don’t exactly agree with the perspective presented in this article but,
1) I think it raises important questions about the role of public health officials and the responsibility of social media platforms re the spreading of harmful misinformation, and,
2) I think the perspective presented is a valid perspective (just as I think it’s valid to raise concerns about public health officials and Twitter’s policies re moderating social media platforms).
It’s certainly your right to just dismiss the perspective presented out of hand, and/or to equate the United States to Russia and China in terms of government oppression of “freedom of speech” (as we’ve seen done in these very threads).
But if that’s your perspective then there’s really not much for us to discuss in good faith. If you think that viewing these as issues where people of different views can explore those differences reasonably (as I do), to establish what are subjective verus objective truths, to explore where there might be points of agreement, to explore where reasonable questions become unreasonable ones, is untenable, then really there’s not much more to discuss, imo.
https://t.co/ywuccIZEnN
Joshy, There is one very big difference between what happened prior to 1980 with the CIA and the media and what is happening now. In the past, those willing to censor stories in the media were few. The incentive to break a big story was very very large, such as Pulitzer prizes, a big pay raise, etc. There were even then a large contingent of lefties in the media who didn’t like the CIA.
You never provided any proof that what Bernstein reported wasn’t just information gathering. Yet your pre-existing biases upregulated this into something really big. I doubt it.
For the last 6 years however, Big Tech employees are politically alligned with Democrats and the deep state. The cooperation is deep and broad, affecting many many stories and the censorship profound. What we have is what Russia has, a media that is alligned with the state and willing to serve its interests.
J,
Let’s do some maths.
Matt T has at least 10K paid subscribers on his stack.
It costs 5 dollars per month.
That means he makes 50K per month.
That is 600K per year.
And Matt has tens of thousands of paid subscribers.
With an S.
Perhaps David should check my maths here.
He is the real maths specialist.
I could check with Bari and MikeS if you want.
Oh, and here are some stats on teh Stack:
https://backlinko.com/substack-users
I’ll just add one more thing on the Swedish study from last winter. Frank quoted from it but the authors changed their tune in peer review and came into line with official vaccine dogma. Even in the final paper the second graph contradicts the text. It shows a roughly -15% effectiveness against covid at 9 months and still dropping. The preprint showed -25%. I can’t find the preprint at the moment. I may have it in my massive archive but it will take time to find. It also appears to me that they conveniently scrubbed any data for the 6-9 month period post vaccination in the tables in the final paper too.
Summarizing: Despite trying to cover their tracks and support official vaccine dogma, they failed to completely hide the fact that their longer term data shows that vaccination may in fact lead to more infections in the long term. No amount of slandering of the Wall Street Journal can coverup this fact.
This is to me strong evidence that science has been compromised by the new culture of fear, censorship, and cancellation. That’s why Frank I disagree with your apparent faith in “science.” They are totally compromised.
All vaccines are not equal what vaccine were the Swedish studying.
There were three different ones and some were quite a bit more effective than others. You can find the paper online at the Lancet.
Here’s a detailed writeup on all the evidence on vaccinating kids.
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-are-we-boosting-kids?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
“Since then I have reviewed dozens of datasets and studies, and I’ve spoken with epidemiologists, pediatric immunologists, and infectious diseases specialists. If you listen to what these experts say, if you read the largely overlooked documents, and if you actually look closely at the primary data from the CDC and Pfizer, you will find a story of American health agencies’ misleading communications and a myopic policy agenda sometimes at odds with science.”
dpy: You are citing a journalist at a minor publication that produces “clickbait” for a living. Early in the fall of 2021, the FDA advisory committee rejected boosters for non-elderly adults and later recommended them as evidence accumulated showing that their protection was fading. At the earlier meeting, the advisory panel likely made clear to FDA officials what sort of evidence would warrant boosters for adults in general. When that evidence quickly began arriving, plans for expanding booster to all adults were formulated and almost automatically approved at
the next advisory committee meeting because they had already decided what evidence they were looking for. At least, this is a non-conspiratorial interpretation of what MAY have happened. FDA advisory committee meetings normally are public affairs and a transcript will all of the PowerPoints with data and transcript of the discussion are published (long ago when I read one) and certainly could have been obtained by FOI. However, it is now clear that waning protection from falling antibody levels was a growing real problem and that the boosters that were approved were administered just in time to keep some out of the hospital or morgue when omicron arrived at the end of the year. All of this whining about a decision that history has shown was correct makes little sense to me.
The only way to get at the “truth” (to the extent that truth can be determined) is to have a well-moderated and perhaps ongoing debate or trial where both sides can present their evidence, arguments and counterarguments. Then, listeners who have an open mind can make up their own mind what to think. This is exactly what the climate change consensus refuses to allow, because they know it will cost them support. This is what the National Constitution Center provides for many cases reaching the Supreme Court. What I learn from those discussions is that the experts (when respectfully confronted by a knowledgeable opponent) agree on far more about the issues that one would expect and that the real debate is over relatively narrow differences with good arguments on both sides. Since I know such debates are held within FDA advisory meetings, I trust those decisions in the absence of clear contradictory information (such as the less aggressive approach to vaccinating children taken in other countries). The CDC’s leadership is entangled in partisan debates involving the WH and they don’t have an independent advisory committee. I have much less faith in them.
Due to the highly partisan attacks that have been made during the pandemic and the recent evolution of the Republican party into a “Know-Nothing” Party of conspiracy theorists, there is a huge market for one-sided click-bait that fails the primary principle of journalism – present BOTH sides of the story. People on both the left and right are seeking political advantage and riches from inflaming controversy and creating distrust. When people don’t trust the FDA, we get vaccine hesitancy and hundreds of thousands die. When both sides lie for political advantage about racially motivated killing by police and a politically “weaponized FBI”, people lose faith in law enforcement. This makes people more susceptible to propaganda put out by the Russian IRA, China and Iran over the Internet. When people don’t trust the authorities to prevent elections from being stolen … things really get serious.
You just did it again, Frank, by using fallacious reasoning to attack my source who says he has invested a vast amount of time doing research from the primary sources. He’s every bit as trustworthy as you are. You are after all an anonymous internet presence whose “credentials” are unverified.
Your comment here is a long winded nothingburger. Distrust of “authorities” is how science for example advances through constant questioning of “concensus” ideas.
The list of those who have come to the realization that our elite institutions have been corrupted is long. They include for example John Ioannidis who is totally non-political. They include Jonathan Turley who has totally changed his mind and is a card carrying member of academia. They include our host Judith Curry who concluded 10 years ago that the climate science establishment was corrupt. They include Elon Musk who has a mountain of proof of this corruption. Jordan Peterson, Jay Battacharia, Ben Shapiro, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss to name just a few. You will notice that this list includes many top notch scientists and reporters, many of whom are lefties.
And this is why I distrust you as well. What we have in the USA is exactly what they have in Russia or China. The regime runs a vast censorship and spying apparatus that is a collusion with corporate media (with a couple of exceptions that you lie about and call “right wing”) and big Tech. It I think shows something that you should reflect on. You are really taking on the role of apologist for this censorship regime despite mountains of evidence of its corruption and it’s subverting our republic form of government.
This is a bipartisan problem too. I have completely changed my view of George W. Bush. His black and white view of the world got this whole thing started by transforming the FBI into an intelligence agency. He used it against foreigners but Obama quickly realized he could use it domestically too. By 2016 the transformation was complete. People like Bill Krystal are completely corrupt and have no principles. But what is most striking (as Glenn Greenwald shows voluminously) is that the “Progressives” have become total captives of these corrupt institutions and advocates of more censorship.
Also, the FDA and CDC have a terrible track record. The CDC published studies of masks for example that were in one case essentially cherry picked to prove the opposite of what the data showed. On masks, school closures, vaccinating the previously infected and children, lockdowns and “vaccination can stop the virus” they used their authority in service to pseudo-science at best. Why Frank do you still have confidence in them?
One more thing on the vaccines.
There is an obvious way for the CDC to “fix” the majority of vaccine hestitency you mischaracterize as “conspiracy theories” fueled by the “right wing.” They should have an ongoing very large trial with a long time frame. I will not take any more mRNA vaccines and wish I hadn’t taken the first 2. My wife is also worried that her booster may have had side effects as her health has gotten worse over the last couple of years. There is only pseudo-science and crude mechanistic narratives to convince her otherwise. She is not a believer in conspiracy theories.
The CDC and “the Science” has caused the fact that the public no longer trusts them. Only they can fix this by mass firings or retirements and an honest admission of their malfeasance.
dpy writes: “There is an obvious way for the CDC to “fix” the majority of vaccine hestitency you mischaracterize as “conspiracy theories” fueled by the “right wing.” They should have an ongoing very large trial with a long time frame. I will not take any more mRNA vaccines and wish I hadn’t taken the first 2. My wife is also worried that her booster may have had side effects as her health has gotten worse over the last couple of years. There is only pseudo-science and crude mechanistic narratives to convince her otherwise. She is not a believer in conspiracy theories.”
The Phase III clinical trials of the mRNA vaccines lasted six months, which meant that the volunteers – who didn’t know whether they had received vaccine or placebo – had wait six months to find out – AND to get vaccinated, if they had received placebo! And you want these brave volunteers to be denied the protection of vaccination for another couple of years – a vaccine which was known to be 95% effective thanks to the 150 or so who came down with COVID because they were unlucky enough to have received placebo. Not only would this have been pointless, it would have been grossly unethical!
I don’t know old you and your wife are, but isn’t it normal for people’s health to change over 2+ years. From an evolutionary point of view, survival of the fittest doesn’t help us avoid health problems once we have reproduced and raised our children to independence. It’s downhill from that point. How many people go two years without encountering any health issues. To put it more crudely, 9000 mostly vaccinated Americans die every day -and did so before the pandemic. Some of them died – simply by chance – within a day of week of vaccination, about 10,000 or 70,000 according to my estimates. Perhaps ten times as many – 100,000 – develop a non-trivial problem EVERY DAY. And if you are living with the stress and fear that mRNA vaccines have damaged your health, the likelihood of deterioration is higher. 75% of the placebo group in the vaccine mRNA study reported feeling under the weather, headache, pain at the injection site, in part because they were warned that the might suffer these side effects and because getting vaccinated with an experimental vaccine is a stressful experience! Many fewer reported such symptoms after the second dose of placebo, because the first experience turned out to be a minor event.
Please tell you wife (and yourself) that all traces of the mRNA had been mostly degraded within 1 day of vaccination (according to PCR) and the spike protein it coded for was gone in less than one week (according to antigen tests somewhat like the rapid home tests available today). If she has suffered a COVID infection, exactly the same immune responses would have happened (or she would have died). The only thing left behind in either case was the immune response: antibodies, T-cells and B-cells that subsequently protect you from infection by the same virus. If those immune cells had created an auto-immune response to some other protein on the surface of your cells – a rare problem that threatens every time you mount an immune response – it would have started within a few weeks and left obvious signs of an auto-immune problem (elevated white cells, etc.) That is what happens with myocarditis. My sister came down with an arthritis in her hands at 18 after a viral infection, but which fortunately didn’t progress. And my son at age 5 came down with an “arthritis” in his ankles and toes possibly initiated by an infected sore from a rented ski boot. High doses of NSAIDs turned down his immune system and the problem has disappeared for three decades. Vaccines and COVID infections create an immune response that is automatically down regulated unless it thinks a normal protein comes in contact with is foreign evader that must be defeated.
Turn off all of the negative propaganda about vaccines! In the remote possibility I’m wrong, there is nothing you can do now and you will certainly feel better without all of the stress of believing vaccination has damaged your health. You could even get angry at those who are getting attention and rich spreading all of today’s conspiracy theories, because they certainly can’t ALL be correct. (Steve McIntyre was correct about corruption in paleoclimatology, but the basic physics of the greenhouse and enhanced greenhouse effect was correct (and more important). Such conspiracy theories are a side effect of the rise of social media. Think about all of the children growing up with anxiety, depression and helplessness because of Greta Thunberg’s propaganda about climate change. What would you tell them about the possibility it will be 4 degC warmer in 2100?
Respectfully and with best wishes, Frank
I appreciate your response Frank. However with respect I think you are really fixated on dislike for the “right wing” and “conspiracy” theories and an unfounded belief in pandemic science.
1. My wife and I don’t do conspiracy theories, only real proven conspiracies.
a. There was a real vast conspiracy between Twitter and Facebook, the mainstream media, and the deep state to censor perfectly legitimate thinking and facts on a host of issues such as the Hunter Biden laptop and the Biden influence peddling operation. This was “interference” in our election.
b. There was a conspiracy to get Alex Berenson removed from Twitter. Scott Gottlieb a well paid Pfizer director asked Twitter to do that and also to flag other tweets. One said that natural immunity is superior to vaccination but that those not previously infected should get vaccinated. Twitter labeled that accurate tweet as “misleading.” Alex will be revealing much more later this week, including I suspect proof that the CDC and Fauci were involved in the censorship.
c. There was a real conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. It involved NGO’s, government scientists like Fauci and many many scientists who approached this issue as religious fanatics.
d. There was a mob mentality among scientists to suppress any deviation from the politically motivated “talking points” on everything from vaccination to masks to how serious this disease was to young healthy people.
The CDC/FDA have no credibility and that’s why we distrust the “safety” and “efficacy” of these new types of vaccines.
1. They approved school closures to mollify the irrational teacher’s unions based only on pseudo-science.
2. They are recommending boosters for children despite a peer reviewed paper by 9 authors showing that this is unethical.
3. They rushed through the approval for vaccinating children without proper clinical trials.
4. Their mask recommendations were pseudo-science. Fuhrer Fauci was right in March of 2020. The rigorous pre-pandemic science shows a negligible benefit from surgical and cloth masks. Further the CDC to this day has two flawed studies on masks up on their web site.
5. They were wrong about natural immunity vs. vaccination. The vaccine mandates they recommended were unconstitutional and unethical.
6. There will be others too as time goes on and more data comes out. The problem here is that post pandemic covid science is a giant pile of flaming rubbish and is mostly pseudo-science. Ioannidis has been documenting this in Tablet. There are some suggestive patterns in the all cause mortality data. England up to May gave this in age cohorts. We will see how long it takes science to recover from its current political fanaticism.
So, tell me again why I should trust the CDC, the FBI, and the CIA who are a pack of professional liars? These liars are fully ensconsed at PMSNBC and CNN. These are two of the most biased and political fanatical news organizations in my lifetime. Yet you demonize Fox news. Further these fanatics attack fine reporters who are bringing exceptionally important truths about our deep state to light.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-msnbc-and-authoritarianism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1042&post_id=95682106&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email
Frank – the covid was no where near 95 % effective and less than 50% effective after only 5-6 months. The lack of effectiveness is very well known and was known as early as July /August of 2021.
Glenn Greenwald has an excellent Rumble video today about the latest Twitter files reporting. It details that government actors were inundating Twitter with censorship requests. Also Government actors were sending lists of accounts that were supposedly “spreading foreign disinformation” to their lackeys in the corporate media who would then publish them as a backdoor way to get Twitter, Google, and Fakebook to censor them.
It appears that almost all our elite institutions were colluding to rigorously control the flow of information just as happens in Russian or Communist China. And liberals yawn and call for tighter controls. This is I think incredibly dangerous. I for one am refusing to give any clicks or support to any of these instututions and an actively contributing to the “new media” such as the Daily Wire.
And Glenn further catalogues the disinformation being almost unanimously spread by the corporate media that there is nothing of significance here.
https://open.substack.com/pub/systemupdate/p/media-silent-as-latest-twitter-files?r=6jqh1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Dr. Curry meets new media at WUWT:
“YouTube Bans Heartland Institute’s Channel Just Before Live-stream with Climate Scientist Judith Curry”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/01/07/youtube-bans-heartland-institutes-channel-just-before-live-stream-with-climate-scientist-judith-curry/
Life in the truth lane!
2021:
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg6296
A 2021 review:
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2014564118
This may not be as theatrical as teh Glenn screaming at the top of his lungs, however.
Fish, meet barrel:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-022-01814-3
Denizens should not rely on our resident Freedom Fighters for their research.
I have a longer comment that is in moderation.
Suffice it to say that WeeWee first “study” is not real science. It’s a “narrative” study that doesn’t do any real science or statistics. It just launders some narratives and mechanisms. They define their question so as to make all the previous more rigorous science not applicable to their very odd question. It’s a ruse to ignore the dozens of rigorous studies looking at mask usage in health care workers and other groups.
The second paper looks to me like a pretty small effect.
Both papers are in the post-pandemic period when science quality has declined dramatically and many papers twist data to fit the “concensus” narrative as documented by Ioannidis among others.
This is just cherry picking. Studies before the pandemic were of higher quality such as the one I cited.
Hall Minotaurs Does Not Want You to See This:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2119266119
Another 2022 hit wonder!
Another study comparing countries with “corrections” for many “effects.” Weak methodology. Note that it all but admits that real science studies of mask mandates didn’t show significant protection. WeeWee continues to cherry pick studies done after the advent of covid19 and the advent of massive decline in scientific quality.
WeeWee wizzes the fire hydrant and it does stink. When a non-scientist and propagandist gets involved, science is twisted and abused.
And of course, it is topped off with the habitual lies about what I want people to see.
Willard
What is your motivation for promoting mandatory mask use? You know masks have VERY little positive benefit and do cause unintended negative consequences.
Is this some kind of Inquisition or just a leading question by a third tier lawyer, Rob?
Here is another study our Hall Minotaur does not want you to see:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029
Have you noticed that unless and until heads fall off he and his wife will never deem to protect themselves even if they might belong to one of the population at most risk?
Not that I mind much. Eventually less of a social burden for everyone else.
Willard –
> Not that I mind much. Eventually less of a social burden for everyone else.
My understanding of the evidence is that main functionality of masks is a potential marginal advantage in source control, not that wearing masks is less likely to protect the wearer. Thus, there’s evidence people not wearing a masks (in particular circumstances, at the community level) adds to the social burden.
Yikes – tripped up on double negatives…
My point being that while masks may offer some degree of protection for the wearer, in balance, the potential benefit is tilted more towards lessen the likelihood of someone infected spreading the virus to others. Thus, to the extent that they are beneficial, not wearing a mask would likely increase the social burden not decrease it.
Thoughts?
J,
Allow to clarify. I was referring to our Hall Minotaur’s earlier rant about the guv that forces him to become an antivaxxer:
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984786
You are right of course that masks are about protecting otters. You might even argue that vaccines do something similar.
I expect our Hall Minotaur to be as “germaphobe” as he is paranoid. But if starts to root for Covid parties like antivaxxers organize pox parties, I might need to revise my policy.
Hope this helps.
Willard –
Sure about vaccines, albeit with respect to blocking the processes of transmission, the waning comes into play. With respect to reducing the public health burden of severe disease, the waning effect is less pronounced.
It’s a sad state of affairs that the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask has outweighed for some the potential community benefit.
Again with vaccines, given the risk profile, the calculus is more complicated. But clearly within certain bands, the evidence suggests that the public health benefit strongly outweighs the cost.
What a world.
What a world Indeed where Americans are forced to adopt behaviors with little valid evidence of a clear benefit.
Just follow with the state says and shut up
Begging questions definitely suits you better, Rob.
When was the last time you offered any evidence?
Joshua, Even a first look at the loose fit of surgical masks will tell you they are of no use even for source control. Wearing them is not a favor to your neighbor. It may give a false sense of security. N95’s could work but most people can’t tolerate them for very long.
Your generalization about the value of vaccination to the community is not very useful. In fact, vaccination does not help healthy people under 50 years old. In fact, almost everyone has been exposed to Covid19 and vaccines I think only slowed that process. We are now seeing a lot of anecdotal cases of multiple infections among the vaccinated. There is some evidence this is due to antibody changes brought on by boosters. The paper is linked above I think.
Vaccine hesitancy is in fact due to the obvious and very costly failures of public health authorities and scientists that are getting impossible to cover up even with a massive campaign of censorship and state collusion with media unprecedented in American history even during wartime. Now that Musk has done an invaluable service to the world by making Twitter once again a forum for discussion, Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall. Berenson is teasing the COVID Twitter files and says its not good for at least two people. I’m guessing that includes Fauci.
J,
Note how vaccine hesitancy corresponds *exactly* to our Hall Minotaur’s concerns.
That he keeps repeating the same FUD Muslim clerics did to boycott the oral polio vaccine in Nigeria has nothing to do whatsoever with manufacturing anxiety in the population.
The contrarian megaphones that clog social media with their madness have no effect whatsoever.
I could live with that.
W: “The contrarian megaphones that clog social media with their madness have no effect whatsoever.”
I wish the US security state was that at ease with allowing criticism, and respected their oaths to the First Amendment (an all the others). But they didn’t, without fear, somehow knowing the legacy media would be on their side. This is what is driving the “crazy contrarians.” Musk has proven “it’s worse than we thought.”
Breaking the public trust discredits all government establishments to some degree but the health establishment uniquely did most of their discrediting themselves. Out of the Covid gate they blasted Trump as a racist for stopping air travel from China on Jan 31, 2020, where Fauci should have been the one calling for a ban weeks earlier. Then they botched the PCR test reagent manufacturing, leaving the US blind and behind the rest of the world in monitoring and contact tracing (when it could have been important).
We all know the rest of the list of missing research on mode of spread, mask effectiveness and vaccine safety.
Willard, respectfully, the antivaxxers, which DPY and I are not, (we actually got the jabs), are not the problem. In fact, when Biden sneeringly slanders the “unvaccinated,” conjuring up ignorant rural dirt kickers, we should keep in mind that group heavily includes Amish, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Tuskegee experiment remembering minorities, firefighters, athletes and nurses (believe it or not). The problem, face it, was effete, corrupt, incompetent, Fauci, Redfield and Birx and TDS.
Yes Ron, it was very bad incompetence and also gaslighting the public. On most major policy decisions the CDC was wrong or mostly wrong. They put up un peer reviews studies on masks for example that were doing obvious cherry picking and using noncomparable control groups. On masks, school closures, vaxing children, vaxing those with natural immunity, and lockdowns they were wrong.
I don’t what Willard thinks he is doing here but he’s doing the classic attempt to smear you and me by using associating us with an unpopular group, viz., antivaxxers. It’s right out of Senator McCarthy’s playbook. But hey Biden himself does it too.
> I wish
Your wish is my command, Ron:
https://youtu.be/Y23mTSviCZo
Dubya outdoes himself!
Let’s just stick to masks for now since WeWee has cited several covid era studies with bad methodology. I’ll ignore the personal insults designed to cover the fact that WeeWee is just deflecting and spreading disinformation.
1. Covid science has been a flaming pile of intellectual rubbish saturated with Lard to boot. Ioannidis in Tablet carefully documents this. WeeWee’s “narrative” study is not even real science.
2. With regard to masks I posted a lengthy and well referenced article in city journal which also debunks WeeWee’s Boston study.
3. Pre-covid mask trials were a lot more rigorous often with well selected control groups. I posted one paper with voluminous citations to these studies.
4. This more rigorous science shows that N95’s have a significant benefit against respiratory infections while cloth and surgical masks do not.
5. Continuous use of the N95 is required to achieve statistical significance.
6. N95 masks fit very tightly and exert often uncomfortable pressure on the face and nose. This is why N95 compliance is often poor even with health workers.
7. There are side effects from overuse of an N95 including skin irritations and infections, hypoxia, etc.
8. Even the Biden administration in one of its few correct decisions is downplaying masks and emphasizing indoor air quality.
9. This is supported by the fact that there are very few infections among airline passengers. That’s because of the hepa filters and the air flow pattern which is down from the overhead to the floor and then out the side vents.
10. Surgical masks are very hard to get to fit tightly. At the sides, there is often a bulge and gap and on the sides of the nose and at the chin.
11. Covid19 is mostly transmitted via aerosols which are vastly smaller than the holes in surgical masks. But larger particles will escape through the gaps too.
12. In an indoor space, convection and diffusion will rapidly spread the aerosols throughout the space absent a very effective climate control system (currently found only on aircraft really).
13. This is why mask mandates have not worked and never did work.
14. The WHO pre-covid recommended against mask mandates.
If WeeWee wants to “protect” himself he needs to use an N95 mask 24/7 and just slowly waste away. But he could probably stand to lose the weight.
DPY – Lets assume for arguments sake that masks actually reduce the spread of covid – dubious assumption based on empirical data – buts lets make that assumption.
What is being accomplished if masks actually work
A possible slow down in the spread, yet covid is a respiratory virus that is too deeply embedded into the general population to be contained. Even the boston mask study shows that the supposed benefit reverses itself after 8-12 weeks, same with the flawed Kansas mask study
Further, a temporary slowdown does nothing to vacilitate a long term solution , which is developing immunity through the general population. In fact, masking has the effect of impeding the development of immunity.
In summary, masking causes more long term problems that it solves
Joe –
> Further, a temporary slowdown does nothing to vacilitate a long term solution ,
Classic binary thinking.
If masks reduce the rate of transmission, then in a given period of time a given set of people will be infected less often. Assuming that each time you get infected, even if there isn’t an accumulated effect, there is an associated risk for negative outcomes This is particularly relevant for those who are more vulnerable.
There’s also the potential that wearing masks reduces the severity of infection (viral load).
> which is developing immunity through the general population. In fact, masking has the effect of impeding the development of immunity.
If there is a benefit of increasing immunity through a faster rate of repeat infections, it comes at a cost – particularly for those who are most vulnerable.
I don’t think we really know enough to say for sure whether slowing the spread was a benefit or not. As I linked above there is some evidence the vaccinated are prolonging the epidemic and getting infected multiple times. But it’s not totally conclusive yet. Viral epidemiology is simply an area of deep ignorance and an ill-posed problem.
But I do believe the obsession with covid was harmful. our biggest public health problem is the obesity epidemic and the CDC is doing very little to address it. And this problem made Covid a lot worse in the US than it was in Sweden for example.
Thank you for preparing the eventual backpedaling from Team Freedom, Joe.
You still have time to find any support for your empty assertion.
Our Hall Minotaur is 81 theses short.
Finally an interesting T file:
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/21/finally-an-interesting-twitter-files-that-appears-to-reveal-sketchy-government-behavior/
Glenn might be less interested by teh Donald’s DOD getting T to whitelist Murican propaganda directed at the Arab world.
But we expect our Freedom Fighters to rip off their shirts over this for at least a week.
Selective outrage is your middle name, David:
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/22/how-twitter-hid-us-military-info-ops-from-the-public/
Try again. This time your spit might reach me.
Shirley teh Glenn could find a way to blame this on Hunter’s laptop:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jan/08/brazils-presidential-palace-and-supreme-court-stormed-by-pro-bolsonaro-supporters-live
Perhaps I should ask the chatbot to find me a rationale using this very comment thread. My guess is that it would go along the lines of: gubmint and the media are to be blamed, for otherwise our Freedom Fighters would not have stormed the &c.
Let me check teh Glenn’s blue bird. Will report.
Dollar –
Whadya think? Will GG ridicule concerns about violence in Brazil the same way he ridiculed AOC”s concerns about Jan. 6?
Concerns, perhaps, from his husband’s colleagues?
Dollar?
Supposed to be Willard.
https://twitter.com/LiberalFathers/status/1612230766615842817?s=20&t=kmEGq9Ptm–2DHdPxZOkFg
The chatbot reports:
> When Brazilians see obvious election fraud, they protest and do something about it. They don’t just sit there and allow installed Presidents for fear of BLM and AntiFA threats! The cabal has underestimated the courage and backbone of the people of Brazil!
Kidding. It is a real tweet:
https://twitter.com/LiberalsLeaving/status/1612249378068254722
BLM. Should have guessed.
The lead author on a peer reviewed reanalysis of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA vaccine says they need to be halted across the board due to serious adverse events now outweighing benefits against Covid-19 risks for all.
Author’s video statement: https://twitter.com/i/status/1612352266228441094
The paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283
Also today, Florida surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, is under fire for blocking mandates for student vaccinations for Covid.
“Under Ladapo’s direction, Florida has broken with federal recommendations on COVID vaccination numerous times. Last spring, Ladapo recommended against vaccinating healthy kids ages 5 to 17opens in a new tab or window, and last summer, he recommended against their use in kids under 5.
The FDOH [FL Dept of Health] analysis released in October reported an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related deaths in men ages 18 to 39 within 28 days of mRNA vaccination, and based on those findings, Ladapo recommended against mRNA vaccination in this age group.”
The WaPo, however, reports experts dispute Ladapo’s analysis.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/features/102531
Thanks Ron for the link. If I do a rough calculation I get a 0.1% rate of side effects for the vaccine.
On the Florida action, I cited above a peer reviewed paper with 9 authors showing that vaccination is not ethical for children. Even Frank was unable to touch it except to smear one of the authors.
Regardless of whether Lapado’s analysis method is conclusive, his conclusion would appear to be right. The media such as WaPo is not trustworthy and the official dogma on vaccines is strong and concensus enforcement in full swing.
Berenson has a new piece today with evidence that Scott Gottleib asked Twitter to take down a couple of tweets that contained true information but might cause lower vaccine uptake. Scott was and is a director of Pfizer.
The lead author is the last one in the list, Ron.
I’m sure you know him:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/peer-review-fail-vaccine-publishes-antivax-propaganda/
Small world.
Ron –
Have you read any critiques of Malhotra’s science?
No, I hadn’t been following it closely. I did a quick search see one here that starts out “Malhotra falsely claims…” It reminds me of whenever a liberal writer has a beef the immediately talk past the sale, “Trump falsely claims”, etc.., instead of a good faith dissection of facts with logical analysis. And whenever they mention an undisputable fact that is embarrassing to the left narrative they always say “conservatives claim.”
Once you get past all the blather the article gets down to its proof of claim. Malhotra claimed that all cause mortality was worse in the unvaccinated group. The article claims other studies found the vaccines to be highly effective in preventing death. This is apples and oranges. This, of course, is not comparing apples to apples.
Dr. Fraiman also points out in his video that since his study, (which had similar findings to Malhotra’s), it is increasingly apparent that the earlier studies were done when the vaccine was more effective against the Covid variant of that time, which was deadlier then.
The risk benefit equation has changed now even if the more life years were saved in the past by the much greater number of elderly saved versus modest number of young and healthy killed by the vaccine.
Ron –
You might like to watch this:
https://youtu.be/RUpf8JPN8e4
Or this:
https://youtu.be/zimprlih1eg
I haven’t watched either, but since you’re promoting Malhotra’s tweets I figured you’d like to watch them both
You might also want to read this:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/i-know-you-are-but-what-am-i-dr-asseem-malhotra-rails-against-covid-19-misinformation/
Oh, and this:
https://youtu.be/v5dUuYovmNU
> versus modest number of young and healthy killed by the vaccine.
Quite remarkable, indeed…
Ron –
BTW, I re-wached the first part of that list video. 9 had forgotten how convincingly it demonstrates that Malhotra’s science is not I be trusted at gave value
Let’s just say that if you watch it, I’d appreciate you explaining how you have any confidence in Malhotra’s science, whatsoever.
Josh, Just searching you tube and selecting a video to watch is a very poor way to evaluate this work. This person, Susan Oliver, speaks in a sing song high pitched voice in a somewhat jocular and ironic way. Not the signs of a serious scientist. The constant hand gestures are wierd. There is essentially no math or statistics analysis, just referencing a few disagreeing papers. That means nothing especially during the pandemic when science has seen an authoritarian streak to punish dissenters and suppress their work. She makes accusations of “misrepresenting” an abstract or citing a quality paper. She is not competent to evaluate this (see below).
If you could get past your selection bias you could find some recent work that would tend to strengthen the case against this atypical vaccine. Ron cited one and I cited a couple too. Did you read those?
Oliver’s twitter page says “scientist who is passionate about correcting misinformation.” A warning sign of bias and someone trying to increase their online visibility.
She basically works in the pharmaceutical industry and leads a team. 30 publication. Seems to know nothing about medicine or epidemiology. Almost certainly never practiced medicine. Would you suspect Josh that she has a vested interest in proving vaccines are safe and effective? You, the almighty bias detector should be all over this.
There is in fact a growing body of evidence that these vaccines no longer really work and even in 2021 only worked for about 5-9 months. There is now some indirect evidence that after getting a booster, the immune system may be less capable of fighting off covid19. It is referenced earlier. Did you read that?
Even for you Josh, your talent for linking low quality biased videos from unqualified people reaches new heights. This shows a profound disrespect for us and for Judith. You just waste everyone else’s time.
I’m not going to read anything you have linked. By your own logic, your links seem to be not worth the time.
Joshua, I never brought up Malhotra, you did. I acknowledge the possibility of bias, yet his bias has a 50/50 chance of being closer to the target than Pfizer’s or their government lobbyists.
And since the burden used to be on the medical intervention to “do no harm” my opinion is to call off any further Covid vaccination mandates, or boosters for under 60, or any additional boosters for any that have already been boosted. This is unless a new variant is much more deadly, and a new vaccine is shown to be safe and effective. The risk-benefit is a moving target based on the virus’s harm, the community protection, an individual’s vulnerability and available therapeutics. I guessing this number of variables is overwhelming to the average woke pundit – culture enforcer.
How are you holding up?
Ron –
> Joshua, I never brought up Malhotra, you did.
?
You linked to a tweet of his. In that tweet he referenced research that he promoted.
> I acknowledge the possibility of bias, yet his bias has a 50/50 chance of being closer to the target than Pfizer’s or their government lobbyists.
? I think if you watch the material I linked, you might conclude, as I have, that there isn’t a “50/50” chance of the research he promotes being biased in a particular direction.
> And since the burden used to be on the medical intervention to “do no harm” my opinion is to call off any further Covid vaccination mandates, or boosters for under 60, or any additional boosters for any that have already been boosted.
That gets complicated. First, in some contexts doing harm can be not providing a vaccine. In some contexts, doing harm can be not strongly encouraging or even not mandating vaccines.
> This is unless a new variant is much more deadly, and a new vaccine is shown to be safe and effective. The risk-benefit is a moving target based on the virus’s harm, the community protection, an individual’s vulnerability and available therapeutics.
I think we can agree than an analysis of “doing harm” depends on analysis of the costs and benefits of a particular action – be it recommending, encouraging, or mandating vaccines, or not recommend, encouraging, or mandating vaccines. I will note that the relevant “harms” could conceivably also include, perhaps, ancillary harms from mandating vaccines even if the medical cost/benefit ratio clearly tips towards the benefit side.
>I guessing this number of variables is overwhelming to the average woke pundit – culture enforcer.
I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, exactly. Are you saying that I’m a “woke pundit – culture enforcer?” Are you saying that the links I provided are to “work pundit – culture enforcers?”
If it’s directed at me, then we have nothing more to discuss as you’re clearly no longer committing to good faith exchange. If it was directed at the links…. I provided links that speak directly to (1) Malhotra’s science, and thus indirectly to the science that he judges useful for doing a cost/benefit analysis of the vaccines and, (2) the evidence that’s available for assessing the costs and benefits of the vaccines.
In part, as a way to get a foothold on your views of the costs and benefits of the vaccines, I provided some links relevant to the vaccine cost/benefit analysis done by Malholtra, who you clearly think to be a credible source in this discussion. I’m sure that you wouldn’t link to him as a source if you felt that he’s not a credible source who pushed clearly invalid analyses in the past on this topic. That’s why I asked you to look at the information in those links.
> How are you holding up?
? I’m reasonably sure you’re asking me that question with some kind of rhetorical goal but I have no idea what that goal might be.
I’d like an explanation, because it suggests you’re either not interested in good faith exchange, either because you’ve changed your mind or contrary to what you’ve stated before, you never were all along. Please explain why you’re asking that question and whether there was some rhetorical goal involved.
Ron –
> Joshua, I never brought up Malhotra, you did.
?
You linked to a tweet of his. In that tweet he referenced research that he promoted.
> I acknowledge the possibility of bias, yet his bias has a 50/50 chance of being closer to the target than Pfizer’s or their government lobbyists.
? I think if you watch the material I linked, you might conclude, as I have, that there isn’t a “50/50” chance of the research he promotes being biased in a particular direction.
For what it’s worth, Marty has been introduced in this comment:
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984051
I prefer hall monitors who do their job properly.
J, my long reply is in moderation.
Meanwhile, I realized in all you long attacks and sensitives, you forgot to make any proactive points. This is the pattern that DPY points out often too. You rarely stake yourself except to support the liberal establishment party line, whatever that is. If not, what independent thoughts do you dare to offer?
Do you support the current CDC’s recommendations on the Covid vaccine’s across the board, including for pre-schoolers?
If they change it tomorrow and will you change your view tomorrow with them? Were you for the government and military Covid vaccine mandate up until the day they reversed that?
> And since the burden used to be on the medical intervention to “do no harm” my opinion is to call off any further Covid vaccination mandates, or boosters for under 60, or any additional boosters for any that have already been boosted.
That gets complicated. First, in some contexts doing harm can be not providing a vaccine. In some contexts, doing harm can be not strongly encouraging or even not mandating vaccines.
> This is unless a new variant is much more deadly, and a new vaccine is shown to be safe and effective. The risk-benefit is a moving target based on the virus’s harm, the community protection, an individual’s vulnerability and available therapeutics.
I think an analysis of “doing harm” depends on analysis of the costs and benefits of a particular action – be it recommending, encouraging, or mandating vaccines, or not recommend, encouraging, or mandating vaccines. I will note that the relevant “harms” could conceivably also include, perhaps, ancillary harms from mandating vaccines even if the medical cost/benefit ratio clearly tips towards the benefit side.
>I guessing this number of variables is overwhelming to the average woke pundit – culture enforcer.
I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, exactly. Are you saying that I’m a “woke pundit – culture enforcer?” Are you saying that the links I provided are to “work pundit – culture enforcers?”
If it’s directed at me, then we have nothing more to discuss as you’re clearly no longer committing to good faith exchange. If it was directed at the links…. I provided links that speak directly to (1) Malhotra’s science, and thus indirectly to the science that he judges useful for doing a cost/benefit analysis of the vaccines and, (2) the evidence that’s available for assessing the costs and benefits of the vaccines.
In part, as a way to get a foothold on your views of the costs and benefits of the vaccines, I provided some links relevant to the vaccine cost/benefit analysis done by Malholtra, who you clearly think to be a credible source in this discussion. I’m sure that you wouldn’t link to him as a source if you felt that he’s not a credible source who pushed clearly invalid analyses in the past on this topic. That’s why I asked you to look at the information in those links.
> How are you holding up?
? I’m reasonably sure you’re asking me that question with some kind of rhetorical goal but I have no idea what that goal might be.
I’d like an explanation, because it suggests you’re either not interested in good faith exchange, either because you’ve changed your mind or contrary to what you’ve stated before, you never were all along. Please explain why you’re asking that question and whether there was some rhetorical goal involved.
Ron –
> You rarely stake yourself except to support the liberal establishment party line, whatever that is.
Classic. I never make my opinions apparent to you, but you know that I “support the liberal establishment party line,” and then you say “whatever that is,” Do you not see the logical incoherence?
J, you just did it again. You attacked my statement but made no effort to assert any alternative. I never even occurred to you to prove me wrong by offering a counter example.
Regarding Malhotra, my comment and links were regarding Fraiman and his paper. I didn’t notice that his video had been tweeted by another researcher, Malhotra, that had dovetailing research. I thought you knew something about Malhotra when you asked the empty question. I should have known better.
> Do you support the current CDC’s recommendations on the Covid vaccine’s across the board, including for pre-schoolers?
I neither “support” or “don’t support” their recommendations. I don’t think that my “support” is particularly relevant (and actually I find it strange question).
We have custody of a 5 year-old granddaughter. After looking at the available information from a variety of sources, including Offit, I don’t currently favor her getting a booster at this point. Neither have I gotten a bivalent booster. However, I think these are tough calls and I’ve gone back and forth on both decisions over time. A lot depends on specifics of context. I think that strong claims in either direction aren’t in line with how I see the available evidence – but I also recognize my limitations in understanding that evidence and I recognize that sometimes I’m going to be wrong. I see a ton of what I consider to be mis- and dis-information regarding the vaccines (Malhotra is, IMO, a purveyor of such information. For an even more stark example check out “Died Suddenly. I provided those links because you linked to his tweet and so I thought you might be interested in seeing how bizarrely bad his science is”).
> If they change it tomorrow and will you change your view tomorrow with them?
With them? Whether or not I’d follow their advice would depend on the circumstances. Your frequent condescending characterizations aren’t constructive towards good faith exchange.
> Were you for the government and military Covid vaccine mandate up until the day they reversed that?
In our exchange, you have displayed a track record of failing to incorporate what I’ve said about my views, a track record of failing to recognize and acknowledge what I have said, a track record of mis-characterizing my views, and a track record of failing to clarify my views before you’ve mis-characterized them. Your mistaken notion that I just agree with “the government and military” no matter what they say displays ignorance and an ill-fitted overconfidence that leads you to mistaken views.
I’m done here. It seems pointless to continue our exchange further as this pattern repeats and actually seems to be getting worse despite my best attempts to change it. If you show come accountability I’d be happy to continue.
I think Joshua is misrepresenting Ron’s comments. Ron provides links of higher quality than Josh’s superficial ones. He seems to be honest and straightforward about what he thinks.
Let’s summarize: Josh just spent many hours of his “valuable” time posting repetitious and evasive comments while hiding his views, which are mostly vague examples of ambiguous ideas where it’s always a “close call.” Bothsiderism at its best.
Oh and the Twitter files just show what has always happened with the CIA and the media. As you say Ron, they always tow the party line from the establishment narrative you find in the corrupt New York Times, a former newspaper.
Joshua, you came closer than I have ever seen you here state an affirmative belief of conclusion. I am sorry that you are calling it quits right when you were just making progress.
You points are easily misunderstood because you don’t make them, you imply them. And, yes, I have been giving you a dose of your own medicine and it tastes horrible. You responded by jumping to the worst conclusions that were available to you.
My affirmative point here is that for good faith conversation one needs to be very explicit and respectfulness helps too. When you don’t the other side jumps to wrong conclusions. Also, it is counter-productive to spout about with sensitivities. If you want to get a dialogue back on track either apologies and ask for more clarity or make your point.
Don’t tell me to go to a link without giving your point. That should be a rule.
For example, Joshua wrote: “I provided those links because you linked to his [Malhotra’s] tweet and so I thought you might be interested in seeing how bizarrely bad his science is).”
I didn’t even know Tweeter was going to copy the whole tweet when I copied the video link. I made it clear what I was talking about because I said video, not tweet. I also provided a link to Fraiman’s paper. To make things even more clear I made a point in my comment about them.
Joshua, you, on the other hand, responded with the mostly empty question of whether I supported Malhotra’s research, whom I didn’t at that moment even know who he was. I did that research in good faith that you might have been making a point and found the Malhotra had published a paper similar to Fraiman’s. Now it makes sense why Malhotra was tweeting Fraiman’s video. The point of the video, which you never addressed, perhaps because you didn’t hear it was that international analysis of all cause mortality by country was showing a clear negative footprint of the mRNA vaccine.
I am glad you are holding off of any further Covid boosters vaccines for the 5-year-old under your care. I hope I had an impact in that.
> I hope I had an impact in that.
You are certainly entitled to that hope. But I think it’s funny that you think you’ve said or done anything that leads me to look to you as a guide for making such decisions. It just goes to show how completely I’ve failed to give you any insight into how or what I think. You continue to be totally off in understanding my views.
Joshua, I hope you know that I do occasionally learn something from our interactions and if nothing else they push me to think more deeply. I am sure there are many points we agree on but loath to admit. I really liked your Bernstein link and am curious as to his position today on the CIA and the media, considering he shares CNN with so many former spooks (if there is such a thing).
Also, in reflection I take back my criticism of your scarcity of independent thinking. That should be in no sense a requirement to make honest good faith criticisms. For example, I and others encouraged Stephen McIntyre to make his own paleoclimate reconstruction. After all, he was an expert from analyzing all of the proxies from hockey team reconstructions. He refused on the principle that it was not his burden to provide an alternative science in order audit bad science.
We need you and Willard and others to keep challenging us. Be skeptical of the skeptics. Just please be respectful.
Ron –
I said I’d given up on trying to have a good faith exchange with you – but I did offer a caveat with regard to accountability.
So just to be clear:
> Also, in reflection I take back my criticism of your scarcity of independent thinking. That should be in no sense a requirement to make honest good faith criticisms.
I think it should be clear to you why that wouldn’t be what I meant by accountability. (1) First you repeatedly say in your view I (effectively) don’t display evidence of independent thinking, (2) then I tell you repeatedly that you repeatedly saying that, is incompatible with my view of good faith exchange as well as obviously unsupported by anything I’ve written, then (3) you say you’re sorry for criticizing my lack of independent thinking because independent thinking isn’t required for good faith exchange – once again effectively saying you think my comments reflect a lack of independent thinking.
It has become abundantly clear that you and I have a different view on what underlies good faith exchange.
At any rate, here’s something maybe we do agree on. We don’t have to agree on the efficacy and cost/benefit of the covid vaccines to agee that the cost should be kept low:
https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1612839643451641857?s=20&t=4K9-2HTuh8t1OBZyry8nXA
Ron, Josh already said his position on the CIA/FBI/media/BigTech collusion is. It is that its always been this bad. I detailed the facts and data showing that that is nonsense. Josh simply doesn’t respond to facts and data while expecting us to watch his videos by unqualified “scientists.” It’s difficult to have a fruitful discussion on these terms.
The one thing Josh provides is insight into how divorced from reality the leftie world has become. From the corrupt media to the deep state, “the science”, and Big Tech. I don’t think we have ever had this pervasive corruption in American history. In the gilded age most people didn’t bother with the media and it was very diverse. Progressivism was every bit as pseudo-scientific as woke ideology and equally racist. But progressivism never fully captured academia and certainly the corporate world actively fought it. You probably have to go back to the Middle Ages and the corruption of the Church and monarchs to find something comparable.
Joshua, I think we have another point of agreement that we have found different definitions of what constitutes a good faith dialogue.
My definition starts with stating your honest beliefs, including your best efforts at understanding the points the other is making. This is done by acknowledging points even when you are about to counter or add to them. When you don’t acknowledge someone’s point then it’s not established that you understand and it clogs the dialogue with the point getting repeated.
Good faith also is not playing dishonest games of trying to smear the other’s credibility by bringing up past differences as evidence of irrationality. However, it is fair to bring up past positions relevant to the discussion, even if tenuously connected.
Finally, showing respect by not name calling or hectoring if someone forgot to answer your question (or it never came out of moderation). Respect is also carrying a positive assumption that the other is not intentionally deflecting or evading relevant questions. And, of course, be a good example by not evading or deflecting.
Follow the Golden Rule. It’s harder than it looks. Question yourself.
All that said. Yes, I honestly think you and half the country suffer from a deficit of independent thinking. It could explain why the other half values freedom and truth seeking. There — a new hypothesis born. Ask me for evidence and I will be glad to provide it.
DPY, I would tend to agree with you but I know we are biased too. I think there is value in Joshua and even Willard’s comments as they provide a sound board of the other point of view to keep us from being an echo chamber. Getting my blood up is good. It gets be to dig deeper for evidence and rightly brings doubt if it’s not there.
The key is I would say is showing more respect. On the question of good faith, there are a lot of good practices to show it, but the overarching principle is the hope for reciprocity, i.e. the Golden Rule.
ATTP, once came over here and ask Judith what her secret sauce was for success. Could you imagine the squeals of outrage from him, J or W if Judith moderated with one tenth the heavy-handedness of him or his sidekicks? Pre-emptive goodwill plus the patience of job for the other’s realizations.
Just to set the record straight, Judith for a while allowed Josh to call her biased even though he had NO real evidence. At that time other climate scientists were saying something similar so Josh quoted all those detractors. I was literally hundreds of comments that were extremely repetitious and very biased comments. Josh thinks he is a bias detector. The problem is that the detector is itself off by a factor of 2.
There are many many other instances. The attacks on Nic literally involved thousands of comments that were all repeating the same point.
He participated in the online caning of Ioannidis. Josh’s hero Andrew Gelman joined in for a while but later decided Ioannidis was OK after all. Josh continues to this day to repeat those smears.
Ron, I somewhat agree but the problem here is not that they question our biases but that the quality of their cited evidence is so low and the endless repetition shows disrespect for those who might be trying to read the comments.
In Willard’s case there really is an ethical issue. He is playing a game designed to distract and raise phony doubts.
Ron,
A couple of points:
Please do not conflate decency with tone. While I applaud your concerns about our Hall Minotaur’s disrespect, you may not have shown as much respect as you presume. Your humbug was as loud and clear as is your actual cant.
There has been more comments deleted in this thread alone that last year at AT’s. So best of luck trying to whine about moderation.
Let us spare a thought for Lynette.
Willard, despite countless comments here you have provided only very low quality studies on masks with no intent to ethically take into account all the better evidence. That is prima facia deceptive.
So now to call Ron’s contributions humbug shows you are a hypocrite.
Dear David,
After Ron spent more than 1K words to intimate that you are far from helping, perhaps you should take the hint. Perhaps that is not enough, and should register what happened to your ankle biting comments.
Did you know that your latest guru was once dubbed the COVID Wrongest Man? Here he is:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/pandemics-wrongest-man/618475/
Would you be so kind as to remind Denizens of the death count up to this week, or should Ron do it for you?
Once again Willard you provide nothing of value and waste people’s time.
The Atlantic is a garbage publication that spent years peddling the Russian collusion conspiracy theory. They peddled the lie that the Hunter laptop story was Russian disinformation. They peddled every lie of the CDC about Covid too. They refuse to cover the Twitter files, perhaps the biggest story of the last year.
You of course have peddled many of these lies yourself. I don’t know what the covid death toll is. It is manipulated because anyone goes to the hospital and dies from something else but tests positive is counted.
You smear Berenson of course. Everyone has been wrong on the pandemic. Berenson has been less wrong than the CDC. You are a smear merchant and a merchant of doubt.
I am vastly more worried about the latest results on antibodies in those who got boosted, the reported repeated infections in this cohort, and the fact that all cause mortality remains high in all the highly vaccinated countries.
Ron is a nicer person than I am. But both Ron and I are much nicer than you are. You must despise people who disagree with you as you show us such disrespect. You are lucky Judith didn’t ban you long ago.
P.S. Your interview with the obscure Florida philosopher on the hawkmoth was also wrong as any first year fluid dynamics student knows.
So it is just a flesh wound, Hall Monitor?
Here is the correct citation:
https://www.thewrap.com/alex-berenson-fox-news-dragged-tweet-dismissing-covid-death-toll-predictions/
No wonder troglodytes like you love him.
Like Joe McCarthy Willard you have only smears and lies. Everyone has been wrong here and Berenson has been more accurate than the CDC and provided a valuable service to report what most were covering up.
Willard: “There has been more comments deleted in this thread alone that last year at AT’s. So best of luck trying to whine about moderation.”
There likely are nil visitors to ATTP that are not echo chamber denizens he has entertained for years. I am glad he took moderation out of your trusted hands, if Lynette is your replacement. I might stop in to say hello. Maybe.
The moderation here is a neurotic AI program that mostly does not like lots of links, or to long a narrative. I think it wants one link per comment. Maybe we can crack it together.
Willard, your link is a from 20 months ago. How long until one calls time on repeating smears from a left magazine? Back in April 2021 when that was written the consensus on the origin of Covid was that the lab leak theory was a scientifically impossible conspiracy theory explained by the emotional need of unstable minds to blame catastrophes on anthropogenic causes rather than accepting natural events. (I think that was their theory.)
How many people have been wrong in the last 20 months about Covid? Hmmm that would be a great study. Should the ones that stayed with the government consensus get a pass? Or, should they be held to a higher standard being authorities taking people’s freedoms and livelihoods?
Ron,
Two other points.
First, the only reason I am here is that you peddling crap that has and will damage the lives of autist parents. This is not an intellectual exercise. You are less cool that you wish to portray here.
Second, no it is not an AI thing. Ask our Hall Minotaur about that.
Problem here WilLard is that the CDC has peddled so much crap (with your blessing I’m sure) that no one trusts them anymore. A lot of this anti-vax stuff is nothing other than seeking alternatives to our corrupt liars in the deep and shallow state, the corrupt media, and “the science.” The solution is for people to demand better and for science to seriously reform itself. If not, we will have to defund it.
In any case, what you are saying about Ron is classic authoritarianism. What you say is (according to my sole anonymous arrogant authority) harming someone. Therefore, just shut up. Are you abandoning Russell’s bedrock belief in free speech? I think WilLard that your jack boots fit too tightly.
Judith should be deleting a lot of your comments WilLard as they are mostly content free and word game playing. Ron is right, ATTP’s blog is almost entirely a dozen or so regulars who already believe the party line. No need to moderate if everyone essentially agrees.
I do notice that ATTP’s doesn’t even come up in a google search. Maybe because its become irrelevant. Now that Ken has become a modicum of moderation and politeness, he is attracting less negative attention. But that’s a good thing. Maybe he can make some contributions to science.
No U, dearest Hall Minotaur.
Are you OK?
For Frank, looks like the “Russians interference elected Trump” narrative was a politically driven lie all along. How many thousands and thousands has this lie been repeated in the regime mouthpiece media?
The New York University Center for Social Media and Politics conducted a study on the limits of what Russian disinformation and misinformation were able to achieve on Twitter during the 2016 election. What they found should put to rest any claims by Democrats that Russian influence on social media swung that election to Donald Trump.
“My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped,” Josh Tucker, one of the report’s authors, who is also the co-director of the New York University center, told the New York Times.
“Now we’re looking back at data and we can see how concentrated this was in one small portion of the population, and how the fact that people who were being exposed to these were really, really likely to vote for Trump,” Tucker said. “And then we have this data to show we can’t find any relationship between being exposed to these tweets and people’s change in attitudes.”
dpy: For the record, I have never speculated that Russia elected Trump. There is a large factual record about what Russia did and clear evidence they did it to help Trump, but its impact on voters is unknowable IMO. Democracy means voters are responsible for seeing through all the BS. Beyond any doubt, Russia believed Trump’s election would help them.
However, I’m sick of lies about what the DNC did to Trump. Even Barr now believes The Crossfire Hurricane investigation began with Mifsud’s Russian dangle to Papadopolous. Both Page and Manafort had been and were actively under investigation for Russian connections before then. Mueller’s report makes no reference to any allegation found in the Dossier. Mueller found extensive contact between Russians trying to help Trump and his campaign, but not a criminal conspiracy provable in court.
Today, the Dossier should be recognized as raw intelligence report by Danchenko, not a creation of the DNC. Given his extensive investigation by the FBI and continuing work for the FBI, it should be obvious that Danchenko was judged believable even though his subsources gave him some inaccurate or unconfirmable info. That is normal. Blaming the DNC for the problems with his intelligence is absurd. You can blame Dem Congressmen for lying about about the investion had found.
Ron and DPY: Finally, the FBI learned about the under the table payments from the pro-Russian Party of Regions in 2015 and opened an official investigation in Jan 2016. before he joined the Trump campaign. They subpoenaed his bank records and had a solid case of tax fraud, that was handled by the tax section, until the CH investigation was opened. I don’t when the FBI discovered that Manafort was being shed bt Deripasha for 20 million, was essential bankrupt and had a member of Russian intelligence as his Ukrainian business partner.
As for the Russian attempts to help elect Trump, including hacking the DNC, read the Mueller report. The Dutch surveiled the Russians doing the hacking. Mueller has indicted about 30 Russians and that takes evidence. Roger Stone communicated with the Russian known as Guccifer2 was aware of the Podesta material that was being saved for October, and was given advanced copy so he cold draft press releases. And he committed perjury when voluntarily testifying to Congress about his actions.
This is only part of why I find you allegations of a hoax insulting. Read the Mueller and DoJ IGs reports. They are thoroughly documented.
Frank, that you still find the Mueller report or MSM credible on this subject is shocking. For 6 years now the onion of lies of what was clearly a full blown domestic black op to reverse and election. Everything you state is a half-truth or worse that came out of media compatriots of the operation or repeater outlets. This list of lies is way too long to cover here. It would take a book. But I will correct just in what you mentioned. The under the table of payments came from the infamous black ledger that DNC operative Alexandra Chalups went to Ukraine to gather and supply to the FBI. It was proved a forgery but it provided a pretext for the re-opening of Manafort’s tax records which revealed the 19MM loan from Deripaska that never got paid back, a matter had been previously cleared with the IRS.
The DoJ did not accept that it was a loan even though they new that Deripaska had hired Steele to actively pursue Manafort’s assets in the US to gain repayment in March 2016. Deripaska also happened to be working with Bruce Ohr, the #4 in the DoJ three months earlier on a deal that would provide a pathway for Deripaska to gain a US permanent visa, a desire he had paid DC lobbyists millions of dollars for over the prior 14 years. Bruce’s wife, Nelly, coincidentally was working for Simpson doing research on Manafort that was being billed to Deripaska through Simpson and then Steele. Danchenko’s first assignment by Steele related to Trump was to investigate Manafort. This was March, 3 months before Chalupa went to Ukraine.
Manafort’s “Russian agent” contact, Konstantine Kilimnick, it turned out was a primary intelligence source working for the US embassy in Ukraine. He was a US asset, not Russian. The fact that he was touted by the MSM for two years as a Putin asset without a single journalist calling him, though his number was listed, is as a discrediting example of the decline of the MSM into a party propaganda machine, pointed out by Matt Taibbi in his successful Munk Debate against the NYT here. Taibbi and Aaron Mate were the only two journalists to call Kilimnick, breaking out the true story.
Mueller’s Russian bot farm indictments were shown to be fake if you follow that story afterward. Roger Stone was the victim of a honey trap set up by whomever is behind the Guccifer 2.0. All circumstantial evidence points to Hillary in collusion with CIA.
Yes Ron, I am baffled at Frank myself. He seems quite intelligent and is scientifically competent. But I think there must be some deep derangement syndrome at work here that clouds his judgment.
Glenn Greenwald today has an excellent if long rumble video explaining what is happening here. The world is no longer divided along left – right lines. The divide is between our corrupt elites and the people. This is why the establishment types are now claiming that Taibbi is “right wing.” This is absurd on the face of it. They also lump in Tusi Gabbard and Greenwald into the populist fascist camp. This is really exactly the same as Joseph McCarthy and his list of “Communists” in the US government.
DPY, regarding Frank, I would hope he can explain himself why being the analytical thinker and man of science that he would still hold priors that the MSM, or Mueller, are trustworthy sources of information at this point. One must intentionally prohibit themselves from investigating not to see there patterns of coordinated and continual misinformation. Yes, they use the same word to censor the truth from social media. It is Orwellian. Verizon unilaterally cancelled One American News last summer with no explanation given. Considering what we see in the Twitter files I would not be surprised if the FBI advised Verizon on doing so. If that comes out remember I called it.
I am looking forward to the Jan 6, Capitol footage getting released if McCarthy actually has the power to make that happen. He might be shocked to find he doesn’t. Also GOP subpoena’s were worthless IIRC. The Capitol police are not going to switch allegiance to GOP just because of an election.
Frank, I have a longer comment that I have failed to get through moderation for a couple of days that ties a central personality in the Ukraine impeachment saga to the Steele dossier saga. If those events were organic there is only a one in million chance this would be the case.
Fiona Hill introduced Danchenko to Steele for employment, introduced Charles Dolan to Danchenko, admitted receiving an early copy of the dossier from Strobe Talbot, a close friend of the Clintons. And she was hired into the Trump White House by the person that would become the Ukraine whistleblower. That’s a lot of coincidences.
Ron, If you want to email me something on these links, I’m quite interested. dpy6629@gmail.com
I have noticed myself that sometimes longer comments seem to go into moderation. While Judith does a good job of moderation, I think WordPress must be arcane and hard for her to use in this effort.
Frank, You are recycling misinformation here. It may not be your fault because the media have been lying to us on this subject for over 6 years. The FBI knew in January 2017 that Danchenko made up the Dossier out of whole cloth. He was paid by the Clinton campaign to do so, a fact that even an incompetent investigator should have been able to determine. Durham and Nunes had no trouble determining this. Mueller even rubber stamped the use of the Dossier in one of the FISA warrant applications. It now appears that the FBI hired Danchenko to hide the fact that he was lying to them, i.e., to enable them to hide the documents showing that Danchenko’s work was a fabrication so they could continue to investigate Trump and to be able to constantly leak mostly lies to the media who eagerly published them. You can find all the details in reports of Durham’s and Nunes’ work I believe. I don’t have time right now to provide a link. Nunes and his staff did a really good job of “just the facts” reporting that the media was hiding.
But your mistake is to believe the corrupt media, the same media we now find was colluding with the deep state to get big tech to censor people and true information. The deep state would often launder lists of accounts they wanted banned through the media in the hopes that the bad publicity would cause big tech to ban these accounts. Of course the deep state also had weekly meetings with Twitter and other big tech firms where long lists of things things to ban and censor.
You said previously that Crossfire Hurricane began to look into the DNC hack. Which is it? Look, Frank, there is constant and far more consequential interference in our elections by the deep state. The fixation on Russia is just a political talking point fabricated by the Clinton campaign the day after she lost and laundered through the deep state to disable Trump’s administration.
And of course the deep state – Big Tech – corrupt media collusion to suppress the Hunter laptop story was based on lies from former CIA officials. There is strong polling evidence that this changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
Your fixation on Trump and the inconsequential Russian disinformation campaigns is focusing on a seedling and ignoring the forest of disinformation we see much of it propagated by our elite institutions.
In a previous comment I gave a long list of some of this disinformation and censoring realating to covid. You can find more in Ioannidis’ Tablet essay from last August. It would be good reading for you to balance your usual diet of elite “media.”
Also, Frank, the evidence of Russia actor’s involvement in 2016 has evaporated down so significantly the last item standing, the “Wikileaks hack” has no better evidence pointing to Russia than to any other actor, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom is now connected directly to the Trump Towers-Alfa Bank episode through her lawyer, Sussman, and the Steele dossier, not only through Steele, but through her agent, Charles Dolan, who was the source for the pee tape story fed to Danchenko, then to Steele. She is connected to the Wikileaks by the suspicious circumstance that she had to be aware of the Cozy Bear malware on the DNC server that sat there for 9 months from the summer of 2015, when we now know Dutch intelligence notified the FBI about it. On May 1, 2016, the DNC’s vendor IT service vendor, MIS Department Inc. seeing “suspicious activity on the server”, called Perkins Coie, who called Dmitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike, (the exact chain of actors as 40 days earlier when John Podesta was “hacked” at Hillary For America). But the DNC exfiltration is dated May 21 by the last email taken. The FBI declined to investigate this national security threat. We now know the FBI colluded with Clinton on the Steele Dossier and Alfa Bank hoaxes. How much more of a picture does one need?
None of the above revelations came from the 2-1/2-year long, $40MM Mueller investigation. That was all BS.
For investigative articles search Paul Sperry, Hans Mahncke and Steve McIntryre.
Frank: “Both Page and Manafort had been and were actively under investigation for Russian connections before [Crossfire H] then.”
Page’s was a confidential informant for the CIA before 2016. How he got under investigation before his name was in the Steele dossier I don’t know if anyone knows. My theory on how he got into the dossier is this: Perkin Coie had scif access to the USIC database which likely only showed a file cover on Page. The FBI had no evidence on Page other than he had done business in Russia. So they couldn’t get a FISA on Page, which they needed to spy on the entire Trump campaign using the two hope rule. This is why Page’s got fed to Steele to be laundered back through his dossier. That made the FISA have enough intel to get approved. Kevin Clinesmith’s prosecution was for falsely confirming to the FISC that file jacket was a derogatory one rather than one of a CIA asset, which it was. Klinesmith plead guilty years later, BTW, and was handed a time out by the judge and was back practicing law within 12 months.
Manafort was under investigation by Steele since Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016. Oleg Deripaska had hired him to look for Manafort’s assets and Steele called Simpson to collaborate, according to Steele. Manafort came to the attention of the FBI in July 2016 from the DNC’s Alexandria Chalupa. She was a Ukrainian national who went to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Manafort. She found what we now know was a forged document called the “black ledger” with Manafort’s name on it involving corruption. Manafort was never charged on any of that but was the pretext for investigating him and his tax records.
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/tbt-dnc-consultant-reportedly-sought-dirt-trump-ukrainian-government
https://nypost.com/2019/11/13/who-is-alexandra-chalupa-the-dnc-operative-republicans-say-dug-for-dirt-on-trump/
Thanks Ron. It’s a truly disgusting tale of corruption and lying such as one might expect in Russia or Venezuela.
Dpy and Ron: There is no shred of evidence showing that the DNC told Danchenko what to report to Steele. The DNC had no idea of who Danchenko was. Fusion GPS had been researching Trump during the primaries for a Republican opposed to Trump. They approached Elias, who knew nothing about the opposition research GPS shared with him, but he served as the sole contact with Fusion so the relationship was protected by attorney client privilege (until Fusion’s bank records were subpoenaed). Fusion told Elias that many trails business trails led to Russia and they would use DNC money to hire people with knowledge of Russia (Nellie) and sources inside Russia (Steele). Steele didn’t know Fusion was being paid by the DNC itself (it could have been someone independent like the Republican who earlier funded Fusion) and the DNC didn’t know there money was going to Steele (but there were not many candidates). So there is no evidence of a channel from someone knowledgeable in the DNC to Danchenko. Furthermore, the FBI interviewed some of Danchenko’s sub-sources and has presumably found it plausible that they were the source of some of Danchenko’s information (whether or not the info was confirmed or later dismissed). Dolan and Trump’s attorney confirmed that stories of a Trump sex tape were circulating in Moscow. The DNC funded the investigation that resulted in the Dossier, but contributed NOTHING to its contents.
It is true that Danchenko told the FBI that most of the Dossier was gossip and bar talk with unaware friends who worked near important figures in the Russian government. Except in rare circumstances, much human intelligence IS gossip and bar talk that sometimes can be pieced together to make something important. I’m sure Danchenko’s candor helped his credibility with the FBI. From the FBI’s perspective, the first question was: Is Danchenko telling us the truth about what he heard and told Steele? Since they retained his services for four years, the answer must be yes. The second question is: Did Russian intelligence learn of Danchenko and plant disinformation on his subsources, such as Cohen’s alleged trip to Prague. Danchenko’s first trip to Russia happened within weeks of Steele’s hiring, likely leaving far too little time to mount a counteroperation. After Steele began talking to the press, the chances the Russian learned about Danchenko increased.
Ron and DPY: Carter Page was hoping to get rich in Russian fossil fuels through deals with his two Russian partners. He had numerous influential contacts in the Russian government and spent a week in Moscow in December 2016 advising his friends how to deal with the new Trump administration, which he applied to join. At the same time he was happy to gossip about what he knew with experts from the CIA. He was an official “source” for the CIA, but not an “agent” trusted to seek information the CIA needed. Only the FBI is allowed to recruit American citizens to act as agents. Clinesmith got in trouble taking a shortcut trying to clarify for the FISA court that Page was not an agent for the CIA. Since he didn’t intentionally mislead the court, nor was charged by Durham of intentionally misleading the court,he has been reinstated by the DC bar.
In the US, Page was investigated because he spent time talking with Russian “friends” who worked for Russian Intelligence. They were overheard discussing how Page’s hunger for a big oil deal could be used to recruit him as a spy. So a FISA warrant was issued in 2014 or 2015 to find out Afterwards, when interviewed by the FBI, he admitted knowing that his Russian friends worked for Russian intelligence and said he saw nothing wrong with sharing information with them. In other words, if you want to say Page “worked” for the CIA, he also worked cor the Russians. Page ignored the fact that the invasion of Crimea had made Russia an enemy.
Around the beginning of 2016. the US government was prosecuting one of Page’s Russian friends for espionage and Page was interviewed as a potential witness. Page immediate contacted other Russian friends and told them everything the prosecutors had discussed with him. That prompted the NYC field office to open a second investigation into Page, just as he was about to officially join the Trump campaign as a foreign policy expert in March. As far as I known, Page has committed no crime. But the FBI also investigates threats to National Security, and Page clearly posed a threat worth investigating long before the Steele Dossier arrived in DC in Sept 2016.
“Dpy and Ron: There is no shred of evidence showing that the DNC told Danchenko what to report to Steele.”
Frank, the way it works is that everyone in an op is compartmentalized so they cannot see the whole picture. Danchenko was thinking that he was getting sustenance and cover from US deportation to Russia by supplying Steele fake information made plausible with the help of his childhood friend Galkina and other acquaintances back in Russia. Danchenko maybe believed that Steele was none the wiser. Steele knew it was bogus but thought Simpson and his clients will be none the wiser. Everyone knew it was bogus, including Clinton, who commanded all intimate knowledge of the personalities making up the entire chain of cut outs. She could then easily assign her friend Dolan to go to Russia and bump into Galkina and feed her the Ritz Carlton story that then came back through the Danchenko chain laundered by Steele to the FBI as “Crown intelligence.” Unbeknownst to Steele, the FBI is aware of his sources and knows the information is bogus but they can now use it for their ends as Crown intelligence. The FBI’s Brian Auten and DoJ’s David Laufman brought Danchenko in for questioning on Jan 26, 2017, after promising unconditional immunity. Danchenko spilled most of the truth except for attributing the Ritz Carlton intel to Sergei Millian, to cover Galkina and cover Steele, whom he knows told everyone it was Millian, a person Danchenko admits he never met. Danchenko tried to claim that Millian called him anonymously after they missing an rendezvous in NYC. But that turned out to be impossible because Millian was verifiably out of the county the entire month of July 2016, when Danchenko says this happened. This was the heart of John Durham’s case against Danchenko last fall for lying to the FBI. Danchenko’s lawyers convincingly showed to the jury that the lies were inconsequential because the FBI knew they were lies and covered them up to use to continue their Comey-Mueller operation to try to overthrow Trump. This was proven by the fact that Danchenko was hired by the FBI after his interview to supply more information (but really so they could keep his file hidden as confidential hum-int). They also continued to use the fake dossier to renew the Carter Page FISAs for six more months of spying on the Trump Presidency, which they were hoping to take down with obstruction charges, hoping Trump would try to take action to stop them.
Frank, do you remember way back when the MSM said the dossier came from a GOP never-Trumper? Some people still believe that due to the press never correcting it. I remember at CA when you and I learned this was not true in October of 2017 from the Numes investigation. How long did you hold onto that establishment truth? Shouldn’t you be changing your priors by now on the MSM credibility about anything political?
Frank, here is a link to an article outlining the Dolan-Danchenko revelations, and here is a link to analysis of the Danchenko trial testimony of FBI agent Anderson about how she learned of the Dolan-Galkina connection and how she thought it was of importance but her superiors squashed her. Dolan was not only a Democratic operative but also had a close to Putin’s deputies. There is an appearance of chance that Putin was involved after all — with Clinton’s op. Wouldn’t that fit in with “they accuse you of exactly what they are guilty of.”
Dolan is also the one who put Paul Manafort into the Steele dossier by supplying lies directly to Danchenko here.
Hereis more about Dolan:
Here’s one for Frank and Ron. Turns out the Russiagate lie was a deep state media collusion to cripple Trump’s presidency. Taibbi details the lies used to try to prevent Nunes’ memo from being released in order to keep the truth from coming out. In your case Frank, you took it hook, line, and sinker.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/america-needs-truth-and-reconciliation?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1042&post_id=96119599&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email
Money quote:
We have a lot of problems in this country, and there are serious arguments to be had between blue and red about all sorts of issues, from immigration to the wealth gap to abortion and race. But the country is currently paralyzed by distrust of media that runs so deep that it prevents real dialogue, and that situation can’t be resolved until the corporate press swallows its pride and admits the clock has finally run out on its seven years of loony Russia conspiracies.
Frank wrote: “Clinesmith got in trouble taking a shortcut trying to clarify for the FISA court that Page was not an agent for the CIA. Since he didn’t intentionally mislead the court, nor was charged by Durham of intentionally misleading the court the has been reinstated by the DC bar.”
This I believe is untrue. Clinesmith’s “shortcut” involved forensically altering an email from the CIA to present false evidence against Page to the FISC. Neither Horowitz or Durham saw it as an accident or misunderstanding. Clinesmith did not plead innocent to the crime, which carried a penalty of up to 5 years in prison. He plead guilty and through himself at the mercy of the court, which was very very merciful. Just because the judge allowed him to speak where then Clinesmith claimed to was an accident, to the surprise of everyone present, does not mean that it was, or that Durham thought that it was.
And finally some really good advice for Frank from Matt Taibbi:
It’s over, you nitwits. It’s time to stow the Mueller votive candles, cop to the coverage pileup created by years of errors, and start the reconciliation process.
You’ll be tempted to shout, “But Trump, Stop the Steal, QAnon — Derp!” Don’t do it. Don’t be the Japanese soldier still clutching a bayonet to defend the forgotten atoll in 1960. Forget Trump: you need to clean your own house first. Expunging the years of absurd deceptions has to happen, if media companies ever want wide audiences to trust them again, and that starts with admitting the obvious screwups — like this case.
The bivalent booster in people age 65+ compared with those who did not receive it, among >622,000 participants
81% reduction of hospitalizations (Figure)
86% reduction of deaths
https://t.co/gbQFLgtx2
Your link is to a poodle saying, “Nothing to see here.”
Did they compare all cause mortality yet? No. Let’s wait a year to see who has the cardiac arrests, strokes and embolisms. What are the actual numbers of deaths from Covid? Were the control groups boosted, non-boosted or non-vaccinated? Who funded the study, NIH? Is it the same people who wrote the radio ad I just heard that said the new booster protects against all the new variants? Did they have the study when they wrote that?
The link is broken. Maybe it was taken down because it is false. Reports I’ve seen say 30% effectiveness for 60 days. Try harder Josh.
Link (to preprint that aligns with CSC data) for quote above:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4314067
What you quote Josh is misleading. Check the confidence intervals. The number of hospitalizations and deaths was low enough that the intervals are very large. For death, the interval goes all the way up to 1.04 meaning zero effectiveness. You need to do a search for other studies with more meaningful results.
Generally the latest covid variants are quite mild and not much of the threat.
Summary of the 8 lab studies for the bivalent BA.5 vaccine booster vs original. Neutralizing antibody (nAb) levels vs BA.5 and XBB variants
All 5 live virus studies showed significant increase (3-8 fold) nAb increase for bivalent vs BA.5 and some cross-immunity vs XBB.
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1612913241524678657?s=20&t=d-GI0RLCPQq_KOjHvFL6rA
Since Paul Offit has. Been mentioned and Robert Kennedy has been suggested as a reliable source on vaccines:
https://www.statnews.com/2017/09/22/robert-kennedy-vaccine-safety/
This is from a while back, but it’s a good intro to the claims of disproportionate increase in all cause mortality in association with (and implied causality from) vaccines:
https://unherd.com/thepost/investigating-the-mystery-of-excess-deaths/
Please note, it’s always good to make room for uncertainty.
That said, when people make claims about comparative rates of all cause mortality without attempting to control for potentially confounding variables, they’re probably pushing snake oil, whether they’re doing it out of ignorance or not.
This article is actually pretty good. The problem here is that many highly vaccinated countries are seeing something similar. Their health care systems are functioning in many cases as well as before the pandemic.
The video that goes along with the Unherd article.
https://youtu.be/1Tcct-SVvZE
The interviewee does a pretty good job of outlining the problems with facile and unsubstantiated claims of an association between vaccines and excess deaths.
Here’s a video on the claims of an association (indeed, the implied causation) between vaccination and excess deaths.
https://youtu.be/pWNqinR1QdU
The data are based from England, which tends to have good quality data on COVID:
Josh, You are doing it again. Linking to very low quality videos by unqualified “scientists.” This babe is a pharma employee and knows nothing about epidemology or practicing medicine. Longer comment above with complete debunking.
I look forward to seeing anyone present data, or links to data analysis of data of associations between excess deaths and covid vaccinations.
I have presented links to such analyses.
Here’s a study conducted in the US – comparing excess deaths in states by vaccination rates.
Highly Vaccinated State Had Far Lower Excess Death Rates: Study
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/980326
Obviously, as with all such comparisons, control for confounding variables is a critical issue. That said, this kind of study is more instructive than completely unsubstantiated claims that vaccination is associated with, let among causes, excess deaths.
Please note who makes such completely unsubstantiated claims.
This is behind a paywall and I’m not going to register. State level is way too coarse for this.
Finally, figures up to June 2022 looking at deaths from all causes show unvaccinated people were more likely to die than vaccinated people.
While this data on its own can’t tell us it’s the vaccine protecting people from dying – there are too many complicating factors – if vaccines were driving excess deaths we would expect this to be the other way around..
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-64209221
As mentioned earlier, this is not limited to Britain where the pandemic response led to extraordinary inflation and problem with the health care system. In the US, the system seems to be functioning normally.
Those who question whether there is a large cohort of people pushing dis- mis-information asserting a causal link between covid vaccinations and excess death might want to read this article;
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/died-suddenly-a-tsunami-of-antivax-misinformation-and-conspiracy-theories/
This is not science based, just “debunking”. Josh, you might want to consider that most of the big conspiracy theories of the last 6 years have been proven to be real conspiracies. Yet most of the mainstream media you keep citing have lied about these things and actually voluminously supported the conspiracy theories. I don’t trust them and the fact that you are unaware of or don’t care about much of this shows that you are not a good source of information.
1. Twitter deep state media conspiracy to influence the 2020 election and to allow the regime to massively violate the 1st amendment.
2. The conspiracy to falsely discredit the lab leak hypothesis.
3. The conspiracy between the DNC , the deep state, and the media to spread the fraudulent Steel dossier and other false information to damage the Trump administration.
4. The conspiracy between Gottlieb, Pfizer, and probably the CDC to censor true information.
5. The deep state media big tech conspiracy to influence the 2020 election was real. Especially egregious were the former professional liars from the security state who lied about a true report.
Another video that discusses mis-/dis- information being pushed that associates excess death with covid vaccines.
https://youtu.be/ZoQ0YXXVLMc
This dude has what qualifications? You show absolutely no skepticism. Josh you need to do better vetting stuff. You are suffering from diarrea of the mouth. Show some respect and dig for more rigorous and meaningful stuff.
This dude has a PhD in microbiology, David.
Why are you doing this to yourself?
Yea, how many publications WilLard? You have no idea if he’s qualified and what you mention does nothing to change that.
It’s just a flesh would, David.
You asked for qualifications. You got served.
Hall Minotaurs ought to get some sleep.
Good night.
WilLard, You once again can’t spend more than a few seconds googling the guy. Try harder to make a real contribution. Generally, I’ve found that your evaluation of people’s credentials is biased and worthless.
It was only a matter of time before we started to see claims of a causal link between covid vaccines and excess death being made at Climate Etc.
I’m actually surprised it took this long. But it was inevitable.
Even at the most fundamebtal level, unsubstantiated (and cherry-picked) claims of a causal link between covid vaccinations (or vaccinations more generally) and excess deaths (i.e., excess deaths higher in highly vaccinated countries) have a problem.
In contrast to popular perception, lower-middle-income countries, not high-income countries, have suffered the most mortality-wise.
Excess death rates of all other income groups seem to have converged to a roughly similar number.
[…]
Europe & Central Asia (ECA), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and South Asia (SAR) experienced the highest cumulative excess death rates.
East Asia and the Pacific (EAP) registered the lowest values.
Interestingly, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) did worse than EAP according to the mid-point estimates. That’s despite SSA’s much-younger population structure.
https://pandem-ic.com/the-global-picture-of-excess-deaths-is-disturbing/
In fact, the rise in excess rates is appreciably greater in the poorer countries that have lower elderly shares. This result can be explained by a combination of worse epidemiological odds (higher risk of infection and higher risk of death once infected) and worse indirect effects on all-cause mortality during the pandemic.
https://pandem-ic.com/the-demographics-of-excess-mortality/
You show no respect for the people here. This topic of excess deaths is just now beginning to be explored. It’s way too early to draw firm conclusions. But discussing it is a good thing.
There are new antibody studies that indicate why repeated boosting is not a good idea and why many vaccinated and boosted people are getting covid multiple times. Did you look at the paper linked earlier? I doubt it. It takes some discipline to wade through the details. Vastly easier to link weak tea from Twitter or the media.
Well well well:
https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1612602590604279809
And the Center for combatting digital hate? I’m sure its not biased and making a lot of money off its smears.
Indeed, biases and deception, that can be attributed to monetary benefit, abound:
The data that was not presented to the experts looked at actual infections: who caught Covid-19 and who did not.
It found that 1.9% of the study participants who received the original booster became infected. Among those who got the updated bivalent vaccine – the one that scientists hoped would work better – a higher percentage, 3.2%, became infected. Both versions of the shot were found to be safe.
“I was angry to find out that there was data that was relevant to our decision that we didn’t get to see,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, a group of external advisers that helps the FDA make vaccine decisions. “Decisions that are made for the public have to be made based on all available information – not just some information, but all information.”
As does selectivity in how people apply the logic that monetary benefit makes a source untrustworthy.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/11/health/moderna-bivalent-transparency/index.html
Joshua, I am glad that people you trust like Offit are finally getting fed up with the bias. He is rightly concerned that this will be too big to cover up unlike the autism, tics and other neurological damage found correlated to infant vaccinations.
Greed is only half the malevolent force. The other half is self-preservation, i.e. good people doing nothing, keeping their head down. William Thompson should be lauded as a hero for passing the forbidden MMR data to Hooker. But even Thompson was not willing to risk sacrificing himself. “The drug companies would turn me into the next Wakefield.”
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984800
Ron,
In your hurry to peddle your antivaxx crap, you still forgot to quote the guy:
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984675
You have mentioned his name more than 35 times now.
Willard, first, most people with concerns about vaccine safety agree with quote of Thompson you posted supporting childhood vaccination. But this same guy privately admitted to Hooker that there is corruption in the CDC and that every one of his superiors acts unethically (in 2014). He excused himself from doing more than help Hooker because as they both agreed he would be Wakefielded.
Your quote is parallel to the Bjorn Stevens statement supporting the enhanced greenhouse effect so that he is not cancelled for presenting research antagonistic to the catastrophic climate change alarm. This is a required disclaimer on any finding that harms the climate lobby.
Second, I support the Covid vaccination even now for those have not had it that are over 60 or have co-morbidities like obesity. I also support most childhood vaccinations. I’m not convinced that putting industrial chemicals like aluminum hydroxide or ethyl mercury is a great idea, nor do I think giving them to 12-month olds (the recommended age for MMR) is wiser than waiting until they are 24-36 months old. We know that the younger a child is the more vulnerable their systems are to developmental disorders from environmental toxins. This is settled science.
Most of all we need a real press back. Corruption needs to be exposed and genuine whistleblowers need to be encouraged to come forth.
Ron what WilLard is doing here is classic disinformation and smearing. The first step is to lie about what the target says ( in this case you and I). The second step is to associate the target with an unpopular group (in this case “anti-vaxxers”) that have been smeared by the media/deep state/big tech collusion machine. This is exactly what Joe McCarthy did in the 1950’s. It’s despicable and unethical.
You are going to be disappointed if you think WilLard will change. It’s a pattern for over a decade. Liars who hide behind anonymity are particularly worthy of distain and censure.
WilLard of course spreads disinformation about science too. His hawkmoth interview was totally wrong and disinformation.
The interview was not about the hawkmoth effect, Hall Minotaur. Here is the entry:
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/the-hawkmoth-effect/
If your search history was not occupied by the Newscorp echo chamber or did not have to fight your computer to light it on, you could have found it in a New York minute.
This compounds the earlier failure to quote Taibbi, who has clearly aroused as much envy as fear and loathing at Vanity Fair :
” In its time The Exile was arguably the most abusive, defamatory, un-evenhanded, and crassest publication in Russia, and Ames and his staff had paid for that fact, or at least for the fact that they were arrogant reprobates, many times before.
Columnist Edward Limonov, the 66-year-old political provocateur in whom the Federal Service officials were particularly interested, filed his copy from prison for two years after being convicted of possessing arms, which he admits he intended to smuggle into Kazakhstan in an effort to incite a coup there. Writer Kevin McElwee, an American expatriate, had both legs broken when he was torn from the side of a building he was scaling to escape an angry mob of Muscovites, an incident that had nothing to do with anything he’d written—McElwee, *The Exile’*s film reviewer, was just a rambunctious drunk.
On another occasion, a deranged and slighted man sent a letter promising to kill the “frat boy” Ames. Ames in turn published an editorial urging the loon to instead off his co-editor, Matt Taibbi. True, the many death threats Ames received took less of a physical toll on him than loading up on Viagra and attempting to bed nine Moscow prostitutes in nine hours, which he wrote about to commemorate *The Exile’*s ninth anniversary, but that was only because Ames approached the assignment with a rigor befitting a Consumer Reports exposé—“There really was no other way to tell whether these drugs actually worked,” he recalls with sincerity and audible exhaustion.
But far more dangerous in Putin’s Russia was *The Exile’*s serious journalism. By the time it was shuttered, the paper had published damning views of Russian life through three administrations, two wars, and a stock-market crash, ever since the freezing February night in 1997 when, penniless and infuriatingly sober, Ames had put out the first issue in a torrent of outrage at the sharpies and frauds who insisted that post-Communist Russia was a new democratic paradise, at the liars in the Kremlin, the dreamers in Washington, the academic careerists, Wall Street, the World Bank, the idiots in the press who’d never hired him—at pretty much everyone save Ames himself.
Never mind that he and Taibbi would prove the hardest-partying Moscow media celebrities of their time, never mind that they wouldn’t just expose the place’s hedonism but come to embody it—Ames was pissed off. He wasn’t George Plimpton chasing Hemingway’s Sad Young Men as part of some romantic lost generation. He was living in the unromantic rubble of a lost empire.’
Definitely an example to the youth of both nations
This fits nicely with the antibody study that shows that boosters can actually cause changes in the immune system that make you more susceptible to covid. This would show that repeated boosters are prolonging the covid pandemic. The CDC is lying to us about this.
I wouldnt say the CDC is lying – though there are indications that the body’s normal immune systems is ignoring the multiple boosters and is inhibiting a more robust immune response.
Ken roche over at healthy skeptic has indicated that the body’s immune system no longer considers covid to be a serious threat and as such the body immune system having limited ability to protect against all threats, treats covid as minor threat and thus no longer trys to mount major immune defense against covid. similar to the body no longer developing strong immunity against the common cold.
Soewhat similar to the body’s subsequent reaction to the 1918 spanish flu
apologies if I over simplified the explanation.
Maybe we should skip the CDC and go with the FDA this time?
If you haven’t noticed the worst avian flu outbreak in decades is raging around the world (see egg prices). This would not be the first time of bird flu jumping to humans and other species. Do you think we are ready to handle another pandemic? I don’t and I still wear a mask when I’m indoors with people I don’t know.
H5N6 has jumped species, again.
https://www.contagionlive.com/view/hong-kong-confirms-human-case-of-avian-flu
The case was confirmed in a 54-year-old man, who became symptomatic on November 2, 2022, and was admitted for treatment on November 5, 2022. The man resided in Changsha, Hunan (Mainland China), and was in critical condition at the time he was admitted.
Zoonosis is common for people that work around animals. It takes a lot for a virus to gain the ability to jump species and then also be able to spread within that species. With good contract tracing like with SARS1 the new virus should be able to be extinguished.
dpy: IIRC only 15% of Americans have gotten COVID boosters. How can they be “prolonging” the pandemic for the other 85% when their level of neutralizing antibodies was increased by their last booster?
According to a recent article, the boosted antibodies contain more IgG class antibodies, but “neutralizing” means they protect against viral entry in cell culture. Class may be important in the case of non-neutralizing antibodies, which need to work with T-cells to kill infected cells.
So many wild hypotheses, and no publishable evidence. Remember, compared with the highly boosted, the less boosted or vaccinated are young, less likely to have infection confirmed by PCR, and more likely to have acquired resistance from infections. Comparing these very different groups tells us nothing about the benefits of a booster.
If repeated boosting were “prolonging” the pandemic, why aren’t the unvaccinated who repeatedly get infected doing the same? They are the ones with an infectious disease they can transmit to others!?
Frank, I believe DPY was referring to the studies that are indicating that boosting is dulling T-cell response. The immune system, as you know, is crazy complex. Desensitization can happen from the same antigen’s introduced at a different balance of Immunoglobulins (IgA, IgG, IgM) that stimulate immunity at an earlier time.
Frank, There is plenty of evidence. The Swedish study from which you quoted the author’s misleading summary of their data shows that after 9 months the vaccinated are more likely to get infected. The antibody study I referred to above shows that boosting causes a dramatic increase in IG4 antibodies that are typically used by the body to tamp down the immune response. I linked it above. The authors say that perhaps we need to rethink the timing of any boosters we recommend.
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/under-white-house-pressure-facebook?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=279400&post_id=96189545&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email
Clear evidence that Facebook was censoring true information about covid vaccinations under pressure from the White House. More evidence Frank that you should not trust social media or as Ron points out above the legacy media either. They are actively hiding the truth from sus.
In addition to a selective application of “guilt by monetary benefit,” another interesting bias is when someone persists in misunderstanding others’ views, and foist their own constructed views upon them, despite being repeatedly corrected.
> people you trust like Offit..
Hard to imagine a better example of motivated reasoning (and bad faith engagement). Just another day at Climate Etc.
Since you had provided a link to Offit’s Dec `22 interview regarding his position on booster efficacy trials I guess I jumped to the conclusion that you thought he was a trusted authority on that.
It was an honest mistake. So, are you saying you don’t trust Offit as a vaccine authority? Or, are you saying I shouldn’t have made the assumption, even though it was correct and reasonable, because anyone outside your tribe should be super careful of your sensitivities? I could see that, but we would need to reciprocate. That would tie both of our hands. Practicing good faith as well as assuming good faith are much better alternatives, IMO.
Ron >
> It was an honest mistake.
It was a mistake you make over and over and over. And keep trying to blame on me. That’s why I’ve given up on you. Until/when you show some accountability
I forgot when I wrote this
I can’t think of any good reason for you to have presumed that I would be interested in hearing your alternative theory of why I do not support Trump, when I have already explained why I no longer support Trump. I don’t know that I lost my temper (I don’t think I did, but whatever) however, it is irritating to have somebody ignore an honest explanation and use their ‘mind reading’ skills to correct someone about what their actual decision making process involved. I think you meant for this to be irritating and offensive, honestly.
Oh, wait. I DIDN’T write that. Well, must have been some librul incapable independent thought.
You know, only a librul incapable of independent thought could have thought your engagement checked off a list of bad faith attributes.
Right Ron?
This was good:
I don’t want to believe that and feel that there is an innate thirst for truth and I am not unique in seeking it. I think my main problem is that I hear people out that make extraordinary claims. I have an open mind and don’t fear my brains falling out.
I guess that must have been something you wrote in an exchange on your views in vaccines with a bunch o’ closed-minded, independent thought incapable libruls
Right, Ron
Too bad they had trouble understanding that their negative judgment of your views in vaccines was ’cause, unlike them, you’re so open-minded.
Maybe if the had more humility like you do they could get there?
Sorry -forgot to make it clear that here
I don’t want to believe that and feel that there is an innate thirst for truth and I am not unique in seeking it. I think my main problem is that I hear people out that make extraordinary claims. I have an open mind and don’t fear my brains falling out.
I was quoting you, explaining why you have a different view on vaccines than others. Must have been a bunch o’ libruls you were talking to. Of course.they prolly weren’t independent thinkers enough to understand.
Just to be clear, Joshua, I did not write that quote either. And I could not find it on this blog. So you are reaching way back into your dossier and got disorganized apparently.
Also, your quote as it reads seems to be fair, if not argumentative. It’s a gray area as to how super careful one must be not to be accused of misrepresenting someone’s views. But if you are going to attack for it you should also clarify your views or risk being seen as lacking in good faith.
Joshua, you are really reaching. Of course, the dialogue you are snipping pieces can’t be liberals because liberals today are not allowed to disagree with one another for fear of being cast out into the heartland. They would be accused of creating chaos.
> Joshua, you are really reaching
Lol.
Quoiting YOU, and someone else other than me speaking to the exact same type of bad faith engagement as I described, is “really reaching.”
Got it.
Don’t change. Ron. You’re perfect as you are.
(actually, It would be better if you showed some accountability and we could get on with a good faith discussion. But short of that happening, please don’t change.)
Joshua, I am trying to gather a point from your long comments and I don’t want to be accused of intentionally not understanding.
Your point seems to be that I deserved Willard’s misrepresented my views on vaccine safety by slurring me because it’s “a both sides thing,” just like my assuming that you trust Paul Offit’s authority on vaccines just because he is likely the foremost establishment authority on vaccines. NPR often interviews him often on vaccines and the evils of anti-vaxx misinformation. And you brought his interview on boosting into the conversation by linking to it, but you never specifically said the words: “I trust Paul Offit on vaccines.” So you are saying I was way out of bounds to assume it. Is that right? Is that what you are saying? I don’t want to get it all wrong again.
Ron,
However hard you might try to drape your antivaxx stance behind some quest for Truth, your JAQing off is too obvious. Same for your fight for ultimate freedom. If you start at the level 5 of the Contrarian Matrix:
https://contrarianmatrix.wordpress.com/we-won/
there is no amount of concerns you can raise that will hide your conspiracy ideation.
Is that clearer this time, or you will be playing dumb for another week?
You read me like a book, Willard.
> I don’t want to be accused of intentionally not understanding.
>> NPR often interviews him often on vaccines..
>>> [extending your style] And you’re a librul. And since NPR interviews him and you’re librul I can just assume that you “trust” him on vaccines and then characterize your views as based on a non-independently minded trust, and I can then use that to characterize libruls (as a class) as not independent-minded. See – I never have to venture outside my own head to I desfsmd the world. And whatever I see lines up just perfectly!!
And the circular resoning and non-falsifiable reasoning goes on and on to confirm that my views are right.
Don’t consider the problem, when non-liberals point out your reliance on bad faith exchange, and foisting views on people they don’t have, and creatjng a banal self-serving (and grandiose) dichotomy to prove that you’re views are arrived at because of your glorious open-mindedness. Just switch up on the nature of the self-serving dichotomy of you run into any trouble at all.
Don’t change that Ron.
It would spoil your fun.
Don’t do it.
I guess this means we can’t go in together on a beach house this summer, snap.
How are you holding up, Ron?
> I guess this means we can’t go in together on a beach house this summer,
Just take your conic books when you go. That way you won’t have to change your fantasies about what I believe or don’t believe by actually considering what I say.
Or don’t even bother with the comic books. Just live in your fantasy world with boogeyman libruls.
Joshua, you linked to Offit as a trusted authority on Covid boosting. No?
Ron –
The reason why you’re confused about my views (or at least pretend to be) is because you make up my views, based on cartoonish stereotypes you carry around in your head, and try to foist them on to me. And when I say things that aren’t aligned with your fantasies, you get confused.
It’s not a pattern that’s unique to you. It’s a rather commonplace phenomenon. But it’s not a basis for good faith exchange. You’ve had many opportunities to engage differently. I provided those examples to make it clear the poor faith exchange pattern isn’t because you’re engaging with me, or with a librul.
It’s not too late to course correct. It starts with accountability. And accountability starts with not blaming me for your failures.
Regarding masks:
Is there any other randomized control trial besides this one?
( https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817 )
Regarding Offit:
Offit was the lone vote against the bivalent booster and said he was not getting anymore boosters for himself since he had already had COVID?
One of Offit’s rationales was the quick incubation period of COVID, which was ~3 days at the time of his vote and as I understand it, is down to ~1 day with latest variants. This means vax will not stop infection nor transmission.
Fortunately, evolution of the virus has meant reduced virulence, though ‘increased fusegenicity’ and alternative receptor binding would throw us a curve.
[HALL MINOTAUR] The Atlantic is garbage
[JUDY] https://twitter.com/curryja/status/1613230859750109184
Willard –
You don’t understand. Prolly ’cause you’re a librul and not capable of independent thought.
If you weren’t a librul you’d understand that it’s always garbage. Except when it isn’t.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Same is true of you WilLard.
‘Vaxxing’ lumps together many issues.
One reason that fueled Offit’s opposition to continued boosters is that the incubation period of COVID is brief and getting briefer.
Childhood immunizations can ‘immunize’ because the diseases are relatively slow.
Polio, measles, smallpox, chickenpox, rubella, all have incubation periods on the order of 10 days or longer.
When the pathogen is slower than the human immune response, vax makes sense.
https://www.virology.ws/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screenshot-2014-10-07-13.18.17.png
COVID was around 3.5 days, but the latest variants are reportedly around 1 day. That’s too fast for t-cell response.
The bivalent vaccine booster outperforms
A review of the cumulative body of evidence
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/the-bivalent-vaccine-booster-outperforms
This link uses the Israeli data but is deceptively only quoting the central estimate without including the wide confidence interval. It’s typical of the motivated reasoning regarding covid.
Both of these are retrospective, but…
Cases? – negative efficacy:
“Risk of COVID-19 increased with time since the most recent prior COVID-19 episode and with the number of vaccine doses previously received.”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.17.22283625v1.full.pdf
Deaths? – getting close to percent vaxxed – no effect:
“Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/23/vaccinated-people-now-make-up-majority-covid-deaths/
Shedding obesity helps immune response – including to vaccines – so that should be the focus. But it’s difficult and means people have to actually do something for themselves.
Retrospective population-level epidemiological data seems to me to be insufficient to determine “negative efficacy.” That said, from completely non-expert eyes there do seem to be plausible theories for a causal mechanism and so these kinds of data, seems to me, can’t just be flatly dismissed.
But this is a fast-moving situation and confounding variables abound, and so proceeding with caution is certainly warranted and longer term we can attain enough analyses from different sources to gain a clearer picture.
Offit argues for holding off on boosters among those not at higher levels of risk. Ses reasonable to me. Topol argues that the balance of evidence warrants a more broad-scale administration of boosters. Seems reasonable to me.
I decided not to get the bi-valent booster since the benefit seems marginal and since I’m a candidate for Paxlovid. But I’m not at all sure that in the end getting one wouldn’t have been the better choice.
It’s unfortunate that there are a lot of people who cherry-pick evidence to confirm identity-oriented biases.
> Deaths? – getting close to percent vaxxed – no effect:
That, of course, is ridiculous, unless you have case-controlled data that account for the base rate issue.
That’s not to say that the issue of vaccinated people dying doesn’t have very important public health implications. Of course it does!
But to go to “no effect” from non-stratified data is vapid and likely counterproductive.
> no effect:
It’s unfortunate people say stuff like “no effect” without data stratified to assess base rate, confounding variables, etc.
Interesting when people with background and experience in scientific analysis do so.
My n=1, COVID positive a month after boosting.
The vast majority of my acquaintances had a similar experience of boosted and COVID positive.
Those that are still clinging to the pharma propaganda are the ones that didn’t get COVID.
Evidently, around 10% of the population is genetically immune, so there’s a certain amount of noise in the numbers.
But being COVID positive probably makes future vaccination pointless. That and the fact that, like colds, the rapid incubation of COVID means it’s inevitable to get it, unless one won the genetic lottery.
The kind of cr@p you get when you ignore foundations kid science.
https://twitter.com/PeterSweden7/status/1613600209086386176?t=2xJkyaBcqWL3WP783N5UKA&s=19
TE is correct Josh. Prior infection provides superior and longer lasting immunity than vaccination. See the paper above on the antibody reaction to boosting and how it’s a warning flag
Josh – the table in bullet point 4 – hospitalization rates per 100k for the unvaccinated vs vaccinated is of dubious accuracy.
The average weekly death rate for the unvaxed 65+ age group in the Nov2020-Jan 2021 wave was approximately 50 per week.
The reported average weekly death rate for the 65+ unvaxed age group during the nov 2021- jan 2022 wave ranged between 150-250 per week depending on which state. the is a 3x -5x increase. An increase in the average weekly death rate of any magnitude is implausible especially considering that the omicron variant was less lethal,. thus an increase of 3x is pure data error.
The error is caused by a combination of coding vaxed individuals as unvaxed in the data base and understating the size of the unvaxed population. Due to the small size of the over 65 unvaxed population, small errors can translate into huge per capita differences.
I realize that several states and countries show similar results in their data base, but that size error should be showing serious red flags
https://healthy-skeptic.com/2023/01/11/breakthrough-events-age-65-and-over-2/
Josh –
Above is a link to the MN data
Note that the per capita death rate for the vax & boosted vs the unvaxed is nearly the same since feb 2022 once the correct denominator is used.
The second point is that there are lot of misleading studies due to data base errors that would normally be caught with a basic level of due diligence.
So wonderful:
https://gizmodo.com/twitter-bans-dc-bus-system-but-brings-back-ron-watkins-1849971827
Glad to see that Musk is opening up Twitter for free speech. Are Government agencies allowed as participants? It would seem to be against the TOS.
This just came to my attention and it is important to read it and come to terms with the new secular clericy that views its role in the same way the priesthood during the Middle Ages.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/stanford-failed-academic-freedom-test
We live in an age when a high public health bureaucrat can, without irony, announce to the world that if you criticize him, you are not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing “the science” itself. The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.
120000 people watch Judith on rumble after being banned on you tube
https://reclaimthenet.org/heartland-institute-censored-by-youtube/
The best of all possible worlds:
Perhaps there would be more credibility given to federal charges if both parties were for law and order. The FBI and DoJ are increasingly seen as being as legitimate as FSB and CCP. Case in point: the new special counsel assigned by Garland to investigate Biden’s 6-year-old home stashes of classified documents was part of the Steele dossier – Russia hoax team.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/01/12/mollie_hemingway_our_department_of_justice_has_been_politicized_to_go_after_political_opponents_and_protect_allies.html
If our Freedom Fighters had any integrity, they would drop the “But they started it”. Case in point (h/t Freedom Ron):
https://www.thedailybeast.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-says-she-couldve-led-a-better-armed-insurrection-on-jan-6
You got to hand it to Freedom Fighters, they got an ethos.
I think her point it that the people on the left are so baited up in their radicalism they routinely fall for intentionally misinterpreted events to make dishonest prosecutions and justifications for it.
Her point is well taken. Willie, your bothsiderism and distractions are not winning anyone over. The FBI has been turned into a domestic intelligence agency that spies on Americans and targets them for investigation even when there is no evidence of a crime. They have constructed an entire narrative around the white supremicist extremism theme. You might get a VW bus full of them on a good day.
I applaud the bluntness of the words you put into Marjorie’s mouth, Ron.
Since a little fantasy of violence is good for the Freedom Fighters esprit de corps, it might be important to make sure that your Scandinavian counterparts get their daily dose of it:
https://expo.se/2023/01/elon-musk-funded-nonprofit-run-mit-professor-offered-finance-swedish-pro-nazi-group
Now that Elon saved money by “refusing” to pay his rent in Singapore, he could ratchet up his freeze peach initiatives.
Ron: what is a “dishonest prosecution”? Don’t both sides get to present their evidence? Aren’t some of the judges Trump appointees who are deeply concerned that that Trump supporters are being treated more harshly than BLM demonstrators. Haven’t all judges involved agreed to similar punishment for similar offenses? Isn’t the vast majority of the evidence against the J6 defendants video and social media posts supporting Stop the Steal? Aren’t many of the defendants affluent citizens who traveled to DC who can afford a vigorous defense? Doesn’t conviction in a jury trial require a unanimous jury to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? The answer to all these questions is yes.
I won’t say that there aren’t some dubious prosecution. In this case, Trump appointed judges and competent defense attorneys have leveled the playing field. Many admitted they entered the Capitol intending to disrupt a federal proceeding (a federal crime) certifying Electoral Votes and the peaceful transfer of power. The real miscarriage of justice will occur if these people are pardoned for political reasons.
The top leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have been or are being tried for sedition. Serious trials for serious crimes. The jury has convicted some defendants of some, ut. ot all, charges. Next the prosecutors will see if cooperating defendants will allow them to charge Roger Stone (a member of the Proud Boys) or others closer to Trump. Seems unlikely at the moment. Prosecutors may still be able to convict Trump for conspiracy in the submitting of fraudulent Electoral Votes, for conspiring with Eastman to convince Pence to reject Electoral Votes and conspiring with a rouge DoJ attorney to present false claim of fraud to state legislatures.
Frank,
Freedom Ron only means he has no idea how the SEC works.
Frank, I’m not sure if you are used to the rough and tumble of American politics. From 2000 Dems have claimed every election they lost was stolen and in many cases there were groups of politicians conspiring to try to overturn them. One manifestation of this was voting against certification as Jamie Raskin did for example in 2016. One manifestation of the corrupt DOJ/FBI is attempts to criminalize normal politics.
Of course, you didn’t respond to the overwhelming evidence of a deep state big tech corporate media conspiracy to interfere in the 2020 election and after that to impose a quite restrictive censorship regime that is clearly illegal. And yet you were concerned about inconsequential “Russian interference” in 2016. As I said before, this myth was generated by a conspiracy between Clinton operatives, the deep state (at least 6 FBI personnel were fired for misconduct here), and the media to cripple Trump’s presidency. So why aren’t you hopping mad at the Authoritarian threat to our democracy?
The other evidence here is the FBI narrative that “white supremecists” are the main domestic terrorism threat. Many whistleblowers have come forward who say the FBI is transferring Jan. 6 cases to offices all over the country to support the lie that this is happening everywhere. They say they don’t see a lot of evidence this is much of a threat. They also say the pattern of the use of swat teams on “enemies of the state” is something that has never happened before. Where is the SWAT team to raid Biden’s home or to arrest Hunter Biden, who is a career criminal? It is very dangerous to have a double standard of justice.
Frank, WordPress has blocked me 3 times from replying.
No, I don’t think there is equal justice or any semblance of truth coming out of the US government. Our last hope lies with the GOP oversight to expose it and get the word out around the legacy media’s information wall.
Biden – Fetterman ’24!
It’s a no-brainer!
bigterguy | January 16, 2023 at 4:26 pm | Reply
Biden – Fetterman ’24!
It’s a no-brainer!
that deserves a serious down vote
Two papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research calculate the death toll of the lockdown policies in the US at 97,000 per year, spread evenly among all age grouped except children. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30104 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00469580221139016
Here is today’s Washington Times:
Just looked at summary of first study but it looks to me like spin and not science.
Surely sophisticated analysts know that it’s not scientific to just make counterfactual assumptions and build science on top of them. It’s as fundamental as “correlation doesn’t mean causation” (I.e., a correlation of NPIs and “non-covid excess deaths” doesn’t simplistically translate into “lockdown deaths”) – particularly without addressing counterfactual assumptions about what might have happened had there been no NPIs.
https://jech.bmj.com/content/75/11/1031
The same rules should apply to covid studies as one should expect from research into climate change.
Not to day that cost/benefit of policies SHOULDN’T be done. They’re critically important – and absolutely should be done. But counterfactual assumptions should be carefully and explicitly addressed. When they aren’t, it’s a sign of cognitive biases.
J,
Casey is a Chicago schoolboy and Rob is a trader:
https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/157
So yeah, ou can smell the fight for freedom.
Speaking of which, please light a candle for Mt Baker Proud Boys co-founder, Aaron Laigaie, whom just died from Covid. He will always be remember for having said:
https://twitter.com/MtBakerBoy/status/1603585547242704896
His fate provides a new meaning to cancel culture.
No Josh, It’s analyzing public health data. Clearly this data, excess mortality, is the best measure of what “worked” or what countries did “better.”
After all your Sweden bashing over the last year running to thousands of comments and phony citations of misleading statistics such as covid “death” counts and case numbers, you should appreciate some real analysis.
I doubt if there are other explanations for the excess deaths. Almost by definition, they must be due to different policy responses. The second source goes into details showing that drug overdose deaths rose along with homicides. Also diabetes and cancer. These are all plausibly explained by social isolation and fear of going to the doctor for early diagnosis or treatment.
No doubt our Hall Minotaur noticed:
For more on this Very Objective initiative:
https://www.uchicago.edu/education-and-research/center/the-initiative-on-enabling-choice-and-competition-in-healthcare
If you can’t attack the conclusions, you smear the authors. That’s fallacious and a bad faith way of obfuscation.
Our Hall Minotaur commits a fallacy, but which one?
Ah, yes – the post hoc fallacy.
Tsk tsk tsk.
Willard –
It’s fascinating to see scientific sophisticates ignore obviously relevant factors (such as when and where NPIs were implemented and lifted/i>) as they isolate the impact of NPIs on causingan increase in excess deaths.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/opinion/covid-pandemic-history.amp.html
Joshua | January 18, 2023 at 8:56 am |
Willard –
It’s fascinating to see scientific sophisticates ignore obviously relevant factors (such as when and where NPIs were implemented and lifted/i>) as they isolate the impact of NPIs on causingan increase in excess deaths.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/04/opinion/covid-pandemic-history.amp.html
Josh – links to a partisan opinion piece printed in a partisan newspaper which aligns with his partisan beliefs to demonstrate that everyone who doesnt agree with his biased perceptions is infact biased.
Adhominumadhominumadhominumadhipominum. What is our Hall Minotaur waiting for?
Joe –
Tread lightly, or you might be criticized for “smearing.”
This babe is a pharma employee and knows nothing about epidemology or practicing medicine.
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984984
And Joe –
It might be interesting to read where you think the author was wrong, if you’re so inclined.
Joshie’s repsonse _Joshua | January 18, 2023 at 11:17 am |
“And Joe –
It might be interesting to read where you think the author was wrong, if you’re so inclined.”
Josh – My point stands – David Wallace-wells has a long history of partisan misrepresentation of facts and science in numerous fields of science. Same issue through out his opinion piece.
Josh – You need to seriously consider discarding your tunnel vision partisan viewpoint of science and developing objective analytical skills.
My point remains –
Yes Joe, Ron and I refer to Josh and WilLard as beavus and butthead. They perfectly instantiate that persona.
Joe –
I’m sure that you only consider opinions that reflect no bias, and of course there’s a 99.9% chance I’m not capable of seeing bias in opinions that you disagee with…
But it might still be interesting to read your comments on the specifics in how DWW’s piece is in error.
Josh – read any of David wallace wells articles. They are filled with partisan mispresentations.
Your inability to recognize those mispresentations says a lot about your objective critical thinking skills. Period
until you display some objectivity, there is no reason to continue this conversation.
Joe –
I don’t take anything DWW says as gospel. I don’t assume anything he says is accurate. It’s not entirely dissimilar to my view that not all of Judith’s opinions, nor all of your opinions are inaccurate. But he does discuss evidence that’s relevant to discussions that have been ongoing here related to COVID.
If you change your mind and decide to give your opinion on the evidence he discusses, or his opinions on what it signifies, it might be interesting for me to read.
Personally, I sometimes find value in reading the opinions of people I generally disagree with, or whom I think offer biased interpretations as a rule. Sometimrs n hindsight., I decide it was a waste of time, although often even if I don’t change my perspective I find it a worthwhile exercise – especially sometimes as a reference point in ongoing discussions. .
Anyway, obviously it’s clearly up to you. If you find more value in rejecting his opinions out of hand, even o the point of hsvibg no interest in even reading his discussion of the evidence and then sharing with me your opinion on where he misinterpreted it – so be it. Oftentimes you do take the time to present to me your interpretations of evidence but I guess this is not such a case.
Joshua, can you imagine a scientific and journalistic protocol requiring the investigator or reporter to be assigned a skeptic of their hypothesis from among a pool of bidders for that purpose? The skeptics would be required to be given 1/3 the article space for their rebuttal. Would this impede information flow or enhance. Would it enhance or retard readership? I am looking for an honest rebuttal. Just throwing ideas out there.
Ron –
As a general paradigm, I think it might being some benefit. I’m sure there are some circumstances where it would being no benefit. I can imagine that in some situations there is a down side potential of “spreading misinformation.”. So it’s hard for me to give a generalizeable opinion on it as a paradigm but in balance I think it would be a net positive.
There’s some discussion of only publishing studies that have replicated. Again, I can see where that might provide no benefit or result in down side outcomes (truly informative replication studies are extremely difficult to conduct). But in balance is say it’s a good idea.
Perhaps better would be to have “teams” compromising analysists with conflicting “priors” collaborate on research would be a good paradigm.
But the bigger issue, imo, is the ideologically-based motivated reasoning component. I don’t know how much any particular paradigm can mitigate the impact of that.
Josh, The problem is that in your case, detecting “motivated reasoning” requires mind reading which is unethical. Ron offers a good proposal. That is how election ballot pamphlets are written.
BTW, The New York Times is a very biased source and it peddles disinformation constantly for example about the Russian “interference” in our elections, Russian collusion, and the Biden laptop. They won a Pulitzer prize I believe for their lies about Russian collusion.
“Perhaps better would be to have “teams” compromising analysists with conflicting “priors” collaborate on research would be a good paradigm.”
Yes. This was the red team-blue team concept. I think that is appropriate for major studies. Each would collect data separately or in cooperation but produce an independent paper on an identical deadline. Then each could be afforded the opportunity to analyze the other’s paper and add a rebuttal section.
In smaller single author projects or news editorial it would just be the rebuttal section.
“But the bigger issue, imo, is the ideologically-based motivated reasoning component. I don’t know how much any particular paradigm can mitigate the impact of that.”
Everyone realizes that without true consensus the two non-optimal choices are: accept stalemate or coerce the other side. The potential for persuasion only comes from trusted data and trusted analysis, which must come from trusted investigators.
Eventually the competition would shift from believers and skeptics to a competition between effective outcomes versus useless ones. Hopefully. Thoughts?
Ron –
> Eventually the competition would shift from believers and skeptics to a competition between effective outcomes versus useless ones. Hopefully. Thoughts?
I’m a believer in stakeholder dialog where people are invested in finding synergies via a process of distinguishing between positions and interests, and looking for outcomes that support. shared interests. That requires good faith and basically a commitment that you don’t walk away until something approaching a consensus is reached. Battling over positions is zero sum, finding shared interests is non-zero sum.
There are plenty of examples where that process (participatory democracy) have worked for policy development. “Experts” can contribute to that process within a non-hierarchical structure, where they are effectively just another stakeholder.
That mechanism can help control for the motivated reasoning (or dishonest advocacy) in the evidence presented. Even better would be whereby the evidence presented was based on consensus-building among researchers to clarify shared-definition and outline points of agreement and points of disagreement. Replication studies could be a part of that.
Ron –
> Eventually the competition would shift from believers and skeptics to a competition between effective outcomes versus useless ones. Hopefully. Thoughts?
I’m a believer in stakeholder dialog where people are invested in finding synergies via a process of distinguishing between positions and interests, and looking for outcomes that support. shared interests. That requires good faith and basically a commitment that you don’t walk away until something approaching a consensus is reached. Battling over positions is zero sum, finding shared interests is non-zero sum.
.
There are plenty of examples where that process (participatory democracy) have worked for policy development. “Experts” can contribute to that process within a non-hierarchical structure, where they are effectively just another stakeholder.
That mechanism can help control for the motivated reasoning (or dishonest advocacy) in the evidence presented. Even better would be whereby the evidence presented was based on consensus-building among researchers to clarify shared-definition and outline points of agreement and points of disagreement. Replication studies could be a part of that.
There are plenty of examples where that process (participatory democracy) have worked for policy development. “Experts” can contribute to that process within a non-hierarchical structure, where they are effectively just another stakeholder.
.
Even better would be where the evidence presented was based on consensus-building among researchers to clarify shared-definition and outline points of agreement and points of disagreement. Replication studies could be a part of that.
“I’m a believer in stakeholder dialog where people are invested in finding synergies via a process of distinguishing between positions and interests, and looking for outcomes that support shared interests.”
Every citizen is a stakeholder in a representative democracy when it comes to national or international issues. Families, friends and community are diverse enough that everyone has a stake in education, public health, transportation, economy and national security. Agreed?
In order for a representative democracy to work the citizen stakeholders need to have pertinent and trustworthy information regarding the issues and the representatives they are supporting or opposing.
Trust is earned slowly over time by a record of honesty and honoring rules and commitments. The press, aided by citizen reporting, is essential for the public to make informed opinions. The very basis of these opinions start with factual assumptions. Unbiased science is critical for the foundation of debate.
Today’s press is mainly supported by exposing enemies and creating outrage, more than supporting thoughtful dialogue. Agreed?
The key is making it profitable to produce unbiased information that can be universally trusted.
“That requires good faith and basically a commitment that you don’t walk away until something approaching a consensus is reached.”
A great many people are happy to vote along with whomever they trust that understands the issues. For those at the table battling ideas and weightings of value on their behalf, their good faith and commitment to preserving it would be greatly enhanced by removing the club of power from the table. That needs to be done by an agreement to de-politicize the press, government agencies and government science.
“Battling over positions is zero sum, finding shared interests is non-zero sum.”
Yes. If everyone can agree that the western world enlightenment is ill that is the first step to getting well. Unless one is committed to persuasion then one is fighting over a zero sum. A non-zero sum economic engine of advancement, peace, health and security is reached by persuasion. That is built by trust, which is built by honesty and openness, which is built by the willingness to air all sides of thought in the open, without repercussions beyond the credit of having one or lost the consensus.
When a court hearing is given after an investigation that is subject to cross-examination and expert testimony, and a jury makes its verdict, the public will accept it if they trust the process was fair. If it would work there it should work on every issue put on trial with the same principles.
The problem here Josh is that you are centered on a vague “process” that you haven’t really defined rather than the truth. Truth is best arrived at using a somewhat adversarial process as used to happen in some science and in some cases happened between the media and the government (in the distant past unfortunately).
The problem here is that this process requires more honesty and self-reflection than political actors can muster. I dare say based on your history here of distorting what others say, it is also beyond your capability to comment on.
At Ron defined clearly what his process was. It’s a version of what I mentioned above.
“Truth” can be messy but usually it is obscured by a dense fog of obfuscation and confusion. Sometimes the truth is that we will never know the absolute “correct answer” because it doesn’t exist. But the quest for truth is vastly nobler than the search for “absence of bias or motivated reasoning” something which you cannot ethically access anyway.
Ron –
> Yes. If everyone can agree that the western world enlightenment is ill that is the first step to getting well.
So we can advance as long as everyone agrees with your world view? Related to that, I’ve asked you many times to elucidate when you start outlining this downward trajectory and what metric you’re using. I’ve also told you more than once in my view your repeated non answer is consistent with non good faith engagement.
Anyway, there’s plenty of instances of non-zero engagements without necessitating an embrace of he collapses of the enlightenment.
> Unless one is committed to persuasion then one is fighting over a zero sum.
Here (and in what follows) are you repeating back what I said in agreement? I described a process of persuasion.
“So we can advance as long as everyone agrees with your world view?”
Not at all. We can advance when most everyone can consent that the process for seeking truth was fair. There is a built in natural bias to what it fair and equitable. That can be overcome by a process. That is what we attempt in the courts with rules of evidence and procedure. Not everyone needs to like the outcome but they must believe that it was the best genuine attempt at truth and justice.
Court processes have evolved toward this end. Before the 1934 Lindbergh kidnapping trial there was no rule that the prosecution had to supply the defense any exculpatory evidence. It was assumed that the state would do so. They were wrong to be that trusting. Having legal penalties for withholding such evidence or cherry picking evidence also makes people trust the system more. Justice progressed but DNA technology revealed a great number of people that were wrongly convicted of murder. So the process is still being refined.
We need to have the same attitude with the scientific process and update it with the tools of information technology of the 21st century.
Josh and WilLard, You of course didn’t respond to the fact that all cause excess mortality is a much more reliable statistic than the cases and “covid deaths” that you Josh trafficed in for years here in thousands of comments.
The fact Josh that you post a you tube video that is a self-parody shows that you can’t distinguish reliable sources from propaganda. You really discredit yourself and everyone here can see it.
David,
Why are trying to bait me?
I am quite sure you do not want that.
If we believe what our Hall Minotaur said, that is.
Should we?
I will leave Covidball to Frank, if you do not mind.
As a token of appreciation:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/06/cassidy-hutchinson-january-6-hearing-trump-republicans-covering-up-greatest-scandal-in-u-s-history.html
Was Aaron Laigaie an excess death?
WilLard, It’s you who is baiting me with your totally irrelevant deflection to some BS about the “insurrection.” As a Canadian, perhaps you like authoritarianism. You are a veteran obfuscator and game player. Why do you think anyone reading this will give your droppings any credance?
And just in case you thought the vast conspiracy to violate our first amendment rights only involved Google. Or if you foolishly believe the media narrative that this is not anything new, it is now obvious that Facebook was basically serving as the CDC’s state run media concerning covid.
https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-police/
Frank might be particularly interested in this as it is likely science itself was jawboned by the CDC into denying various “theories” such as the lab leak theory.
On top of all that, the source sounds like it is unearthing a conspiracy theory, perhaps even a vast woke conspiracy theory. But who cares. Authorities of all stripes try to influence moderation. That’s normal politics and a giant nothingburger. So why did our Hall Minotaur post it? Perhaps this normal political activity should be banned in the new Authoritarian state our Hall Minotaur has never said he opposes. He’s not acknowledged the flood of sources proving this state is here. Only a deeply bad faith actor would do that.
Before reading the op ed expecting it to be blasting the Dem’s corruption and routine violations of the constitution but it instead it was the most balanced article in recent memory. It was extremely well-researched and covered every nuance fairly.
Talking about “conspiracy theories,” I would say the definition would be it was imagining a collusion of nefarious actors without doing research that would find sensible motivations.
Willard, I could not find a sentence in your comment that was not some devious speculation about things you admit no investigation of. What is your definition of “conspiracy theory.”
Which op-Ed, Freedom Ron?
Before I play Socrates with you, please define what you mean by definition.
“Which op ed?”
https://reason.com/2023/01/19/how-the-cdc-became-the-speech-police/
“What do you mean by definition?”
Perhaps you could propose the psychological underpinnings of the term “conspiracy theory” followed by the logical fallacies most commonly used to create the delusion. Maybe you could present an example of what you consider a commonly believed conspiracy theory from the recent past that is now illuminated to even former believers as such. And with that example diagram your claimed underpinnings that allowed it.
“Before I play Socrates with you…”
What I believe Willard is referring to here is an argument that I made that western culture might be in retrograde when it comes to certain issues. And that the shift was evidenced in youth culture since this is soon to be present culture. Joshua’s response was a quote from Socrates complaining about kids today. Thus the argument that Joshua was making is that older people are biased in their memories of their youth by nostalgia.
Therefore, from Joshua’s reasoning, older people are not any more experienced in the world than younger people because their experience in untrustworthy, at least about direction of culture. Joshua then hectored my for weeks to answer his point on this. I responded each time with a more developed thought. Since none of them were acknowledged I will develop it further. While human nature is very slow to evolve, as we can see evidences of it in mammalian behavior, culture is constructed much faster, as we can see from the nations around the world.
My argument is not that nostalgia does not exist, it’s that all changes in culture are not necessarily positive. And, therefore some (or most) changes are temporary. Culture evolves out of a selection process that can be organic or cogitatively directed. But culture advancement is absolutely critical for societal advancement.
Which is more dangerous to humanity, a retrograde culture or a 2C-4C warming of northern hemisphere winter nights? This is my question.
What I think Ron is saying is that he’s willing to use my comment to peddle his gobbledygook. Which kinda undermines the image of a true free noble spirit that he’s trying to sell right now. None of what he’s saying is related to playing Socrates or the old tack to sugarcoat his conservatism.
The point Ron is missing is that he’s responding to a comment that was in fact written by our Hall Minotaur.
And no, it’s not an op-ed. Robby has a Senior Editor for that libertarian mouthpiece for years. Judy wrote an op-ed, for she’s not on the Australian editorial board.
And since I have a paragraph left:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-joe-barton-retires-20171130-story.html
Poor Joe. No wonder contrarians never refer to him anymore.
WilLard, This is not hard and I’m surprised someone of your sterling intellect couldn’t find the material as its all over the TWitter files. perhaps in your leftist cacoon, you are able to pretend this is all “misinformation.” It is not.
I’ve explained this over and over again here. Collusion between the deep state, the elite media, and big tech to censor content that does not violate their rules but that the regime doesn’t like is illegal and a violation of the Constitution.
You hold the championship here for deleted comments. I would say most have been deleted.
Actually, David, a David holds that title.
You are playing the ref once more.
How right wing think tanks wokewash fossil fuel industries:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-right-wing-groups-behind-renewable#details
If only they could rely on Freedom Ron’s techniques for manufacturing dissent and Just Ask Questions about fairness.
WilLard uses a totally activist substack to attack fossil fuels. This is propaganda WilLard. You might try instead Judith’s posts here recently that are actually intelligent and balanced.
Willard provides a link to a nutcase
That guy makes the folks at skeptical science seem sane
You’re being sloppy, Joe.
Res ipsa loquitur.
The benefit of bivalent boosters for enhanced, ~80% protection from hospitalizations and deaths (vs vaccine plus prior prior booster or unvaccinated) has now been shown in 6 countries (Israel, US, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden)
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.19.23284764v1
Imagine if instead of partisan, ideologically-based antagonism over vaccines we unified in focus on developing better ones, as Topol says – “nasal, pan-variant, more durable, less side effects.”
Speaking of side effects:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4329970
Interpretation: Although rare, a statistically significant association between BNT162b2 vaccination and myo/pericarditis and AKI was observed. While the association between BNT162b2 and myo/pericarditis has been confirmed internationally, further research is required to understand the association of AKI. BNT162b2 was not found to be associated with most of the AESIs investigated, providing reassurances around the safety of the vaccine.
More evidence of how people are gaming uncertainty ranges in the evidence on side-effects to spread fear and panic to advance an “anti-consensus” ideogicsl agenda.
Now where have I seen that before?
Imagine if we focused on long term double blind clinical trials for these vaccines just as we do for any other drug or treatment?
In any case, the argument here has always been about recommending these drugs for young healthy people and mandating them as a condition of employment.
The covid vaccine narrative is starting to crumble and uptake has been poor in the US for example. Covid is now a mild disease and we know natural immunity is vastly superior to the vaccine anyway.
McCarthy had his general counsel “spend hours” with senior executives at Twitter trying to get Marjorie Taylor Greene back on the platform after she was banned for violating misinformation policies.
https://t.co/LwlTtIvfoN
I’m sure Taibbi will have a Twitter Files thread full of outrage, momentarily.
And by early 2022, Ms. Greene had begun to believe that Mr. McCarthy was willing to go to bat for her. When her personal Twitter account was shut down for violating coronavirus misinformation policies, Ms. Greene raced to Mr. McCarthy’s office in the Capitol and demanded that he get the social media platform to reinstate her account, according to a person familiar with the exchange.
Instead of telling Ms. Greene that he had no power to order a private company to change its content moderation policies, Mr. McCarthy directed his general counsel, Machalagh Carr, to appeal to Twitter executives. Over the next two months, Ms. Carr would spend hours on the phone with them arguing Ms. Greene’s case, and even helped draft a formal appeal on her behalf.
I’m sure Matt just forgot to mention that in his “reporting,” just like he forgot to mention the topic was pics of body parts when the Biden team lobbied Twitter regarding tweets about Hunter.
Josh, You are confused here. Trying to allow someone access to public forums to express their views is exactly the opposite as pressuring those forums to censor someone for no good reason.
I would say I’m surprised by the logic chopping here but I’m not.
Good grief, David.
You spent a month one on this and you still haven’t grokked that you were whining about gubmint influence?
WilLard, As usual you either lied about what I said or more likely you are too lazy to have actually read them. See Ron’s comment below.
Joshua: “McCarthy had his general counsel “spend hours” with senior executives at Twitter trying to get Marjorie Taylor Greene back on the platform after she was banned for violating misinformation policies.”
Joshua, I see you arguing the asking a private company to remove a ban on speech is equivalent to asking them to ban speech. Is that right? If not, then I don’t see hypocrisy.
If you are saying that then I see you disagreeing with Louis Brandeis’s famous SCOTUS opinion that the remedy to misinformation is more speech, not censorship. Please explain how he was wrong and who should earn the assignment of authority to be the guardians of truth.
Ron –
Thanks for confirming that as expected you’re all good with government officials pressuring a private sector, social media company to modify it’s policies in response to the political preferences of powerful government officials.
Lol.
Ron,
Did you notice that when you speak of a thing the gubmint does that you like, the gubmint disappears from your sentences? If it was present, you would have to make your argument cohere with that editorial you confused for an op-Ed. Ask our Hall Minotaur for details.
Also, private companies, 1A. Two different things. Unless and until you revise the rights of corporations, you will be getting nowhere fast. You will continue to root for the gubmint when it does something you like and rant against it when it does not. And then from the Freedom Fighter we all know and love you will turn into an ordinary troglodyte,
And btw – I’m all for taking context into account when examining these issues. I think that elected government can have a viable interest, on the part of its constituency, to engage with social media around the parameters of moderation. And certainly there can be overreach in my view. My argument is that context matters and people need to be open around that engagement rather than taking categorical and rhetorical stances such as “free speech absolutism.” .Leveraging this issue via self-victimization and political grandstanding seems sub, sub-optimal in my view.
Joshua: “Thanks for confirming that as expected you’re all good with government officials pressuring a private sector, social media company to modify it’s policies in response to the political preferences of powerful government officials.”
How did you get all that from my questioning you to clarify your principle? The only principle I mentioned is Brandeis’s famous quote protecting free speech in the US, the quote that your partner called “usual claptrap by 1A truthers.”
McCarthy, being the leader of his party in the House, is acting as a leader of his members, defending not just Green, but all from political speech censorship. A person’s right to an unfettered Twitter account is not protected constitutionally, true. But Jawboning is when the government is coercing a private actor to do something that government is constitutionally barred from. The government is free to ask private individuals and corporations not to discriminate unfairly or to ask them to ignore other illegal government requests of them.
WilLard you are just repeating the same irrelevant obfuscations. The Twitter files are vastly bigger than one article in Reason that you are vaguely mischaracterizing. Like a lot of your fellow lefties, you constantly lie and accuse others of what you yourself are doing. On this thread you stooped to plagiarism and bragged about it.
> true. But
Splendid, Ron.
I’m glad that you finally throw Robby under the bus, and wish you the best of luck into your troglodyte journey.
You might like:
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1826&context=hastings_comm_ent_law_journal
Speech is an act like any other, and language is a social art.
… icy…
Funny when denizens try to out-phony Elon:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?t=hUI6kOPu13prZNDR0M6HdA&s=19
You and Willard are denizens.
Perhaps so. No sure exactly how that determination is made.
But regardless, I’m not trying to make disingenuously parsed claims that no one “here” has been talking about “free speech absolutism,” nor am I making phony claims about being a free speech absolutist as Elon is (who is being praised here for his phony dedication to free speech).
“No[t] sure exactly how that determination is made.”
Joshua, your name comes up 280 hits on a Ctrl-F. Willard is 218. You two are denizens. The more the merrier.
Joshua, I agree that nobody is or should be an absolutist in literal terms. I think this is one of many examples your straw men. If you are going to argue that Musk is not motivated to risk billions and his true business focus in order to preserve a principle he sees endangered then what is your analysis for Musk’s Twitter acquisition?
Ron,
You might wish to add “ |” to your search to make sure you are excluding mentions. You could also search for variations on my name. It is important to distinguish my contributions from the signalling and the scapegoating.
As is, your agreement looks pretty performative. It is in fact empty. Perhaps you should clarify how you reconcile the tension in your position instead of whining about being misrepresented. More so that followed by a silly if-by-whiskey.
Meanwhile, please consider the possibility that ranting against the press has become part of the GOP:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-being-anti-media-is-now-part-of-the-gop-identity/
But the Press is actually a Bingo square, btw.
More gaslighting and obfuscating from WilLard. There is massive evidence the press is promoting left narratives and not reporting “news” that the regime doesn’t like. Can you read or do you deny the Twitter files are authentic?
And the press is now getting almost as untrusted by the public as politicians. Scientists are also losing a lot of credibility. I linked earlier to an article in Nature about it.
Oh, David. You are such a charmer.
That Freedom Fighters megaphones ate the GOP has become a well-known historical fact:
https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-ezra-klein-show-2/episode/how-right-wing-media-ate-the-republican-party-210978682
Learning Newtspeak is not that hard.
I believe in you.
Love,
Ron –
I’m all for discussing the various contexts that interact with the questions related to government influence on entities like private sector social media organizations. I think there are legit questions at hand w/r/t what happened in this country with Twitter. But imo, you can’t have reasonable discussions with people who claim the situation here is comparable to Russia or China, or people who rely on agenda-pushing, ideologically focused reporting as we see with the “Twitter Files,” or people who ignore important context related to Musk’s involvement. Of course the “Twitter Files” convey relevant information but when people act as if there’s no nuance involved, as if there aren’t reasonable points of disagreement, as if it’s nothing other than biased reporting on neo-Stalinism, for me it’s effectively no different than phony absolutism that applies only when it fits an agenda.
Josh, You are so biased and self-centered. The reporting of the Twitter files is by independent journalists who have no conflicts of interest. Can you point to a single thing that shows bias and/or ideological motivation?? It’s all fact based and just reporting of actual events.
You yourself are the poster boy for bias, childish lack of perspective, and smearing actual independent journalist.
Russia’s media are formally independent but in fact they are fed “news” from government sources and serious affronts to the Putin government are dealt with. There is probably no direct censorship by the government. It’s just understood what the rules are. That’s exactly what the FBI and CIA were doing with the corporate media and big tech to control what information the public has access to.
What the hell is the “important context” you refer to? Is it the nothingberger from Berstein on the CIA using private people to report information? That’s not “context”, its the “look a squirrel” strategy.
Joshua, I did not hear an answer to my question about what you think Musk’s motivations for Twitter acquisition were.
Tell me your answer. Was it:
1) He needed another business to run?
2) Was a closet “teabagger” and is lying about being a former Dem?
3) Is hoping to increase electric car sales among conservatives?
4) Is a genuine futurist and saw humanity threatened by the direction the left was taking, weighing the loss of free speech as much more dangerous than loss of polar ice.
Ron –
Why would I try to read Musk’s mind?
I can’t, but I have no reason to doubt he sees himself as a “free speech absolutist.” Nonetheless, many of his actions have been clearly inconsistent with his self-characterization.
Joshua is here ignoring Musk’s stated intention to allow most legal speech on Twitter. That is not “absolutism.” The rules will be different in different countries.
Musk allowed the independent reporters access to Twitter internal servers and records with NO pre-conditions. Therefore, he had no influence on what the journalists did. How is that problematic, Josh? And for once try not to smear Musk and claim that he once made a statement you found questionable. No one will care or remember these smears.
J,
Our dynamic duo of Freedom Fighters are here to ignore that Elon is mostly acting like an autocrat:
https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji
You got to hand it to Elon, he has an ethos.
It fairness, Freedom Fighters always have a soft spot for shiny boots when they kick people they don’t care about.
Willard –
> Our dynamic duo of Freedom Fighters are here to ignore that Elon is mostly acting like an autocrat:
It’s always interesting to observe attitudes towards authority figures.
Trump is an exception to the reasoning about politicians, Elon is an exception to the reasoning about corporatists. Blind faith in “independent” “reporters” like Taibbi being beyond bias or self-interest.
Etc.
It makes one wonder about a search for father figures.
Findings In this systematic review and meta-analysis including 17 studies with 10 935 541 vaccinated and 2 635 251 unvaccinated children aged 5 to 11 years, COVID-19 vaccination was associated with lower risks of SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptomatic COVID-19, hospitalization, and multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children. While vaccination, compared with placebo, was associated with higher incidences of adverse events, the overall frequency of severe adverse events, including myocarditis, was low.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2800743
Just as I was expecting to find, this paper in many cases has quite broad confidence intervals. That’s because covid hospitalization or death is rare in children who are otherwise healthy. But what is a covid hospitalization or death? The standard definitions are wrong as even Dr. Wen of CNN fame now admits.
Another weakness is that they didn’t distinguish between children with other health problems and healthy kids.
I didn’t see a definition of safe or effective either.
It’s not a convincing paper. Covid is just not a significant risk for healthy young people. Never has been and now with the latest variants, you must strain pretty hard to show that the harm prevented is significant. You know, just not letting your kids outside is probably going to prevent a significant numbers of accidents and medical interventions. Some will be hit by cars or falling trees too.
People differ greatly in their attitudes towards well-evidenced science. What characterises this variation? Here, we consider this issue in the context of genetics and allied sciences. While most prior research has focused on the relationship between attitude to science and what people know about it, recent evidence suggests that individuals with strongly negative attitudes towards specific genetic technologies (genetic modification (GM) technology and vaccines) commonly do not objectively understand the science, but, importantly, believe that they do. Here, using data from a probability survey of United Kingdom adults, we extend this prior work in 2 regards. First, we ask whether people with more extreme attitudes, be they positive or negative, are more likely to believe that they understand the science. Second, as negativity to genetics is commonly framed around issues particular to specific technologies, we ask whether attitudinal trends are contingent on specification of technology. We find (1) that individuals with strongly positive or negative attitudes towards genetics more strongly believe that they well understand the science; but (2) only for those most positive to the science is this self-confidence warranted; and (3) these effects are not contingent on specification of any particular technologies. These results suggest a potentially general model to explain why people differ in their degree of acceptance or rejection of science, this being that the more someone believes they understand the science, the more confident they will be in their acceptance or rejection of it. While there are more technology nonspecific opponents who also oppose GM technology than expected by chance, most GM opponents fit a different demographic. For the most part, opposition to GM appears not to reflect a smokescreen concealing a broader underlying negativity.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001915
Who cares about this paper? I don’t. There is quite strong evidence that the vast vast majority of people including many scientists don’t understand the true nature of science and the high uncertainties implied by nonlinearity and chaos. I don’t care how confident they are in their views. Better to spend the money wasted on this study on real science education so we can better combat the political hacks out there spreading falsehoods such as that climate models or CFD generally are reliable and skillful.
When you subtract the fallacious attacks on people you don’t like, your commentary has little substance left, David darling.
Willard again refused to address the substance because perhaps he can’t.
It’s really scary what gets through peer review. We don’t need a paper to explain why people don’t trust bad science or people that lie about their bias. We need more papers that explain how we can make science more trustworthy. I thought that was a point you momentarily agreed with me on, Joshua.
Ron –
There’s a large amount of evidence regarding the mechanisms of “trust” formation re science, “expert” advice, etc. That paper rests upon a large body of evidence on motivated resoning and other cognitive biases. It may add some insight. My own personal belief has long been that the interaction between motivated reasoning and views on science is largely moderated by the degree to which individuals identify with one particular set of world views or another that overlap with the scope of the scientific evidence. I think this paper speaks to that dynamic.
You’re certainly entitled to disagree. Sorry if it caused you some kind of harm to look at it.
As for making science “trustworthy,” I think it’s a bilateral dynamic. Positive contributions can certainly be made through modifications on the “science” side of the equation. But there also needs to me more ownership over the processes of cognitive biases on the other side.
It is the second time you say that, David, and either you have not checked, e.g.:
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/02/15/americans-trust-in-scientists-other-groups-declines/
or you just don’t care telling porkies.
Most everyone trust scientists, even after intense campaigns of FUD from think tanks, conspiracists, and other various Freedom Fighters outlets.
You still have work to do. This is not the place to bring more chaos to the world. When are you starting your nonlinear podcast?
Willard, one might say you need to see a poll in how much people trust polls. I am guessing the retort would be that some polls are done responsibly and in unbiased fashion and that other polls are “push” polls. So it’s hard to generalize. But if you asked people what is the most trustworthy way of gauging public opinion almost all would say it’s polling.
Now just substitute science for polling in my above paragraph. Trustworthiness is a relative thing that is very hard to make scientific arguments about. All most can agree on is that a process that is reproducible and produces consistent outcomes no matter who the investigator is, as long as they follow the method, then that there is a factual underlying mechanism. And this is ideally tested by the ability to make predictions based on this mechanism that are unique and wouldn’t be predictable otherwise.
This is the main weakness of climate science in that there is little testing of a unique predictive power. We try to compensate for that my making more models with more complexity but no progress on the basics.
Searching at Kahan’s site for “trust in science” brings a lot I have found interesting regarding that issue. Here’s just one:
http://culturalcognition.squarespace.com/blog/2014/11/25/conservatives-lose-faith-in-science-over-last-40-years-where.html
Of course, it’s prolly just coincidence that some data show a political signal around the issue of “trust in science” (Kahan has some interesting thoughts on whether it’s a meaningful signal) Or maybe it’s just that conservatives are dedicated to truth whereas librulz are just seeking power, trying to de-populate the planet, and many other evil and nefarious goals.
Whatever you do, don’t consider the fundamental attribution error to be remotely applicable.
I think they’re all pretty interesting. For example, this one:
It is almost surely a mistake to think that highly divisive conflicts over science are attributable to general distrust of science or scientists.
http://culturalcognition.squarespace.com/blog/2017/3/8/the-trust-in-science-particularity-thesis-a-fragment.html
Joshua: “Or maybe it’s just that conservatives are dedicated to truth whereas librulz are just seeking power, trying to de-populate the planet, and many other evil and nefarious goals.”
I admit the liberals have gained the upper hand in power in the world except for the former eastern block, who still remember living under the left. It is thus natural that those out of power, conservatives, would be more interested in truth, abuses power and biases in science and unequal prosecutions. I don’t think a study is necessary to confirm that.
As far as nefarious goes, it’s always in the eyes of the beholder. Herr Adolf and crew thought they were doing the planet a favor with their hygiene solutions. Honest, they really did. I know it’s hard to believe but they were fighting evil. Is it the same evil you are fighting? Who knows. This is why principles matter, process matters, not just who wins. (BTW, it matters that elections are transparent and verifiable enough to be excepted, especially in times of instability or you tend to get more instability.) This is all why the ultimate solution is persuasion — so you never get to the other final solution.
Ron,
That Freedom Fighters see themselves as truth seekers might not cohere with reality.
Check how David tries to portray an editorial as supporting a claim that is false when it only raises tangential concerns. Check how you deflect from that empirical fact by trying to bait me with But Science. Or better yet, notice how Why Most Research Findings Are False is itself invalid:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1855693
Maybe contrarians are predestined to root for models that can never be satisfied.
Just maybe.
Willard: “Maybe contrarians are predestined to root for models that can never be satisfied.”
Joshua and I were making progress in agreeing that seeing evil in the other was a natural rationalization stemming from a divergence of assumptions, likely stemming from values, but potentially being something as shallow as not wanting to be wrong.
Since values are intangible they are the most suspect. There is no way to test them except by trading positions and gaming out whether the result leads to a more desired outcome. Scientifically thinking minds, or “truth seekers,” as you call them, practice this exercise as a matter of habit. It is necessary for clear thinking.
The model that can never be satisfied is Climate Bingo. There was a whole post on this that I am suspecting has been long forgotten, but the conclusion was that you set up a game that is unproductive because as part of it you de-legitimize any argument that challenges you own by the fact that it comes from an illegitimate source. This is called the ad hominem fallacy.
That fallacy in turn allows your mind to plant your perceived evil opponent’s arguments a being disingenuous. But modulz, but LIA, But southern hemisphere, But tree rings, etc…
This is unfair. Response: But fairness.
Ron,
How you evade the fact that people indeed trust scientists is all I need to evaluate the importance you give to truth. The defensiveness you display on the face of facts speaks louder than whatever posturing that acts like a secret handshake to communicate with fellow Freedom Fighters. This behaviour is tangible enough to me. And of course there is a square for But Truth:
https://tinyurl.com/the-bingo/but-truth/
What you do with your words matters more to me than what you say, which implies that in contrast to J’s approach faith has no currency in my world view.
Fairness is part of justice, btw. That you rediscover social justice can be seen as progress indeed. Please do become an SJW!
Cheers.
W: “How you evade the fact that people indeed trust scientists is all I need to evaluate the importance you give to truth.”
Let’s talk a little about confirmation bias here. Your free-floating assumption here is my intention to evade, which in turn then allows you to conclude that I do not truly seek the truth. Politely left unsaid is that if I am not seeking the truth then I am being deceptive, which is evil, which allows anything I say to be illegitimate and also helps the free floating assumption that I am intentionally evading arguments due to fear of logical traps that might reveal undesired truth. I admit I have a lot of assumptions here too and I didn’t even get to peoples trust for scientists, which is a huge statement with hundreds or assumptions and variables. But at least we are getting to the importance of trust. If we agree on that we have a start. The next point I hope we can agree on is that the truth is always legitimate and things that degrade truth are the opposite, except in protecting safety against bodily harm (which is also subjective and open to abuse).
“The defensiveness you display on the face of facts speaks louder than whatever posturing that acts like a secret handshake to communicate with fellow Freedom Fighters.”
Scary logic. Making rational arguments is proof of one’s disingenuousness and collusion with other disingenuous people.
“This behaviour is tangible enough to me. And of course there is a square for But Truth:”
Of course.
“…faith has no currency in my world view.”
“Fairness is part of justice, btw. That you rediscover social justice can be seen as progress indeed. Please do become an SJW!”
I am there with you except I do not believe war is the answer, its persuasion. If you agree, which I hope you do, then even using the terms of battle are counterproductive. One should always be looking for common ground on assumptions that can be built upon. Ideas do not need to be conquered, just revealed.
Oh, Ron. You goose.
Confirmation bias as *nothing* to do with observing you dodge and weave instead of acknowledging that people indeed trust scientists more than you do. Do you really think that your rationalizations will make this fact disappear?
As the Son of Lobster might say, think again sunshine:
https://issues.org/trust-in-science-is-not-the-problem-engagement-leshner/
Please consider that only started manufacturing dissent.
Give yourself a chance.
Ron –
> Joshua and I were making progress in agreeing that seeing evil in the other was a natural rationalization stemming from a divergence of assumptions, likely stemming from values, but potentially being something as shallow as not wanting to be wrong.
No, we aren’t in agreement there. I think more generally the values are shared: for example the value of government playing a role to the benefit of citizens but without overreaching into tyranny. The values of family and caring for the less fortunate. In my view despite these largely shared values, identity orientation shifts people’s views on which policies best advance those values. And then cognitive biases reinforce those differences and biases like the fundamental attribution error creates an environment of antagonism around those differing views on policies. Then the differing views on the policies serve to exacerbate the identity-based polarization. It’s about “us” and “others,” and people feel better about their in-group by confirming their biases that others’ views in policies just reinforce how bevel they are. For examples of the dynamic I’m talking about, just look at what you and your buds here have to say about “the left.”. For my part, you will NEVER see me disproportionately attribute evil to “the right.”. And of you think you’ve seen me do so, EVERY time you think you’ve seen it in my comments what you’re actually seeing is an invention that you’re foisting on to me.
“…people indeed trust scientists more than you do. Do you really think that your rationalizations will make this fact disappear?”
I am a scientist (and engineer). I experiment and test my designed formulations and apparati. The whole question of trusting scientists is ridiculous.
Science is credited with all the technological advancement of civilization. And that fact is taught in elementary school. Science has a great brand except for the fraud scandals and the weaponizing of knowledge for perverse ends. Bioweapon viruses research does not help the brand of science, for example. Neither does it help the brand with political bureaucrats proclaim they are science.
Good science follows with good methods. Ethical science follows with good ethics. Trust in science comes with a trust in humanity, that the default will be a culture of enforcing good and ethical science.
It’s funny that those with the same political affiliation that is untrusting of genetically modified foods is the group that is accusing others of being superstitious against chemically manufactured mRNA getting injected into their kids.
It’s not a matter of trusting science, it’s always a matter of trusting people.
Arguments about science are just folded into this large dynamic – particularly when the science overlaps with polarizing identity orientations. Some areas of science are completely un-controversial. The splits around science don’t arise because of a lack of “trust” (look at Kahan’s stuff), nor because of the science itself. The splits are a function of science becoming a proxy battleground for ideologically-based antipathies.
> Scientifically thinking minds, or “truth seekers,” as you call them…
Were all “truth-seekers.”. But those who are pursuing idookfixal agendas see their in-group as the true “truth-seekers” and the out-group as the evil-doers who seek to corrupt science so they can rrwch their evil goals.
> That fallacy in turn allows your mind to plant your perceived evil opponent’s arguments a being disingenuous.
For the most part, I don’t think that the arguments are disingenuous, per se. There are exceptions if course but due the most part, imo, people really are seeking “the truth.”. But that doesn’t exempt them from the cognitive biases that have been extensively researched and for which there is a ton ‘evidence. And of course, that evidence predicts that people will perceive their side as disproportionately motivated by truth and the “other” side as motivated by nefarious goals.
This has grown extremely repetitious and lacking in evidence. Willard as usual cherry picks one survey that actually shows declining trust in scientists. If he had any interest in the truth he could have found these. I’m pretty sure I linked the editorial before. A lot of people are quite worried about declining confidence in “The Science.”
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/science-editor-chief-sounds-alarm-over-falling-public-trust
https://www.nature.com/articles/537029a
And a 1996 study of more than 1,000 postdocs found that more than one-quarter would select or omit data to improve their chances of receiving grant funding.
https://associationofanaesthetists-publications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anae.15297
In my blog post on CFD, there are a host of good references on the replication crisis which is real despite the almost religious apologetics from non-scientist anonymous internet entities.
Joshua: “I think more generally the values are shared: for example the value of government playing a role to the benefit of citizens but without overreaching into tyranny. The values of family and caring for the less fortunate. In my view despite these largely shared values, identity orientation shifts people’s views on which policies best advance those values.”
Joshua, values don’t have to be much different to cause a rift, because policy always is weighting values. A slight difference can result in opposing views. So I agree with your assessment that most people accept that tyranny is bad, for example. But the policy dispute arises out of the priors on how dangerous or prone to toward tyranny a policy might be versus its abilities to address an intended stated goal, vaccine policy, for example. Republicans tend to government as America’s founders saw it, necessary for national security and interstate cohesion but a danger to liberty. “That government is best which governs least…”
I suppose liberty it is conservative in that it is conserving America’s founding ideals. Social conservatism tends to conserve values handed down by tradition and religious doctrine. Fiscal conservative want to preserve wealth by prudent investment and finance, including frequent checks of the balance sheet and cash flow. These are all shared by liberals too but by a lesser degree. Instead liberals put more emphasis on group virtue. Although conservatives a more apt to join community groups, liberals are more apt to join affinity groups based on race, gender and politics. Conservatives tend to be slower in getting involved in politics and are more reacting to what is perceived as political breakdown of law and order.
These are all generalizations, however, that are overshadowed by the divisiveness that has entered from the downward spiral of our institutions that are being politicized. Outrage is being met with outrage. We are on a dangerous course an in need of a political awakening that one side cannot achieve its goals without persuading the other side rather than coerce. And once that is adopted trust will build rather than ebb.
J: “Arguments about science are just folded into this large dynamic – particularly when the science overlaps with polarizing identity orientations… The splits are a function of science becoming a proxy battleground for ideologically-based antipathies.”
I agree. I would go further that therefore part of the energy devoted in science today is being diverted toward control of information and debate. This same dynamic is seen in the media. The competition used to be for the “scoop,” the first to get new information and the story credit. Now that is gone in exchange for enforcement of narrative and media collaboration.
J: “Were all “truth-seekers.”. But those who are pursuing idookfixal [ideological] agendas see their in-group as the true “truth-seekers” and the out-group as the evil-doers who seek to corrupt science so they can rrwch [reach] their evil goals.”
This is human nature. We must educate to get beyond vilification as a method of “winning” because it doesn’t work. All goals can become perverted into evil if one does not adhere to civil principles and ethics. Process matters.
J: “For the most part, I don’t think that the arguments are disingenuous, per se. There are exceptions if [of] course but due the most part, imo, people really are seeking “the truth.”. But that doesn’t exempt them from the cognitive biases that have been extensively researched and for which there is a ton ‘evidence. And of course, that evidence predicts that people will perceive their side as disproportionately motivated by truth and the “other” side as motivated by nefarious goals.”
The best tool is reciprocal substitution, placing oneself in the other’s shoes. If there is a double standard then the rules are being abused by definition. This goes for science as well as justice.
For example, I just read a medical article complaining that every young person that drops dead suddenly from a cardiac event now is assumed to be a covid vaccine victim. They argue it is confirmation bias, highlighting infrequent natural events that otherwise would pass without notice. I am sure there are 10 papers on this premise right now. OTOH, the same politically oriented group that is downplaying the covid vaccine’s cardiac risks are assuming every wild fire, drought and flood is unprecedented and an example of fossil fuel CO2 effects on the atmosphere. Ideally in both cases scientists would be cautioning to use statistical tools and not anecdotal observation.
Ron –
> because policy always is weighting values.
Always?
I certainly don’t agee with your opinion (stated as categorical fact).
Imo, people’s perspectives on policies often isn’t a direct function of a weight of values. Thus, you can have objections to (or acceptance of) policies based on a projected valuedls assessment that isn’t consistent or doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. One good example is how a health insurance mandate went from support among some Republicans (as a Romney policy) because of the “value” of “personal responsibility” to rejection (as an Obama policy) in the basis of it being depraved and tyrannical. We can see how for man evangelicals the “value” placed upon personal integrity in politicians reversed pre- to post Trump (hugjk valued to not that important). There of course many examples among demz or libz. The mechsnjsm of causality is often: identity—> policy preference—> value weighting and not values–> values weighting–> policy preference.
The weighting of the values implications of policies is often subjective or a arbitrary (in the sense of self-sealing) and often mercurial and often a reflection of signaling (virtue signaling if you’d like). Values are assigned to policies as a way to confirm that “we” are great and “they” are creeps.
Often we get disagreement on policies framed as a function of the values supposedly intrinsic to those policies, and those difference in preference for the policies is attributed to different values systems, when actually there’s plenty of evidence of largely shared underlying values and little evidence that the policies carry an intrinsic values weight. That’s why with an issue such as abortion there’s such a polarized and dichotomous framing of “pro-life” and “pro-choice” policies whereas if the group identification is actually broken down at a more specific level there’s far more agreement about policies and more overlap with regard to the “values” inherent to policies.
And that’s a response to only the first sentence of your comment!
I’m not going to respond to the rest, as after skimming it very briefly, imo, there’s no value in even reading further; basically as it’s more pushing of your simplistic and polarized and dichotomous ideological agenda dressed up in Ronsplaining cartoonish picturedls about such things as why Republicans favor the policies they favor. Do you think I’ve never read anything about Republicans before you deem to ” ‘splain things to me?
I know that sounds rude but I do appreciate that you took the time to respond but I don’t want you to waste your time responding on my behalf and I think being frank about how i see your comments might be useful in that context. Contrarywise please do respond if you (1) see why I view your comments that way and (2) find a way to actually be responsive to what I write, rather than just ‘splain to me why you belief your polarized world view is an accurate portrayal of reality. If you get something from writing your thoughts up, go for it. But don’t do it for my benefit unless you can write something that seems to better interrogate your partisan assumptions.
I don’t doubt you might have a similar view towards m comments and as such, that’s fine.
For example this (I did read more to flesh out an explanation):
> Fiscal conservative want to preserve wealth by prudent investment and finance, including frequent checks of the balance sheet and cash flow. These are all shared by liberals too but by a lesser degree. Instead liberals put more emphasis on group virtue. Although conservatives a more apt to join community groups, liberals are more apt to join affinity groups based on race, gender and politics. Conservatives tend to be slower in getting involved in politics and are more reacting to what is perceived as political breakdown of law and order.
>> These are all generalizations,…
If you want to discuss what you see as values differences between conservercsrice and liberals, and in particular as a way to explain policy preferences in association with those ideological identifications, bring more to the table. Don’t just repeat popular conceptions that reinforce a polarized prior in the values differences between xknssrcrices and libz.
There’s a lot of research out there on these issues
I have pretty general beliefs about this but they are far set in stone. Your pontification, however, isn’t going to convince me that the evidence I’ve seen that’s not consistent with your explanation is wrong. Even just the ubiquitous evidence that the “fiscal conservativeness” of people who self-defined as “fiscal conservatives” is highly situational and not consistent should be obvious that your popular taxonomy needs evidentiary support. And of course the same would apply to an attempt to validate common categorizations of liberals whether they have a positive or negative connotation. There’s plenty of real world evidence that popular beliefs about how the values of liberals are reflected in their policy preferences don’t stand up to scrutiny. The world is more complicated than that and there’s plenty of research into the supposed values differences between conservative and liberals. I’m skeptical about much of it but certainly there’s much that I’ve seen that even if I disagee with, I think is more viable just the common stereotype narratives that you unwind for my benefit.
Joshua, I agree with your observation that much or most of the political divide is pure tribal reactions of hating whatever the other side likes, if that is what you were saying. For example, as many have pointed out, the biggest problem with hydroxy chloroquine was that Trump said it had great promise one minute before Fauci said it’s certainly nothing. That set in stone the battle to resist testing it or design tests that used it as a last resort after the infection part and during the pneumonia, when it was more harmful than helpful. Only the Henry Ford Institute gave it early enough to show benefit. But that was washed out of the headlines by the Lancet study which later turned out to be the Surgisphere fraud. The science is got so corrupted by politicization that I still am not sure whether early treatment with HCQ was worthless or not. You’re right, there was no difference in values there. The only reason I went through the trouble of trying to find the small differences in conservative and liberal values is to underscore there is some basis for disagreements, albeit overshadowed now by the deterioration of trust and respect of the other’s political identities.
It’s interesting you brought up abortion. I would say that is also a good example of what we are talking about. The Republican dominant view in the mid 20th century was zero abortion and for Catholics even zero contraception. That position was slowly shifting to a less absolutist doctrine but the Democrats did not waste the fact that once the majority position was not that doctrine they went all in on making it a huge liberty fight. Yes, the Dems were social freedom fighters, free love, free abortions. It’s my body. That certainly would not have happened imo if it were not an ability to contrast, degrade and demoralize their political opposition. In short it was done for power first, freedom second. As the Republicans gave up ground on the issue decade after decade, almost resigned to Roe v Wade, the Dems had to push further to keep the winning message to the point of supporting infanticide, killing failed full-term abortions on the table. Nobody would support that if it could not be used to keep a fight going. I think we see the same with transgender movement going into the bathrooms and sports of the opposite sex to the point it’s just to keep the fight alive.
Joshua, I suppose we have too much disdain of agreement to agree that we just have too much disdain of agreement.
Ron –
> Joshua, I suppose we have too much disdain of agreement to agree that we just have too much disdain of agreement.
Well, I suppose that’s just a throw away line but I doubt that either of has “disdain of agreement.” and I don’t think of agreement as an objective anyway.
I’d settle for something more basic like understanding. As near as I can tell you’re so focused on pushing your agenda you don’t enough time to try to understand what I write, and instead take a shortcut of substituting misconceptions for what I actually think.
Willard has another example of extreme cherry picking above. He links a 2 page response to Ioannidis’ rightly famous paper on why most published results are wrong. The 2 page response has no math or statistics in it but advances the extraordinarily weak claim that Ioannidis’ paper is not “proof” of his claims.
For those who are trying to go beyond “the science” apologetics, the 2 pager actually references Ioannidis’ response which is detailed and convincing.
Ioannidis’ paper is cited over and over again indicating that Willard’s “response” has lost the argument and Ioannidis won this war.
It cannot be overemphasized that anytime a strong result comes out pointing out how extraordinarily weak a lot of “science” is there is a built in defense mechanism that responds. There are literally hundreds of thousands of “scientists” out there who want to keep the corrupt soft money culture going.
The problem is that the trickle of these results has now become a flood. Perhaps the most telling one I’ve found concerns pre-registration of trails.
https://www.nature.com/articles/524269f
I also found in my archive this one relating to the “trust in scientists” issue”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/28/exaggerations-threaten-public-trust-in-science-leading-statistician-david-spiegelhalter?CMP=share_btn_tw
This paper has many many references and goes into detail concerning the bad incentive systems in place in “the science.”
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ees.2016.0223
J: “I doubt that either of has “disdain of agreement.” and I don’t think of agreement as an objective anyway.”
Joshua, If I understand your prose correctly, you feel I am focused on “pushing an agenda,” a blanket indictment that naturally would reflect disdain. You’re saying I don’t try to understand what you write and take shortcuts to misconceptions of your thoughts. This is something one would presume that another would do if they had disdain for that person and their thoughts.
Considering on this blog we regularly responded to each other’s thoughts for hundreds of comments in a largely free uncensored forum, this is remarkable. Just imagine everyone else in our respective identity groups that don’t converse but just feed on negative media propaganda. Yet we can’t agree that this is a fundamental problem. I think this very much proves my conclusion.
J: “I’d settle for something more basic like understanding.”
It’s easy to think one understands. But until they test their understanding against other’s perspectives on the same data one is taking a big leap of faith. For thousands of years those with the biggest clubs perspectives won but civilization crawled. Then we had the enlightenment.
Ron –
> Joshua, If I understand your prose correctly, you feel I am focused on “pushing an agenda,” a blanket indictment that naturally would reflect disdain.
I probably shouldn’t have written to suggest a blanket indictment; although I think that your pushing an agenda is a fair description of your responses to me, I don’t think it should be applied uniformly across ALL of your responses. Regardless, no, I don’t think saying that’s true does reflect disdain. Regardless of whether it’s uniform and complete, pushing an agenda is commonplace. I find it annoying and an obstacle, but not one that merits “disdain.” It’s just part of human nature for these types of exchanges. Further, you now seem to have moved from “disdain for agreement,” to disdain for you personally or disdain for what you write. This is another problem, where the topic at hand shifts across comments and from my response to your interpretation. Even if I did have “disdain for agreement,” for you to then move to disdain for you or disdain for what you write makes it impossible to have a coherent discussion and once again is effectively a situation where you’re putting words in my mouth and foisting views on me that I don’t have and haven’t expressed.
Certainly such misunderstandings can also occur because I haven’t been clear in what I write. I’m sure that has happened as well. But we can’t get to that because of the frequency with which you are foisting views on me that I don’ have.
> You’re saying I don’t try to understand what you write and take shortcuts to misconceptions of your thoughts.
Here is another example. It isn’t that I think you don’t try to understand, at least not always. It’s that you take a shortcut to understanding (at least sometimes) and jump to substituting an idea you have in your head for what it is that I’m saying. Again, this is a common phenomenon in these kinds of discourse.
I don’t doubt that I do the same sometimes. But that’s different than not “trying” to understand. You can jump to wrong conclusions even if you have tried to understand (and failed), or I think more commonly, if you (or I) haven’t tried with enough diligence. I am not in a position, however, to judge how hard you’ve tried to understand. Nonetheless, my observation is that frequently you don’t clarify your understanding and instead substitute incorrect conclusions for what it was that I said.
> This is something one would presume that another would do if they had disdain for that person and their thoughts.
I’m also not in a position to judge whether you have disdain for me or my thoughts. There have been many situations during the past few weeks where very often I write a comment to you and a certain individual interjects and responds to me with comments that are directly disdainful of me and the opinions I express. With that individual I have a fairly high certainty that there’s disdain for me and my thoughts. You haven’t done the same. You have wrongly associated me and my thoughts with people and views for which you clearly have disdain, but that’s somewhat different. You also haven’t asked this certain other individual to stop cluttering up our exchange. Both of those phenomena could mean that you have disdain without expressing – but I’m not in a position to judge. I can’t get into your head.
> Just imagine everyone else in our respective identity groups that don’t converse but just feed on negative media propaganda. Yet we can’t agree that this is a fundamental problem.
???? I think we do agree there is a problem there.
> I think this very much proves my conclusion.
You’ve lost me there. What is it that proves what conclusion? First, you think that “everyone else in our respective identity groups” don’t converse and just feed on negative media propaganda? I think it is often true and it’s a problem but that’s too broad a characterization.
Second, even there I don’t get where you go from it’s a general problem to concluding that I (or you either) have “disdain” for agreement or even that I think you have disdain for me or even for my views. Again, I can’t get into your head and I’m certainly not going to judge your “disdain” or lack thereof on the basis of what others do.
> It’s easy to think one understands. But until they test their understanding against other’s perspectives on the same data one is taking a big leap of faith.
Yes, I agree.
> For thousands of years those with the biggest clubs perspectives won but civilization crawled. Then we had the enlightenment.
Seems like a non-sequitur to me.
Joshua,
I think we both recognize that human nature and emotion are at odds with clear logical thinking. I think we agree that therefore to test ones conclusions by dialogue with those who are legitimately skeptical is wise. And it looks like you agreed with that this is a systemic problem which is greatly fed by a media that reinforces a growing political divide.
Would you also agree that in essence the media is acting as a surrogate for the legitimately skeptical dialogue that most realize is needed as a check on their own clarity of rationality? Is the media basically getting paid to be the trusted advisor that is in reality a yes-man that is warping clarity of thought? OTOH, is listening to adversarial media wise knowing that they are not objective but just selling confirmation? It seems like the answer would be no because they are not “legitimately skeptical” but just being intentionally biased shills for pay.
I know this might all seem rather obvious when pointed out but I don’t think people often go through the exercise of analyzing it. Why am I? I have been sincerely trying to find something, anything, we can agree on and have found it quite a challenge. That got me wondering why that is. You already know my theories on trust dynamics. I am just wondering whether there is a point in which productive dialogue between certain parties becomes impossible due lack or trust or disdain or whatever you want to call it. I am thinking, for example, that you could suspect this whole thing is a trap and therefore wise to foil it.
In some camps, this is “free speech absolutism.”
ELON MUSK CAVES TO PRESSURE FROM INDIA TO REMOVE BBC DOC CRITICAL OF MODI
Officials from India’s ruling right-wing party said American tech companies like Twitter and YouTube complied with demands to remove the documentary
In others, while not “free speech absolutism” it reflects true dedication to principles of open dialog.
In my view it’s just more of what we already knew from many other similar examples of how Musk’s actions are inconsistent with his rhetoric.
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/24/twitter-elon-musk-modi-india-bbc/
Doesn’t Musk say that Twitter will operate under the laws of the country in question? Isn’t what Twitter is doing in India consistent with that?
So Musk is cooperating with government to stifle freedom of expression.
Not exactly “free speech absolutism.”
Not exactly “free speech absolutism.”
A straw man argument imo. I believe he was referencing the US when he commented.
Lol. So he’s an absolutist.
Except when he’s not an absolutist.
Amazing.
I love how you say that absolute doesn’t mean absolute, but probably the funniest part of your special pleading for a no true Scotsman defense is that he seems to be specifically referring to multiple countries when declaring his absolutism.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600?t=grwPs4HPbnLT7-6QTCn1eg&s=19
As if anyone really interested would actually need more evidence to assess Musk’s dedication to open discourse:
Elon Musk calls British diver in Thai cave rescue ‘pedo’ in baseless attack
Accusation directed on Twitter at Vern Unsworth, who called Tesla CEO’s offer of ‘mini-sub’ to help rescuers a ‘PR stunt’
‘Cause, you know, calling someone a “ped0” is the first thing I think of when I think of dedication to open discourse.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk-british-diver-thai-cave-rescue-pedo-twitter
Part of the context relevant to the government’s role in freedom of expression:
https://popular.info/p/florida-teachers-told-to-remove-books
And related to Elon’s undying devotion to making sure that Witter is a place of “free speech absolutism.”
As the tweet circulated widely, however, Twitter appended a “Community Note” stating that “[a]ll books are not being removed from classroom libraries.”
[…]
The purpose of a Community Note, according to Twitter, is to “add context to potentially misleading Tweets.” The biggest problem with this Community Note is that it is wrong. Teachers in Manatee County have been told to remove all books from their classroom libraries. On Monday, for example, teachers at Bayshore High School in Manatee County received the following message: “Remove or cover all classroom libraries until all materials can be reviewed.”
I’m sure that any minute Bari and Matt will be reporting on the government/social media nexus in the context of freedom of expression:
What I find interesting and amusing is how progressives like Joshua and Willard have gone from praising Musk to trying to eviscerate him after he switched allegiances from the Democratic party to more of an independent stance
Rob –
> What I find interesting and amusing is how progressives like Joshua and Willard have gone from praising Musk
Feel free to point out anywhere where I ever praised him.
Guess what? You can’t. Because I never did. Perhaps yet another example of someone foisting on to me views that I never had – because you can’t get beyond cartoonish portrayals of people who disagree with you.
As for “eviscerating.” …
It’s interesting that you think that providing context to his “free speech absolutist” advocacy = “eviscerating.”
I don’t happen to agree. I see it more as just commonplace and banal hypocrisy. What’s hard to understand is why some people seem to think he’s above the banal and commonplace. He claims he’s a “free speech absolutist” whereas there’s plenty of evidence his actions aren’t consistent with such a characterization.
Rob –
Is this an example of what you were talking about?:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/05/25/elon-musks-big-oil-conspiracy-theory/#comment-2363889
Yeah, just look how difficult India has recently found it to block links to a BBC documentary that they don’t like. Hang on…
Our Hall Minotaur again refuses to address the argument.
Perhaps because he is the Hall Minotaur.
NO, it is you WilLard and Josh who refuse to address the issue that Twitter is a vastly more interesting and truthful place since Musk took over. No one cares about “context” that is meaningless smears.
No one cares about your unsubstantiated and irrelevant opinion, David. It is just noise.
Here is how an argument looks like:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/25/23571103/elon-musk-twitter-india-social-media-bbc-documentary-modi-censorship
Elon says one thing to please Freedom Fighters like you. Then he does another. At best because he does not bite the hand that feeds him. Elon has an excuse for licking boots. What’s yours?
There is a link under “buried in debt.”
In the space of 6 hours twitter went from being “vastly more free now” to “vastly more interesting and truthful place”! What happened to the FREEDOM?
And how is it more truthful when governments like India are allowed to restrict truths that they don’t like? Certainly interesting (in a ‘that’s an interesting way of defining truth and freedom’ kind of way) but certainly not more free or truthful. Unless that is what you want to believe, of course…
I have so many questions:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/ali-alexander-nick-fuentes-rebanned-twitter-1234668251/
The first one would be: is this… cancel culture?
“… is this… cancel culture?”
If one defines cancel culture as an unjustified and/or counterproductive retaliation of unfavored speech then one must answer that is so first.
What is justice for unfavored speech depends on the rights of the speaker balanced against the rights of the offended. There is good consensus that people have no right to intentionally mislead a crowd into panic in a movie theater by yelling “fire.” But if the person mistook smoke from an extinguished kitchen fire then they likely would be excused even if their alarm caused injury. So intentions are a fundamental component.
Fire danger in theaters is not political or religious or easily subject to bias. Intentions are thus clear. Political speech is different.
If an idiot wants to say they are not anti Semite, but anti termite, I think we need to let that pass without ejecting them from the establishment, as long as they are not physically threatening violence. We should not start cancelling their accounts or even their memberships. We should talk to them quietly and respectfully let them know it is wrong to make blanket attacks on races, genders or identities. Maybe talk to them about MLK’s dream.
The deeper question is what are the animosities that would make somebody have disdain for whole groups. And, is that problem solved by coercing them further into not expressing themselves? Probably not. They might even think the coercion confirms their thoughts and justifies their participation in violent retribution.
> The deeper question
That depends what you mean by “deeper.” If that means “let me probe the minds of my opponents,” it is indeed very deep. If that means “say what you will about Fuentes, at least this guy has an ethos,” it is also deep. And more importantly if that means “let me show you how Very Intelligent I can sound while trying to dodge a basic inconsistency,” then it is not deep, but Very Deep.
Coming up next – Very Deep questions about how we could respectfully ask the ZZs to get out of Ukraine.
W: “If that means “say what you will about Fuentes, at least this guy has an ethos,” it is also deep.”
I did not defend Fuentes’s ideas, but I defend his speech as long as he is not inciting specific acts of violence.
You might have heard at some time “I will not defend what you say but I will defend your right to say it.” That used to be a common American credo. I still think its a good idea because as I pointed out the alternatives are not good.
I remember about six years ago Anders suggested at his blog that the UK government should step in to prevent Ridley or Moncton, I forget, from speaking at Oxford. I commented (managing not be to censored) that his proposal should be taken up right away by their Ministry of Truth. Back then the absurdity of such a thing made my comment easy to spot as sarcasm, Orwell… ha ha ha. Anders replied, “Oh Ron…please.”
Last year the Biden DHS unveiled its Dept. of Misinformation. Then after some people had the same reaction I had they decided to re-veil it.
The media wrote countless times in the 1990s about how the end of the ski industry was in our future. Today Alta Ski Resort in Utah has a 12 feet base. Exactly when will all these apocalyptic predictions start coming true?
file:///var/mobile/Library/SMS/Attachments/55/05/7BD3F95A-328E-42A9-8245-C80361CD8A77/IMG_0907.jpeg
A better link
https://www.sltrib.com/sports/2023/01/25/alta-snaps-snowfall-record-after/
https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1620202355064209408?s=20&t=4gg2tzsGykCt_QKP8oGH-Q
This is just pseudo-science. There is no way to know if these groups are comparable in any way. Also they rely on databases of vaccinated that are often very incomplete meaning that many of those counted as “unvaccinated” actually did get vaccinated at a pharmacy that doesn’t report this data.
dpy6629,
More to the point, the concept of a vaccination status is a fuzzy one rendered crisp for the purposes of such analyses. Having been injected, a period of time has to pass before the vaccine can take effect. If a person dies of Covid-19 in the meantime, is it reasonable to count that as a failed vaccination? But we are dealing with a gradual development of immunity here, so where exactly do we draw the line? From what I can see from the supplementary information to the CDC report, the health authorities in the USA followed the common practice of saying that, for the purposes of studying morbidity under vaccination status, one cannot be considered as having been vaccinated until at least 14 days have passed since your injection. Also, I see that they consider two stage vaccinations as being incomplete until at least 14 days have passed since the second injection. That seems reasonable to me from the perspective of measuring the vaccines’ efficacy in reducing Covid-19 related death, but it raises two important issues.
Firstly, given that 14 days is an arbitrary cut-off, what is the science behind choosing that precise value and how is the analysis affected when changing the chosen value? Let us say, for the purpose of the argument, that the vast majority of the benefit from vaccination has actually kicked in by the seventh day. What would the mortality statistics look like if that had been chosen as the more realistic arbitrary cut-off, given that a lot of Covid-19 deaths that had been attributed to unvaccinated people would now transfer to the vaccinated count? The sensitivity of the results to such an adjustment should be investigated but I am not sure if anyone in authority is motivated to do so or even if such analyses would now be possible given the way the data has been collected.
Secondly, the problem becomes more acute when both vaccine safety and vaccine efficacy become the focus of attention. If a person is not considered to be vaccinated until at least 14 days have passed since injection, then to which group is a non-covid related death attributed in the meantime? Surely, if side effects are a matter of concern, one should classify someone as being vaccinated just as soon as they have been injected.
The conflict of interest here means that we would need to be working with two, quite different, definitions of what it means to be vaccinated. And the big question would be to ask how all-cause morbidity classifications are affected depending upon which definition is chosen. As far as I am aware, the only person who has examined this issue is Professor Norman Fenton, whose interest in performing re-analysis with adjusted definitions has been enough to place him in the dangerous anti-vaxxer category as far as the authorities are concerned (the problem being that he has noted that the case for vaccine efficacy and safety is weakened signiffically under such re-definitions). That’s a shame because it strikes me as an interesting and necessary line of investigation.
DPY – its not so much pseudo science as just sloppy data and failure to recognize when the data is corrupted. Though, Based on the size of the error, everyone at the CDC probably knows the errors.
Josh – like most covidians is unable to spot studies / reports which have and/or use corrupted data .
Numerous errors in the data base, both bad numerators, and bad denominators.
John –
Interesting point that it could meaningfully alter the broader picture of efficacy – it seems it should be relatively straight-forward for the CDC to do a sensitivity analysis with a sub-sample from which to extrapolate. What is your view on whether or not it likely does have much impact? Given that we don’t have that sensitivity analysis, what’s your prior about the magnitude of impact?
John –
Also, do you know whether the ONS has a similar 14-day delay before considering someone as vaccinated? My recollection is that they don’t, although I can’t remember where I got that idea from.
Joshua,
I think my answer to your question needs to be in two parts:
Firstly, if we are talking about the impact of, say, changing from a 14 day to 7 day definition when looking at the question of vaccine efficacy, I suspect that the difference would not be enough to change one’s views radically regarding that question. The vaccinated would still be dying a lot less from Covid-19 than the unvaccinated. This assessment is a matter of pure speculation on my part.
However, if one were to try to answer the question as to whether vaccine efficacy significantly outweighs the damages caused by side effects, one would have to look at all cause morbidity and look at how the results differ between a 14 day definition and the alternative (and equally valid) definition that says you are vaccinated as soon as you have been jabbed. In this instance I suspect that the difference may be enough to potentially change one’s views. This assessment, however, is not a matter of pure speculation on my part, because I have the benefit of having examined Professor Fenton’s paper, where he looked into the corresponding data collated and analysed by the ONS in the UK. In that analysis the change of definition made a huge difference to the results. Since the data collection protocols seem to be similar between the USA health authorities and their counterparts in the UK, I suspect that Professor Fenton would arrive at similar results if he were to repeat his counterfactual analysis using the USA data. I may ask him if he would be interested in attempting such an analysis but, as I said above, I’m not sure whether it would be as easy as you suggest. I’m not sure to what extent the necessary raw data is still readily available, even to the CDC.
As a footnote, I think it is only fair to point out that the UK’s ONS disputes Professor Fenton’s analysis and offers its own explanation for the ‘anomalies’ he has highlighted. For what it is worth, I have looked at the ONS explanation and I think it does not actually address Fenton’s concerns. That’s certainly how he feels. Also, the ONS has denied that they have miscategorised vaccination status in the way suggested by Fenton. This may be what you were remembering. Either way, I think the basic point stands: there can be no single definition of vaccination status that suits the dual purpose of analysing both vaccine efficacy and safety. I have not seen anything from the ONS that explains how they addressed that problem.
If you are interested in following any of this up, I recommend you start by looking on Professor Fenton’s website.
John –
Thanks. It does seem to me that there’s going to be an aspect of uncertainty due to the issue you raise about the delay and a potentially arbitrary, dichotomous cut-off. It doesn’t seem to me, albeit as someone not versed in statistics, that it would be terribly difficult to conduct a sensitivity analysis with a sample that quantified the effect of the delay around and increasing away from that 14-day cutoff. Seems like it would be a worthwhile endeavor as it would only add to clarity.
FWIW, from what I’ve seen I don’t think that Fenton is a particularly reliable source for analysis (although some might appeal to his authority).
My prior is that including such an analysis wouldn’t significantly shift an assessment of the efficacy of the vaccines, but again that’s as someone without a background in stats. That’s why I asked you for your prior.
It’s this kind of analysis that leads me to question the magnitude of the effect in terms of altering the view tihe pint of reversing a signal in efficacy:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00320-6/fulltext#:~:text=Based%20on%20our%20model%20fit,to%20Dec%208%2C%202021).
That suggest a really big signal to overcome that, it seems to me, would jump out in real world data if you’re suggesting a negative efficacy from vaccines relative to vaccine injury. Of course those data were from before immunity was built up and with a lesser impact from waning, and the more pressing issue would be looking at the current context.
At any rate, it seems to me that if there isn’t a deal in the ONS data, it would make for an interesting comparison – alrhihf if course there would be many potential confounds across countries.
Joshua | January 31, 2023 at 12:07 pm |
It’s this kind of analysis that leads me to question the magnitude of the effect in terms of altering the view tihe pint of reversing a signal in efficacy:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(22)00320-6/fulltext#:~:text=Based%20on%20our%20model%20fit,to%20Dec%208%2C%202021).
Josh – do you ever bother to perfom any level of due diligence on the studies you cite. Try it someday
Joshua,
I don’t think we need to speculate upon how easy or possible it would be for the CDC to do their own analyses using alternative vaccination status definitions. The essential fact is that they haven’t done so (or if they have, they haven’t published the results). It seems to me common sense that a vaccine status definition that is appropriate for studying vaccine efficacy cannot be equally appropriate for studying vaccine harm, and vice versa. By adopting the 14 day definition for the purposes of data generation it appears that the data were collated for the CDC with the intent of determining vaccine efficacy and that seems to be the only definition (give or take a few days) that has been used. This must surely have implications when people start to use morbidity statistics, generated using that single vaccine status definition, to make a case for both vaccine efficacy and safety. A much more nuanced analysis is required that recognizes the conflict of interest, i.e. that data generated for one analytical purpose will not necessarily be suitable for another. To do that one would have to look at how the definition affects the results. As far as I am aware, Professor Fenton and his long-time collaborator, Professor Martin Neil, are the only two people who have attempted such an analysis. You might think in advance that the effect must be small, and on that I would agree with you. But then you have to read his paper.
As for Professor Fenton’s credibility, I would really rather not go there. What mattered to me instead was to read his paper for myself to see whether or not his statistical argument made sense. And I have to say, despite his surprising conclusion, I couldn’t find the flaw in his argument or the data. Others, however, claim to have found the flaw. The ONS itself has made two counter claims:
1) There is no re-analysis required to determine vaccine safety because the ONS did, in fact, use the definition that a person is vaccinated as soon as they are injected. They say that now, of course, but I have failed to find any statement to that effect in their published study. Secondly, if that were true, where does that leave their analysis regarding vaccine efficacy, since such a definition is wholly unsuited for that purpose? They would need to be saying that they used two definitions; but they didn’t claim that at the time and they are not even claiming that now.
2) The anomaly in the ONS data that first caused Fenton to suspect that vaccinees had been miscategorised (at least from the perspective of analysing vaccine safety) doesn’t require such an explanation because it can be readily explained by the so-called ‘healthy vaccinee effect’, i.e. people who were terminally ill were not getting vaccinated so there is bound to be a greater number of non-covid related deaths amongst the unvaccinated. My first reaction to reading that was to be very surprised that an organisation such as the ONS could offer such an obviously flawed argument. Firstly, the existence of the healthy vaccinee is not evidenced. The policy at the time in the UK was to vaccinate even the terminally ill and, in fact, the vulnerable were prioritised for vaccination (there were, however, some instances were this was not the case because the vaccination might compromise the patient’s treatment or condition). Secondly, the healthy vaccinee effect does not seem to address the anomaly that Fenton and Neil had discovered, which was a temporal correlation in deaths that had no plausible causation, i.e. people who were not vaccinated appeared to be dying in greater numbers, but only during the period that others of their age group were being vaccinated. A miscategorisation is the only explanation that I can think of that explains such a weird phenomenon. But I remain open-minded.
At the end of the day, this is a matter that needs to be carefully argued one way or another. It cannot be settled by simply calling into question someone’s reliability based upon what has been said on twitter or some of the company he keeps. And as for appealing to authority, there is perhaps no greater authority in the UK than the ONS. Even the UK’s Office for Statistical Regulations has become involved in the argument and they have arbitrated in favour of the ONS. So I assure you, no one, such as I, who is still arguing in favour of taking Fenton’s analysis seriously is doing so by appeal to authority.
PS. When I said that the UK Office for Statistical Regulations arbitrated in favour of the ONS, I meant only on the matter of the healthy vaccinee effect. What they also said is this:
“Overall, then, our view is that the [ONS] Death By Vaccination Status publication does not provide information on vaccine effectiveness or vaccine safety, and should not be used in this way.”
Which is an issue, because that is exactly how everyone has used it.
John –
> What they also said is this:….
IIRC, I saw Fenton talk about that in his interview with Campbell, which I skimmed a bit…
The issue of people going beyond what the data tells them has certainly been a big problem throughout the pandemic. Not surprising, I guess, since the pandemic has been a festival of motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, etc.
I remember early in the pandemic, Vincent Racaniello talking about the problem of trying to use population level epidemiological data, without lab-based evidence in support, to theorize about biological aspects of the virus. It made a big impression on me. And with that in mind, I think it’s one of the areas where people have almost routinely gone beyond what the data can support. Conclusions people have drawn regarding the virulence of the different variants being a good example.
John –
> 1) There is no re-analysis required to determine vaccine safety because the ONS did, in fact, use the definition that a person is vaccinated as soon as they are injected.
Ah. Yes, that was what I recalled, I think from a critique of something else from Fenton which pointed out that his analysis wrongly claimed there was a delay.
> The anomaly in the ONS data that first caused Fenton to suspect that vaccinees had been miscategorised (at least from the perspective of analysing vaccine safety) doesn’t require such an explanation because it can be readily explained by the so-called ‘healthy vaccinee effect’, i.e. people who were terminally ill were not getting vaccinated so there is bound to be a greater number of non-covid related deaths amongst the unvaccinated.
As I recall from looking at that issue a bit, the healthy vaccinee effect is pretty speculative, based on heavily caveated research in an entirely different context (as I recall flu vaccinations, and not during an on-going pandemic where there’s a massive vaccination campaign). As it seems you’d agree, I don’t think it should be applied as some kind of a rule across contexts. Perhaps you’ve seen where it has been accumulated specific to the COVID era data. If so, I’d appreciate a link. I think there’s plenty of reason to speculate that in fact, during the COVID era, vaccinees are actually less healthy as a group, even when age-matched, and even accounting for the fact that the very unhealthy might get vaccinated at a lower rate. Certainly, again, conclusions about vaccine efficacy (which would include the widespread attribution we’ve been seeing of harms to vaccines by assumptions based on reverse engineering excess death) should be informed by matched controls between who has and hasn’t gotten vaccinated.
>“…I think from a critique of something else from Fenton which pointed out that his analysis wrongly claimed there was a delay.”
If this is what I’m thinking of, there was a popular tweet that showed an extract from the ONS document, purporting to be the definition they had used for ‘vaccinated’, and purportedly showing that it did not imply a delay. I took one look at it and immediately recognised that it was not a definition for ‘vaccinated’ but a definition for something else that used the term ‘vaccinated’. In fact there is nothing in the ONS document that clarifies the definition they used, nor would I expect there to be. The categorisation policy that Fenton was referring to was that used by the health authorities who were responsible for generating the statistics subsequently used by the ONS. I think it was quite widely known that they had used 14 days as their cut-off. I certainly remember that figure being made public at the time. So, in answer to the “pointed out that his analysis wrongly claimed”, I say, “Err, no”.
>“As I recall from looking at that issue a bit, the healthy vaccinee effect is pretty speculative…”
Moreover, it is irrelevant to Fenton’s analysis. And yet the ONS and the UK’s Office of Statistical Regulations don’t agree so. It’s this sort of thing that does my head in. Curiouser and curiouser.
As you say, there is a lot of motivated thinking and many confounders to deal with. But there is also the old adage about there being lies, damn lies and statistics. Ultimately, it is not a subject I would want to bet my reputation on, and I envy Professor Fenton not one jot.
John –
> If this is what I’m thinking of, there was a popular tweet that showed an extract from the ONS document, purporting to be the definition they had used for ‘vaccinated’, and purportedly showing that it did not imply a delay
I can’t recall what it was…whether it was a critique of what Fenton has said or someone that was critical of the vaccines. It may have been re that Doshi article that seemed dodgy to me (which ironically was co-authored by a highly regarded statistician who comments at the blog that I recommended you post your ideas on) that Fenton seemed to thing was of good quality….
Anyway, I recall that in this critique it was said there’s no delay, contra the analysis that was being critiqued. I dont recall the source being used and I didn’t check at the time. They could have been wrong but armed quite certain. And that’s why I asked you if you knew
Joshua,
I will admit that I have seen a number of posts online that have been critical of Fenton’s reasoning and have questioned his abilities. However, one has to view this in the context of what the eminent statistician, John Tukey, said of his colleagues:
“The collective noun for a group of statisticians should be a quarrel.”
I have a soft spot for Fenton because he introduced me to Bayesianism many moons ago and we share a lot in our professional background (e.g. we were both engaged in the fields of software metrics and safety engineering, albeit he as an academic and consultant and me as a humble practitioner). His credentials do make him an authority figure, but there are lots of authority figures out there, at each other’s throats. Ultimately, one has to study the reasoning oneself and draw a conclusion, and this can be difficult. If experts are arguing, one shouldn’t expect to find this easy.
John –
Don’t know if you’ll see this comment but I was wondering what you thought of this Tweet by Fenton:
https://twitter.com/profnfenton/status/1621778177977622530?t=HcruwFK9RF8HycBn_Wlz-Q&s=19
John Ridgeway & DPY – in response to your comments, The error in the CDC report that shows 12x benefit ( lower death rate from being vaxed) – The 12x is only using a comparison based on a 0ne month post vax – kinda worthless metric.
The other 2.4x less risk of dying has major data file error which should be obvious. The CDC uses data obtained from the various state health departments.
The average weekly death rate at the height of the Nov 2020-jan 2021 wave was approx 50 per 100k of the unvaxed 65+ age group. The “reported ” average week death rate for the unvaxed 65+ age group during the height of the Nov 2021-jan 2022 wave ranged between 170-240 per 100k (depending on the state). Totally implausible that the per capita death for the unvaxed increased 3-5x for the milder omicron variant.
In sum its pretty obvious that there are data base errors and yet they are still being promoted as valid.
Yes, This is another strike against the CDC who have pushed flawed studies and in the case of masks almost fraudulent analysis. I don’t see how anyone who is awake can still believe what they say and the low uptake for the new booster shows the public doesn’t trust them.
Interesting article on immune imprinting:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(23)00007-5/fulltext
At any rate, hopefully this pans out:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4342771
Speaking of the media environment, the Russiagate hoax is finally being taken apart in detail at the Columbia Journalism Review. Also an analysis of why the media is distrusted by most Americans.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
And Josh’s latest whipping boys come in for some strong praise.
“Not all journalists got Russiagate wrong. Gerth quotes reporters Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times criticizing the media’s coverage. And Gerth singles out Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Aaron Maté as three journalists who got the story right (he could have also included Michael Tracey), and accurately debunked other news media’s coverage of the allegations and evidence. Gerth also credits Michael Isikoff, a well-known investigative journalist who has worked for the Washington Post, Yahoo News, and other publications, for changing his news coverage after uncritically reporting on an infamous memo written by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, which suggested, among other things, that the Russian government-controlled Trump by hiring prostitutes to urinate on him.”
Public News by Michael Shellenberger and LeightonWoodhouse
I did an exhaustive search and was unsuccessful in finding Michael Isikoff reporting any regrets in the last 2 years about his role in the Russia hoax. I can only credit him with losing interest in sustaining the hoax after Danchenko and the FBI were outed. Unfortunately, one can’t say the same for Isikoff’s original co-agent on the hoax, David Corn, who is still high on his own gas. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/11/the-steele-dossier-and-donald-trumps-betrayal-of-america/
Ron –
In your exhaustive research did you read the book he wrote on the topic?
At about 40 minutes on in this interview they reference statements he made in his book, that reporters (he?) didn’t scrutinize the dossier sufficiently:
https://youtu.be/K54J4qiXRcA
Don’t know if that meets your view of reporting “regret.”
Joshua
Do you honestly believe the magnitude of any supposed apology equals that of the initial accusations? Isn’t that the duty if you make a false accusation?
Rob –
1) I don’t understand your question. You introduced “apology” as if it was previously in discussion. It wasn’t. What “initial accusations” are you talking about? How are you meausing “magnitude” if an apology/accusations?
2) Why are my beliefs a subject of your question? Are you truly curious about that they are, or is this rhetorical?
Interesting event considering the rhetoric about the putative seismic shift in Twitter’s role in truth in reporting, and in Twitter policies re monitoring misinformation:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/02/politics/fact-check-biden-world-war-iii/index.html
This happens to politicians all the time. Recall the famous lie about Trump’s “fine people on both sides” comments that Biden used to launch his campaign. it was the centerpiece of that campaign and laundered by all the media as accurate. But it was a lie.
For Frank’s benefit, it does appear that the Russiagate hoax is finally collapsing as more and more honest journalists are documenting this sustained multiyear politically motivated massive disinformation campaign involving big tech, the deep state, and the corporate US based media. You were wrong Frank to take the bait. Repent all ye Trump haters and Russia collusion conspiracy theorists. This is the big story that threatens our Democracy, not populism or Trump.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
https://rumble.com/v27vze6-russiagate-a-worthwhile-deep-dive-into-the-medias-stunning-lies-and-corrupt.html
https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton
https://www.racket.news/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Ftwitter%2520files%2520summary%2520taibbi&utm_medium=reader2
The only rational conclusion is that our corporate media have become as bad as Russian media, i.e., colluding with the government at all levels to spread the state propaganda line.
And a new meta analysis on masks also confirms yet again what 20 years of research has shown, they don’t work in community settings.
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/the-cochrane-review-on-masks-is-damning?utm
dpy, I wish they were coming to their senses but the reality is that the US media is worse than Pravda and Tass were in their Soviet heyday. Michael Isikoff may have ceased being a shoveler of the Russia hoax but he is not out in front of setting the record straight. Instead, his Yahoo News bosses are regularly publishing articles that vilify Fox News and brainwashed far right-wingers that let Trump off the hook. The only thing they haven’t yet claimed is that Trump as a hypnotic power. That one was Goebbels’s explanation for the evil in a certain minority, a description that somehow also became apart of Ilhan Omar’s education.
Here is a random paragraph from Thursday’s article:
“Consequently, while Trump may have skated on tax fraud in the past (because he donated to the right political campaigns) and never paid any meaningful price for his serial sexual abuse (because there are a ton of sexist assholes in America), to continue to support America’s enemies and seemingly get away with it takes a village. He has his own social media platform, the benefit of other alt-right-controlled social media platforms, Fox News, virtually the entire Republican Party, and the entire Russian propaganda machine to keep him afloat in situations that would have undone virtually any other traitor in our history.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-still-putin-stooge-traitor-024722294.html
The Jeff Gerth series in the Columbia Journal Review is a big deal. Gerth is a 28-year veteran of the NYT is blasting his own paper for its unrepentance on the Russia hoax. But Gerth does not even provide any opinion commentary throughout his four part series until the afternote. There He points out that the FBI’s lead investigator, Strzok, after 10 months of investigation notes there is not there there. This is a Mueller is building his dream team, including Clinton lawyers to go after Trump. But the NYT ignored that when they learned it.
Instead, the NYT and others point to the DNC hack as proof of Russian meddling. Gerth never disputes the hack nor points to the problems of the FBI allowing Perkins Coie (Clinton) to do the investigation for them. But now that we have the perspective of more puzzle pieces, what are the chances that Russia coincidentally played right into Clinton’s hand and openly meddled and entrapped Roger Stone?
One could imagine that it was the Russian meddling that Hillary tried to use to her advantage by setting up the fake dossier and fake investigation of Alfa bank link to Trump Towers. But that does not fit the timeline. The earliest Clinton could have gotten an inkling of the Russia meddling was May 1 (or May 10, depending on telling) when Crowdstrike’s Dimitri Alperovitch claimed he told Perkins Coie he found Russians in the DNC server. By this time the Perkins had already hired Fusion GPS to go after Trump. And while Alperovitch was still at the DNC trying to clean the server Glenn Simpson was already meeting in London with Christopher Steele. The date of DNC email server exfiltration was May 21 and Wikileaks did not announce they had “Hillary related emails” until June 16, which everyone assumed was her lost home server emails until the DNC announced it was their emails on June 18. The Trump Jr. honey trap with the Fusion GPS Russian lawyer presenting a document at Trump Tower prepared by Fusion GPS had already occurred on June 10. The timeline does not fit. The plot’s actual start likely predated Alexander Downer’s (a large Clinton Foundation donor) going to the FBI about Papadopoulos.
What amazes me Ron is how the true believers in these conspiracy theories will not address the fact that they are elite lies designed to prevent their power from being eroded by “populism.” Frank is a perfect example. He’s intelligent and detail oriented yet he continues to peddle the elite line and has never acknowledged that this is probably the biggest disinformation campaign in world history.
Yes, there is a semi-religious component for sure. Both Gerth and Greenwald noted that the NYT audience kind of wants to be fed narrative more than they desire the truth. An alternative theory would be that modern society’s comforts are suspending adolescence. Seeing no need for unpleasant complexities, people are content with a story time escape. Both Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow are great story tellers. But where Rachel only questions Trump and deplorables, Tucker questions almost anyone whom he disagrees, including every potential GOP presidential candidate (except for DeSantis so far).
Yet, whichever story teller one prefers one must hold their nose and actively pursue information contrary to their preferred beliefs if they desire the truth. Fewer are making the time. More and more getting their news from comedians. Am I imagining all of this, Josh? Yes, he will say, Socrates was worried about the same thing.
Ron –
Speaking of narratives, you might find this interesting. I sure did:
https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/russia-and-the-us-press-the-article-the-cjr-didnt-publish/
and Ron –
.
> Am I imagining all of this, Josh? ? Yes, he will say,
Yet again, you substitute your fantasies, born of your biases, for what I believe. It’s understandable – we all do that to some extent. The problem is your lack of accountability – because as long as you continue to do it with NO accountability you can’t even hope to correct for the problem.
As it happens, I wouldn’t disagree that Tucker might be more likely to criticize Donald than Rachel would Joe. (talk about damning with faint praise and a kind of bigotry of low expectations).
Tucker is more of an ideologue than Rachel and Trump is less ideological (more transactional) than Joe. That math leads up to your calculation. But so what? Does it mean that Tucker in the end is less hypocritical or cynical than Rachel? I don’t think so I any meaningful manifestation, as Tucker is still manifestly hugely hypocritical as all get out on many substantive issues. I’ll leave you to split the well-coiffed hairs of TV stars.
J: “Yet again, you substitute your fantasies, born of your biases, for what I believe.”
All I was imagining was that you would disagree. That was a pretty low bar, as you say. What you believe is still mostly a mystery since you are shy to go on the record. It’s much easier to criticize. I think we can all agree on that.
J: “As it happens, I wouldn’t disagree that Tucker might be more likely to criticize Donald than Rachel would Joe. (talk about damning with faint praise and a kind of bigotry of low expectations).”
What I actually said was the Tucker is open to firing in all directions. That makes him less hypocritical. And, I disagree that Trump is easier to criticize per se. Though I think there is universal agreement that Trump does not coddle, the left thought that would lead to inflamed foreign relations. It turned out that the world was not needing coddlers.
In regard to Tucker being hypocritical, I would say that he tries not to be by admitting his errors, like supporting the ouster of Saddam and the Taliban. On those points I think he is too self-critical. The fault was not realizing what it takes to rebuild broken cultures versus rebuilding where the culture previously functioned, like Germany and Japan.
Ron –
> What you believe is still mostly a mystery since you are shy to go on the record.
I’m not at all shy to go on record. This is yet another fantasy. What happens is you make up views for me and foist them on me, and you’re incorrect (likely due to a combo of a lack of cognitive empathy, misconceptions about “the left,’ a lack of imagination, fundamental attribution error, and motivated reasoning/confirmation bias). Again, all pretty normal and banal stuff, but there’s a problem with degree, and a bigger problem resulting from a lack of accountability – such as asserting that I’m shy about “going on the record.”
W/hat happens is when I tell you that your fantasies about what I think are wrong, you hen think that means that I’m shy about saying what I believe. And you get stuck into your cycle of unfalsifiability. I think you’re not going to make progress here unless you take into account your underlying, and no doubt long-standing hostility towards “the left,” which leads to your antipathy towards me as a member of “the left.”
> That makes him less hypocritical.
Again, while I think he’s more likely to state for the record that he was wrong on some issues, it doesn’t materially make him more hypocritical – as nightly he displays double-standards and usually his admissions of error are phony displays. That’s more of his arsenal than Rachel. I’m not at all sure it makes him less hypocritical.
I do remember one interesting occasion when he make a big show of acknowledging error in a long history of attributing poverty to a “culture of poverty.” And related criticism of neo-liberalism. That was actually pretty impressive. But I don’t think that anyone could actually find any distinction in any of his related positions pre- to post-acknowledgement. It was for show.
He’s a showman and part of his rhetorical style is to make a big display of “acknowledging error.’ It’s kind of funny that you buy into his showmanship. Kind of like how people think that Trump is different than other politicians.
> The fault was not realizing what it takes to rebuild broken cultures versus rebuilding where the culture previously functioned, like Germany and Japan.
Lol. So it wasn’t the invasion and the underlying pro-hegemony philosophy for the invasion (as laid out for a long time by PNAC), but a lack of understanding of the cultures (which were well described by many analyses that were uniformly ignored by the neocons) because Arabs don’t share qualities of the Germans and Japanese. So much for the principles of non-interventionism, eh?
OH, and btw – you prolly already know about this, but I just heard an interview with this author and found it interesting and thought of you because of your interest in conspiracy theories:
https://wgnradio.com/john-williams/author-brad-meltzer-and-the-plot-to-kill-the-big-three/
Ron –
From another thread:
This could not be more perfect – a characterization of my views on the importance of attempting to internalize external costs into the price of energy
> And [Josh] thinks the solution is to make the price go up more by pricing in his idea of “externalities.”
As usual – foisting views on me that I don’t have.
At least with you, it’s not clear that foisting views on me that I don’t have is (in the least always) an intentional choice. It is often the case in such discussions that misinterpretation or even mis-representation are in fact unintentional whether due to cognitive biases or ambiguity in what has been previously stated. And thus clarification (particularly when requested) is very important (an areas where we have a firm of agreement).
But Jeff has made it quite clear in the past that with him it actually is volitional.
Now perhaps you think it’s my responsibility to clarify how Jeff has foisted views on me I don’t own. But past experience tells me that’s a wasted effort – as no attempt to clarify will net positive results, because he won’t accept and correct for his fundamental misunderstanding. And attempts in the past to correct his misunderstanding have made it obvious that good faith engagement was not an option because it wasn’t Jeff’s intent. Instead, his intent was to vent resentment and hostility towards cartoons of “the left,” and that was how his mischaracterization was derived in the first place.
Notice that there’s no inquiries or even a quote provided to verify IN ANY WAY, that his interpretation and portrayal of my views was correct.
That’s why I think the place to start is to verify one’s interpretation of the I’m their interluctor’s views. Using a quote is a good rule of thumb.
Also – another link you might find interesting – even if we leave out the conspiratorial framing you might find it interesting. But perhaps the conspiratorial framing in itself will catch your fancy:
https://newrepublic.com/article/170328/charles-mcgonigal-throw-2016-election
This link is a new low even for you Josh. The author claims to “know a huge amount of stuff about Trump’s Russian connections the FBI doesn’t.” But its all irrelevant trivia, guilt by association, and really really old stuff about Trump’s businesses.
That this kind of real dissembling and diversion can be published in our media shows how totally corrupt they have become. Gerth’s long articles in the Columbia Journalism Review destroy these lies about the “russians” and Trump.
Let me just ask you Josh, Do you still believe the Russiagate hoax based on rubbish such as this?