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Photoshopping, fraud and circular logic in research

By Mike Hearn | Daily Sceptic | July 22, 2021

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Marcia Angell

Check out this image from a peer reviewed research paper that supposedly shows skin lesions being treated by a laser:

Left: before treatment for keratoses. Right: after they were airbrushed out. (image diff is available here)

On being challenged the authors said:

The photograph was taken in the same room with a similar environment; unfortunately the patient wore the same shirt.

The journal found this explanation acceptable and forwarded the response to the complainants.

It’s becoming clear that science has major difficulties with not only a flood of incorrect and intellectually fraudulent claims, but also literally faked, entirely made up papers with random data, imaginary experiments and photoshopped images in them. Some of these papers are sold by organised gangs to Chinese doctors who need them to get promoted. But others come from really sketchy outfits like (sigh) the National Health Service, to whom we owe the masterpiece seen above.

The British Government hasn’t noticed that its doctors are massaging medical evidence. Instead this example comes from Elizabeth Bik, who runs a blog where she and a few other volunteers try to spot clusters of fraudulent papers. She embarrassed the journal in public here, and the paper was finally retracted. But she’s just a volunteer who raises money on Patreon for her work. Here’s her assessment of what’s going on:

Science has a huge problem: 100s (1000s?) of science papers with obvious photoshops that have been reported, but that are all swept under the proverbial rug, with no action or only an author-friendly correction… There are dozens of examples where journals rather accept a clean (better photoshopped?) figure redo than asking the authors for a thorough explanation.

As the only people trying to spot these fake papers are bloggers, we can safely assume that far larger numbers of papers are fake than the “thousands” they have already found and reported. For example,

0.04% of papers are retracted. At least 1.9% of papers have duplicate images “suggestive of deliberate manipulation”. About 2.5% of scientists admit to fraud, and they estimate that 10% of other scientists have committed fraud.

Photos of supposedly different samples in which two images are identical. From “Anticancer activity of biogenerated silver nanoparticles: an integrated proteomic investigation”. The journal investigated and concluded that this is fine.

It’s been known for years that a lot of claims made by scientists can’t be replicated. In some fields, the majority of all claims appear to not replicate due to a large mix of issues like overly lax thresholds for claiming statistical significance, poor study design and other somewhat subtle errors. But how much research is deliberate falsehood?

The sad truth is the size of the fraud problem is entirely unknown because the institutions of science have absolutely no mechanisms to detect bad behaviour whatsoever. Academia is dominated by (and largely originated) the same ideology calling for the total defunding of the police, so no surprise that they just assume everyone has absolute integrity all the time: research claims are constantly accepted at face value even when obviously nonsensical or fake. Deceptive research sails through peer review, gets published, cited and then incorporated into decision making. There are no rules and it’d be pointless to make any because there’s nobody to enforce them: universities are notorious for solidly defending fraudulent professors.

So let’s turn over the rock and see what crawls out. We’ll start with China and then turn our attention back to more western types of deception.

Chinese fraud studios

In 2018, the U.S. National Science Foundation announced that: “For the first time, China has overtaken the United States in terms of the total number of science publications.” Should the USA worry about this? Perhaps not. After some bloggers exposed an industrial research-faking operation that had generated at least 600 papers about experiments that never happened, a Chinese doctor reached out to beg for mercy:

Hello teacher, yesterday you disclosed that there were some doctors having fraudulent pictures in their papers. This has raised attention. As one of these doctors, I kindly ask you to please leave us alone as soon as possible… Without papers, you don’t get promotion; without a promotion, you can hardly feed your family… You expose us but there are thousands of other people doing the same. As long as the system remains the same and the rules of the game remain the same, similar acts of faking data are for sure to go on. This time you exposed us, probably costing us our job. For the sake of Chinese doctors as a whole, especially for us young doctors, please be considerate. We really have no choice, please!

Note the belief that “thousands of other people” are doing the same, and that these doctors need more than one paper to keep being promoted, so the 600 found so far is surely the tip of an iceberg given China’s size. There are about 3.8 million doctors in China implying that there are quite possibly tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these things in circulation.

The fake papers are remarkable:

  • They are so good they are undetectable in isolation. The NHS photo is an aberration – normally these papers get spotted by noticing re-used technical images across papers that claim to be different experiments by different people. The fake papers are probably produced by real scientists with access to real lab equipment. The use of spammy-looking Gmail accounts is also a signal because Gmail is banned in China (e.g. BrendaWillingham12192@gmail.com, RosettajKirkland3814@gmail.com, CaseyPeiffer8311@gmail.com). The reliance on bot-generated Gmail accounts implies enormous scale.
  • They are peer reviewed and published in western journals. For instance, the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry by Wiley or Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy by Elsevier. They claim to be doing advanced micro-biology on serious diseases: a typical title is something like “MicroRNA-125b promotes neurons cell apoptosis and Tau phosphorylation in Alzheimer’s disease”. Journals have no way to detect these papers and aren’t trying to develop any.
  • Some of them present traditional Chinese medicine as scientific. TCM is more or less the Chinese equivalent of homeopathy with lots of herbal remedies, eating body parts of exotic animals to cure erectile dysfunction, and so on. But the Chinese Government is obsessed with it and thinks it’s the same as normal medicine. From the top down, Chinese scientists are expected to produce papers claiming that TCM works, and they do! Mostly this stuff stays in Chinese but the ever increasing reliance of western universities on Chinese funding means it’s now finding its way into the English language literature as well, e.g. “Probing the Qi of traditional Chinese herbal medicines by the biological synthesis of nano-Au” was published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Advert by a research faking operation. Credit to “Smut Clyde” and “TigerBB8”.

Most western scientists are too clever to buy a completely fake paper (or so we hope). But their promotion incentives are identical, and there are other techniques that let you publish as many fake papers as you want. Let’s turn our attention to…

Impossible numbers in western science

The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.

Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet

How many scientists just make up their data? A well known recent case of this was the Surgisphere scandal, in which a paper appeared in The Lancet that claimed to be based on a proprietary dataset of nearly 100,000 COVID-19 patients across over 670 U.S. hospitals. This figure was larger than the official case counts of some entire continents at the time, and there was no reason for hospitals to share tightly controlled medical data with a random company nobody had heard of, so the claim was implausible on its face. Sure enough, when challenged it turned out none of the authors had ever actually seen the data, just summaries of it provided by one guy, who on investigation had a long track record of dishonesty. The Lancet probably accepted this paper because it made Trump look bad and the editor (Horton, quoted above) appears to hate Trump more than he hates bad science.

There are some other cases like this that came to light over the years, like the story of Brian Wansink, or that of Paolo Macchiarini, who left a trail of dead patients in his wake. But while anecdotes about individual cases are interesting, can we be more rigorous?

One clue comes from automated tools that scan research papers looking for mathematically impossible numbers, which can sometimes be detected even in the absence of the raw original data. In recent years a few such tools have been developed and deployed, mostly against psychology and food science.

  • The statcheck program showed that “half of all published psychology papers… contained at least one p-value that was inconsistent with its test”.
  • The GRIM program showed that of the papers it could verify, around half contained averages that weren’t possible given the sample sizes, and more than 20% contained multiple such inconsistencies.
  • The SPRITE program detected various experiments on food that would have required subjects to eat implausible quantities (e.g. a child needing to eat 60 carrots in a single sitting, or 3/4 kilogram of crisps).

Being flagged by a stats checker doesn’t guarantee the data is made up: GRIM can detect simple mistakes like typos and SPRITE requires common sense to detect that something is wrong (i.e., no child will eat a plate of 60 carrots). But when there are multiple such problems in a single paper, things start to look more suspicious. The fact that half of all papers had incorrect data in them is concerning, especially because it seems to match Richard Horton’s intuitive guess at how much science is simply untrue. And the GRIM paper revealed a deeper problem: more than half of the scientists refused to provide the raw data for further checking, even though they had agreed to share it as a condition of being published. This is rather suspicious.

One of the difficulties with detecting scientific fraud is that the line between dishonesty and simple absurdity can get quite blurry. Sometimes scientists “calculate” data that is clearly wrong, but don’t actually try to hide or it may even admit to it in the paper, knowing full well that nobody cares and nonsensical data won’t actually matter. Here’s an example from a COVID modelling paper:

The model was allowed to calculate that the average Brit must live with 7 other people, because it couldn’t obtain data fit otherwise (actual number=2.4). This one comes from University College London, is written by 12 neuroscientists, passed peer review and has 37 citations. The peer reviewer noticed that the incorrect number was in the paper but signed off on it anyway.

For decades psychiatrists published research into the “gene for depression” 5-HTTLPR. They created an entire literature not only linking the gene to depression but explaining how it worked, linking it to parenting styles, developing treatments based up on it. Over 450 papers were published on the topic. Eventually a geneticist discovered what they were doing and used DNA databanks to point out that none of those papers could possibly be true.

Sometimes numbers aren’t “wrong” but are instead logically vacuous. The Flaxman et al paper from Imperial College that tried to prove lockdowns work had the usual problem of statistically implausible numbers, but more importantly was built on circular logic: their model assumed only government interventions could end epidemics. This is obviously nonsense and they breezily admitted it in the paper, where they said their work was “illustrative only” and that “in reality even in the absence of government interventions we would expect Rt to decrease”. No problem: this fictional illustration got published in Nature and the authors presented the model’s outputs as scientific proof of their own assumption to the media. The paper is vacuous mathematical obfuscation, but scientists either can’t tell or don’t care: it has racked up over 1,300 citations and the number is still growing rapidly. To put that number in perspective, in physics the top 1% of all researchers have around 2,000 citations over their entire career.

Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

Earlier this month, the BMJ published an astounding blog post with the same title as this section. There’s no need to add anything because simply quoting it is sufficient:

The anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that… when he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials… [Ben] Mol’s best guess is that about 20% of trials are false. Very few of these papers are retracted.

We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary.

Richard Smith

Richard Smith is a former editor of the BMJ, cofounder of the Committee on Medical Ethics (COPE), for many years the chair of the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee, and a member of the board of the U.K. Research Integrity Office.

Or put another way, an overseer of the Research Integrity Office believes research has no integrity.

What can be done?

600 fraudulent papers here, 450 over there, 1300+ citations of just one bad paper… pretty quickly it starts adding up.

We’re often told science is self-correcting. Is that true? Probably not. “The Science Reform Brain Drain” is perhaps the bleakest essay I’ve read this year. Reformers like the men who developed SPRITE and GRIM have been giving up and leaving science entirely. Pointing out in public that your colleagues are dishonest is never a great career move, and the work was often futile. One scientist who quit and went into industry summed up his fraud detection work like this:

The clearest consequence of my actions has been that Zhang has gotten better at publishing. Every time I reported an irregularity with his data, his next article would not feature that irregularity.

Even when a bull enters the China shop and gets a few papers retracted, it doesn’t actually matter because it has little effect: retracted papers keep getting cited for years afterwards and actually may be cited more than non-retracted papers, because one of the effects of retraction is that the article becomes free to download.

In the past year most talk of bad science has been about models with bad assumptions. This is an issue but has been hiding problems that are far worse: scientists are buying fake papers, Photoshopping evidence, refusing to upload their data, knowingly publishing numbers that cannot be correct, citing papers that were retracted for being fraudulent and (of course) presenting mathematical obfuscations of what they want to be true as if it were science. Journals usually ignore fraud reports entirely, or when put under pressure let scientists submit “corrected” versions of their papers. And worst of all, the journal editors that are responsible for scientific gatekeeping know all this is happening, but aren’t doing anything about it.

In fact, very little can be done because above all, universities rely on reputation and don’t want anyone to find out about bad behaviour, so they fight tooth and nail to protect academics no matter how badly they are behaving. There are no rules. Any rules that are alleged to exist turn out when tested to be illusions.

Claims made by scientists are automatically trusted by the majority of people. Maybe they shouldn’t be?

Mike Hearn is a former Google software engineer. You can read his blog at Plan 99.

July 22, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Why are the Vaccines working so much better in the US than in Israel?

Is it plausible that the vaccinated make up 0.8% of COVID deaths in the US but 75% in Israel?

By Marko Marjanović | Anti-Empire | July 20, 2021

Fauci says that an incredible 99.2% of those who die of COVID in the US are now unvaccinated:

Fauci, the country’s top public health official, has said that in June, 99.2% of Covid deaths in the US could be attributed to those who are unvaccinated.

92% would be a high enough number to raise eyebrows but 99.2% is just incredible. But hey, the better these things work the happier. Who doesn’t love a nice life-saving medical intervention?

The problem is this. In Israel the 60% who are vaccinated instead contributed 75% of the deaths so far in July.

The upper left, the bottom left, and the bottom right are broken down between vaccinated (green) and unvaccinated (red). Orange are vaccinated with one dose.
Vaccinated Israelis are also contributing the clear majority of COVID hospitalizations, and of severe cases.

Some days all new severe hospitalizations are vaccinated Israelis.

Sure enough, the sample size in Israel is small. They’ve had just 12 deaths whole July (of which 9 were vaccinated) so far. Thus one shouldn’t rush to too many conclusions from here.

Also, one always has to keep in mind that the vaccinated are considerably older on average, so it is not surprising that they remain overrepresented among hospitalizations.

Much of the unvaccinated in Israel is made up of children who are not going to end up hospitalized with COVID either way:

Nonetheless, the discrepancy between the vaccine outcome reported by Fauci and reported in Israel is just too big to be accepted without an explanation.

How is it that the 60% vaccinated Israelis contributed 75% of Israeli COVID deaths in July, but the 52% Americans vaccinated by June contributed just 0.8% of deaths that month?

How come the difference in COVID outcomes between the two groups is so much greater in America than in Israel? How come the vaccines work so much better in Americans than in Israelis?

Is the vaccine anti-semitic?

July 22, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

A Conversation with Dr. Byram Bridle

Supervisor Jim Desmond | April 13, 2021

We sat down with Dr. Byram Bridle, an associate Professor of Viral Immunology, Department of Pathobiology at the University of Guelph.  Here’s the article that we discussed: https://theconversation.com/a-year-of…

July 22, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

The Great Betrayal

By Will Jones • Daily Sceptic • July 21, 2021

Destroy their education. Destroy their jobs and their job prospects. Destroy their social life, their friendships, their mental health. Force them to work long hours at school or in physically demanding jobs in uncomfortable and breath-inhibiting face masks. This is what our country has done to our young people in the past 16 months.

Why? In an attempt (and not a very successful one) to protect a small minority of mostly elderly folk who are particularly vulnerable to one disease while we wait in limbo to develop a vaccine and roll it out to the vulnerable population.

Then do we give them back their freedom? Not at all. Then we move the goalposts, making freedom conditional on more and more people getting the vaccine. Until we make it to so-called ‘Freedom Day’, a month later than originally planned, and Boris Johnson chooses then to tell young people that their freedom to do the things they enjoy will be dependent on receiving a vaccine.

A vaccine that uses experimental technology and was rushed through trials without waiting for the full safety data (trials which will never now conclude as the control groups have been vaccinated). A vaccine, or rather vaccines, which the authorities now acknowledge increase the risk of dangerous blood clotting and heart conditions, particularly in younger people. Vaccines for which there are now more reports of fatalities in the U.S. than all other vaccines put together for the past 30 years.

OpenVAERS

The E.U.’s own infectious disease journal Eurosurveillance has just published a study concluding that, when it comes to the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots, “in young adults, the risks were similar or higher than the benefits”.

Bear in mind this is just considering one side effect based on the reported incidence. It doesn’t take into account other side effects and under-reporting.

That’s the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is now discouraged for under 40s in the U.K. Are Pfizer and Moderna vaccines much better? Warnings have recently been added to them that they cause serious heart conditions in some cases. What else might emerge as the data is properly analysed?

The decision whether to take a particular vaccine, given the risk and potential benefit, is a personal one, and we can hardly blame the minority of young adults who appear to be concluding they’d rather take their chances with the virus, from which they’re also likely to get better immunity.

Any kind of threat of withdrawal of benefits for failure to take a medicine, let alone an experimental medicine, undermines informed consent. For that matter, the paucity of information provided on the real risk of side effects and the real age-specific level of benefit undermines informed consent.

Our young people have been betrayed again and again by this Government, which seems to have reached a place where it regards them primarily as vectors of disease who must be coerced into taking the prescribed medicine to make them clean enough to allow out and about. Yet the evidence that the vaccines are particularly good at preventing the spread of infection is patchy at best.

Our leaders should be ashamed of themselves for how they have abused young people and their trust, jeopardised their health and strangled their aspirations.

Sadly, I don’t think enough of them are sufficiently alive yet to the full horror of what has been pointlessly done to them in the last year and a bit to realise how angry they should be. But if they ever do wake up to it, there will be a terrible political reckoning.

July 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Obstetrician’s safety claims on Covid vaccine in pregnancy ‘were misleading and biased’

By Sally Beck | The Conservative Woman | July 21, 2021

THE UK Medical Freedom Alliance has sent an open letter to Dr Brenda Kelly, consultant obstetrician at Oxford University Hospitals, detailing ‘serious concerns’ about statements she made in videos on the hospitals’ website about Covid-19 vaccination in pregnancy.

The alliance, a group of medical professionals, scientists and lawyers, says it is concerned about several ‘simplified, misleading and biased’ claims Dr Kelly made about the safety and efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines. It says these claims are not supported by the available evidence, and ‘may seriously impede the process of obtaining fully informed consent from pregnant women’.

This is the text of the letter:

We would like to share with you our Open Letters to the RCOG / RCM dated 29 March 2021 and to the JCVI dated 19 April 2021 vaccines-should-be-offered-to-all-pregnant-women regarding Covid-19 vaccines for pregnant women.

This is in response to your recent appearance in a series of short videos, published on the Oxford University Hospitals website, where you made several statements conveying simplified and biased messages that are not supported by the available evidence.

Concerns are mainly related, but not limited to, your representation of the Covid-19 vaccine safety profile.

1. You state that Covid-19 vaccines are safer for pregnant women than contracting Covid-19 disease, when there is no evidence at all that Covid-19 vaccines will prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection or any of the complications you refer to (stillbirths / premature delivery / long Covid).

2. Your statement that Covid-19 vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ stands completely unqualified, resulting in the suggestion that nobody will come to any serious harm as a result of the vaccine.

As a medical practitioner, we are sure that you will be aware that such a statement does not apply to any medical intervention, and cannot possibly apply to a product that is based on a completely novel technology whilst remaining in Phase 3 trial stages, not due to be completed till 2023.

3. You indicate it to be reassuring that Covid-19 vaccines do not contain any live virus, but completely fail to mention that the gene technology using mRNA and lipid nanoparticles has never previously received full regulatory approval for humans on a large scale.

As pregnant women were not included in the regulatory trials, the effect of this technology on a pregnancy, a developing foetus and on a breastfeeding baby cannot possibly be known and declared safe at this stage.

4. You categorically state that there are no harmful ingredients in the Covid-19 vaccines, specifically the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which you recommend for pregnant women. May we refer you to the Government documents for a full list of ingredients of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Both mRNA vaccines contain polyethylene glycol (PEG). PEG is a known allergen which carries a risk of serious, potentially fatal allergic reactions. The US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) has issued advice that anyone allergic to PEG or its close relative, Polysorbate, should not receive either of the currently available mRNA vaccines.

This has also been reflected in advice from the NHS, which states: ‘Since the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine contains PEG, individuals with PEG allergy should not receive this vaccine.’

5. You state that side-effects to be expected after a Covid-19 vaccine would be mild and self-limiting. However, since the start of Covid-19 vaccine rollout to the population in December 2020, thousands of vaccine-related illnesses and deaths have been reported through databases in the US, Europe and the UK, raising serious concerns about safety.

In the report published by the MHRA on June 30, 2021, there were over one million adverse reactions in the UK, some of them very serious, including seizures, paralysis, blindness, strokes, blood clots and acute cardiac events. This report includes 1,440 fatalities.

Some life-threatening effects, such as blood clots and myocarditis, have been reported specifically in young people, which will be particularly relevant for women of childbearing age.

We strongly suggest that any published information regarding Covid-19 vaccine should include reference to risks of serious morbidity, which you completely fail to mention.

In this context, it is also essential to note that Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers demanded and were granted exemption from any liability for adverse effects of injury or death caused by their products.

6. You claim that safety of Covid-19 vaccines in pregnancy may be inferred from monitoring over 130,000 pregnant women in the US, which has not raised any safety concerns.

Whilst this suggests robust reassurance, this assertion completely fails to acknowledge that this ‘study’ refers to the CDC’s V-safe Covid-19 Vaccine Pregnancy Registry, which is a voluntary reporting system, collecting observational data of over 130,000 women, who happened to be pregnant at the time of vaccination. It is notable that only just over 5,000 of these women have been formally enrolled.

This is not comparable to robust, thorough, scientific evaluation and peer-reviewed evidence.

No data is available regarding potential effects on the foetus or other pregnancy outcomes, as the length of time Covid-19 vaccines have been tested and administered does not even equal the length of a single pregnancy at this point.

Published data from June 2021 in the New England Journal of Medicine only refer to ‘preliminary findings’ regarding safety of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines in pregnancy, also mostly based on the V-safe pregnancy registry.

This study reports 104 miscarriages before 20 weeks in 127 women, who had received a Covid-19 vaccine before the third trimester and completed their pregnancy. As of 30 June 2021, 314 miscarriages and 12 stillbirths / foetal deaths have been reported to the MHRA via the Yellow Card system.

7. We would like to draw your attention to a recent report from the MHRA regarding the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, dated June 4, 2021, which states under toxicology conclusions: ‘In the context of supply under Regulation 174, it is considered that sufficient reassurance of safe use of the vaccine in pregnant women cannot be provided at the present time: However, use in women of childbearing potential could be supported provided healthcare professionals are advised to rule out known or suspected pregnancy prior to vaccination. Women who are breastfeeding should also not be vaccinated.’

8. We further would like to draw your attention to the Summary of Product Characteristics for Covid-19 Vaccine Moderna by the MHRA updated 25 June 2021, which states: ‘Administration of COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna in pregnancy should only be considered when the potential benefits outweigh any potential risks for the mother and foetus. It is unknown whether COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna is excreted in human milk.’

This is not consistent with your message that the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are suitable for every pregnant woman without further considerations.

In the current situation, which is fraught with uncertainty and fear, the public is looking to professionals for balanced advice. We suggest that anyone stepping forward with a purpose of conveying information relevant to Covid-19 vaccination bears the responsibility to do so comprehensively and based on all available evidence.

We further suggest that presenting such a simplified and biased message as in your series aimed at pregnant women, is deeply irresponsible and even unprofessional.

We find it incomprehensible how you would justify omitting all the information we have presented in this letter, which is freely available and essential to assimilate for anyone deliberating whether to accept a Covid-19 vaccine, especially when two lives are potentially affected at once, as during pregnancy.

We therefore strongly recommend that you immediately retract your videos or issue a corrected version including comprehensive and balanced information regarding the available evidence about Covid-19 vaccine safety in pregnancy.

We thank you for reading this letter and sincerely hope you consider its contents in full.

July 21, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Delete NHS App + Stop Getting Tested = Scamdemic Over

By Richie Allen | July 21, 2021

Friends, gammons, countrymen, lend me your shell-likes. Take out your phone. Press your thumb or forefinger on the NHS app. Hold it down for a second. It’ll give you options. Choose delete app. Good job. Now, never take a PCR or lateral flow test again.

Congratulations. You have ended the scamdemic. Go about your business. By the way, it’s not a bad idea to switch off the 24-hour news channels either.

Listening to BBC radio this morning, I was genuinely surprised to learn that a significant proportion of the population is labouring under the misapprehension that keeping the NHS app on their phones is compulsory. It isn’t. It’s entirely voluntary.

Problems arise when you are pinged and then contacted by a track and trace call-centre to inform you that you were in contact with someone who tested positive. At that point you risk being fined if you don’t isolate for the specified time and answer your phone when they call you to confirm that you are complying.

So delete the feckin app! Do it now and stop being tested. How thick do you need to be to have a test when you are healthy? Use your God given brain. It’s a trap.

How can I put it in a way that it is universally understood? Healthy man take test. Test faulty. Test come back positive. Man must isolate. Government say cases rising. Must impose restrictions. People must have jab.

It’s Kafkaesque, but the people still hold all the aces. It’s very simple. Delete the bastard app and tell them to get stuffed when they ask you to have a test. If you haven’t had a jab yet, don’t. You’ll be amazed at how quickly this will go away.

July 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

THE CASE FOR IVERMECTIN | CRAIG KELLY MP

Whocomcampaigner |  June 22, 2021

Here is Craig Kelly presenting his evidence of Ivermectin suppression to an empty Australian parliament. This picture illustrates the type of ‘democracy’ that we have in Australia today. The people’s voice is not being heard by our government.

July 21, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

By Richard Smith | BMJ | July 5, 2021

Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.

As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.

Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.

Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan. Most of the trials were zombies. Ioannidis concluded that there are hundreds of thousands of zombie trials published from those countries alone.

Others have found similar results, and Mol’s best guess is that about 20% of trials are false. Very few of these papers are retracted.

We have long known that peer review is ineffective at detecting fraud, especially if the reviewers start, as most have until now, by assuming that the research is honestly reported. I remember being part of a panel in the 1990s investigating one of Britain’s most outrageous cases of fraud, when the statistical reviewer of the study told us that he had found multiple problems with the study and only hoped that it was better done than it was reported. We asked if he had ever considered that the study might be fraudulent, and he told us that he hadn’t.

We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary. Some supporting evidence comes from the trial having been registered and having ethics committee approval. Andrew Grey, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Auckland, and others have developed a checklist with around 40 items that can be used as a screening tool for fraud (you can view the checklist here). The REAPPRAISED checklist (Research governance, Ethics, Authorship, Plagiarism, Research conduct, Analyses and methods, Image manipulation, Statistics, Errors, Data manipulation and reporting) covers issues like “ethical oversight and funding, research productivity and investigator workload, validity of randomisation, plausibility of results and duplicate data reporting.” The checklist has been used to detect studies that have subsequently been retracted but hasn’t been through the full evaluation that you would expect for a clinical screening tool. (But I must congratulate the authors on a clever acronym: some say that dreaming up the acronym for a study is the most difficult part of the whole process.)

Roberts and others wrote about the problem of the many untrustworthy and zombie trials in The BMJ six years ago with the provocative title: “The knowledge system underpinning healthcare is not fit for purpose and must change.” They wanted the Cochrane Collaboration and anybody conducting systematic reviews to take very seriously the problem of fraud. It was perhaps coincidence, but a few weeks before the webinar the Cochrane Collaboration produced guidelines on reviewing studies where there has been a retraction, an expression of concern, or the reviewers are worried about the trustworthiness of the data.

Retractions are the easiest to deal with, but they are, as Mol said, only a tiny fraction of untrustworthy or zombie studies. An editorial in the Cochrane Library accompanying the new guidelines recognises that there is no agreement on what constitutes an untrustworthy study, screening tools are not reliable, and “Misclassification could also lead to reputational damage to authors, legal consequences, and ethical issues associated with participants having taken part in research, only for it to be discounted.” The Collaboration is being cautious but does stand to lose credibility—and income—if the world ceases to trust Cochrane Reviews because they are thought to be based on untrustworthy trials.

Research fraud is often viewed as a problem of “bad apples,” but Barbara K Redman, who spoke at the webinar insists that it is not a problem of bad apples but bad barrels if not, she said, of rotten forests or orchards. In her book Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach she argues that research misconduct is a systems problem—the system provides incentives to publish fraudulent research and does not have adequate regulatory processes. Researchers progress by publishing research, and because the publication system is built on trust and peer review is not designed to detect fraud it is easy to publish fraudulent research. The business model of journals and publishers depends on publishing, preferably lots of studies as cheaply as possible. They have little incentive to check for fraud and a positive disincentive to experience reputational damage—and possibly legal risk—from retracting studies. Funders, universities, and other research institutions similarly have incentives to fund and publish studies and disincentives to make a fuss about fraudulent research they may have funded or had undertaken in their institution—perhaps by one of their star researchers. Regulators often lack the legal standing and the resources to respond to what is clearly extensive fraud, recognising that proving a study to be fraudulent (as opposed to suspecting it of being fraudulent) is a skilled, complex, and time consuming process. Another problem is that research is increasingly international with participants from many institutions in many countries: who then takes on the unenviable task of investigating fraud? Science really needs global governance.

Everybody gains from the publication game, concluded Roberts, apart from the patients who suffer from being given treatments based on fraudulent data.

Stephen Lock, my predecessor as editor of The BMJ, became worried about research fraud in the 1980s, but people thought his concerns eccentric. Research authorities insisted that fraud was rare, didn’t matter because science was self-correcting, and that no patients had suffered because of scientific fraud. All those reasons for not taking research fraud seriously have proved to be false, and, 40 years on from Lock’s concerns, we are realising that the problem is huge, the system encourages fraud, and we have no adequate way to respond. It may be time to move from assuming that research has been honestly conducted and reported to assuming it to be untrustworthy until there is some evidence to the contrary.

Richard Smith was the editor of The BMJ until 2004.

Competing interest: RS was a cofounder of the Committee on Medical Ethics (COPE), for many years the chair of the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee, and a member of the board of the UK Research Integrity Office.

July 20, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Should COVID-19 be a vaccine disease or a childhood disease?

By Christine S Benn & Professor Peter Aaby | BMJ | July 18, 2021

Dear Editor

In the discussion regarding COVID-19 vaccination of children, several aspects seem to be missing.

First, vaccination of children is based on a small Pfizer-sponsored phase 3 trial of 2260 adolescents randomized to BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine or saline. The resulting paper concludes that the vaccine ”had a favorable safety profile”(1). However, based on data presented in supplementary table 2, in the age group 12-15 years, 7/1131 vaccinated vs. 2/1129 unvaccinated had a severe adverse event (1), i.e. a 3-fold increased risk. In the 16-25 years age group presented in the same paper, 9/536 vaccinated vs. 3/561 unvaccinated had a severe adverse event (1), i.e. likewise a 3-fold increased risk. The combined results indicate a 3.28 (95% confidence interval 1.21 to 8.94)-fold increased risk in severe adverse events in the vaccinated adolescents/young adults (2). In absolute numbers, 1 of 100 vaccinated experienced a severe event, vs. 3 of 1000 unvaccinated. Data was not presented by sex.

A protective vaccine can have negative non-specific and sex-differential effects on overall health (3). For instance, a protective measles vaccine had to be withdrawn after being associated with 2-fold higher all-cause mortality for females (4). A partially protective malaria vaccine was recently likewise associated with 2-fold higher female mortality (5). These epidemiological observations indicate that while the vaccines protected against the target disease, they increased the susceptibility to other diseases. In other words, the specific protection came at the price of increased susceptibility to other diseases. This epidemiological phenomenon of negative non-specific effects has been linked to innate immune tolerance (3, 6). Though the number of participants was small, the only study so far of BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine indicates that this vaccine induces innate immune tolerance towards bacterial and viral ligands (7). Thus, protection against COVID-19 could come at the price of increased risk of other infections.

Other pandemic vaccines have later been found out to have caused rare but severe side effects, like Guillain-Barré syndrome in recipients of flu vaccines in 1976, and narcolepsy linked to one brand of swine flu influenza vaccine in 2009(8). None of the phase 3 trials of COVID-19 vaccines were designed to study either non-specific sex-differential effects, or rare but severe long-term side effects (8).

Given the low risk of severe COVID-19 in previously healthy children – none in the Pfizer-sponsored phase 3 trial (1) – it is not clear that vaccine benefits outweigh harm in healthy children.

Second, arguments for vaccinating children include that infection in children could lead to more dangerous variants. Variants of concern have typically been the result of persistent infections in immunocompromised people that can cause the virus to mutate more frequently because the person’s immune system cannot clear the virus as quickly as the immune system of a healthy person (9). Presumably healthy children, who typically have very mild/short-lasting infections, are unlikely to give rise to variants of concern. Noteworthy, individuals, who have had COVID-19 infection, will likely have broad resistance towards SARS-CoV2 variants(10), and thus contribute importantly to herd immunity.

This leads us to the third point: Should COVID-19 be a vaccine disease or a childhood disease? There has been surprisingly little discussion about the future of COVID-19. Many people seem to assume that COVID-19 will become a disease for which we vaccinate the whole population perhaps annually or biannually. This will be expensive – and potentially harmful, if the (repeated) vaccinations have negative effects. We do not think vaccination of the whole population is necessary either; in fact, it may be counter-productive for society.

The known endemic human Corona-viruses (HCoV) infect most people before age 15; thereafter people may become re-infected again, but as evidenced by the lack of IgM responses, the response is a recall response (11). These HCoV rarely cause severe disease until the age of immunosenescence and we would never contemplate vaccinating against HCoVs at the population level, even if vaccines existed.

Given that we are so lucky that SARS-CoV2 very rarely cause severe disease in children, the safest and cheapest way forward seems to be to tame SARS-CoV2 to a common childhood disease like other HCoV. This would happen by allowing SARS-CoV2 to infect children, who thereby likely become protected against severe disease well into late adulthood. Importantly, this transition of SARS-CoV2 into a childhood disease would be delayed if there is too little SARS-CoV2 circulating. As noted by others: “Once most adults are vaccinated, circulation of SARS-CoV-2 may in fact be desirable, as it is likely to lead to primary infection early in life when disease is mild, followed by booster re-exposures throughout adulthood … This would keep reinfections mild and immunity up to date”(12).

In conclusion, there are good arguments why not vaccinating children may in fact serve several purposes at the individual as well as at the societal level:
• Not vaccinating children protects children against the potential unknown harms of COVID-19 vaccinations.
• Not vaccinating children gives them the opportunity to develop a broad natural immunity, contributing to herd immunity, and speeding up the transition of SARS-CoV2 into a childhood disease.
The avoided costs of making COVID-19 a vaccine disease, for which we vaccinate the whole population maybe annually or biannually, could be well spent on other health related issues such as smoking, cancer, obesity, and mental health.

References:

1. Frenck RW, Jr., Klein NP, Kitchin N, Gurtman A, Absalon J, Lockhart S, et al. Safety, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 Covid-19 Vaccine in Adolescents. N Engl J Med. 2021.
2. Benn CS. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christine-stabell-benn_safety-immunogenic…. LinkedIn post 2021.
3. Benn CS, Fisker AB, Rieckmann A, Sørup S, Aaby P. Vaccinology: time to change the paradigm? Lancet Infect Dis. 2020.
4. Aaby P, Jensen H, Samb B, Cisse B, Sodemann M, Jakobsen M, et al. Differences in female-male mortality after high-titre measles vaccine and association with subsequent vaccination with diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and inactivated poliovirus: reanalysis of West African studies. Lancet. 2003;361(9376):2183-8.
5. Klein SL, Shann F, Moss WJ, Benn CS, Aaby P. RTS,S Malaria Vaccine and Increased Mortality in Girls. MBio. 2016;7(2):e00514-16.
6. Blok BA, de Bree LCJ, Diavatopoulos DA, Langereis JD, Joosten LAB, Aaby P, et al. Interacting, Nonspecific, Immunological Effects of Bacille Calmette-Guerin and Tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis Inactivated Polio Vaccinations: An Explorative, Randomized Trial. Clin Infect Dis. 2020;70(3):455-63.
7. Föhse FK, Geckin B, Overheul GJ, van de Maat J, Kilic G, Bulut O, et al. The BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responses. medRxiv. 2021:2021.05.03.21256520.
8. Doshi P. Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us. Bmj. 2020;371:m4037.
9. Peacock TP, Penrice-Randal R, Hiscox JA, Barclay WS. SARS-CoV-2 one year on: evidence for ongoing viral adaptation. J Gen Virol. 2021;102(4).
10. Ferretti AP, Kula T, Wang Y, Nguyen DMV, Weinheimer A, Dunlap GS, et al. Unbiased Screens Show CD8(+) T Cells of COVID-19 Patients Recognize Shared Epitopes in SARS-CoV-2 that Largely Reside outside the Spike Protein. Immunity. 2020;53(5):1095-107.e3.
11. Zhou W, Wang W, Wang H, Lu R, Tan W. First infection by all four non-severe acute respiratory syndrome human coronaviruses takes place during childhood. BMC Infect Dis. 2013;13:433.
12. Lavine JS, Bjornstad O, Antia R. Vaccinating children against SARS-CoV-2. BMJ. 2021;373:n1197.

Competing interests: No competing interests

Christine S Benn & Professor Peter Aaby
Bandim Health Project, Department of Clinical Research, University of Southern Denmark
Studiestræde 6, 1455 Copenhagen K, Denmark
@StabellBenn

July 20, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Why the EU’s Carbon Border Tax will Fail to Stop Carbon Leakage

By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | July 20, 2021

The EU is once again attempting to impose a carbon tax on all imports, to stop “carbon leakage”, the loss of manufacturing or other businesses relocating to lower cost countries. But a few simple economic calculations demonstrate why the EU’s plan will not stop the ongoing haemorrhage of business activity.

Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism: Questions and Answers

Why is the Commission proposing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism?

The EU is at the forefront of international efforts to fight climate change. The European Green Deal sets out a clear path towards realising the EU’s ambitious target of a 55% reduction in carbon emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2030, and to become a climate-neutral continent by 2050.

The July 2021 package in support of the EU’s climate targets is an integral part of our strategy to achieve this, and will further seal the EU’s reputation as a global climate leader. As part of these efforts, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) is a climate measure that should prevent the risk of carbon leakage and support the EU’s increased ambition on climate mitigation, while ensuring WTO compatibility.

Climate change is a global problem that needs global solutions. As we raise our own climate ambition and less stringent environmental and climate policies prevail in non-EU countries, there is a strong risk of so-called ‘carbon leakage’ – i.e. companies based in the EU could move carbon-intensive production abroad to take advantage of lax standards, or EU products could be replaced by more carbon-intensive imports. Such carbon leakage can shift emissions outside of Europe and therefore seriously undermine EU and global climate efforts. The CBAM will equalise the price of carbon between domestic products and imports and ensure that the EU’s climate objectives are not undermined by production relocating to countries with less ambitious policies.

…

Read more: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_21_3661

Why does this tax put an EU producer at a disadvantage?

EU Border Tax – No Sale

Simple – selling to another EU entity is price competitive, so far, but selling outside the EU is impossibly expensive, because you are competing with other sellers who don’t pay EU carbon taxes. An exporter outside the EU has an advantage over a manufacturer inside the EU, even if they have to pay a carbon border adjustment.

What about if the EU tries to level the playing field for EU based exporters, and applies a tax credit to exports? This opens the door to massive global carbon carousel fraud.

EU Carbon Tax Carousel Fraud

EU Carbon Tax Carousel Fraud

Either the EU destroys their own exporters, in an attempt to protect their domestic industry, or they have a big firefight on their hands, trying to contain carbon carousel fraud, which will only get worse any time they try to ratchet up their carbon price.

What about the effect of carbon pricing on businesses inside the EU carbon tax zone?

Classic supply and demand graph

Classic supply and demand graph, showing the impact on quantity of a tax driven rise in price per unit.

In this case quantity is assumed to be a proxy for economic activity.

Ever visited a shopping centre, and wondered why all the interesting shops are slowly replaced by clothes shops or other high turnover businesses? The reason is all those interesting shops are not profitable enough to pay the rent, and over time they are replaced by simpler, less interesting businesses – safe, boring, profitable, but still a contraction in the diversity of life choices available to consumers.

Pretty much the same thing would happen to domestic high carbon businesses afflicted by EU carbon pricing.

The EU at least in principle likely hopes that revenue from the carbon tax will drop to zero, as people discover low carbon or zero carbon alternatives to the high carbon goods they currently use such as alumina, or simply learn to live without.

But this is a huge gamble. The only reason for carbon leakage in the first place is because the carbon intensive goods targeted by the EU are difficult to replace with low carbon alternatives, and difficult to live without.

If a carbon intensive good is irreplaceable, continued dependency on that high carbon good will be an ongoing anchor dragging on the European economy.

Of course you could make an argument that the benefits the people of the EU receive from reduced CO2 emissions outweigh the costs, that one day our descendants will thank us for giving them the opportunity to experience cold weather. But this does not help consumers and businesses today.

In conclusion, the EU carbon border adjustment will do nothing to prevent carbon leakage. The EU does not control enough of the global economy to make it more than an inconvenience for multinationals. The only people the EU border carbon adjustment will hurt are people living in the EU, who will see their choices and opportunities contract.

July 20, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

‘Climate Change’ Charlatanism Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

By John O’Sullivan • The Pipeline • July 18, 2021

Professor Ole Humlum is a former Professor of Physical Geography at the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway, and Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography, University of Oslo, Norway. He specializes in reporting and analyzing annual changes in the climate. I wrote about the professor’s work just over a year ago on this site. His report, published annually by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, was moderately optimistic on climate changes in 2019, pointing out that some of them were for the better, some worse, but that overall there was no justification for the alarmist rhetoric of climate emergency. For instance, as I then wrote,

He points out  that new data on rising ocean temperatures raise interesting questions about the source of the heat. We can detect a great deal of heat rising from the bottom of the oceans. This obviously cannot be anything to do with human activity.

Since annual reports come out every year, his latest report on the world’s climate in 2020 has just been published. It covers the waterfront from Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation to Zonal Air Temperatures, and though most of it is addressed to technical specialists, it reaches some broad general conclusions that can be grasped by the layman. By and large these are a mix of moderate changes, long-term stability in main trends, and some trends getting worse but falling short of a climate emergency. Here, for instance, is his summing-up of changes in snow cover:

Variations in global snow-cover extent are driven by changes in the Northern Hemisphere, where most of the major land masses are located. Southern Hemisphere snow-cover extent is essentially controlled by the Antarctic ice sheet, and is therefore relatively stable. Northern Hemisphere average snow cover has also been stable since the advent of satellite observations, although local and regional inter-annual variations may be large. Considering seasonal changes in the Northern Hemisphere since 1979, autumn extent has been slightly increasing, mid-winter extent has been largely stable, and spring extent has been slightly decreasing. In 2020, Northern Hemisphere seasonal snow cover was somewhat below that of the preceding years.

And here is his account of storms and hurricanes in 2020:

The most recent data on numbers of global tropical storms and hurricane accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) are well within the range seen since 1970. In fact, the ACE data series displays a variable pattern over time, with a significant 3.6-year variation, but without any clear trend towards higher or lower values. A longer ACE series for the Atlantic Basin (since 1850), however, suggests a natural cycle of about 60 years’ duration for tropical-storm and hurricane ACE. The number of hurricane landfalls in the continental United States remains within the normal range for the entire record since 1851. (My italics.)

Not easy reading, as you can see, but worthwhile because it records what actually happened to the climate in the last year. And that picture contrasts strongly with two things: the general impression of what happened to the climate given by the mainstream media, and the forecasts drawn from computer modelling in previous years of what would happen to the climate. Those two things generally reinforce each other almost as if the media reports those real climate events that reflect the media “narrative” and ignore or gloss over those that don’t. The truth rarely, if ever, catches up with the predictions in mainstream news reporting.

Time and again the dates for which catastrophe was confidently predicted have passed without grave occurrences, as I wrote a year ago. No apologies are offered, and no signs given that the forecasters will be reconsidering the theories on which their forecasts either were based or by which they will in future be supported.

To be sure, that’s a problem not confined to climate science. There’s a general crisis of “replication” or “reproducibility” in science as scientists themselves have been debating in the last decade. As Wikipedia sums it up:

A 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists conducted by Nature reported that 70 percent of them had failed to reproduce at least one other scientist’s experiment (including 87 percent of chemists, 77 percent of biologists, 69 percent of physicists and engineers, 67 percent of medical researchers, 64 percent of earth and environmental scientists, and 62 percent of all others), while 50 percent had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments, and less than 20 percent had ever been contacted by another researcher unable to reproduce their work. Only a minority had ever attempted to publish a replication, and while 24 percent had been able to publish a successful replication, only 13 percent had published a failed replication, and several respondents that had published failed replications noted that editors and reviewers demanded that they play down comparisons with the original studies.

That’s bad enough. Worse, common sense suggests that the rate of failed replications will be higher in forecasting than in already performed physical experiments. To replication failure and prediction failure, however, we should probably add a third crisis—namely, impartiality failure on the part of the mainstream media—if we are to understand how bad things are.

The latest example of this is the media treatment of a new book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, by Steven Koonin, a physicist specializing in energy policy who served as an Under-Secretary for Energy for Science in the Obama administration. He doubts some of the claims allegedly accepted as valid by a “consensus” of scientists. Koonin has since come under fierce attack from those scientific reviewers who in turn doubt his own claims. That’s well and good—it’s how science is supposed to operate until experiments settle the argument conclusively–for the moment. In the meantime Koonin must fight his corner as best he can—as apparently he intends to do.

What is objectionable is that social media should tilt an already tilted playing field so that its “fact-checkers” preface information about “Unsettled” with a kind of health warning that its statistics are unreliable and that the book itself “denialist” when in fact Koonin denies not climate warming but some arguments about its speed, extent, and whether we’re pursuing the right mix of mitigation and adaptation in dealing with it. That’s a debate we need—and which we’re bound to have anyway because of the looming costs of Net-Zero.

Suppressing debate simply won’t work. And that’s likely to be demonstrated soon. Koonin has agreed to give the GWPF’s annual lecture in November in London. My guess is that the Foundation will have to hire a larger-than-usual hall to accommodate an audience drawn there by today’s equivalent of “Banned in Boston”—namely, “Not Available on Social Media.”

July 20, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Covid vaccines: We’ve been misled from the very start

By Neville Hodgkinson | The Conservative Woman | July 20, 2021

IT IS truly amazing how self-deceiving a profession that sets out to help and heal sick people can be when it comes to acknowledging that the cure is sometimes worse than the illness. Evidence is mounting that just such a state of denial is manifesting in the mass rollout of the Covid vaccine.

Decades ago, I examined evidence for the effectiveness of flu vaccine and found that it rested entirely within studies showing an increase in antibodies to the circulating virus, but that this did not translate into less illness.

A group of GPs who were uneasy about the impact of the vaccine on old and frail people set up a trial of their own in which they found that those who had the jab had no less flu, but more non-specific illness, in the ensuing year compared with a group of similar frailty who were not inoculated.

Similarly, doctors at two boarding schools who conducted trials among their own pupils dropped the vaccine after finding it was of no benefit.

It would be almost impossible to do similar studies today because the NHS mounts such a relentless campaign every winter to have everyone vaccinated. It is in effect the marketing arm for the flu vaccine manufacturers, of which GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi and AstraZeneca are leading players, making billions from the jabs.

The UK-based Cochrane research network, however, has been constantly evaluating global studies on the effectiveness of flu vaccinations since 1999. Put together, the data from dozens of well-conducted studies covering more than 80,000 participants fails to prove a reduction in deaths from flu or flu-like illnesses, and shows that vaccinations could even increase the number of hospitalisations.

Germany’s renowned Robert Koch Institute has found clear evidence that for the over-60s, in the 2017/18 and 2018/19 flu seasons, vaccination increased the risk of flu instead of protecting against it.

The fact that despite the scientific evidence, illusions still continue about such a commonly used vaccine bodes ill for hopes that governments and their advisers will listen to the evidence with regard to Covid-19.

The mantra that the jab is ‘safe and effective’ is becoming a sick joke.  There is now massive evidence of harm and mounting evidence that it does not work anything like as well as hoped.

The harm is there for all to see. As of mid-June, UK regulators received 276,867 adverse events reports, including 1,332 deaths; in the US, there were more than 6,000 deaths, and 400,000 events serious enough to be reported; and in the European Union, some 1,500,000 injuries and 15,000 deaths.

Claims that these reports are unconfirmed as cause-and-effect related are countered by the argument ‘Where is the proof that they are not?’ Under-reporting is known to be common, and many of the injuries occurred within hours or days of the victim receiving the jab.   There has never been a vaccine with anything like this measure of recorded harm.

Government agencies assert that thousands of lives have been saved by the vaccination drives. But wherever the claims are examined carefully, as opposed to being passed on by doctors and journalists who accepted them uncritically and are now desperately hoping they are true, the evidence is found to be increasingly thin.

As Dr Will Jones noted in the newly launched Daily Sceptic (formerly Lockdown Sceptics), latest data from the ZOE app, the world’s largest ongoing study of Covid-19, shows that as of July 12, infections in the vaccinated (at least one dose) in the UK now outnumber those in the unvaccinated for the first time, as the former continue to surge while the latter plummet.

What does Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, which seems more independent-minded than leaders of the UK’s state-run NHS, tell us about the Covid vaccine?

It published a 74-page paper last January in which the effectiveness in the age group 75 and over was said to be ‘subject to a high degree of uncertainty’ and no longer statistically significant. What’s more, the quality of the data across all age groups, based on proof of prevention of serious illness, was ‘very low’.

Reporting these findings, the German magazine Multipolar said it was scandalous that they are not mentioned in their government’s information services, and that the big media remain silent on the topic.

In truth, we have been misled about the vaccine from the start.  Repeatedly publicised claims of 95 per cent ‘efficacy’ do not mean you are 95 per cent protected against Covid if you have the jab.

They are based on studies such as Pfizer’s in which 40,000 participants in different countries were divided into two groups, one of which received the vaccine and the other a placebo. There were no deaths in either group, so the trial told us nothing about risk of death. But 162 of the placebo group were designated Covid cases, compared with only eight among those vaccinated. The diagnosis was on the basis of the participants having one or more symptoms of the disease, confirmed through a lab test.

Eight compared with 162 gives what is called a relative risk reduction (RRR) of 95 per cent. It is a self-contained figure that has only a marginal bearing on the experience of the trial participants generally.

What we rarely hear about is what is known as the absolute risk, that is, the percentage of cases reported in each group of 20,000. For the vaccinated individuals, their chances of becoming a case were 0.04 per cent, and for the placebo group, 0.75 per cent. That represents an absolute risk reduction (ARR) of 0.71 per cent (0.75 per cent minus 0.04 per cent) which does not sound like much to write home about. Even that was probably an exaggeration, because side-effects in the vaccinated group would have been obvious to observers, making them less likely to report them as cases.

It gets even worse. One of the criteria of a ‘case’ in the trials was that it should be contracted not earlier than seven days after the second jab. That helped keep the number down enormously – to only eight – in the vaccinated group. This is because so many vaccine recipients have Covid-like symptoms in the first few days after the jab.

A subsequent analysis, hidden away in a report by the US Food and Drug Administration, found that when Covid-like symptoms reported in those first few days were included, there were 407 cases among the vaccinated compared with only 287 in the placebo group, an entirely different risk-benefit picture and one consistent with many studies showing an increase in death rates among the elderly immediately after the jab.

All of this means we should not be surprised to find that ‘a disturbing trend’ has appeared among the most vaccinated nations in the world, as TrialSite News reports. In Gibraltar, Malta, Seychelles, UAE and the Isle of Man, Covid cases are considerably up, including deaths in some of these nations, despite ‘overwhelming’ percentages of their populations being vaccinated.

Israel, too, with 81 per cent of its adult population fully vaccinated and cases that went right down to a handful a day, is now seeing a surge in new infections, of which an estimated 40-50 per cent are in vaccinated individuals.

Is this because of a new variant of the virus, against which the existing vaccines don’t work? Will it mean subjecting ourselves to booster shots, with the accompanying risks, every few months? Or is it because there is ultimately going to be no escaping actual infection with the virus?

We just do not know.

There is one light in the darkness. Several studies have shown that once an individual has had the infection, even if only mildly, their immune system develops lasting protection against the toxic spike protein encoded by the genetically engineered virus.

July 20, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

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