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SARS CoV2 aka COVID-19: maybe Scientists and Doctors and Experts Speaking to the Public should be assumed to be INCOMPETENT if not DISHONEST?
Related: cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, health, Other World Computing, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
Science is in a crisis, with up to 38% of scientific studies non-replicable. Add in the fact that many studies not conforming to the orthodoxy are never published and the huge conflicts of interest that abound (financial, prestige, social/business, etc). So many areas of science have become anti-science, with dogmatic quasi-religious overtones*.
* The medical lies about statins come to mind (currently degrading the health of tens if not hundreds of millions of people), along with nutritional “science” that has had hugely damaging effects over the past 50 years and remains uncorrected.
Incompetent researchers, gullible national experts
See below. Surely there is confirmation bias at work among so-called scientists and exports, who failed to verify the most basic facts of their case
According to ScienceMag.com, a failure to check the single most important factor upon which the paper draws conclusions only rises to the level of “flawed”? How can a science magazine not call a spade a spade? A “flaw” sounds subtle, like an honest mistake. It is a considerably different matter from incompetence so profound that it borders on fraud.
Next, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) also failed to call out this foundational crack in this “scientific” paper. It calls into question everything that NEJM publishes as at best highly suspect when a fundamental tenet upon which conclusions are based never existed.
Emphasis added.
ScienceMag.com: Study claiming new coronavirus can be transmitted by people without symptoms was flawed
A paper published on 30 January in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about the first four people in Germany infected with a novel coronavirus made many headlines because it seemed to confirm what public health experts feared: that someone who has no symptoms from infection with the virus, named 2019-nCoV, can still transmit it to others.
... Chinese researchers had previously suggested asymptomatic people might transmit the virus but had not presented clear-cut evidence. “There’s no doubt after reading [the NEJM] paper that asymptomatic transmission is occurring,” Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told journalists. “This study lays the question to rest.”
But now, it turns out that information was wrong. The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German government’s public health agency, has written a letter to NEJM to set the record straight, even though it was not involved in the paper.
The letter in NEJM described a cluster of infections that began after a businesswoman from Shanghai visited a company near Munich on 20 and 21 January, where she had a meeting with the first of four people who later fell ill. Crucially, she wasn’t sick at the time: “During her stay, she had been well with no sign or symptoms of infection but had become ill on her flight back to China,” the authors wrote. “The fact that asymptomatic persons are potential sources of 2019-nCoV infection may warrant a reassessment of transmission dynamics of the current outbreak.”
[WIND: to start with, “persons” is BS—there was one person forming the basis for this farce of a paper, and they failed to question that one person!
Technical jargon that builds in an unproven notion as a predicate (“the fact that”) is a common way of masking scientific and communication incompetence by those who don’t know WTF they are talking about and wish to mask that fact by making it sound educated and wise, knowing that the reader will implicitly accept the predicate and that the jargon will do the rest. In reality, it translates to “we have our heads up our asses but we hope you won’t notice”]
But the researchers didn’t actually speak to the woman before they published the paper. The last author, Michael Hoelscher of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Medical Center, says the paper relied on information from the four other patients: “They told us that the patient from China did not appear to have any symptoms.”
[WIND: a “scientist” who relies on heresy? Would not qualify as incompetent journalism, let alone science].
Afterward, however, RKI and the Health and Food Safety Authority of the state of Bavaria did talk to the Shanghai patient on the phone, and it turned out she did have symptoms while in Germany. According to people familiar with the call, she felt tired, suffered from muscle pain, and took paracetamol, a fever-lowering medication. (An RKI spokesperson would only confirm to Science that the woman had symptoms.)
... Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says calling a case asymptomatic without talking to the person is problematic. “In retrospect, it sounds like this was a poor choice,” he says. However, “In an emergency setting, it’s often not possible to talk to all the people,” he adds. “I’m assuming that this was an overstretched group trying to get out their best idea of what the truth was quickly rather than somebody trying to be careless.”
[WIND: this above is pathetic; rationalizations have no place in science, nor does mind reading (assumptions about inner mental state), nor does failing to talk to the ONE person upon which the entire paper rested. The duplicity and evasion of Lipsitch's response is striking in its tone-deaf scientific corruption].
The Public Health Agency of Sweden reacted less charitably. “The sources that claimed that the coronavirus would infect during the incubation period lack scientific support for this analysis in their articles,” says a document with frequently asked questions the agency posted on its website yesterday. “This applies, among other things, to an article in [NEJM] that has subsequently proven to contain major flaws and errors.”...
In other words, the researchers relied on heresy, and called it “science”.
NEJM failed to question the core assertion for which no evidence existed, and published this farce, for which a freshman would have gotten an 'F' for failing to ask the core question upon which the entire paper relied. It is and was total anal-ysis.
Then our gullible Dr. Fauci ate it up and cemented it into public record as bedrock fact.
OMG!!!
It doesn’t matter if asymptomatic transmission turns out to be correct or incorrect; what matters is that these people should be unqualified to ever deliver medical advice to anyone ever again. If you are at the top of your field, professional errors this bad are unacceptable and should result in immediate dismissal and laughed out of town.
Perhaps even worse, a gullible (or at least sloppy) Dr Fauci makes unequivocal statements without questioning the core premise of the paper. Unbelievable. We are taking advice as a nation from this supposed expert, one unable to check a simple core fact for veracity?
When scientists and doctors combine confirmation bias with lack of critical thinking and even basic fact checking expected of a rank beginner, we are left with total GIGO. These people cannot be trusted. They got almost everything wrong and continue to do so.
