SEARCH
BMJ: Time to Assume that Health Research is Fraudulent Until Proven Otherwise + The more Certain Someone is about COVID-19, the Less You Should Trust Them
Related: ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, health, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
Everything is political now, especially medical “science”. And your life is on the line.
Let’s kick this off with a paper from 16 years ago, since the problem has only gotten worse.
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
John P. A. Ioannidis, August 30 2005.
...Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias...
It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.
...
Corollaries
Corollary 1: The smaller the studies conducted in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true...
Corollary 2: The smaller the effect sizes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true...
Corollary 3: The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested relationships in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true...
Corollary 4: The greater the flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true...
Corollary 5: The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true..
Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true......
Most Research Findings Are False for Most Research Designs and for Most Fields
Claimed Research Findings May Often Be Simply Accurate Measures of the Prevailing Bias
...
WIND: real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it.
BMJ: Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?
2021-07-06
...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.
WIND: always follow the money, and never trust without verifying.
Why published research is untrustworthy
2021-07-06
...The present status of research that is “misleading, exaggerated or plain wrong” is reminiscent of the news media. The attitude that scientists are always right should be changed; they are most often wrong [1]!
nstead of trying to make cosmetic changes to their results, they should openly and frankly recognize the weakness of the results. Researchers need to change from a “butterfly behavior” [24] to a more altruistic approach so that an issue (the “flower”) can be fully exploited in search of a breakthrough, before moving on to the next flower [24]. As pointed out by Douglas G. Altman in 1994 we still need “less research, better research and research done for the right reasons” [2].
WIND: scientific integrity was on its deathbed twenty years ago. It is now an old oak rotten and hollow inside, ready to topple over with the first winter storm.
BMJ: The more certain someone is about covid-19, the less you should trust them
2020-10-19
...Returning to our starting point, two unequivocal authorities have written that “As our understanding of influenza viruses has increased dramatically in recent decades we have moved ever further from certainty about the determinants of, and possibilities for, pandemic emergence.”15 Their point is illustrated by the largely unexpected pandemic of coronavirus disease hitting a world bristling with influenza pandemic management plans.
When deciding whom to listen to in the covid-19 era, we should respect those who respect uncertainty, and listen in particular to those who acknowledge conflicting evidence on even their most strongly held views. Commentators who are utterly consistent, and see whatever new data or situation emerge through the lens of their pre-existing views—be it “Let it rip” or “Zero covid now”—would fail this test.
WIND: put the CDC and FDA through this filter, and nothing passes.
Nature: The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science
2020-10-19
...“The effect is devastating,” says Li, about the impacts on Chinese science. “The literature environment published in Chinese is already ruined, since hardly anyone believes them or references studies from them.”
“Now this plague has eroded into the international medical journals,” he adds. The fact that people use paper mills also affects China’s reputation globally, says Futao Huang, a Chinese researcher working at Hiroshima University in Japan.
The prevalence of problem papers is leading some journal editors to doubt the submissions they get from Chinese hospital researchers. “The increasing volume of this ‘junk science’ is wreaking havoc on the credibility of the research emanating out of China and increasingly casting doubt upon legitimate science from the region,” said a February 2021 editorial2 in the journal Molecular Therapy.
...
WIND: anything out of CCP-controlled China is not to be trusted.
Sebastian Rushworth MD: A reflection on covid mania
by Sebastian Rushworth M.D.., 23 September 2021. Emphasis added.
...
It’s hard to maintain faith in science when it is so wilfully distorted to accord with a political agenda, and when many doctors and scientists so happily go along with what is handed down from on high. I recently learned that an excellent study on the covid vaccines, carried out at a prestigious institution, has spent months trying to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but has been denied again and again, because its results don’t align with the official dogma. Clearly, the journals are engaging in politically motivated censorship.
When this is the case, peer-review becomes a harmful process, whose only purpose is to determine the political acceptability of research, not it’s quality or usefulness. It becomes impossible for the lay person, and even for doctors and scientists, to know what the truth is, because uncomfortable truths remain buried or remain at the pre-print stage, which makes it all too easy to dismiss them – “Oh, that’s just a pre-print, it hasn’t been peer-reviewed”. That is the world we live in.
...
WIND: “follow the science” ===> “follow the officially approved science”!
A note on sampling biases in the Bangladesh mask trial
2021-12-02
...We suggest that the very large causal effects on consent rates and thus population denominators urge caution in interpreting the small differences we see in symptomatic seropositivity between treatment and controls, which are already not statistically significant according to standard non-parametric paired tests. Additionally, as the trial shows that the intervention studied can have large and highly significant effects even on unintended aspects of behavior, including staff surveying behavior, bias-susceptible endpoints that depend on subjective reports of symptoms from participants to staff should be used with care.
WIND: the Bangladesh mask trial was one of those frauds used by the media to promote the narrative of mask usage. Anyone on the peer review committee should lose all their scientific credibility, and be banned from publishing any research for the rest of their life. And of course, the authors of this farce study.
A disaster for humanity
Trust the science? Trust your government? Trust the experts? Mantras for fools used by manipulators. But the public propaganda outlets formerly known as “news” can easily brainwish the public, most of whom have have only a dim understanding of science, statistics, etc. Science is now “what I say it is” as the experts will tell you.
Only over decades does scientific truth slowly emerge.
And the peer review process has become a joke, with its heavy infusion of social approbation and clubby approach to what is right or wrong. Major journals are now rife with anti-scientific wokism and pandering. The whole situation is disgusting and a pox on humanity.
