Earlier this month the BMJ published a blog post by its former editor Richard Smith entitled: “Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?” The conclusion was essentially yes. Today we’re publishing an original piece by Mike Hearn looking at fraud and other problems besetting scientific research. Mike was a regular contributor to Lockdown Sceptics and the author of the site’s most read article in its 16-month history. Here is an extract from his latest piece:
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.
Mike goes on to describe a phenomenon I wasn’t aware of, namely, the prevalence of fraudulent medical papers by Chinese doctors.
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.
Mike is a former Google software engineer and has an excellent blog that you can find here. His piece is very much worth reading in full.
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The photoshop comment is priceless!
The guy wore the same shirt and jacket, held exactly the same pose, pulled exactly the same expression and despite that, the poor photoshopping still gave it away!!
A lot of it isnt fraud – it is just one of sheer incompetence – far too many so called academics who actually are not capable of their job. and then you have those who follow the grants and give the answers the grant funders want to hear – it may not be that they actually fiddle their detailed findings but the “conclusions” bear little resemblance to the research.
and then you have the publicity merchants. I am afraid I have now placed a well known academic with his research into covid statistics in that category. You make a big splash and then you have to, oh dear, we didnt get the numbers in our model right – a week or two later.
So, all in all, as the article makes rather too clear – academia is in a complete mess
Anything to do with Blair wanting to see 50% of the yoof going to University “??
Didnt he meet up with G..So$os even before becoming PM to ‘talk about the future’?
The corona pandemic has been almost entirely fraudulent, and it hasn’t been hard to conceal it. You just need a huge propaganda budget and the compliance of the top “experts” and away you go. No great subterfuge required – just a Big Lie.
The same logic applies to the Climate scam. Same aim as covid/lockdowns/vax, simply a different methodology.
Just ask yourself who benefits, who pays.
Scientists who either want the cash or promote the deception for ideological aims.
The long march has infiltrated the majority of institutions and universities lead the way.
How does it feel to realise much of what you thought you knew is lies?
That some have worked their entire miserable lives planning to murder most of us.
I’m glad I’m 61 not 21. I feel most pissed off for my kids & grandbabies. Never had a life or a chance with gullible idiots like us atop them.
We’re like those kneeling figures in those grainy films, head shot and into the graves.
I recall as a teenager asking my parents “but why didn’t they get up and fight?”
Now you know.
Well some of us did stand up, maybe it made no difference at all. But they’ll need to shoot me in the face, the bastards. Live with that.
It’s five minutes to midnight.
It used to puzzle me how the victims could run into the machine gun pits to be murdered. However, the exchanges I have had, and continue to have, with aggressive, and immature and half-witted, advocates of vaccination for Covid leave me in no doubt that the bulk of the population are sheep eager for slaughter, or turkeys excited by Christmas.
I have resolved not to accept a jab and expect to be interned or murdered by officialdom. Rather that than lying on a trolley in some filthy hospital corridor, dying painfully and wishing I had had the balls to defy them.
Ioannidis reckons at least 50% of all research is not reproducible and in medicine it’s more like 75%.
Well this is hardly surprising but it’s good it’s out in the open.
A far bigger scandal was uncovered by: Dr David Martin Patented coronavirus https://www.bitchute.com/video/4FdvU43qOdfD/
Fullermich is all over this. This is the smoking gun on the whole scam. Even Toby would find it difficult to dismiss this as just a conspiracy theory….
I long ago gave up when I realised he wouldn’t publish the truth,
Same with talkRADIO.
Once you realise that though they don’t mean to, those you set store by are as much establishment as Vallance, you disengage.
Very few serious groups anywhere in the world now, such as America’s Frontline Doctors & TruthForHealth, both USA, both a mix of law, Medicine & science. I’m their CSO.
They’ve a slightly more open media; their state judicial system still functions, though Washington is as captured as London.
Apart from the federal aspects, there’s the people in the red, Open, Southern states. As a lifelong secular guy it’s been a shock. A majority actually believe & it means they see evil when we’ve forgotten how to. Finally, there’s a recent history of fighting for liberty & the 2nd amendment might cone in handy too
So we’ll give it a good go there. Hard to be too optimistic but what else is there?
All the best
Mike
Mike, you are one of the small number of hero’s in all of this. Never give up, far too many people are relying on people like you even if they don’t yet realise it.
Wasn’t it Churchill who said “Keep buggering on!”
It sure as hell wasn’t Bozo.
I won’t quit but I can’t quite point to an objective which, if accomplished, cracks this open.
I’d hoped a year ago that lots of people would do something once certain obvious (to me) lies were pointed out. But they didn’t. As time went on, there have become fewer. That’s not uplifting.
Science in academia has issues like any other field: politics, private business, media (state or private), police & army, religious institutions, etc.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with scientific academia but it should not be put on a very high pedestal and assumed that people in science are more moral (like in those disaster movies).
“assumed that people in science are more moral ” Indeed. It should also not be assumed that people involved in healthcare are immune to human weaknesses like vanity, cowardice, greed, gullibility.
Most of those I worked with were pretty honest. I encountered serious fraud just once.
Where I’ve been utterly floored is with COWARDICE.
The number of U.K. scientists & medics who agreed with my technical analysts but wouldn’t say anything! My former best pal from university, a professor. Complete cowards. Friendship based on me assuming we had similar moral compasses when we did not.
The strong PsyOps aspect also foxes me still. I can see it’s effects but I can’t even tune into whatever it is that’s turned normally forthright people into mute people. What’s that all about?
Mike
What puzzles me about you is nothing to do with you at all; it’s the bloody fools who assert that you are a ranting mad man who is not credible. Pointing out to them that as a former Pfizer scientific researcher and Vice President of the company, positions you could not have held without the confidence of the company, you would be accepted as a very credible expert witness in any court cuts no ice with them. I think your justified anger, your passion and your commitment frighten them; they want bland emollient platitudes that reassure them and leave the monsters in the wardrobe undisturbed and you’re telling them that Father Christmas does not exist and there are no fairies at the bottom of the garden, only a festering dung heap picked over by maggots. For an infantilised population that believes death, like the repayments on the new plasma TV, can be deferred that is terrifying.
Thanks for the efforts you’re making and the trouble you’re taking.
As a published academic researcher and former journal editor, all I can say is that all types of academic research is conducted in an environment that is essentially the anarchic wild west when it comes to standards of work. There are really no mechanisms in place to reliably ensure quality of research output other than the fear some might have of being publicly shamed if one was caught out “cheating”. But the volume of output is so great that it would be the really unlucky fool who got caught. In low visibility areas of research, there is little reward for anything one might publish, so I suspect the level of outright fraud may vary in relation to the degree the institutional culture tolerates fraud. More generally, in most cases, it is not fraud outright but just crap work, poorly organized and documented. Again, no quality control mechanisms exist other than one to three peers reading a research report, so researchers are basically able to be as shoddy as they want behind the scenes (and for tenured academics that can be pretty shoddy). If academics stuck to just producing scholarship for other academics to read and incorporate into their lectures and seminars, that would be fine. But once the state and industry started throwing oceans of money around, the consequences of the shoddiness of so much academic work (obviously not all) is now raining down on everyone, and causing no end of trouble.
These essays outline one of the most serious indictments of an entire culture. Once basic integrity becomes subverted by perverse incentives, then the foundations of the building are undermined.
The nature of simplistic publication and citation counting, funding dependent on results, and beauty shows chasing what is fashionable are all part of the problem of the financial basis of HE undermining its essential rationale. The balance has tipped disastrously, and peer review becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
I’m reluctant to get into ‘good old days’ stuff, and certainly don’t subscribe to the notion that the opening up of opportunity is the source of the problem. But, beyond research, I see a gradual erosion of degree classifications. ‘Firsts’ used to be pretty rare 50 years
ago, and ‘Upper Seconds’ represented a fairly small proportion of awards. Not so now – and I don’t believe that is a representation of commensurate increase in academic attainment. It is, again, a feature of perverse incentives and students simply as revenue, with competition driven by mickey-mouse performance indicators.
The real culprit is the financialisation of everything, reducing complexity to bone-headed accounting.
There’s been a lot to get depressed about over the last eighteen months – but this fundamental issue gets near the very top of the list.
I agree with a lot of this but not that it’s down to finance- if anything finance generally rewards competence and punishes incompetence, it doesn’t cover it up on a daily basis as we see in the public sector. Do it right or you’re out, basically. So many kids chase easy, pointless degrees because they think they are automatically entitled to do this and then get a cushy, well paid media job or similar, instead of doing actual productive, useful work and they seem to be encouraged in this. My niece is currently considering what A level course to take based on how much study and work she has to do as much as what she actually wants to do. Almost every teenager I meet seems to see it like this- heaven forfend they should actually do some work and they all seem to think it should be funded by the Government as though there’s some magical supply of free money. sooner or later, reality is going to bite really hard.
This is a brilliant video by Jason Fung which shows some of the techniques used to distort research. Covers things such as selective publication, rigged outcomes, advertorials as ‘best practice’, reprint revenues, bribery of jounal editors, publication bias and financial conflicts of interests
Dr. Jason Fung: Financial Conflicts of Interests and the End of Evidence-Based Medicine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6IO2DZjOkY
‘When the evidence base of medicine is bought and paid for people die’
Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest physicist of all time*: A lot of his physics was beyond peer review as it was so far ahead, his alchemy was over a million words of utter bunk, yet peer review would have approved it.
*However you measure it.
The best results have always been produced down the pub rather than in the lab and scientists usually have enough brain cells to make up the results to look feasible rather than excellent.
A bit like the announcement on the news just now that daily testing of children will result in 43% fewer absences.
Call me a cynic.
‘The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research’ by Jon Jureidini and Leemon McHenry – if you want serious facts about how distorted medicine has become this is a must read. Details six cases of uncovering pharma fraudulent claims etc. But mainly shows how the entire academic, govt, corporate world in embedded in pharma, how it works and how powerful it is – also presents the Carl Popper falsification theory alternative – it might be old school but without independent oversight almost every drug we take is tainted. Chinese fraud is one thing but blaming the Chinese can only go so far – to me it’s another ruse – this is home grown (Wellcome trust et al.) and urgent.
This is not surprising. Medical journals have been publishing fake articles for years written by ghostwriters claiming to be doctors, on the pharmaceutical payroll. This is particularly prevalent in the cancer industry.
The recent book Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science by Stuart J. Ritchie is also worth reading on the subject.
I got into hot water quickly last year, identifying the fraudulent PCR test as sitting at the purulent heart of what was obviously a global conspiracy. Nothing theoretical about it.
Why else did scores of countries discard their pandemic preparedness plans & adopt a narrative wholly comprised of lies?
Now, given the huge avoidable deaths toll & destruction of economies, there had to be a yet bigger prize at stake, one for which a few score thousand deaths was fine.
Within a few days of the variants fraud starting up, I deduced VaxPass + variant boosters = lethal injection (with delay & plausible deniability).
That is where this is going at accelerating pace. Depopulation, grand scale. Holocaust 2.0
This time, the victims take themselves to the ‘vaccination centres’
I’ve left U.K. and am doing my best to extract my family. Third world with friends is the only possible temporary haven & even that won’t last long.
They’ll disrupt the financial system or the net or supply chains just to make it really grim,
Alternatively we could get off our knees & just take our old normal lives back.
But we won’t. I’ve felt such anger at the sheer bloody cowardice of those who’s brains could have worked this out,
A PhD helps but it’s not needed. Just stop rejecting Occam’s razor & censoring unpleasant thoughts.
And don’t say I didn’t bloody warn you.
Good luck everyone,
Mike
Good luck I hope it works out for you. This country is finished unless and until the people take it back from the evil cabal. I’d like to see Bozo and his minions hanged for Treason, miracles can happen and that is what I’m hoping for.
Unfortunately it’s as far as I can tell a fully international affair.
For U.K. read all of Western Europe, Aus, NZ. Canada & large tracts of the US.
Sounds familiar? It’s the Five Eyes.
Dr Mike,
I wonder if you have considered Mexico as a new domicile?
If I had the funds, it’s somewhere I would consider. I give below a now retracted prediction from Deagel.com from around 2019. The Mexican prediction for population growth/decline (Page1) for 2025 is shown as steady whereas the UK’s (Page 3) is a catastrophic decline.
I also offer a link to a book recommending attractive locations within Mexico along with valuable insider information “Retirement Secrets of Mexico” by Russell Blake. I like to think this aware and successful fellow is an FB friend.
Whatever you decide, I do wish you and yours well in your adventures.
https://wp.me/p2KsQn-20P
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HM8D9FQ/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_VDE4KG0KQRKSQ5DJD21S
Kindest regards,
Zara.
I never treasured publications much because I was commercial not academic.
Still, it’s nice to be an author & I totted up around 40 peer reviewed journal articles & 60 meeting abstracts (oral or poster communication), couple of books.
Ironically it’s in industry where until now, I’d have said is as pure as can be, because so many others check everything, ultimately for regulatory purposes.
I think it was true but clearly everything is now corrupted. People who look like me, VPs & SVPs are creating these bloody bio weapons which are completely unsuitable for injecting into people.
How are they not protesting? Resigning?
Those who say it was easy for me to speak out, well, I did resign over fraud at a company when I was 31 & the only breadwinner. That was pretty horrible.
But your point is the right one: once basic rules of human conduct are trampled, there’s literally nothing left.
Malcolm Kendrick recently wrote an article on why it is not possible to trust the conclusions of medical research.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/07/07/covid19-the-final-nail-in-coffin-of-medical-research/