Formal scientific institutions took a battering during the pandemic, and deservedly so. From the wildly inaccurate predictions of SAGE modellers to the denial of natural immunity by signatories of the John Snow Memorandum, ‘Science’ (uppercase ‘s’) has not had a good three years.
A particularly striking illustration of this is citation patterns in the scientific literature. If things were working well, the best studies would get cited the most. Unfortunately, that appears not to be the case: citations have flowed disproportionately to studies that uphold The Narrative.
In June, 2020, researchers from Imperial College London (including our old friend Neil Ferguson) published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature titled ‘Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe’.
They concluded – on the basis of a complex model-fitting exercise – that lockdowns had saved the lives of 3.1 million people across 11 European countries. That’s right, 3.1 million lives saved, and during the first three months of the pandemic alone.
Doesn’t very plausible, does it? After all, Sweden didn’t lock down, and they saw about as many deaths – or even fewer – than the countries that did lockdown. So how did the researchers get to the figure of 3.1 million lives saved?
As Philippe Lemoine notes, they just assumed that death numbers would have been far greater in the absence of lockdowns, and then took the difference between those numbers and the ones that were actually observed, and concluded the difference was due to lockdowns. Okay, but what about Sweden?
Well, the researchers fit a model in which the effect of different interventions could vary from country to country. And while Sweden didn’t have a lockdown, they did have a ban on public gatherings (of more than 500 people). So in the researchers’ model, Sweden’s ban on public gatherings ended up having the same impact as lockdown in all the other countries.
They were effectively claiming that, in France, Italy, the UK etc., lockdowns succeeded in preventing hundreds of thousands of deaths, but in Sweden, the same effect was achieved by simply banning public gatherings. Like I said, not very plausible. In fact, it’s preposterous.
The paper has been heavily criticised. However, that hasn’t stopped it being cited 2779 times! Most researchers don’t get that many citations in their entire career, let alone on a single paper.
Now let’s look at the number of citations accrued by papers finding that lockdowns didn’t have much effect.
Simon Wood’s paper ‘Did COVID-19 infections decline before UK lockdown?’ concluded that “infections were in decline before full UK lockdown”. It has been cited a total of 40 times (across two different versions).
Christian Bjørnskov’s paper ‘Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison’ found “no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development”. It has been cited a total of 57 times.
Eran Bendavid and colleagues’ paper ‘Assessing mandatory stay-at-home and business closure effects on the spread of COVID-19’ did “not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs”. It has been cited a total of 205 times.
Christopher Berry and colleagues’ paper ‘Evaluating the effects of shelter-in-place policies during the COVID-19 pandemic’ did “not find detectable effects of these policies on disease spread or deaths”. It has been cited a total of 68 times.
While none of these papers is perfect, they’re all vastly more rigorous than the Imperial College study published in Nature. Despite this, none of them has garnered even 1/10th as many citations as that study.
Something has gone seriously wrong when a flawed study gets almost three thousand citations, while more rigorous studies only pick up a few dozen. As to what explains this disparity, I can only speculate that most scientists haven’t come to terms with the fact that the ‘experts’ dropped the ball.
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Free speech and the woke mind virus cannot both co-habit Clown World because, as we’ve seen with many examples now, serious ructions do occur as a result, so one of them must die otherwise it’s just the never-ending battle. Consequently we keep hearing of more and more pathetic garbage and the messing about with our literature, as well as our language, such as this latest Woketard offering, which defies common sense and is basically censorship on steroids;
”Saying a patient has “blacked out” when they have fainted is racist, pharmacists have been warned.
Chemist workers have been banned from using the traditional phrase for briefly losing consciousness in case it causes offence.
Other words and phrases with “racial undertones” on a barred list drawn up by union bosses – in what horrified critics branded “virtue signalling” – include black sheep, black market and “blackmail”.
The – for want of a better phrase – “blacklist” was compiled by Nav Bhogal, a member of the Pharmacists’ Defence Association’s BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) network.
Titled “Addressing racial undertones in the language of pharmacy”, Mr Bhogal said that the words have become “embedded in our professional vocabulary”.
He claims the words and phrases also have “associations with race, power dynamics, and negativity” which “can be harmful”.
The article, published on the website of the Pharmacists’ Defence Association (PDA), is the latest in a series of controversial “woke” language guides.”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1993540/pharmacy-guide-woke-nonsense
Nav Bhogal wants shipping back to his ancestral home.
#w#t.
It’s a Captain Obvious cameo, but it always amazes me why people who demonstrably hate white people and have no interest in respecting/tolerating our culture, insist on moving where the white folk live. Perplexing.
Just stay the feck away then!
It’d be like me moving to Dubai and making a formal complaint to the municipality about all the women walking around looking like mobile tents and how that offends my liberal Western female sensibilities, because ‘Women’s Rights’. You move to a place that has a completely different culture and you accept that culture and respect the contrasting laws and customs. It’s just the sheer arrogance of it. Of course, I don’t think many places, even those such as the UAE, which are a bit more relaxed and tolerant of Westerners and other religions, would suffer the “suicidal empathy” and outright treachery from its own leaders and citizens that we’re experiencing here in most of Europe.
You nailed it Mogs.
She did
Yes but it’s all being organised & constructed – this downfall of western civilisation – by our own European ilk who are using every trick in the book which includes these useful ( to them ) idiots, foreign or otherwise to help carry out their plans !!
I was hoping to dream of a white Christmas next year. I know it’s not going to happen. But I fear even hoping it may get me into trouble.
This case will show how politicised the High Court has become. I think we all suspect but just how far has it gone.
‘The DfE document informed Ms Phillipson that failure to intervene over the Act would mean the legislation automatically going live at the start of August…’
Extraordinary to reflect that civil servants advised a Minister to ‘intervene’ to stop legislation that had been passed by Parliament. Quite obviously, that is a power reserved to the House of Commons, and presumably the FSU argument will be based on that fact.
But I expect the Court to find that, because of the ECHR, Parliament was ulta vires in the first place, and had no power to pass the legislation.
We shouldn’t joke about such possibilities.
Surprisingly I don’t believe this story.
Are we really expected to accept that just after winning the election Phillipson decided to put a complete stop to legislation that was scheduled to go live within a couple of weeks? Bollox. And the Civil service seems to have had a remarkably well prepared response to her whingeing. I’m not buying it. So, Labour knew they had the election in the bag before it was run or Phillipson thought she’d wing it before she even had her feet under her desk.
This story has a distinct whiff of jackanory attached to it.
Everyone knew that Labour had the election in the bag before it was run. Weren’t you paying attention?
Bridget Phillipson Classroom Dictator
The “Hate Speech” Strawman….As ever, who gets to decide what is hate speech.
Who? Those running The State, its apparatchiks, cronies and useful idiots.
Is it the rôle of Civil Servants to brief Ministers on how to circumvent or evade legislation?
A guy called Julius Streicher was hanged at Nuremberg for incitement to genocide, ie, publishing an antisemitic German newspaper (Der Stürmer) which is all he was ever personally responsible for. So, why on earth do you keep claiming there was something like free speech? There ain’t and that Philipps tried to get Jewish organisations onboard just demonstrates that she understood how to get rid of supposedly free speech she really doesn’t like.
You want to censor and kill people who don’t obey. Guess what? She wants that as well. Same difference. Petty squabbles about who is or isn’t to be hanged for speaking freely don’t change the quality of the discussion.
BTW: Wasn’t there also an Irish-born American who got executed by the British state for speaking English?