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Heavily Criticised Pro-lockdown Paper Cited Far More Than Anti-lockdown Papers

by Noah Carl
13 March 2023 11:00 AM

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.

Tags: LockdownPhilippe LemoineSweden

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9 Comments
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FerdIII
FerdIII
2 years ago

Anyone who believes that ‘science’ is an impartial process, looking at evidence and discovering ‘truth’ is either naive or just really bloody stupid.

Sources which provide the money, the world-view zeitgeist, the secular-religious affiliations (atheists are the most religious people I have met), power, conferences, careers, jet sets, published papers, talk shows, grants – these are the drivers of ‘the science’ ™….

58
0
Benthic
Benthic
2 years ago

What was our Neil who published a paper titled ‘Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe’ using to estimate these life saving interventions, chicken bones?

20
0
JaneDoeNL
JaneDoeNL
2 years ago

The answer may be quite mundane really.

Perhaps it was made clear, in one form or another, that the chances of a paper getting published, particularly in a leading multi-page pharma ad scientific journal would be far greater if ‘approved’ sources were cited. Just as we have seen with the now laughable but obligatory phrase that the corona vaxxes had saved hundreds of billions of lives every day that gets trotted out in every paper discussing corona.

They will keep spouting nonsense as long as people keep repeating nonsense without challenge. Why does no one point out that very simple observation will tell us what we need to know?

When Spain opened up in the summer of 2020, after quite literally incarcerating the bulk of the population for 3 months, face rags were required indoors and outdoors for more than a year. NL had no face mask requirements (other than public transport) until December 2020, and after that only indoors – not for children under 12 (Spain children under 6), nor children in school – my friend’s then 9-year old was wearing a rag for more than 8 hours a day! If one wished to prove that masks had any use whatsoever, a comparison of the 2 countries should suffice – Spain should be able to show significantly fewer infections, fewer hospitalisations, fewer deaths – it can’t, quite the contrary. According to Worldometer, Spain had 2560 deaths per million, NL 1336 deaths per million. There may be some issue as to how covid deaths were attributed, but regardless, that is quite a difference and in itself is enough to say that neither incarceration nor face masks did anything (at least beneficial). If no positive, easily quantifiable benefit can be demonstrated, why are we still talking about studies? If it walks like a duck…

43
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ebygum
ebygum
2 years ago

They are just like the pro-maskers..they are never going to give in and accept the overwhelming evidence….
This article from Brownstone was published in November of 2021!
https://brownstone.org/articles/more-than-400-studies-on-the-failure-of-compulsory-covid-interventions/

Before Convid (BC) you would be hard pushed to find any science upholding these interventions…something those of us who see through it know…..we just have to keep slogging away to wake more people up….

31
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D J
D J
2 years ago

Follow the money.

23
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JohnK
JohnK
2 years ago

Digging their own grave, certain organisations, when intelligent people find out what they’re up to. Loss of reputation would be a mild comment.

8
0
RTSC
RTSC
2 years ago

Ferguson, and his fellow Soothsayers at Imperial College, are a menace to society.

How on earth can someone, whose every prediction of doom and destruction has been catastrophically exaggerated, still be treated seriously and listened to by the idiots in Government.

14
0
DevonBlueBoy
DevonBlueBoy
2 years ago
Reply to  RTSC

And why the hell was he listened to in the first place? If you want to buy a physical product, e.g. a laptop, you can examine it before purchase. If you want to buy a service e.g. a computer modelling forecast, you would usually ask for evidence of previous accuracy. Not though by the bellends who chose Ferguson and his GIGO forecasts

13
0
7941MHKB
7941MHKB
2 years ago
Reply to  DevonBlueBoy

He had a long history of abject, preposterous, failed ‘forecasts’ long before he was appointed as “The Science” to HMG.

Susan Michie had been an active member, Central Committee stalwart of the British Communist Party for 40 years when appointed for her psyops “Nudging” by HMG.

Which Civil “Servants” proposed their appointment? Why aren’t they now in a damp dungeon in The Tower?

8
0

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