You can hunt anything you want, animals, insects and, latterly, human beings, especially scientists. This happened to us and to Tom in the august columns of the New York Times (NYT), as we reported here, here and here.
The main problem appears to have been that the columnist took exception to the idea that the Cochrane Review A122 failed to find any better quality evidence of mask effectiveness, and of course, she proceeded to try to shoot the messenger.
Ever since her article, however, some of the background to her intervention has come to light, and Tom has written back to the NYT pointing out some of the consequences of its irresponsible behaviour:
Opinion Editor
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018212-556-1922
kathleen.kingsbury@nytimes.com
Dear Ms. Kingsbury,
Thank you for your reply dated March 18th to my complaint dated March 15th 2023.
Matters are not what you reported, although I understand your willingness to defend your columnist.
Dr. Tufekci seems to have forgotten to make clear that she has been lobbying CDC and maybe other organisations for over three years to impose mask mandates, although she has no scientific expertise in this matter. This happened after a somersault from her initial position against use of masks (she is in very good company in such a change of course in March 2020). Elsewhere she described creating a new symbolism around the use of masks, a clearly ideological standpoint which has naught to do with science.
Dr. Tufekci now publicly claims that she has corrected Cochrane (although it was hard work it took her almost a month). She has done no such thing, as no edits have been made to the review text.
You and Dr. Tufekci state that the Plain Language Summary of the review may have helped people misinterpret the review.
Possible corrections, addenda and edits in science (and in the Cochrane Library) are handled through the editorial peer review mechanism, not through the columns of a daily. It seems to me that by insisting on corrections and claiming “victory” the New York Times through its columnist is trying to subvert not just Cochrane but the whole scientific process, while launching a personal attack on me, one of the twelve authors. Her attack on our review and on me can perhaps be explained in her own words: “The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all. They look like viral or coordinated harassment campaigns, which harness the dynamics of viral outrage to impose an unbearable and disproportionate cost on the act of speaking out.”
I ask you to look again in detail at the personal agenda of your columnist and ask yourself if subversion of the scientific process through unqualified comments is the aim of the New York Times. Finally I note that your mission is to “seek the truth and help people understand the world“.
I do not think this is possible if you hold an ideological view.
I believe that given the facts you owe me at least a right of reply.
I look forward to hearing from you,
Yours,
Professor Tom Jefferson
Senior Associate Tutor
University of Oxford
Oxford
OX2 6GG
It remains to be seen whether the complaint will be taken seriously.
Our dissection of the UKHSA mask review that we had scheduled for today has been postponed to Friday at the request of GB News which will be interviewing one of us on Friday just after the 10am news to present our findings. In making this decision, we were aware that we had promised publication today, but the opportunity of communicating on TV is too great to let go.
We hope that our readers will forgive us and tune in on Friday morning.
Last but not least, Carl is busy drafting his response to a Request for Evidence under Rule 9 of the Inquiry Rules 2006 Module 2 of the U.K. COVID-19 Public Inquiry..
We plan to serialise the response once it is ready and, of course, any reply the NYT might send us.
But please do not hold your breath, and as we have said many times before, keep away from mainstream media headlines. They are one of the main causes of the mess we are in.
Dr. Carl Heneghan is the Oxford Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Dr. Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist based in Rome who works with Professor Heneghan on the Cochrane Collaboration. This article was first published on their Substack blog, Trust The Evidence, which you can subscribe to here.
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If anyone really thinks that our elected representatives run the show then I have a bridge to sell them. Ministers can go along for the ride whilst enjoying their perks but woe betide anyone who tries to push anything through the blob that they don’t want to do.
A bit strawmanny.
I doubt many of the tinfoilers like me think that getting rid of Raab was a conspiracy.
Not all court intrigue is conspiracy, sometimes it’s just ideological.
The ouster of Truss was a bit of both.
The installation of Sunak was mostly conspiracy.
“I doubt many of the tinfoilers like me think that getting rid of Raab was a conspiracy.”
I have no idea, tbh. I don’t see how we can know unless we have some way of getting inside the heads of the main protagonists and access records of every conversation they ever had. It’s entirely speculative. What’s not a conspiracy theory is that the establishment is now dominated by the political left.
You are right. It only takes enough cultists agreeing on principle that someone they don’t like needs to be attacked into unemployment for it to happen.
Is that a conspiracy? I suppose it’s an open one.
Good summing up..
“we very frequently overlook the middle ground between the views of the tinfoil hat wearers on the one hand and the anti-disinformation guardians of sensible technocratic soft-Left centrism on the other. ”
Seems to me the “other hand” from us “tinfoil hat wearers” is neither sensible, nor “soft” left nor is it properly technocratic. Covid, “climate change”, wokeism, Ukraine war are all lunatic, fanatical, dangerous, evidence-free cults.
Spot on.
Damn right..
It’s the usual “It’s OK when we do it”. When scientists disagreeing with the mainstream narrative on climate change are harrassed, or there’s a pile-on on Andrew Bridgen, that’s not bullying.
A bit like “breaking the law.”
My piece on the WHO treaty refers.
Unfortunately, we now seem to be back in an age where power and privilege are decided solely by the elites. The challenge from the prosperity generated by free thinking individuals engaged in private enterprise has virtually disappeared as a result of globalist and elitist policy; this was the route that opened up and democratised society in the first place.
British society got democratized because a leader of a faction of the house of commons convinced a king to create enough new, politically suitably aligned peers to turn the house of lords into the function-free relic relic it remains to this day. Sorry, nothing that came from free thinking individuals engaged in private enterprise.
For once I think that the Americans have the best idea. After a presidential election the White House is cleared out and the victors brings in their own team of staff.
A first class article.
One caveat – suggesting civil servants got rid of Raab leaves a big question unanswered – what input did Fishy have?
If Fishy was not involved who then is running the Civil servants?
Move Civil Service departments outside London, perhaps starting with somewhere in Ashfield.
The bastards have now had a victory, this will get a lot worse very quickly
Seems that we need to bring in sortition not just for MPs but also for all judges.
Can’t get any worse or more arbitrary than currently, that’s for sure.
As for conspiracies, I am with Peter Hitchens:
“Of course there are conspiracies in Westminster. They are called lunch and dinner meetings.”
The so-called human rights act is a bit difficult to digest, but I think the meaning regarding the right to family life is as follows
1) Someone the secretary of the interior deems to be a foreign criminal has no right to a family life regardless of his personal situation before the secretary of the interior made this decision.
2) People economically dependent on him also don’t have a right to a family life as they could always live on welfare instead.
ie, such a decision by the secretary of the interior effectively nullifies any family. It would be much more honest to state that foreigners can never become part of a family for the purpose of the European Convention on Human Rights, or, yet shorter, that foreigners are – by legal definition – not human. They exist so that the secretary of the interior may utilize them for demonstrational purpose as he sees fit and in the meantime, they’re supposed to be grateful to be allowed to pay taxes.
Considering that the secretary of the interior will hardly make such decisions himself but rely on the input of the associated civil service departments, that’s a landgrab of the administrative executive which believes the judical executive is just too bothersome, or, to put it into more commonly used terms, it’s really about two different branches of the so-called technocracy fighting a turf war.
How this would relates to Raab’s behaviour in a completely different function in 2019 is still entirely unclear.
Civil Servants act like our masters
************************************
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
And to prove the points made by Dr McGrogan, the spineless amoeba that is the Prime Minister didn’t have the guts to support Raab and tell the blob to wind in their necks and do what they are, very well, paid to do – support the Government
Why would he.. he’s a blobette after all..
A masterly description of the utter mess we are in.