Neil Ferguson et al have just published a paper arguing that had the UK adopted Sweden's approach to Covid, our death toll would be twice as high. But the paper is just flat out wrong, from the first sentence onwards.
Former Google software engineer Mike Hearn has written a 'Postcard From France' for the Daily Sceptic about the almost universal lack of enforcement of Macron's Pass Sanitaire. No vaccine passport? Pas de problème.
We hear a lot about misinformation being put about by non-scientists, but nothing about fraudulent papers published in scientific journals. Former Google software engineer Mike Hearn investigates for the Daily Sceptic.
by Mike Hearn It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.Marcia Angell Check out this image from a peer reviewed research paper that supposedly shows skin lesions being treated by a laser: Left: before treatment for keratoses. Right: after they were airbrushed out. (image diff is available here) On being challenged the authors said: The photograph was taken in the same room with a similar environment; unfortunately the patient wore the same shirt. The journal found this explanation acceptable and forwarded the response to the complainants. It’s becoming clear that science has major difficulties with not only a flood of incorrect and intellectually fraudulent claims, but also literally faked, entirely made up papers with random data, imaginary experiments and photoshopped images in them. Some of these papers are sold by organised gangs to Chinese doctors who need them to get promoted. But others come from really sketchy outfits like (sigh) the National Health Service, to whom we owe the masterpiece seen above. The British Government hasn’t noticed that its doctors are massaging...
by Mike Hearn A recent paper in the Lancet claims that one in five people might not get immunity from being infected with COVID. The study is invalid. Although these sorts of problems have been seen before, this is a good opportunity to quickly recall why COVID science is in such dire straits. The research has a straightforward goal: follow a population of Danish people who tested positive in Denmark's first wave, and re-test them during the second wave to see if they became infected a second time. Denmark has a large free PCR testing programme so there is plenty of data to analyse. Out of 11,068 who tested positive in the first wave, 72 also tested positive during the second wave. This fact is used to advocate for vaccination of people who've already had COVID. The obvious problem with this strategy is that false positives can cause apparent reinfection even when no such thing has happened. The paper doesn't mention this possibility until page 7, where the entire topic is dismissed in a single sentence: "Some misclassifications by PCR tests might have occurred; however, the test used is believed to be highly accurate, with a sensitivity of 97·1% and specificity of 99·98%." My curiosity was piqued by this figure because, as I've written about previously, at least as of...
