Last week, I saw what I now think might be the single most brain dead paper that I’ve ever read being amplified by antivax bloggers and by John Campbell, the latter of whom, just when I think he can’t go any lower, always seems to find a way to surpass my already contemptuously low expectations for just how deep into the rabbit hole of antivax quackery and conspiracy theories he’ll go. Let’s just see what you think when I show you how the antivax Substack fool 2nd Smartest Guy in the World (2ndSGitW) characterizes it: DEMOCIDE EPIDEMIC: The First Ever Peer-Reviewed Journal Study That Proves Excess Covid-19 Deaths in the United Kingdom Were Due to Midazolam. Seeing that Substack, I made the mistake of clicking on the link to the “study” (if you can call it that) that 2ndSGitW was so impressed by: Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic. As I read it, a certain famous clip from the Adam Sandler movie Billy Madison came to mind:
Yes, this “study” warrants such a response, for reasons that you will soon see. First, though, let’s see what a credulous fool like 2ndSGitW—but I repeat myself—thinks of this “study”:
The peer-reviewed journal space is almost completely captured by BigPharma and their Intelligence Industrial Complex partners-in-crime. Which is precisely why a recent study entitled, Excess Deaths in the United Kingdom: Midazolam and Euthanasia in the COVID-19 Pandemic getting published in a scientific publication is such an historically important event in this post scamdemic new normal.
Elsewhere, John Campbell, predictably, just ate it all up:
Calling any journal that would publish such an abject lesson in how correlation tortured from the data does not necessarily indicate causation “peer-reviewed” is definitely a stretch, but apparently Medical & Clinical Research is a real journal that even boasts an Impact Factor of 2.93! That’s not a horrible IF—that is, if it’s even real, which I doubt, particularly given that this page claims an IF of 1.023 (which is it?)—although it’s not particularly impressive either. What the journal does not boast of is being indexed in PubMed, which is the minimum that I look for in a peer-reviewed journal, other than brand new journals that haven’t been around long enough to be considered for indexing by PubMed. Moreover, the journal has a lot of signs of being a predatory open access journal. I mean, just look at its website if you don’t believe me, particularly the part where the “journal” will publish your PowerPoint slides, for a fee of course.
The weird thing that I noticed in the journal is that it had a fair number of articles that looked and sounded (on the surface and abstract at least) to be legitimate scientific papers, rather than the utter dreck that I will show this article to be. Next, I noticed that this article seemed to be part of a “special issue” devoted to COVID-19 and its [sic] variants. I further noticed, though, that it’s an open access journal with a rather high publication charge of $3,916. While open access journals are not necessarily a red flag and there are many reputable ones, open access journals with a dodgy looking website (like this one’s) and a high publication charge are.
I was also curious about the author, Wilson Sy, as I had never heard of him before, either as a scientist or as a spreader of COVID-19 misinformation. He’s the sole author of this paper, which is odd, because in legitimate scientific papers presenting new research sole authorship has become quite rare. Moreover, he is listed not as a scientist, but rather as a Director, Investment Analytics Research, Australia, whatever that means. Googling him revealed little more than that he appears to be some sort of financial analyst and that he’s published about COVID-19. In other words, he’s just the sort of guy who’s not qualified to write a paper like this, but somehow he’s managed to get it published just the same, and not just this paper. He has two other papers in the “special issue” entitled Early Indication of Long-Term Impact of COVID Injections and Simpson’s paradox in the correlations between excess mortality and Simpson’s paradox in the correlations between excess mortality and covid-19 injections: a case study of iatrogenic pandemic for elderly Australians. Wow. The financial guy tries to use Simpson’s paradox, which is a a statistical phenomenon in which an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears or even reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations to try to show that vaccines didn’t really save lives. Just perusing the introduction to that latter paper revealed to me a veritable “greatest hits” of antivax nonsense, including the claim that the mRNA vaccines are not actually vaccines. (They are.)
I’m more interested on what Sy has to say about midazolam, though. First, though, in case you’re not familiar with it, midazolam (trade name Versed) is a benzodiazepine drug used mostly as a powerful sedative, often for anesthesia. It’s often used as part of a cocktail of drugs to sedate patients who require mechanical ventilation, because being on a ventilator is profoundly uncomfortable, as is being forced to lie in the same position while on the ventilator. Indeed, sometimes when the lungs are very stiff it’s necessary to use drugs to paralyze patients on the ventilator, and it’s a horrible thing to be both awake and paralyzed; so in addition to the paralytics, various sedatives are administered to keep the patient comfortable. Midazolam also has amnesiac properties, so that the patient also forgets much of what happened while sedated. You can guess where this is going. During the biggest surges of COVID-19, there were lots of people paralyzed on ventilators being supported until either they recovered or did not. Right off the bat, you can guess that midazolam use would likely correlate with those big COVID-19 surges, because more people were hospitalized and on ventilators. Indeed, I even remember that, during parts of those surges, there were shortages of midazolam and drugs like it because so many patients were on ventilators, to the point that, rather than a continuous IV infusion, sometimes the drug was being administered intermittently in a bolus fashion, which is suboptimal for keeping patients sedated.
But let’s get back to the paper. In it, Sy “analyzes” (if you can call it that) excess mortality in the UK as recorded in its Office of National Statistics (ONS) Database. Thinking the data “corrupted” by data entry errors, stating:
The extensive analysis [5] of detailed ONS statistics based on vaccination status and their relationships with COVID cases and mortality has shown inconsistencies, which appear to have originated from flawed definitions of vaccination status and erroneous data entry.
And:
This aspect of ONS data corruption appears universal, as it also occurs with Australian data [6] which have originated from the flawed data entry and reporting convention [7] from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which may have recorded status lagging actual status by at least 14 days. Essentially, the death of a recently injected person may not be recorded in the database of deaths of the “vaccinated” [8]. This simple omission makes comparison of deaths by vaccination status a data misdirection inflating “unvaccinated” deaths which are calculated by subtracting “vaccinated” deaths from all deaths of the population [9].
Oh, goody. Sy thinks the data from the UK, the US, and Australia are so compromised that he can’t possibly find out what he wants to find out. So he decides to use a most…unusual…method:
Despite advances in modern information technology, the accuracy of data collection has not advanced in the United Kingdom for over 150 years, because the same problems of erroneous data entry found then are still found now in the COVID pandemic, not only in the UK but all over the world. We have independently discovered [6] the same UK data problem and solution for assessing COVID-19 vaccination as Alfred Russel Wallace [10] had 150 years ago in investigating the consequences of Vaccination Acts starting in 1840 on smallpox:
“Having thus cleared away the mass of doubtful or erroneous statistics depending on comparisons of the vaccinated and unvaccinated in limited areas or selected groups of patients, we turn to the only really important evidence, those ‘masses of national experience’…”
Emphasis added. The entry of incorrect data for vaccination status, over 150 years ago as now [10], cannot be solved by technology, but by better data management. Just as did Alfred Wallace, an eminent peer and friend of Charles Darwin, the method we have used (the “Wallace Method”) to overcome the lack of accurate detailed vaccination data is to use accurate macro-data such as all-cause mortality (‘masses of national experience’) and doses of COVID vaccination, to perform detailed statistical analysis to draw broad and robust epidemiological conclusions.
This paper follows the Wallace Method by examining the “masses of national experience” of the pandemic which are the all-cause and excess mortality data over time and across the regions of England.
Oh, goody. Sy is going to use a vaguely described method that is over 150 years old and last applied to smallpox made by one of the most famous antivaccinationists of the 19th century, someone who never wavered in his belief, despite all evidence, that smallpox vaccination was useless and became in his later years a passionate advocate of spiritualism and supported land nationalization. I’m sure this will go just swimmingly! So, apparently unburdened by any knowledge of epidemiology, statistical analysis relevant to epidemiology, or any understanding of public health, Sy paddles boldly down the river of antivax pseudoscience to produce this chart:
First, off, what is being graphed is not the infection fatality rate (IFR) but rather the case fatality rate (CFR), the former being the percent of cases who are infected with SARS-CoV-2 who die and the latter being the percent of cases who are symptomatically infected and develop actual clinical symptomatic disease. Now, what do we know about March and April 2020 when it comes to COVID-19? Here’s a hint: It relates to the denominator used to calculate CFR. That’s right! Very few people were being tested for COVID-19 because there was a massive shortage of testing supplies. As a result, it was basically universally accepted that the number of infections was far higher than what was being recorded, because many asymptomatic cases, as well as cases with mild symptoms, were not being recorded, a point made by Dr. Susan Oliver in her retort to Dr. Campbell. I encourage you to watch this—after, of course, you’ve finished reading this post (just sayin’):
Sy, of course, tries to hand-wave away the inconsistency:
While there were suggestions that UK may have had a shortage of PCR tests available early in the pandemic which may explain the relatively small number of COVID cases, but this explanation does not resolve the inconsistency. If there were a shortage of tests, then the registration of the large number of COVID deaths could not have been verified by PCR tests and therefore they were arbitrarily assigned.
Nice try, but no. Here’s the thing. People who die of COVID-19 will have a number of clinical factors that had been identified about the disease that make it possible to give them a diagnosis of COVID-19 with a high degree of accuracy even in the absence of a documented test for the virus. Remember, these patients have characteristic findings on chest X-ray and chest CT, for example. They have characteristic clinical features. While it is always preferable to have a definitive test for the virus to absolutely confirm a diagnosis of COVID-19, it is not always necessary, and we knew that even in April 2020. Basically, Sy is just paraphrasing one of the oldest conspiracy theories of the pandemic, that doctors were encouraged (and all too eager) to report every death as a COVID-19 death, whether SARS-CoV-2 had anything to do with the death or not.
So Sy argues:
In conclusion, the UK data anomaly of April 2020, where the data on COVID cases and deaths are inconsistent, most likely indicated that the huge spike in death may not have been due to SARS-CoV-2 virus. This possible misattribution to COVID-19 was confirmed by the UK Health Security Agency [15], mentioned earlier, which declared that as of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 was not a “high consequence infectious disease”. Therefore, this data anomaly leaves the huge spike in the non-COVID excess deaths yet to be explained, before mass vaccination or any other factors were available, as discussed below.
Except that this “anomaly” is not difficult to explain at all; that is, unless you’re a pseudoscientific conspiracy theorist like Sy. Heck, Susan Oliver had a grand old time pulling up old video of Campbell himself explaining the seeming anomaly using the same sort of observations that I cited explaining it.
Unable to blame the excess mortality on vaccines, Sy decides that it must be something else. Somehow, he latched onto midazolam, thus producing these two money charts:
And:
First off, I have to question something. Sy claims that he’s representing ampules containing 10 mg of midazolam taken from a dataset that I’ve never heard of before, a Prescribing Dataset from the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science. But let’s for the moment assume, just for the sake of argument, that these numbers represent midazolam usage in the UK and dive in. I also can’t help but note how closely Sy set the Y-axis scale in order to make the peaks as close to the same height as possible, the better to visually reinforce his bizarre point.
Notice anything? The graphs on the left show midazolam usage and excess deaths; the graphs on the right shows the deaths shifted by one month, and, wow, it sure looks as though there is a correlation. To that I answer: So what? Once again, when there is a surge in COVID-19 that puts a lot of patients in ICUs on ventilators that cause a surge in excess deaths, there will be an a concomitant increase in midazolam use if midazolam is part of the preferred cocktail of drugs used to sedate patients on ventilators.
Notice something else? Why is the peak of excess deaths delayed by a month? If midazolam were being used for euthanasia, one would expect the peaks to coincide pretty closely. They don’t. Sy tries to hand wave away this issue:
Clearly, Midazolam injections and excess deaths in England are dosages used and registration of deaths may lag. Shifting the time highly correlated, but not synchronously, because medication series for Midazolam injections one-month forward, very high generally does not have instantaneous impact and also reporting of correlation is seen in Figure 10.
The very high correlation (coefficient 91 percent) between excess percent, but still statistically significant with p-value at 0.0007. deaths lagged one month after Midazolam injections is largely The misclassification of COVID deaths, possibly deliberate, also due to the first two enormous spikes to early 2021. From April led to their high correlation with Midazolam injections as seen 2021 onwards to May 2023, the same correlation dropped to 59 Figure 11.
One more time: What statistical test did this fool use to come up with that p-value? Again, real scientists and real statisticians show their work. That aside, this is all handwaving, as to why the two early peaks of excess death correlate (one month delayed) with midazolam prescriptions and later on in the pandemic this correlation supposedly declined.
None of this concerns Sy, who just keeps paddling bravely down the river of pseudoscience to find that, yes, the number of prescriptions for a drug that is often used to sedate ventilated patients correlated with a metric that would be expected to correlate tightly with the number of ventilated patients, excess deaths:
These are what we in the biz call star charts. Do you see a correlation? If there is one, it all depends on two data points, April 2020. Thinking he’s doing a legitimate control, Sy also does this graph of midazolam prescriptions versus non-COVID-19 excess deaths.:
Again, this is meaningless rot, but none of this stops Sy from concluding quite confidently:
A major finding of this paper is that the very high excess deaths in 2020 in the UK were due to Midazolam intervention rather than SARS-CoV-2 infections, demonstrating the unreliability of COVID data as evidence of a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which was denied the status of a “High Consequence Infectious Disease” by UK Health Security Agency in March 2020.
Any claim that COVID vaccination saved lives has little merit, because few lives were threatened by the largely absent SARSCoV-2 virus in the UK; the spike in so-called COVID deaths in 2020 was actually euthanasia deaths by Midazolam, which remains the dominant causal explanation of the pandemic, overwhelming other factors.
Midazolam injections were agnostic to vaccination status. Therefore, excess deaths caused by Midazolam were randomly related to vaccination status, confusing the raw data on “deaths by vaccination status” and thus invalidating most UK studies based on that flawed data.
The illusion that COVID vaccination was “safe and effective” was caused by Midazolam injections in UK being very high in 2020 and diminishing after vaccination, resulting in falling excess deaths over time, mistakenly credited to vaccination. This fallacy is material in justifying a continuation of vaccination policy in UK and Europe.
Got it? According to Sy, not only was all the death not due to COVID-19, but rather to midazolam, but the midazolam-caused deaths distorted the data to give the false appearance that vaccines were decreasing deaths later in the pandemic. Damn, those public health people are nefarious!
Here’s another thing. Versed is not a good drug for euthanasia by itself. As Sy even mentions himself, while it can cause death, it’s pretty safe and takes a lot to kill. That’s why it’s so widely used in anesthesia. It is true that midazolam is often part of the protocol for physician-assisted suicide in countries and states that allow it, but not as the primary drug causing death. Rather, it is given for its purpose, sedation, before the drugs that cause death. For example, in Canada:
The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers recommends fixed dosing of midazolam (an anxiolytic), 10 mg; propofol (an anesthetic coma-inducing agent), 1000 mg; and rocuronium, 200 mg, or cisatracurium, 40 mg (neuromuscular blockers to stop respiration).12 A scoping review showed that, although virtually all Canadian MAiD protocols use kits with fixed dosages of medications, including an anesthetic (propofol or phenobarbital) and a paralytic, along with a secondary “backup kit” in case of failure, there are variations in the inclusion of anxiolytics (e.g., midazolam), analgesia (e.g., lidocaine, magnesium sulfate) and cardiotoxic medications (e.g., bupivacaine, potassium chloride).1 These variations in choice of medication and administration technique may play an important role in ensuring a comfortable and dignified death.
Credulous fools like 2ndSGitW are eating it up too:
Turns out that geronticide is an excellent way to discharge pensions, social security liabilities, and transfer assets to the next generation of indebted heirs, because the house (i.e. government and their bankster coconspirators) always wins.
The summary of the research paper should, in a just and functioning world, result in mass arrests and hangings of every last one of the scamdemic “experts,” more at perpetrators:
The COVID-19 pandemic in UK was iatrogenic, as it did not originate from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but originated from Midazolam use in euthanasia and then likely later from mass vaccination. The main findings supporting this conclusion are:
This is absolutely irrefutable evidence, and it proves that the role of the government is now full on theft and democide.
- There were relatively few cases of infections in early 2020, indicating the non-prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the UK.
- The UK Health Security Agency declared on 19 March 2020, the absence of any “high consequence infectious disease”, denying the existence of a pandemic.
- The enormous spike in excess deaths attributed to COVID-19 was inconsistent with the lack of prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was not veried, due to shortages and unreliability of PCR tests.
- NHS and Nightingale hospitals were mostly empty, confirming absence of a pandemic.
- The excess deaths were spread uniformly and simultaneously across all English regions, inconsistent with natural contagion.
- The spikes in excess deaths across all regions were strongly correlated with Midazolam injections, implicating euthanasia, particularly of the elderly in care homes.
- On investigation, the UK Government, Amnesty International and the Care Quality Commission have all acknowledged that “a systemic or structural dysfunction in hospital services” and the widespread blanket use of “Do Not Attempt Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation” (DNACPR) notices in care homes have contributed to excess deaths in the UK.
No, it’s not. And if the clip from Billy Madison that I led with applies to Wilson Sy’s paper, it’s far too kind a description of 2ndGitW’s black-hole density idiocy and John Campbell’s social medial clout-chasing audience capture.
Truth be told, a 10 mg dose of midazolam is not a huge dose. It’s a pretty standard dose. As you can see in this protocol, if midazolam usage went up because of euthanasia, you would expect to observe increases in other drugs used for euthanasia as well. Did Sy bother to look for some of these other drugs? It’s true that there is considerable overlap between the drugs used to sedate and paralyze ventilated patients (anxiolytics, benzodiazepines, and paralytics), but Sy didn’t even look. Also, we would not expect the use of drugs like potassium chloride to increase massively. Moreover, if midazolam was being used for euthanasia, we would not expect deaths to lag by a month. That simply doesn’t make any sort of rational, biological sense. It doesn’t pass the “smell” test.
Come to think of it, Wilson Sy, 2ndGitW, and John Campbell make Billy Madison’s stupidity look like genius.
53 replies on “Midazolam as “euthanasia” for COVID, or the most brain-dead paper I’ve ever read?”
From 2ndGitW:
(emphasis mine)
Even through Sy’s whole edifice about Midazolam sit on observed reduced excess deaths when the vaccines were rolled out and Midazolam use phased out (and coincidentally, I am sure, a lot less people put on ventilation), nope, the vaccines were still massively deadly.
It is always the vaccines.
The funny thing is, that’s not quite what the paper says. Sy’s argument is that the midazolam produced a falsely high death rate that made it look as though mass vaccination saved lives later in the pandemic when, according to his other bad papers, there was no correlation between vaccination and excess deaths.
Sy’s arguments are in fact all over the place. It seems his main original beef was restrictions put in place to limit spread of COVID-19. Glancing through a few of his “papers” I would summarise his arguments as more along the lines of: COVID-19 does not exist, there was no pandemic and PCR tests are all false, if COVID-19 does exist it is harmless, if it does make people sick then the practices used to treat people with COVID-19, particularly vaccines, are much more harmful than COVID-19 and it would be better for everyone to get natural immunity.
It is an exercise in massive goalpost moving depending on what point he wants to make.
It is only a real journal in the sense that it takes your money and hosts your thoughts on a website. It is part of the Opast Group of over 120 open access journal titles run out of a residential property in Frisco TX. In its latest issue it has such important research papers as “Why humans are better endurance runners than any other animal”. It also offers to publish your PowerPoint presentations as papers, for a fee of course. It also interestingly has a financial penalty if you want to withdraw your paper from publication. Tellingly, the instructions to authors have not been proof read properly, if at all.
The impact factor appears to be entirely made up*. According to Scispace the journal had until 2023 published 88 papers for a full 5 citations.
*Or possibly borrowed from another journal with a similar name. A lot of titles from the Opast Group are very similar to other journals. Sometimes merely substituting and ampersand for and in the title.
It might come as no surprise to readers that Wilson Sy’s Ph.D. is in physics.
If you want to read something even more mind-numbingly stupid, try Sy’s paper (also hosted on an Opast website, this time Journal of Clinical & Experimental Immunology) Australian COVID-19 pandemic: A Bradford Hill Analysis of Iatrogenic Excess Mortality, where Sy tries to argue that because there were no excess deaths in Australia in 2020, therefore there was no COVID-19 pandemic and that all cases were in fact misclassification of influenza and other viruses. He further argues that excess deaths deaths in 2022 were due to COVID-19 vaccinations in 2021.
For those who may not have been following the news in Australia, Australia closed its borders in April 2020 and internal borders within Australia were periodically closed on and off for the next 18 months. The result being very low numbers of COVID-19 cases in Australia. Towards the end of 2021, Australia having vaccinated more than 70% of its adult population opened its borders, just in time to welcome the omicron variant.
sigh Always disturbs me to see another ego completely out of control. I’ve met a few. I had an argument with a fellow who preceded me to a PhD in the lab where I got mine about basically germ theory denial. Because I’m schooled in biochemistry and molecular biology too, I’ve got a great deal of respect for immunology and how much effort has gone into elucidating the immune system (and am aware that while I’m informed, I’m also not fully an expert). This guy more or less didn’t believe that any immunology was useful science and would not hear anything I had to say. He never quite said he was anti-vaccine, but it isn’t hard to infer. Note, this argument occurred at an American Physical Society conference meet-up. This guy was very smart, very capable… but a crank.
The cranky crap I’ve met among physicists is truly dismaying. Nut’n’berry nutrition, germ theory denial, flat creationism, conspiracy theories, Roger Penrose’s quantum consciousness stuff, the works. I saw one guy rationalize away an imbalanced centrifuge as “just a resonance mode…” naw, really? Thankfully, I haven’t yet bumped into a flat earther.
One reason I never accuse cranks of being stupid; the capacity to reason yourself into an imaginative corner depends on having such a powerful brain that nobody can ever argue you down when you make a mistake. People who maintain cognitive dissonance can be very smart. The Gish gallop can be a Picasso level art form.
More parsing of the “alternate facts” from 2ndGitW and Sy:
“denying” is the operative word here.
We Europeans were mostly pretending there was no epidemic in Europe right into March 2020. UK certainly was, under the enlightened leadership of Boris.
We French had mayoral elections mid-March, and the week before, president Macron was telling us to “go enjoy an evening at the theater.” Two days after the elections, on March 17th, we went into lockdown. And two weeks after that, there was an upsurge of hospital admissions for covid19 – the usual latency between a Cov2 viral wave and people falling sick.
Health agencies may have known better, but the policy was to be reassuring and avoiding panicking the public over a “little flu”.
Most Europeans, but not the Italians. Those were already massively hit by the virus in mid-March and about to engage hospital triage (in April, IIRC).
Speaking of which, “hospitals were empty” deserves some facepalm, too.
https://rumble.com/v4rv4d0-professor-angus-dalgleish-covid-vaccines-devastating-health-crisis-in-the-c.html
Ron Johnson, long time front runner for the least intelligent and most dishonest republican who has never been president. I’m sure it was a highly technical webinar.
That clip only contains the 15-minute presentation of oncologist Angus Dalgleish. Perhaps you can open your mind for a few minutes to hear what he had to say, which is quite shocking nevertheless he sounds extremely credible to me. I don’t have the background to judge complex written scientific arguments so I have to rely on my eyes and ears – which are extensions of the brain which expertly manages innumerable processes simultaneously without thinking about it – to give me a sense of who is credible and who isn’t. That’s the real reason why Drs. Gorski, Fauci, Hotez, Offit, Osterholm and Topol, among others, won’t appear in public discussion with people like Drs. Dalgleish, McCullough, Vanden Bossche, Malone, Bridle, Ladapo, Kory and Cole, among others, who I believe would clearly outshine them.
It would have been useful for you to have lead with that statement, instead of posting a bare link.
….
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You…you do realize that you’re literally stating you don’t care about scientific evidence? That you don’t care who is right, only about who looks and sounds right?
Well, yes, that is the “real” reason – in fact, that’s the reason Dr. Gorski has publicly and repeatedly given. Dr. Gorski et al have the scientific evidence on their side, but in a “public discussion” that hardly matters. All too many viewers and listeners will judge the “discussion” the way you do. They’ll rely on their “eyes and ears” instead of on reason, logic, and evidence.
You and Dr. Gorski made some similar points so I’m going to try to address yours in my response to him, rather than repeating myself. You did respond first, but he’s the head honcho:)
That’s because you are unfamiliar with the science and oncology involved and clearly don’t want to learn the science and oncology involved. You’re easy prey for someone like Dalgleish.
Which is why you are so prone to believe disinformation spreaders like Dalgleish over those promoting actual science-based medicine. You fall for slick narratives that jibe with what you already believe.
No, the real reason is that we know that the Gish gallop often appears more credible to people like you, who are clearly not really interested in science-based information.
Gish gallops- or fire hosing– followers with mountains of data/ studies works well for those unacquainted with how science is actually presented formally. A similar method involves describing a convoluted, tortuous ( CT) pathway/ plot that includes highly emotional contents in order to scare audiences into believing you: after all, you’re doing all this for their benefit. ( see NN, PRN, CHD et al)
I once tried to reconstruct different CTs explaining exactly how vaccines supposedly cause autism and got stuck because of the complexity ( based on well known CTs- Wakefield, mercury, too many, too soon etc). Lots of details, no substance – like bad dystopian screenplays.
I will just add that people who build a career as charlatans build the career on their ability to appear credible. That’s what makes them successful. Almost by definition, anti-vaccine leaders will have some charisma – it is what led them to the top.
Scientists build a career on different standards. Going by charisma in a performance is a little bit asking to be misled by the talented charlatan. It’s good if you want to watch a dramatic piece of fiction and be drawn in, but it’s less good if you want to get to the cold facts.
You claim the authority of “science,” Dr. Gorski, but isn’t it true that today’s science is often tomorrow’s superstition? And I think your response is somewhat devoid of logic. For example, if someone is struggling with cancer and trying to decide which doctor to trust are you going to tell them to read the many books they would have to read so they can accurately judge between the complex scientific arguments of oncologists who have decades of experience but vehemently disagree? Approximately no one can do that so the person without a scientific background really has two choices. One is to trust the “medical establishment” and majority of doctors, however we know that in the past scientific breakthroughs were made by people who at first were ridiculed by the existing scientific establishment for their point of view, and I think this is especially true today with the medical establishment being so tied to the financial interests of the pharmaceutical and other industries (with the tobacco and asbestos industries thus able to delay the recognition of their products as harmful for quite some time, if I’m not mistaken). And the other is to try to judge the character of doctors espousing opposing points of view by the way they sound and look. I’m not saying that what they are saying should be disregarded, i.e. if a doctor tells me that eating dog doo will improve my health I’m not going to spend a lot of time evaluating his character, but when I find the arguments are too complex to judge I will rely on the way people sound and look to supplement my ability to judge the science.
I think it’s somewhat obvious that the nasty situation we have today where there is more of a split in the medical community than perhaps ever before – with the pandemic having exacerbated the longstanding conflict between “mainstream” and “alternative” medicine and with many doctors who were mainstream before the pandemic now being highly critical of our health agencies and mainstream protocols – is largely due to many doctors being unwilling to discuss the issues in an open-minded way, especially in public, as they would incur reputational and/or financial loss if the medical advice they have been giving turned out to be incorrect (and some people might get angry, even if they hadn’t been covering up mistakes). For example, if someone like Dr. Dalgleish were to post here and convince you that the Covid vaccines were in fact triggering the accelerated growth of incubating or existing cancers, Dr. Gorski, and you admitted he was right, my guess is that could have detrimental effects on your career, etc. I’m not saying that you will cover up the mistake in that event, but some doctors may be doing that and when they will only participate in written discussion, it’s easier to avoid areas where mistakes have been made, throwing up complicated arguments in other areas to distract attention from the issue. That’s what Dr. Bridle pointed out here a few months ago when he challenged you to engage in video public discussion with him, that in real time discussion it’s harder to evade issues. And in my opinion you not only made at least one mistake in responding to Dr. Bridle – that he was conflating the SV40 virus and the promoter sequences – but you simply did not respond to a few of the few bullet points he laid out (and you didn’t respond to my transcription of Dr. Kory’s argument). Neither, if I’m not mistaken, did you respond to Dr. Vanden Bossche’s retort to you at https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/scientific-blog/response-to-attacks-from-dr-david-gorski (and note the recent “fact-check” of Dr. Vanden Bossche’s https://kunstler.com/podcast/kunstlercast-398-dr-geert-vanden-bossche-and-the-coming-acute-crisis-of-covid-among-the-vaccinated/ interview, at
https://science.feedback.org/review/geert-vanden-bossche-makes-unsupported-prediction-that-mass-covid19-vaccination-will-cause-immune-collapse/, is so rife with straw-man arguments it is clear, imo, that the author didn’t even listen carefully to the interview she was attempting to review).
So I think calls for video public discussion with highly credentialed and influential doctors such as the ones I listed in my previous post are highly warranted, and they would assist the public in being able to judge who should be trusted and who should not.
@Jon Schulz May 3, 2024 at 7:37 pm
I guess this one punches enough of my itch buttons for me to scratch out a reply. So let’s discuss a few points.
In a word, no. If you want to make such a claim, you should at least provide an example. If you think it happens ‘often’, you could provide a couple. The results of actual scientific experiments don’t just turn into superstition when we learn something new. They have to be accounted for as well.
Actually, I think this is what the social media companies that refuse to moderate actually false or harmful content want you to do. And the “free speech advocates” who advocate for an unlimited firehose of random misinformation reinforce that. You SHOULD talk to your primary care doctor and your oncologist, ask questions, and investigate the sources they give you. You can also check out major medical references like the Mayo Clinic or the American Cancer Society. In the mean time, you can enhance your own understanding by reading blog articles by an actual cancer researcher and open and read the research being discussed. And I’m pretty sure Orac has already advised that multiple times.
They also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
A German researcher published a paper on the harms of tobacco smoke in the 19th Century! But that is whataboutism. And the subject of this article is Midazolam, not tobacco or asbestos.
Our current media environment and politicians looking to score points incentivize and encourage that situation. Those “many doctors who were mainstream before the pandemic” have discovered they don’t have to practice good standard-of-care medicine and save patients’ lives to make money. They can start an online pill mill and get Substack subscribers to pay them every month to hear why all the people actually trying to study and understand the problem are wrong.
Three years ago, Maine, Oregon, and no doubt other government bodies were echoing DVM Geert Vanden Bossche’s call for an immediate halt to ALL vaccine administration until he could develop his own Natural Killer Cell vaccine. Fortunately, we didn’t do that. A LOT of people are alive today as a result. Has he published any research at all on that?
You should also ask yourself if they really have expertise in the field they are talking about and what other scientists are saying about their claims. Besides reading Orac and watching Dr Oliver, you might also watch what Dr Dan Wilson has to say about them. Can you cite any legitimate scientist (Dr Campbell, a nursing teacher doesn’t count) who endorses the Midazolam connection?
https://youtu.be/TfpXz2cdY2k?si=xrealMjqjQ6-Y9Zi
@Jon Schulz I read Bossche’s screed. There were any number of personal insults, promotion of his own vaccines and unproved claims. Any layman should notice these.
Like COVID turn people asymptomatic carriers. Did it occur to you he should prove his claims, like citing a paper.
There is a paper about NK cell diversity:
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scitranslmed.aac5722
Indeed, high NK cell diversity was associated with increased risk of HIV-1 acquisition in African women.
@squirrelelite “In a word, no. If you want to make such a claim, you should at least provide an example.” Well, weren’t various drugs such as thalidomide and vioxx approved as safe and effective, based on published peer-review studies, before they caused the damage they did?
I don’t want to get into the free-speech issue right now except to thank Dr. Gorski for allowing points of view different from his own to be expressed here. “You SHOULD talk to your primary care doctor and your oncologist, ask questions, and investigate the sources they give you. You can also check out major medical references like the Mayo Clinic or the American Cancer Society. In the mean time, you can enhance your own understanding by reading blog articles by an actual cancer researcher and open and read the research being discussed.” Well, you’re thinking only of doctors who agree with what the Mayo Clinic and American Cancer Society are saying, there are plenty who don’t. And here’s a blog article from today by a hematologist oncologist and Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatics at UCSF: https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/covid19-vaccines-linked-to-myocarditis And here’s a video from today from medical researcher and physician Dr. Philip McMillan, who I like a lot, reviewing a recent New York Times article on the Covid-vaccine side-effect situation: https://www.youtube.com/live/GmJTDN61JCc?si=cZi2eCSdgK3YEmp- I have a friend who feels so confident that the “vast majority of experts” are right in agreeing that the Covid vaccines are safe and effective (which may not be true, considering that many doctors and scientists are afraid to express their real opinion out of concern they may lose their job and/or research funding, as Dr. Dalgleish noted in the video I linked to), that he will spend an hour arguing with me as to why he won’t watch or read the relatively short articles and videos I recommend to him. I hope you won’t do the same.
“Those ‘many doctors who were mainstream before the pandemic’ have discovered they don’t have to practice good standard-of-care medicine and save patients’ lives to make money. They can start an online pill mill and get Substack subscribers to pay them every month to hear why all the people actually trying to study and understand the problem are wrong.” Believe me, people like Drs. Peter McCullough, Pierre Kory, Geert Vanden Bossche, Robert Malone, Byram Bridle and Ryan Cole did not speak out against the medical establishment and have their careers ruined, to a large extent, because they were planning to have a Substack where they charge people a few dollars a month to be able to comment (or sell supplements he believes will help people, in the case of Dr. McCullough). They spoke out because they saw a response to the pandemic from our health agencies which they felt was destructive and to some extent influenced by financial and/or political concerns, with the medical ethics of “first do no harm” and “informed consent” being thrown out the window in their opinion.
Dr. Vanden Bossche hasn’t published any papers that I know of to date, saying he feels that in emergency situations there simply isn’t time to do that before speaking out publicly, but he has published numerous articles which people can read for free on his Substack which do reference published, peer-reviewed studies, and his 260-page book contains many such references as well. He’s somewhat difficult to understand for people who haven’t studied all the areas of science he draws from (and English isn’t his native tongue) but the basics of what he is saying were explained somewhat more simply by pediatric rheumatologist Rob Rennebohm in a recent interview with Dr. McMillan: https://philipmcmillan.substack.com/p/reanalysis-of-geerts-concern-for I also highly recommend that James Howard Kuntsler interview with Dr. Vanden Bossche which I linked to in my previous post. I don’t think anyone can listen to that and not be concerned that what he is saying might be true. His Substack article from today is at https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/training-is-gaining-a-glimmer-of
Joe Schulz: “Well, weren’t various drugs such as thalidomide and vioxx approved as safe and effective, based on published peer-review studies, before they caused the damage they did?”
Please enlighten us to your understanding of the subject by telling us when and why thalidomide was approved for use in the United States of America.
Hint: why did Dr. Frances Kelsey receive the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service in 1962?
Joe: “Dr. Vanden Bossche hasn’t published any papers that I know of to date, saying he feels that in emergency situations there simply isn’t time to do that before speaking out publicly, but he has published numerous articles”
And yet many published peer reviewed papers and actually came out with not one, but several vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 (often based on previous studies of similar coronaviruses like MERS).
So where his Dr. Vanden Bossche’s lab where he is creating his better treatment for SARS-CoV-2? And when did he very develop treatments for humans?
Also, you wall of text mostly shows you are very naive, and that you should take a basic biology class at a local community college, along with a beginning statistics course geared to those in biological studies (I’ve taken one for sophomore engineering students, and then later a comprehensive one for those who study biology…. the latter is much better, especially for standards of evidence).
@Jon Schulz,
1. Stream of consciousness does not become you.
Try entering 2 carriage returns to start a new paragraph.
Also look up how to use a ‘blockquote’ tag.
Books, blog articles, YouTube videos, and other interviews are not scientific evidence.
At least Prasad’s blog referenced an actual study. I respect Anders Hviid, so his study probably merits a careful evaluation.
However, Bishara et al
(https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.000000000020790) published in Nov 2023 found that
So infection increases the risk. Vaccination reduces it.
ChAdOx was never used in the U.S. The similar J&J vaccine was also found to have clotting problems like CVST and withdrawn from use.
Myocarditis was quickly detected in Phase 4 monitoring of the mRNA vaccines. It is primarily a problem in adolescent to early adult males. Delaying the second dose appears to reduce the risk. Also the Pfizer vaccine is less risky. We figured all that out with real science.
We have 3+ years of evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines did not cause “immune collapse”. And you have cited no research to refute what we expected after the first six months of mass vaccinations when GVB was sounding his alarm.
Nor have you found evidence that the administered vaccines did NOT save lives as predicted by almost everyone else.
Try finding a real published scientific article and explaining it in your own words.
Just sayinig.
@squirrelelite Dr. Vanden Bossche lists the studies which he feels support his position at: https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/blog/supportive-references-from-literature
Thanks for your feedback and advice, here’s a suggestion for you. Try being open-minded and respectful of others instead of a conceited, insulting know-it-all. I try to be open minded and willing to consider points of view which would prove my current views wrong, but when people talk to me in an insulting manner I stop trying to communicate with them as I’m generally not a masochist. Perhaps I act similarly at times, hopefully people will alert me if I do. In any case best of luck.
Jon Schultz:
So you say.
However, the evidence you have presented here suggests the opposite. Several posters have gone through your arguments and shown where they are faulty. Some have been more polite about this than others. Your response has not been to reflect on that and ask why are you presenting incorrect arguments. Instead you have simply presented more of the same.
It is almost like you are determined to present every pseudoscientific argument about COVID-19 that exists. The trouble is that many long-term readers have seen all this before, refuted the same arguments over and over again. They are like zombies and never die.
Then there are your frequent exhortations for posters here to be open minded. This is a common tactic of those who wish to indulge in conspiracy theories. It leads to the caution that one should not be so open minded that your brains fall out.
I am perfectly happy to be open minded, but only so far as the evidence leads. If you want to change my opinion, you need to provide convincing evidence. I have not seen you attempt to do so.
Because you have made much of Geert Vanden Bossche, I might make a few comments about his research. He claims to have discovered a new vaccine, but has published nothing about it. You claim this is because he doesn’t have time to publish. However, all the researchers with successful vaccines and many with unsuccessful vaccines have managed to publish their research. Doesn’t this sound odd to you?
It does to me. I have to ask the question of why Geert Vanden Bossche has not published a paper since 1995 (a search of Scopus found only 5 papers total). This sounds to me, an active scientific researcher, like someone who is not actively doing research. Or if they are, they have no data worth publishing. No data in 20 years sounds like a complete bust.
In my opinion you have been promoting the likes of McCullough, Vanden Bossche, Dalgleish, Malone, Kory, Cole, Bridle and Lapado, because they are saying what you want to here, rather then because they are correct. This shows that despite your exhortations, you have not come to this discussion with an open mind like you claim.
@Chris Preston Thanks for your respectful comments, Mr. or Dr. Preston, however I am unfortunately dealing with some difficult problems and don’t have much time to continue the conversation right now. In any case I think you should follow at least some of the media links I provided so you can see for yourself what I have experienced which makes me think the way I do, rather than asking me to explain it to you. You do not understand what Dr. Vanden Bossche is saying, he has been interested in developing an NK cell vaccine for years, which he thought might be helpful for the pandemic and mentioned when he first started speaking out in 2021, but after various people criticized him as likely having a profit motive he stopped talking about it (until very recently, however he’s not suggesting it could be a panacea for the disaster he thinks is coming) and has only concentrated on the science of how a mass vaccination campaign in the midst of a pandemic (when many people would get infected between the time of their first shot and the time their vaccinal immunity was mature), which is something which had never been done before, would inevitably result in accelerated viral mutations (whereas when he first started speaking out most scientists were saying coronaviruses mutate relatively slowly and variants were not likely to be much of a problem) and lead to a situation where the virus would be able to overcome the immune systems of the vaccinated (depending on factors somewhat different for every person) and wreak havoc – in his opinion, as best I understand it. Again, I highly recommend the James Howard Kuntsler interview and the discussion between Drs. Philip McMillan and Rob Rennebohm. I really think it would be worth your time, if only to get a sense of why many people, including myself, hold Dr. Vanden Bossche in the highest regard. I have criticized Dr. Robert Malone recently for making some dismissive comments about Dr. Vanden Bossche which I felt were scientifically shallow and politically motivated, so while I retain a lot of respect for Dr. Malone I don’t necessarily accept anything or everything any of the people I’ve referred to say. I’m just leaning somewhat heavily in certain directions, based on what I’ve been able to read, hear and see in the time I’ve been able to devote to it (including many hours listening to Dr. Michael Osterholm’s podcast and reading Dr. Eric Feigle-Ding’s tweets, in addition to some time reading Dr. Gorski) and would like to see respectful discussion between the highly credentialed people on all sides so I can better judge who is most trustworthy, and I think a lot of people feel the same way.
@Jon Schultz This is called firehosing: Dump lots of links to unrelated studies.
Claim was that COVID vaccines turn people toasymptomatic carriers. None of links address this. This is easy to test: Vaccinate people and check how many asymptotic carriers there are. It is done multiple times, Why Bossche does not link?
1) Innate antibodies may protective, but people stisll get COVID. Better protection is needd.
2) Asymptotic carriers may infect, but question was doe vaccination turn people to asymptomatic carriers or how many asymptomatic carriers are among infected,
3) Natural abs facilate antigen presentation. Still a long way to vaccine.
4) Abs against common cold coronaviruses does not protect against SARS CoV 2. To cite Orac, color me suprised.
5)Selective pressure here herd immunity (How many people are immune to current variants, There are models describing this. No one, of course, denies that SARS CoV 2 evolves.
@Jon Schultz Evolution requires selective pressure. In this case it would mean high level immunity among people, close to herd immunity. There are models of this,.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.211021#d1e1064
@Aarno,
Good points.
GVB could have collaborated with some good scientists to actually research his concerns. But he hasn’t. he could have gone to work on his own vaccine in early 2020 But he didn’t.
Peter Hotez had a candidate vaccine that couldn’t get support from Operation Warp Speed. So he found international support, got it tested and it is now being manufactured very cheaply on multiple continents. It was doable.
Instead he has made multiple unsupported or ambiguous predictions and keeps pitching them on his substack(s), in interviews, and in a book for $49.99!
I found this good article that debunks 4 of those predictions.
https://science.feedback.org/review/geert-vanden-bossche-makes-unsupported-prediction-that-mass-covid19-vaccination-will-cause-immune-collapse/
“extensions of the brain which expertly manages innumerable processes simultaneously without thinking about it”
Won’t be long before you have your own TV series. Some variant of Monk, Numb3rs and CSI maybe?
They can argue with Orac here, Then eerybody can check tthe facts.
There is BBC on health crisis in question:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-jersey-64373889
The report said an ageing population, an outdated healthcare estate, pressure on inpatient beds, staff retention, and in some cases, poor working relationships were among the contributing factors.
High levels of “medically fit to be discharged” patients not being able to be discharged is putting health services under “considerable stress”, it found.
No diseases are mentiond
You can read Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Dalgleish
You know, being open minded and all that.
Just back for a moment to remind everyone Kory is a fake and a liar.
Despite his scientific accomplishments, Dalgleish was a member of the far right UKIP in the UK. He was an early proponent of the lab-leak conspiracy theory. He also tried to convince the UK Government to put funds into the development of the Norwegian Biovacc-19 vaccine, without disclosing he had stock options in the company involved. When Nature Medicine published the first findings about COVID-19 likely being a natural spillover, Dalgleish and his conspirators tried to undermine the journal and the paper authors – even to the point of getting lies published in right wing papers in the UK.
Dalgleish has turned into a nasty, duplicitous and dishonest manipulator. I would not trust anything he said at this point.
Informing us about how little Pres. Biden did in March 2020 to prevent us from getting the virus. He will also include several picture from the claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop in order to empathize the danger.
Must be that new MidazolamXR wherein you give a multiple 10 mg doses over a few days and a month later, specially designed nanobuckets are triggered (by the SkyNet AI something something Bill Gates) to simultaneously dump their medicinal contents into the patient…
What a heaping pile of stupid that paper is.
You forgot that it’s triggered via 5G.
Using a zinc-plated iPhone. Never forget the zinc.
And I thought that Remdesivir was the euthanasia drug!
( More seriously though, many alt med believers still persist saying that ventilation itself was killing patients and that it should have been stopped)
It did in some cases but the difference is, it ALWAYS can. Get the vent settings wrong or fail to adjust based on course and you can wreck someone’s lungs. Leave them on long enough they lose respiratory stamina and it becomes ever harder to liberate them. This is always a risk, COVID just brought it into focus because it was a severe respiratory illness…especially Delta.
@ Dr Yeti:
I know about these problems ( a little) but some of the alties I read/ hear claim that it should NEVER be used and that people should take family members home if ventilation is mentioned. It is characterised as the chief mode of ‘killing patients for profit’
But then they’re mostly out of their minds.
Well, in the trenches (Especially 2020,) we knew that the vent was a coin flip. They had about a 50/50 chance of coming off. I had families demand to take a patient home but the logistics were insurmountable (the fact they needed a vent means they wouldn’t survive the trip home absent one.)
Similarly, I had cases in the clinic and via telehealth that refused to come to the ER for fear of admission. A few had already heard bs on social media that that we would vent them and they’d die. This is hardly scientific but I remember very clearly three such cases. There were dozens more but these ones I still think about. One died at home.
The other two got so sick someone finally called EMS. Lots of tough talk out there about dying peacefully at home until you see someone headed into respiratory failure; choking, gasping, you get it. Both got direct to unit (icu) admits, vented, the standard other stuff. They were fairly similar in all respects. One never came off the vent the other did but with issues.
I guess I think about them because they proved the ratio; again, not very scientific. I suspect all three would have died at home so I always thought of it as the vent possibly saving lives.
“Submitted: 20 Jan 2024;Accepted: 25 Jan 2024”, so likely no meaningful peer review. Also seems to be inconsistent about the utility of PCR, which varies as his argument requires. Obviously a new entry for the journal of “Correlation is not Causation”, this one is just too stupid.
I’m starting to regard alt med/ contrarian posts not only as pseudoscience but as potential screenplay**, short story or video game scenario writing creating a particular world/ worldview leading to a sales pitch or subscriber request ( see NN, today “How to survive the first 180 days after the DOLLAR COLLAPSE”).
These content creators
— entertain readers with complicated, dystopian, violent plotlines
— which threaten complacent viewers, playing on their fears as well as complementing them ( “YOU can survive while others die” AND
— shilling products/ services/ affiliates that will make the difference- storable foods, seeds, seminars, books, weapons, communication/ money alternatives
Adams spends about 20 minutes*** detailing what will happen when the financial system/ power grid/ supply chain fails and how most people will just DIE but he and his followers will actually THRIVE. Basic skills not university educations will tip the balance.
** -btw- my SO saw Civil War and was not very impressed; being wary myself, I didn’t go.
*** before the sales pitches
Of course, in those scenarios, supporters might find it hard to access Unnatural News website, thus depriving the host (a word with many meanings) of continued income. It’s similar to the addiction some have to horror movies. Scare me again! But not something to take seriously, and a distraction from actual crisis such as climate, overshoot, etc.
@ Mark Robinowitz:
Oh, Mikey has that covered: when the internet fails, he has another system ( I forget what he calls it- non-centralised person-to-person? an affiliate) that will fix everything!
AND his AI** works without the internet! Just like satellite phones ( a sponsor) for cell tower outages and various money alternatives gold, crypto, “gold bills” ( some sponsors) after “fiat” currency fails.
** Mike is training his AI on all of his “knowledge” from NN and beyond
CR
complimenting
I think it was in the mini series “The Day After*” where a bunch of city folks are evacuated to very rural areas. One of the farmers complains about the newcomers: “They don’t even know how to make a leach line!”
*Based on “The Effects of Nuclear War” [1979 – published by the OTA] a paper that after all the dry technical stuff on yields and over-pressure, actually contains a fictional account of the effects of a nuclear strike. It also included a handy-dandy circular slide rule to enable you to calculate the effects yourself!
A. Note that this contradicts what several other anti-vaccine activists, who point to the rise in deaths later, after the vaccines came out (when the Delta wave hits) to blame vaccines. So which is it? Do the same people share both claims?
B. “Largely absent” virus in later times? Did this person miss the Delta and Omicron waves?
C. Although this person did manage to get his point across to anti-vaccine activists, some of the writing here is simply unclear. What, for example, is this supposed to mean? “Clearly, Midazolam injections and excess deaths in England are dosages used and registration of deaths may lag. Shifting the time highly correlated, but not synchronously, because medication series for Midazolam injections one-month forward, very high generally does not have instantaneous impact and also reporting of correlation is seen in Figure 10.”
In a recent X/Tweet, Dr Oliver said
“I was going to say what I really think about John Campbell and his despicable Midazolam claims, but I decided to tone it down.”
In less than wonderful news, Sherri Tenpenny D.O., who testified to Ohio legislators that Covid-19 vaccines magnetized people and created an interface with 5G towers, is trumpeting the reinstatement of her Ohio medical license (a terse Board statement notes that it’s a probationary reinstatement).
Tenpenny’s license was indefinitely suspended last year, but not for her outpouring of nuttery. From Medpage Today:
“In short, Dr. Tenpenny did not simply fail to cooperate with a Board investigation, she refused to cooperate,” the board wrote in the disciplinary document. “And that refusal was based on her unsupported and subjective belief regarding the Board’s motive for the investigation. Licensees of the Board cannot simply refuse to cooperate in investigations because they decide they do not like what they assume is the reason for the investigation.”
At the time, conditions for license reinstatement were simply that she must apply for reinstatement, pay a $3000 fine and cooperate with Board investigators.
http://dispatch.com/story/news/2021/06/09/doctor-sherri-tenpenny-testimony-ohio-lawmakers-vaccines-magnetized-5-g/7616027002/#
Hi, this is my first time commenting here, having followed this blog & SBM for the last year and a half
Working in the public health sector as a pharmacy assistant (in a non-clinical role), I find it distasteful that people like 2ndGitW [a rather apt name] and Sy are happy to denigrate the work of my colleagues in order to spread their ignorant anti-science worldview of how the pandemic is ‘manufactured’ by the healthcare sector (this is an utter myth- we have helped & cared for vulnerable patients in their time of need). Such claims are disgraceful as they degrade public trust in the healthcare sector & can greatly damage people’s health.
[And yes, this paper published by Sy is fatally flawed and deserves to be discredited.]
Should Orac (or anyone else with a sharp mind and concern for public health) deign to take a break from the swamps of Substack and Ooop’n Access pseudoscience (where limited clusters of already-antivax nutters gather for mutual self-reinforcement) into some problematic science journalism in the mainstream press (where masses of regular folks only irregularly attendant to public health issues can be profoundly influenced): check out the “investigative report” on COVID vaccine injury in today’s New York Times. I put one little critical reply in the comment thread, nut IMO this is enough of a deal to call in a top Insolence specialist.
Holy crap. How did I miss this article this morning while perusing my usual news sources? It might merit a post Monday at my not-so-super-secret other blog.
BTW, I can’t find your reply. There are now close to 750 comments.
Apoorva Mandavilli has some previous good reporting about COVID-19. I’m more than a little shocked to see her fall into these easy pitfalls.