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© 2021 AFPScience under scrutiny: COVID crisis throws spotlight on scientific research
By Julie CHARPENTRAT PARIS©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.
28 Comments
virusrex
And yet, people will still defend the disgraced Raoult even when almost 100 of his papers have been found to contain false or misleading data and are in danger of being retracted. Bik is an example of how science self-corrects even when unethical scientists try to deceive the world.
Anyone that chooses to harass and threaten legally people that discover huge problems with their studies is demonstrating that being honest was never a goal.
Fuzzy
The problems today run far deeper than the integrity of data. Add to that social media echo chambers, politics, crony capitalism and the absence of real investigative journalism in traditional media. With all of these competing agendas it's impossible to know the real truth of anything these days. Covid has put all of this on display.
Steve Martin
Anyone who doesn't realize most institutionalized science has long since been as corporate-captured as journalism, has been too busy to do much reading, or too distracted by bread and circuses.
Anyone here old enough to remember those Big Tobacco commercials? 'Winstons tastes good, like a (knock-knock) Cigarette should!' — and while Big T scientists knew for decades the addictive and cancer causing effects of cigarettes, but denied and/or hid internal corporate documents that might hurt corporate profits.
More recently, it is no accident that Big Agra and Big Pharma farmed out their experiments to India, or developing countries in Africa or South America ... because North America and the E.U. still had laws placing a priority on human rights over corporate profits. Under the cover of the constant shout of 'fire' in a crowded theater, now there is no need to look for human guinea pigs abroad.
Notice 'ivermectin' is not mentioned in the above article? Nor are there many, if any, institutionally funded studies showing the dangers of mass vaccination in a still mutating virus, or the efficacy of locking down healthy populations, or the build-up of potentially more dangerous pathogens on the inside of masks during these sultry Japanese summers?
The only way experimental vaccines could be approved for emergency use (and BIG profits for a select few — and their shills) is if there was no safe and efficacious alternative treatment available. Corporate media and social media have done a pretty good job of holding up their end of a sweet business deal.
The only way a democracy can work is if the public is educated. Fat chance that the most influential philosopher of science in the 20th century will ever be part of the standard curriculum. Karl Popper tried to warn us of the dangers of 'scientism' through one of his books ... 'The Open Society and Its Enemies', and his experience of fleeing to England from the Nazi technocracy. But heck, I'd settle for even a critical discussion of T.S. Kuhn.
Gooch
Agree, Steve. Many scientists only have themselves to blame for losing public trust by willfully abusing it.
Steve Martin
Hi Gooch.
Wish we had the opportunity for a chat over coffee or beer.
Yeah. Most of us working stiffs have been flim-flammed into believing scientists are above the pressures of publish or perish research funding, paying their mortgages and saving for their kids' boutique colleges. The motivation and opportunity for 'taking shortcuts' must be immense. Enough to convict a lesser mortal in a court of law.
Cheers buddy!
Raw Beer
Bik did not just raise concerns, she was obsessed and constantly harassed Raoult. It is Raoult who was subjected to an intense backlash ever since he reported the positive effects of HCQ. Including death threats from Prof Raffi, who was heavily funded by Gilead and was later convicted and fined for harassment.
Raoult has been attacked by many pharma-funded people, but when attacks are exaggerated and become harassment he calls on the justice. Bik has deleted several of her comments since Raoult decided to sue her.
Regarding the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, this guy (Dr. Harvey Risch, MD, PhD, Professor of Epidemiology Yale University) does a good job going over the data:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2DxP-6wHoY
Tora
What about Mann's "Hockey Stick"?
Steve Martin
Great points Raw Beer and Tora!
Hoping these comments stay up for long enough for a few more to read and catch on that neither corporations nor Western governments are quite as 'democratic' as their posturing and posing in a 'blinded by science' headpiece.
In the meantime, I hope Japan Inc. doesn't take a page from 'Dr. Duterte's' playbook of 'following the mon... uh, I mean ... science ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liEUC1_l8e8
The above policy makes the President of the Philippines effectively a war criminal according to the Nuremberg Laws. But since when are presidents or CEOs held to the same level of accountability as we mere peons?
virusrex
Something that completely contradicted the conspiracy proponents that said this would never happen, because journal only "suppress" information that supposedly benefit "big pharma" so of course they would never retract a study that proved false when it was against those interests, except that it was done without problems in record time.
What lies? I keep seeing how people mention those but when asked specifically what where the lies nobody can come up with them.
The problem is that people depend on false information that has been repeatedly debunked with clear evidence to "prove" this is what happened with HCQ or the COVID vaccines, you can't blame people for not believing any more in such conspiracies when the people proposing them use disinformation to push them, it makes it seem like that is the only "evidence" they can offer.
A rational person would conclude that if many funded studies have been done, and none shows it is dangerous that would mean the vaccination efforts are safe. An irrational person would immediately be biased into believing a conspiracy, since there will be never any amount of evidence to prove (to them) the conspiracy is not real they will never be convinced. Not even if other drugs like the dirt cheap dexamethasone had absolutely no problem in proving safe and effective at treating complications of COVID, anti-scientific people will just try very hard not to even mention it.
That is not true at all, she as well as other simply exposed the problems in pubpeer, without even contacting the authors directly. Even when having close to 100 manuscripts showing evidence of manipulation and fabrication of data is a perfectly valid reason to demand explanations from the people responsible.
Raoul has been demonstrated as an unethical, bad scientist with plenty of proof of his mistakes, none of them he has even tried to defend against. Data impossible to obtain? identical pictures supposedly showing completely different experiments? falsified ethical approvals for a dozen human trials?, no explanation, no excuse, no defense.
That is obviously mistaken, first because it was not done in any war, and second because the Nuremberg laws apply not only for war situations but are explicitly directed towards human experimentation. Since the vaccines are being used therapeutically not even this applies. This is a telltale sign of antivaxxer propaganda, because anybody that actually was interested in ethical human treatment during treatments can recognize that much more relevant sources are actually available.
Steve Martin
Like much of the publish-or-perish paradigm of institutional science and academia, I guess 'workers' in other domains are also paid by word count.
Raw Beer
The investigation will likely prove otherwise. Raoult’s group has kept records and screen shots of Bik’s writings, which she has deleted.
Until his papers are retracted, these are just baseless ankle biting from pharma-funded people. And he continues to defend himself, in countless interviews where he has refuted all of those baseless accusations.
Doc
Utter nonsense. That is not the problem at all. The issue is that certain information is automatically deemed false to protect a sponsored narrative.
The real problem is suppression of debate, and the classification of any differing opinion as “conspiracy theory”. And it’s often coupled with the term “obvious” and “actual data”, which is unsupported and therefore false . It’s the terminology of the intellectually challenged. It does not belong in the domain of the scientific process at all.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-23-ivermectin-be-investigated-possible-treatment-covid-19-oxford-s-principle-trial
“Led by the University of Oxford, PRINCIPLE is investigating treatments for people at more risk of serious illness from COVID-19 which can speed up recovery, reduce the severity of symptoms and prevent the need for hospital admission. The study has so far recruited more than 5,000 volunteers from across the UK.
Ivermectin is a safe, broad spectrum antiparasitic drug which is in wide use globally to treat parasitic infections.
With known antiviral properties, ivermectin has been shown to reduce SARS-CoV-2 replication in laboratory studies. Small pilot studies show that early administration with ivermectin can reduce viral load and the duration of symptoms in some patients with mild COVID-19. Even though ivermectin is used routinely in some countries to treat COVID-19, there is little evidence from large-scale randomised controlled trials to demonstrate that it can speed up recovery from the illness or reduce hospital admission.
Professor Chris Butler, from the University Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, Joint Chief Investigator of the PRINCIPLE trial, said, ‘Ivermectin is readily available globally, has been in wide use for many other infectious conditions so it’s a well-known medicine with a good safety profile, and because of the early promising results in some studies it is already being widely used to treat COVID-19 in several countries. By including ivermectin in a large-scale trial like PRINCIPLE, we hope to generate robust evidence to determine how effective the treatment is against COVID-19, and whether there are benefits or harms associated with its use.’”
After 18 months, this is NOW finally entering the into the institutional narrative? Absolutely ridiculous. Why weren’t these re-purpose drug trials pushed by our governments and health agencies from Day 1. Re-purpose drug trials performed after 18 months into a questionable “emergency” has lapsed, is irresponsible. Especially when these drugs were brought to the attention of the “health agencies” well before these experimental vaccines were even unleashed.
The whole premise behind deployment of a EUA experimental mRNA medicine was because there was no other known options with approved treatments. By not prioritizing an investigation of existing drugs with a high safety record is not scientific at all. The people in charge with our public health weren’t interested. It is more likely a result of misplaced guidelines driven by financial motivation than anything else.
As this Covid debacle recedes, we will see (and judge) for ourselves the meaning of “scientific research” directed towards our public health. And hopefully disciplinary action will be handed out to the ones that have abused its application and inflicted so much social damage. Starting with the compromised US institutions.
And incompetent senior health officials that have lost credibility.
virusrex
People that can't do anything against arguments have no other resource but try to "attack" the people using them.
How is that a defense of the literally hundreds of problems that have been detected in the papers? The simple fact he is trying to silence perfectly valid criticism already proves he can't do what he should actually be doing if the papers were valid, which would be defending the papers.
On the contrary, unless he can defend the literally hundreds of "mistakes" his reputation is destroyed, and acting like a bully with legal threats has gotten him the scorn of the whole scientific community as is evident in plenty of articles available. A big part of it is that he completely failed to prove his accusations of COI from Bik disqualified completely his appeal to the excuse of "pharma funding".
Doc
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/losing_the_plot_on_covid.html
”Among Americans aged 15–24, a total of 587 died of COVID in 2020, according to the CDC, representing about 0.16%, or about 1 in 642, of COVID deaths. If you are young, you have essentially no chance of dying of COVID. The low youth mortality impact from COVID was known by April 2020.
Yet many universities now require these low-risk young people to inject the experimental vaccine or be banished from campus. Did you already catch the WuFlu and have antibodies? Too bad. The great pulsating brains of academia cannot differentiate.”
“Famed baseball pitcher Anthony Fauci claims that he is Science personified, yet anyone can make simple deductions that have eluded the doctor: there is effectively no difference in COVID rates between regions that went full Stalin on COVID rules and those areas that took a more holistic or decentralized approach to the virus. “
”Lost in all of this seems to be the simple fact that the COVID virus is not that deadly. True, about 12% of the 4.7-million total U.S. deaths recorded between January 2020 and June 2021 were credited to COVID. About 1.7% of positive cases end in death. But 80% of COVID deaths occurred in the over-65 population, which always has a much higher death rate from infectious diseases, such as pneumonia. If you are under 65 and test positive for COVID, you have a 0.25% chance of death (1/400), which is probably about the same as if you caught a bad flu and suffered complications from it. It's also logical that we will see periods of below-average death rates in the next year or two, in the same way that there are bad flu years and not-bad flu years.Self-serving politicians locked down free citizens (and, ironically, released prisoners), destroyed businesses, marred kids' psyches, and harassed people with mask and testing mandates, all for a coronavirus that in the end was not that novel. And they did it with the connivance of corporate media, which censored and slandered anyone who asked the most basic questions about the virus' origins and treatments.
In a future sane world, people will view the orchestrated panic of the COVID era with the same bemused condescension we might view the supposed War of the Worlds radio invasion scare of 1938, or the bygone use of leeches for seemingly every ailment.
Yes, grandson, back in 2020, the whole world went batty.”
ArtistAtLarge
This is HOW science works.
Gathering data, creating an hypothesis, experiment and verification and then establishing working theory.
Over and over, with old information giving way to new information.
It's not magic, it's not perfect and it's not easy and it's HOW mistakes are found and eliminated.
It is, without peer, the best system mankind has devised for rational thought and advancement.
virusrex
You know what is even less deadly than COVID? safe and effective vaccines that help prevent not only death but many other complications and long lasting health problems because of the infection.
Except that of course scientific articles have repeatedly proved that non-pharmacological interventions have prevented a lot of cases and deaths around the world. It is very easy to say something is not working, but against clear evidence it actually do defending the mistake becomes much more complicated.
Sadly this is another "exit" when people discover they have been believing things that can be proved false. We well all see in the future they were right after all, the same as we were supposed to see how COVID would not be more dangerous than the common cold, or that vaccines would cause widespread deaths on the clinical trials and even more when used in the population,
Raw Beer
No, that was a "defense" against your comment that Bik was not harassing Raoult. The investigation will likely show that she has been. That is why she has deleted many of her comments.
If there is any legitimacy to the claim that there are "literally hundreds of problems that have been detected in the papers", then retractions will be issued.
I repeat: until his papers are retracted, these are just baseless ankle biting from pharma-funded people.
This is the second article in a short while on JT dealing with Bik, and as expected it is very one-sided and against Raoult. Just another hit piece, rather than journalism.
virusrex
So the defense is that we have to believe Raout that she did, even when she is well a well recognized authority in problematic figures used in problematic papers that have never done anything like that, while Raoult have been found to lie repeatedly both in and out of research? That is an easy decision.
That would not be the first for Raoult, that has been even banned from a scientific journal for this motive, specially because he has mounted no defense of the papers, The important part is that the problems are evident, unjustified and enough to prove his research is full of serious problems, which is why he lost all credibility in the scientific circles, his harassment is just the cherry on top of the fall many saw from before the pandemic.
When there is clear evidence of scientific fraud and malpractice, and the scientific community in general vouches for Bik it is extremely difficult to make Raoult appear as innocent (which obviously is what you would consider "balanced").
That is new, if you cannot prove vaccines are dangerous, even misrepresenting VAERS deaths as if they were automatically vaccine related then the exit is to not only do this absolutely invalid equivalence but use "hidden" data on top, obviously the much more correct and straightforward process of compare the deaths with unvaccinated population is completely out of the equation, that would prove the opposite of what the author wants people to think.
Doc
Actually incorrect. Not in children and young adults.
But reading the actual data does not seem to be the objective here.
But keep trying. This board needs some levity.
virusrex
You have said that before, but have never produced any evidence that vaccines have produced more deaths and problems in any population group than COVID. Not even once. And specially on vulnerable kids that are at a much higher risk of death than the average children.
That of course have not stopped you from saying they should not have the option to be protected from a very dangerous disease from them, just because.
That is as invalid as using videos as primary sources instead of scientific reports that have to include a discussion of the available conflicting evidence that indicates the opposite of what you want to convince people. If you can just pick the evidence you like and ignore the rest it becomes very easy to "prove" everything.
Raw Beer
According to a recent study you need to vaccinate 200-700 people to prevent one case of Covid-19, and you need to vaccinate 9000-50,000 people to prevent one death from Covid-19. And when considering the vaccine adverse reactions, they stated: “For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination. Conclusions: This lack of clear benefit should cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy.”
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/7/693/htm
Two points I want to add to that:
The lives saved with the vaccines will tend to be old and unhealthy, but many of those killed with the vaccines will be young and healthy.
And all this is with the attacks against people like Raoult and Kory and the vilification/prohibition of safe and effective treatments. I believe that if these treatments were widely used, and a similar study carried out, then the paper would state the following:
“For one death prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination. Conclusions: This clear lack of benefit must cause governments to rethink their vaccination policy.”
virusrex
Unfortunately the analysis is obviously flawed because it insist on considering the deaths reported after vaccination (4 for every 100K people) as if it was "inflicted" by the vaccine, which makes their conclusions simply false. It is very interesting to see they choose not to use a much more correct figure taking in account excess deaths (even without a discovered mechanism) after vaccination instead of the artificially inflated number of the study.
Even if only comparing only young and healthy people vaccines still save much more lives than the deaths actually related to vaccination. But obviously that is using correct information, which anti-scientific people absolutely refuse to do.
Finally, attacks against unethical, deceiving people trying to manipulate others with faulty, fabricated results is completely valid, accepting false data just because a name is not acceptable and people that have the courage of exposing problems and falsifications are much more valuable for humanity than the people that can't even accept they have done something wrong, even if they can't defend against clear evidence.
Doc
The rabid “scientism based” Covid narrative is systematically being eroded away by real data and facts.
When flu season returns this Fall in the Northern Hemisphere, and a significant number of vaccinated Covidians are stricken with illness, we will likely have to face another bout of variant rantings.
Hopefully we will have learned by this time (via real science) that we should focus more on the vulnerable, and not on the healthy ones with next to no risk of illness.
Tobia
'Under-fire Lancet admits conflict of interest on lab-leak letter. After criticism that it failed to declare Peter Daszak’s work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, journal has also ‘recused’ zoologist from its coronavirus origins taskforce' One of the most trusted and prestigious medical journals has lost credibility. This is one of the reasons why ordinary folk do not trust scientists.
virusrex
Not at all, misrepresentations and logic mistakes at much, but those are very easy to debunk, as proved in this topic. It is specially telling when people propose and "argument" but then quickly abandon it when proved faulty. That is the kind of position that gets less and less credibility. The scientific approach with the huge reduction of deaths and cases thanks to measures and vaccines result from scientific advances is more than enough to let people see which side is the one actually interested in the public health.
Specially bad are those that try to use imaginary world wide conspiracies to argue for the public not to be able to vaccinate their children even if they are at increased risk of the disease. Making that kind of argument evidence not only lack of scientific support of their position, but also complete lack of empathy as well.
Nothing is perfect, but science has the huge disadvantage of having to recognized mistakes of all sizes because it is part of the method, in the other side the anti-scientific proponents will never accept doing anything wrong, even if they can be found with clear proof of their misdeeds (as written in the article about Raoult). Nevertheless losing credibility for not being perfect is still a much more preferable option than losing credibility for being purposefully deceitful and hiding problems with further lies as the antivaxxers do.
Doc
You're obviously struggling a little with the subject of this article.
https://www.dollarcollapse.com/trust-virus-experts/
"Early in the pandemic, “trust the science!” could actually be used in a debate without attracting derisive laughter. But as the flip-flops, mistakes and, yes, lies have accumulated, a consensus seems to be forming that the health care authorities are no more trustworthy than the people running Congress .
For proof, let’s start with vitamin D, which sure seems to lessen the severity of coronavirus infections. As the chart below illustrates (couldn’t find the source, but google “covid vitamin D” and you’ll find lots of studies that track with this data), people with higher levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream tend to experience covid-19 as a non-event while people low levels found the infection life-threatening.
*Chart: *https://www.dollarcollapse.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Vitamin-D-and-covid-2021.jpg
There are obvious questions about causality here, so calling vitamin D a “cure” is going way too far. But if it has even a marginal effect – and the data suggest considerably more — a rational government would, you’d think, be handing out vitamin D like Halloween candy. In fact, since we’re mandating/prohibiting all kinds of other behaviors, we might expect vitamin D consumption to be required along with masks and social distancing.
Even covid-czar Anthony Fauci recently said: “If you are deficient in vitamin D, that does have an impact on your susceptibility to infection. So I would not mind recommending — and I do it myself — taking vitamin D supplements.” So why aren’t family-sized bottles of vitamin D arriving in the mail from the CDC? A cynic might wonder if the fact that Big Pharma doesn’t make much money from cheap, widely available supplements plays a role in the government’s apparent lack of interest.
Now about those lockdowns. Tom Woods has been producing charts that appear to show virtually no difference in virus outcomes between US states with aggressive lockdown policies and those without. California, for instance, has shuttered most of its small businesses and imposed widespread curfews, while Florida hasn’t. Here’s the result:
Chart: https://www.dollarcollapse.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/California-vs-Florida-covid.jpg
As for the rest of the world – where they’re supposedly doing better than the US – the pattern of zero correlation between lockdowns and virus spread seems to be holding. France imposed a full national lockdown in March – after which the virus spiked. Then they added mask mandates (indoor and outdoor), with fines attached. And daily new cases soared.
Then of course there’s the lying. Dr. Fauci first claimed that masks don’t help – when he believed they did help — because he feared mask shortages for health care workers. He also admits to changing the official line on herd immunity according to what he thinks we’re ready to hear.
And, in what sounds more like incompetence than dishonesty, he’s apparently been answering the question “when will life go back to normal?” with whatever pops into his head at the time. In early 2020, it was the coming Autumn. In July, it was “a year or so.” More recently it’s “well into 2021.”
But what of Fauci, worshipped by the MSM. He’s the highest paid government official in the United States and also the loudest shill for Big Pharma on the flu. In March of last year Fauci was interviewed on 60 Minutes and was quoted as saying, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” YouTube has suppressed that video for obvious reasons since Dr. Fauci has had a change of heart about the use of masks.
In August 2020, he maintained that for public health safety everyone should wear a mask. Then he realized even more protection was needed than merely a facemask so he recommended not only a facemask but also goggles for maximum protection. In January of 2021, Fauci updated his mask recommendation to that of wearing two masks instead of just one, saying, “It just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.” A full week later Dr. Fauci backtracked one more time saying, “if you really wanna have an extra little bit of protection, maybe I should put two masks on. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's no data that indicates that that is gonna make a difference and that's the reason why the CDC has not changed their recommendations.”
So there you have it. The leading “Expert” in the United States and highest paid public government official has made it clear that,
You don’t need a mask
You do need a mask
You need a mask and goggles
You really need two masks, it makes sense
But you don’t need two masks
Kary Mullis the inventor of the PCR test, the Gold Standard of testing that gave the US an infection rate five times higher than the rest of the world knew Dr. Fauci and had his own opinion as to his qualifications.
Kary Mullis maintained that the PCR test was useless for detecting a disease. The WHO has finally admitted that PRC has a giant flaw. While the CDC and NIH recommend using 40 cycles to determine presence of a virus, even Fauci admits that anything over 27 cycles generates too many false positive signals.
Actually of the 28 million cases that the US claims, over 80% were false positive results due to using too many cycles in an ineffective and basically flawed testing procedure.
The health care establishment could have saved a lot of time — and embarrassment — by just asking regular people about this stuff. But then they would have made a lot less money.
2 +2 = 5 , right?
Doc
Not so. People do NOT keeping pinning anything on him that has to do with scientific consensus.
Fauci himself has coronated himself as the representative of Science.
The one important thing is that people are not buying it.
What he alone should focus upon is defending himself against actions that have nothing to do with science.