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23 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Disagreement over science should not consist of personal attacks

That is not an excuse for uncritically accepting all bad science, nor for refusing to critique things that are clearly flawed
Many people have taken my criticisms of Ioannidis' papers, for example, to be some sort of horrifying vendetta, even though I've never once said anything bad about the man himself
The problem is that some people see any criticism of senior academics by their juniors as impolite and disrespectful, and therefore a personal attack

I find this attitude endlessly absurd
If you reject valid criticisms of work because of the forum that it appears in, or the person making them, then you are no longer interested in science or facts

It really is that simple 🤷‍♂️

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
22 Dec
It's coming towards the end of the year, and there are still countless people minimizing the pandemic and spreading untruths

So I thought I'd do a bit of a thread of FACTS about COVID-19 1/n
2/n Fact 1: the death rate of COVID-19 varies substantially by age, but is high even for relatively young people

For example, a 1 in 2,700 risk of death from COVID-19 for a 35 year old, based on our comprehensive paper on the topic link.springer.com/article/10.100…
3/n Fact 2: COVID-19 is MUCH more dangerous than influenza

For younger age groups, COVID-19 may be similarly lethal. For anyone over 30, it is much worse. @zorinaq has a nice graphic on this
Read 34 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
21 Dec
I've been tangentially watching this critique by @ikashnitsky of another worrying paper in JAMA Psych, so I thought I'd briefly discuss my own thoughts on the paper in a bit of twitter peer-review 1/n
2/n Paper is here, it looks at suicide rates in Maryland during 2020, and finds that there are racial disparities in these rates. In particular, there were fewer White individuals dying of suicide during lockdown, but more Black people died this way jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap…
3/n @ikashnitsky and one of the authors have had a fantastic back-and-forth, and I strongly recommend you read the threads here:

Read 23 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
21 Dec
Wow, 15 locally-acquired cases in NSW. So 23-30-15

That's a huge relief for Sydney, although we won't know for sure if the outbreak is controlled for a few days yet #covidnsw #nswcovid
For those who made fun of the "gold standard", I'd be interested to know of anywhere in the world that ramped up testing by 8x and went from R(t) ~1.4 to R(t)<~1 in THREE DAYS
38,000 tests in one day. That's 5 tests for every 1,000 people in the state in 24 hours!
Read 5 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
17 Dec
The authors of the Great Barrington nonsense have produced a website called "collateral global", claiming to document the collateral effects of COVID-19 lockdowns

I thought I'd have a look at the scholarship on display 1/n
2/n First up - suicide. I have actually looked into this subject a fair bit, and as someone with mental health issues I take a fairly personal interest in the statistics

What does this global repository say?
3/n There are currently 4 studies listed. One found no change in suicide rates, one is an opinion piece by a psychiatrist, and the other two are cross-sectional studies of suicidal ideation
Read 15 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
17 Dec
This is a massive step by Twitter. If implemented across the board, it could largely shut down many denialist accounts
Some generic responses for all the people replying:

- Twitter is a private company. They do not owe you the right to their platform to spread misinformation
- This is preventing lies about one, specific thing, you can still lie about other things
- if this makes you want to leave Twitter, it makes no sense to reply to this tweet - deleting your account is a much more logical step
Read 5 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
16 Dec
I think that this article by @PeteJamison looks at professor John Ioannidis and his statements during the pandemic, but leaves a few of them out

So I thought I'd just tweet out some things said in papers that prof Ioannidis has written this year 1/n
2/n Note: these are all from published or preprinted research, and I'm directly screenshotting so you can read the words for yourself
3/n Back in May, from the original preprint of the IFR paper
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
"the worldwide IFR of COVID-19...may be in the same ballpark as...influenza (0.1%, 0.2% in a bad year)"

This was a mistake (the IFR of flu is not 0.1-0.2%) Image
Read 15 tweets

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