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2 Feb, 5 tweets, 1 min read
I do find it fascinating how the usual "academic civility/silencing" brigade have completely ignored this whole episode. Apparently it's fine to publicly defame junior colleagues as long as it's in service of school reopening
It's also interesting to note that this is quite literally a case of academic "silencing", at least insofar as the journal and authors have tried their hardest to quash any hint of our critique
Without twitter, and the media attention it brought, I doubt very much that this paper would ever have been corrected. The only reason the authors were forced to respond is that the editors were contacted by the Guardian for comment
Even then, the lead author's ONLY response to us pointing out that his paper was mathematically impossible was that our critique was not peer-reviewed
Here are very powerful people - editors at one of the biggest academic journals in the world - dragging their heels and attempting to silence critics

And yet, not a peep from people who claim to care about this sort of thing regularly

Odd, that

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More from @GidMK

2 Feb
Haven't done this in a little while, so let's have a spot of fun

Here's a headline in the Daily Mail. It seems...unlikely that this is true

Let's have a look and see
Lest you think I'm being unfair at the dumb headline, here are the next few paragraphs

Finger length impacts your choice of "masculine" or "feminine" foods! Science?
All credit to the Daily Mail here, they do actually link to the study. Wonderful doi.org/10.1016/j.food…
Read 17 tweets
1 Feb
If I'm really honest, there is only one characteristic that I've deeply admired during the pandemic, and that is simple:

- Those who can admit when they got something wrong
Thing is, it happens to all of us (I am no exception). It is commonplace to be mistaken, but rare indeed that people will own up to their errors
See, my problem is that everyone thinks that they tick most of the boxes on that list. No one thinks that they're too certain, or ignoring human health, or unkind

We're all the heroes of our own story
Read 4 tweets
1 Feb
The story continues - after @ikashnitsky and I pointed out that this paper was mathematically impossible, and had numerous errors, it was partially corrected

Now, the lead author is calling us "trolls"
His initial response to us, when we privately emailed him about the issue in the paper, was, to quote, "you are not just right because you THINK you are" (caps=italics)
Now, remember, this is not a minor paper

Altmetric of 3,400, in dozens of news articles, and it's been cited by the WHO and EU already

This paper is impacting school reopening policy across the globe
Read 16 tweets
25 Jan
The entire field of epidemiology is about balancing cost and benefit, risk and reward. There is no choice without consequences, even the seemingly trivial ones
Most Master of Public Health courses (MPH) have a health economics unit for precisely this reason. Enacting a policy in one place invariably (at best) takes away resources that you would otherwise use somewhere else
This is a big part of the reason I spend so much time trying to convey nuance. There is no decision we can make for public health that is purely good

There are no silver bullets
Read 5 tweets
14 Jan
It's likely that the marginal benefit - the additional improvement on top of other things - of very restrictive COVID-19 interventions like stay-at-home orders may be quite small

However, this is probably equally true of the COST of these interventions
It's something that I've seen completely ignored by most anti-restriction campaigners, but I think it's an important point that we should consider
Yes, if you've already limited how much people can go out to restaurants etc then closing them entirely might not reduce transmission all that much

But it also won't have the same negative impact either!
Read 4 tweets
13 Jan
A new paper has been published by John Ioannidis and Jay "Great Barrington Declaration" Bhattacharya on "lockdowns" as a COVID-19 preventative measure

Let's do some twitter peer-review! 1/n
2/n The paper is here, and it's an interesting read:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11…
3/n The paper takes 10 countries' worth of data, and compares their COVID-19 case numbers against the restrictions they had in place in early 2020, comparing those with less-restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (lrNPIs) with more-restrictive NPIs (mrNPIs) Image
Read 26 tweets

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