Health Nerd Profile picture
24 May, 14 tweets, 6 min read
1/n Some more movement on this study from earlier in the year by Drs Ioannidis, Bhattacharya, Oh, and Bendavid

Along with @lonnibesancon, @FLAHAULT, and others, we've published a series of responses and ongoing critiques of the piece
2/n The newest response is here, and you can have a look at the previous discussion as well:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ec…
3/n For reference, if you've forgotten, the original article basically argued that "more" restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (mrNPIs) such as lockdowns didn't work to prevent COVID-19 cases

It is MASSIVELY popular, with an Altmetric of 19k and dozens of citations
4/n Our basic arguments are pretty simple:

1. Sample size - this study uses a very small sample. That's not really debated by the authors, and it's a limitation
5/n (Weirdly, they have also contradicted their original paper in the replies to the piece - where before they said that their paper had data for every country available, they're now saying they applied a strange exclusion)
6/n 2. The classification of countries as "high" or "low" restriction is arbitrary. In their reply, the authors literally just contradicted us, so we've now got quite a bit of text demonstrating why this is an issue
7/n This is pretty simple - if you don't explain why (say) South Korea is a "low" restriction country, how can we compare it to "high" restriction ones? The categorization is fundamental to the entire paper
8/n 3. Issues with the model. In particular, the policy variable
9/n 4. Issues with the use of time lags, and the time period studied

In particular, the authors say that they analyzed the data up until the "elimination of rapid growth in the first wave"
10/n This is a problem because it means that the analysis is entirely limited to the 'upwards' part of the epidemic curve

If mrNPIs have an effect that is mostly seen on the decline, this would by definition be missed
11/n 5. While we also had some quibbles about language, the final major argument is to do with the model again
12/n Ultimately, we still have the same overall gripe. It is pretty much impossible from the evidence presented in the original research to conclude that mrNPIs work or do not
13/n Indeed, as we point out, unless the authors spend some time delineating exactly what a "more" or "less" restrictive response to COVID-19 actually is, there isn't much you can take home from the analysis anyway
14/n My personal position remains mostly the same on these interventions, that more restrictive ones probably weren't that beneficial in the early days of the pandemic, but that it's really, really hard to know either way

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Health Nerd

Health Nerd Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @GidMK

24 May
Stumbled on this paper about a retracted vitamin D study last year, and it is a WILD RIDE

This paper got 100,000s of downloads on SSRN, and changed worldwide policy

It also might have been...entirely fraudulent?

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
You might not remember the paper, but it was a HUGE DEAL back in mid-2020

It claimed that survival of patients in Indonesia was essentially entirely dependent on vitamin D levels
It was also removed (without any notes) from SSRN sometime in June 2020. Disappeared without a trace

Read 6 tweets
24 May
So, this is still ongoing, but I think there's an important lesson here in how wildly problematic academic debate is as a forum during a pandemic
The bottom line is pretty depressing - we've spent months arguing back and forth, meanwhile this paper has had a HUGE impact and probably impacted policy decisions across the world
Thing is, our debate about this article has been FAST by academic standards

Three letters/responses for a single article published in 6 months? Snappy by many standards
Read 10 tweets
22 May
There is now some reasonably strong evidence that non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 ("lockdowns") were associated with decreased short-term suicides in several locations in the world
In a number of other places, while not associated with a decrease, they were also not associated with an increase either. In fact, best evidence suggests no link between lockdowns and an increased short-term suicide rate
One of the most bizarre things is that whenever you point out the fact that suicide rates have not generally increased during lockdowns or indeed the pandemic, people get very angry at you

Personally, I think it's quite a good thing that there have been fewer suicides
Read 5 tweets
21 May
This story from @liammannix about the quashing of debate within forensic science is one of the most wild things I've ever read ping @RetractionWatch theage.com.au/national/victo…
We often discuss academic "silencing" as a sort of nasty attack on people's credentials, but rarely does that include police detectives investigating people for publishing scientific articles 👀👀👀
And while I have absolutely no expertise in paediatric forensics, I've read Dr. Brook's piece which while retracted is still available as a preprint, and it does not seem like a wild and unscientific document researchgate.net/profile/C-Broo…
Read 4 tweets
18 May
This piece has one of the weirdest uses of data that I've seen in a long time

I think it really shows that Australians are quite keen to get vaccinated! 1/n
2/n The article reports a survey that was run by @smh and @theage talking to adults about whether they were "likely" to be vaccinated "in the months ahead"
3/n According to the article, with nearly a third responding that they were unlikely to be vaccinated, there is a serious reason for concern representing an "alarming level of vaccine hesitancy"

But do the results show this?
Read 14 tweets
16 May
This sort of scientific gatekeeping is bizarre and incomprehensible

As someone who was the victim of a similar effort recently, I find it extensively gross to see senior scientists practising eminence-based science
Graduate students are the backbone of all scientific endeavours, and often do amazing work without which we would all be lost
Perhaps more importantly, it is fundamentally unscientific to argue that someone's publication record makes any difference to the truth of their arguments
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(