Thread by @zexpe

Epic critique of pandemic-era science.

This thread is just a tiny extract…

🧵 1/9

tabletmag.com/sections/scien…

“The pandemic led seemingly overnight to a scary new form of scientific universalism. Everyone did COVID-19 science or commented on it. By August 2021, 330,000 scientific papers were published on COVID-19, involving roughly a million different authors.”
2/6

“An analysis showed that scientists from every single one of the 174 disciplines that comprise what we know as science has published on COVID-19. By the end of 2020, only automobile engineering didn’t have scientists publishing on COVID-19.”
3/6

“By early 2021, the automobile engineers had their say, too.

At first sight, this was an unprecedented mobilization of interdisciplinary talent. However, most of this work was of low quality, often wrong, and sometimes highly misleading.”
4/6

“Many people without subject-matter technical expertise became experts overnight, emphatically saving the world.”
5/6

“As these spurious experts multiplied, evidence-based approaches — like randomized trials and collection of more accurate, unbiased data — were frequently dismissed as inappropriate, too slow, and harmful. The disdain for reliable study designs was even celebrated.”
6/9

“Alongside thousands of solid scientists came freshly minted experts with questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent credentials and questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent data. Social and mainstream media have helped to manufacture this new breed of experts.”
7/9

“Anyone who was not an epidemiologist or health policy specialist could suddenly be cited as an epidemiologist or health policy specialist by reporters who often knew little about those fields but knew immediately which opinions were true.”
8/9

“Conversely, some of the best epidemiologists and health policy specialists in America were smeared as clueless and dangerous by people who believed themselves fit to summarily arbitrate differences of scientific opinion without understanding the methodology or data at issue”
9/9