Over the past 20 months, it has been fascinating and mortifying to find out that pharmaceutical has its own math that isn't really math, but is believed to be math by almost all doctors and even epidemiologists and medical scientists.
Weirdly, the mathematicians say nothing.
Some portion of the mathematicians just don't know. The way it's all done is pretty well hidden out of sight, and generally mathematicians are not given a closer view of much of it without accepting indoctrination.
With such a large army of respected indoctrinated people, it's easy for the "system managers" to intimidate the small handful who could throw a monkey wrench into all of it.
If the whole world worked this way, we would call it totalitarianism, without question. Any reference to "science" would be made under force of compulsion, or with a wink.
The interesting question is...was only in medicine all that time, or was everything else just as illusory?
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I love Frank Herbert's Dune. Deeply. It is the most well-read science fiction novel of all time precisely because it is a deeply crafted universe whose purpose transcends genres into philosophy, religion, economics, technology, spirituality, and so on.
I have spent years discussing with friends and other weirdos what it would mean to make Dune into a great movie. David's Lynch's Dune was...kinda cool, but nothing like what could be achieved by a Game of Thrones budget and time scale. If any book deserves that, it's Dune.
The Dune and Children of Dune miniseries were pretty cool. They scratched and itch, for sure. I could be the curmudgeon and pick nits, but since nothing in the core betrayed the story, I'd feel obnoxious doing so.
Are the @CDCgov (@CDCDirector; @RWalensky) and @US_FDA (@DrWoodcockFDA) really going to watch these vaccines get approval jammed through while dozens of scientists and statisticians with analyses pointing to substantial mortality are ignored---without any risk-benefit analysis?
That's what this looks like---the exact opposite of sound regulation. Can we just drop the facade that our regulatory agencies are distinct from pharmaceutical corporations?
@RWMaloneMD, @stephanieseneff, and others have been warning of antibody-dependent enhancement for a while. When presented with data, I said, "I don't think the statistics yet look like ADE. They're consistent with vaccines being more effective against mild cases...but...
When I see the inversion we're seeing in this chart, that tells me that there is a "change of state" in the system. What would cause the change of state? It's not just that the vaccines aren't working. That would be convergence of the graphs. But inversion may be the first sign.
I take that back for the moment...the chart should be normalized to (per million) or something like that. So, we're still heading toward convergence. I'm speaking too quickly, so forgive that...but my concern is growing, and for a real reason. The data tells a story.
This is not about casual narcissism suffered by people coddled a little much in childhood. This is about a more serious defect...
Have you ever read a news report about some man or woman who killed their kids or their whole family? Most all of us have, but perhaps we grimace with disgust, think "WTF", and quickly let the story drain from our minds. I did that for years.
But at some point, I read an article in an old anonymous blog called The Last Psychiatrist (worth looking up) that made me think deeper and read more. A personal experience made me dig even deeper...