Thread by @colossusPhD

Hi, pals. 👋

I feel a renewed motivation to continue the #COVIDGrifter 🧵.

Without further ado this instalment will focus on Ontario’s resident hysteric, Dr. David N. Fisman @DFisman.

There is no denying that @DFisman at least used to be a real Scientist earlier in his career.

He completed his M.D. with the University of Western Ontario and an M.P.H. at the Harvard School of Public Health.

This thread will focus more on his dubious character.

@dfisman is currently employed as a professor at the cesspool otherwise known as the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Those two very dated awards don’t seem to be very impressive for someone handed the keys to formerly dictating Ontario’s C19 policy.

dlsph.utoronto.ca/faculty-profil…

When David was an actual Scientist he co-authored many articles on the transmissibility of viruses during epidemics.

One of the earlier articles interestingly acknowledges that disease burden is overestimated during an outbreak.

It also acknowledges that serological testing is necessary to calculate the true morbidity rate.

Wow, this is a stunning amount of nuance from Fisman just a decade earlier.

I do question this hypothesis, however.

Being an adult during the Swine Flu Pandemic I do not recall changing any of my behaviours, nor were schools closed or any public health mitigations taken that I am aware of.

This paragraph becomes David’s obsession.

#PublicUnconcern

By 2016 @DFisman published this article on his Incidence Decay with Exponential Adjustment (IDEA) Model.

Credit where credit is due, David acknowledges Farr’s Law and still frequently cites it on Twitter when it comes to modelling outbreaks.

To quickly touch on Farr’s Law, William Farr noticed that a rinderpest outbreak had a natural up and down nature to it as well as the deaths.

He determined that outbreaks of disease would follow an asymmetrical bell shaped curve.

A thing cannot accelerate indefinitely.

Fisman’s IDEA model is basically the same epidemiological forecasting model with a key difference: he factors in BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE.

Remember when I said before it becomes his obsession?

You’ll see how this plays out later.

So far I’ve talked about a David Fisman who seemed to behave like a professional, calm and ethical doctor.

What changed?

Well, we all are aware by now there was a single catastrophic event which caused an enduring mental break that has effected academia for several years…

Let me take a moment to say that when Trump won the election I was politically homeless at the time and I only found it amusing because of how much I didn’t like the establishment.

David was more invested…

#TsunamiOfTears

@DFisman wasn’t a Twitter account until late 2019, but suddenly in January of 2017 David got his first bit of attention from the media when Global News interviewed him for this article:

globalnews.ca/news/3176898/t…

Does this sound like a stable person?

Notice the language. It almost sounds exactly like his tweets today.

“Threatening everybody’s health… threatening MY health.”

“potentially DEAD KIDS.”

[emphasis added]

Real terrifying stuff here, Global. 👍

#CreatedAMonster

As if that Global article wasn’t bad enough, the Toronto Star (yes I know) interviewed David for his opinion on this doozie of a topic.

Keep in mind @dfisman is an epidemiologist, not a civil engineer or a sociologist.

Oh and @EdTubb 🤦‍♂️ wrote this:

thestar.com/news/city_hall…

The absolute leaps in logic that @dfisman draws his conclusions from to drum up anti-Police hysteria is so absurd I actually LOL’d while reading this article.

Actually David they are total coincidences and there could be a myriad of factors involved.

Here is @DFisman leaping to the conclusion that a lack of traffic enforcement, and that alone, is the cause of DEATHS.

But then he says OH I DUNNO. 🤷‍♂️

And here is the most interesting part of his comments.

@dfisman is supposedly a professional.

Madness, you say?

You got that right.

More to come tomorrow when I dive a bit into @dfisman and his tenure with the Ontario Science Fiction Advisory Table @COVIDSciOntario.

Wow. Good morning. I see this thread sort of took off while I was in bed.

It will be a bit before I continue with this thread due to home life. In the meanwhile you could revisit the other threads on #COVIDGrifter @NightShiftMD here…

https://twitter.com/colossusphd/status/1481125316483592194

…and Ryan Imgrund Not-A-Doctor here.

https://twitter.com/colossusphd/status/1482922651115003904

Back to @dfisman.

I didn’t want to spend too much time pouring over Fisman’s tweets from when the pandemic started to when the @COVIDSciOntario became a thing, but I would be remiss to not draw attention to his most hysterical of all tweets, the famous…

#TSUNAMIOFDEATHS

I’m so sorry.

We all know how this played out.

David did too; a mere month later he could only muster whataboutism as an excuse for the @COVIDSciOntario repeatedly dreadful modelling.

#YouMayNeedProfessionalHelp

@Golden_Pup, @robfoot, and @Milhouse_Van_Ho have all done tremendous jobs providing much more thoughtful case projections than the Science Fiction Table (perhaps on purpose) produced.

This is a thread about Fisman’s character, so let’s look at his Declarations of Interest.

For anyone unaware the @TheTorontoSun broke a story that Fisman was a paid consultant to the @ETFOeducators on January 26th, 2021 DOI.

Fisman provided a statement to @anthonyfurey that he recently uploaded a new declaration form to the Table’s website…

#ImSortOfABigDeal

The same day the new DOI form is added to the @COVIDSciOntario website.

@DFisman states he is an Advisor for the @ETFOeducators but it is not C19 related. Look at the other relationships he lists as potential conflicts.

“I’m an expert on covid an people want to hear me talk”

Because C19 is all about politics and not about science, the CBC ran to @DFisman’s defence as well as some of Canada and Ontario’s finest luminaries.

Peter Juni also commented and said he would not accept @DFisman’s resignation because the conflict of interest was minimal.

I don’t particularly like Peter Juni or Adalsteinn Brown, but at least they have always been consistently transparent about their tunnel vision related to C19.

But @DFisman’s conflicts of interest start to become increasingly egregious over the next few months…

Remember on January 26th he just had relationships with Pfizer, AZ, the ETFO and the ONA?

Well by February 10th he was being paid by them. 🤦‍♂️

Oh and the WE Foundation 😬 as well as investment firms and the Canada Pension Plan.

Those conflicts of interest continue as of May 7th with @sanofipasteur, a vaccine developer, added to the list…

And on August 25th.

Fisman’s hysterical behaviour on Twitter aside, this had to be putting the @COVIDSciOntario in a real predicament.

Wait a second, August 25th, 2021? 🤔

That is a very coincidental. Didn’t something happen around then?

August 23rd, 2021: #ResignationDay.

It is very amusing that @DFisman claims the @COVIDSciOntario were blinded by politics, instead of academic entropy, and that they withheld projections.

If you ask me I think they were glad to be rid of a corrupt narcissistic mouthpiece.

DEAD KIDS*

ELDERLY FEARING FOR THEIR LIVES*

TSUNAMI OF DEATH*

And in case you were one of the unlucky ones to survive all of those tribulations you were now in for a #GRIMFALL*

*none of this shit happened