@globeandmail Because our public health leaders are completely out of their depth, and care more about covering up their own incompetence than doing their jobs.
Because an MD is not a PhD, and letting cosplay scientists exclude real ones is not an effective way to handle a science problem.
@globeandmail Because medical politics is a toxic, authoritarian tar pit that selects for the worst members of the profession, and gives them control over their betters.
Because a "Thin White Line" mentality means outside criticism of pseudoscientific medical guidance is ignored.
@globeandmail Because journalists haven't put enough thought into who they platform, and just accept silly claims by clinicians with little or no relevant advanced training that they understand everything that touches human health better than actual experts.
@globeandmail Because journalists haven't put enough critical thought into the poor quality"scientific" studies they hype, and even worse, ignore efforts to educate them about even the most obvious fatal flaws in the work.
@globeandmail Because organizations like the @globeandmail have taken no interest in the immense conflicts of interest of public health and infection control leaders, who committed the most serious medical error in human history and ended "an enormous number of lives".
@globeandmail Because editors won't support investigations into the abysmal quality of research that passes for "the best available evidence" in the medical (as opposed to scientific) literature.
@globeandmail Because even when students at major Canadian medical schools are taught dangerous, easily verified falsehoods as facts, endangering them and the patients under their care to protect the egos of influential senior practitioners, it gets zero coverage.
@globeandmail Because papers like @globeandmail have completely ignored the inability of our public health and infection control leaders to see even the most screamingly obvious disasters coming (note the date here vs "open for the summer").
@globeandmail Because the insights of the world's top bioaerosol experts were discounted in favour of the uninformed opinions of influential clinicians - who don't even face difficult questions from the media, let alone accountability for the resulting carnage.
@globeandmail Because major news outlets have slashed and burned in-house expertise to the point that magical thinking that claims one type of evidence can just erase all others goes unchallenged - no matter how poorly the research is done.
@globeandmail Because the self-licking ice cream cone that is "Evidence Based Medicine" has been allowed to declare that science somehow works differently in medicine - not coincidentally more effective at concentrating power than producing results.
@globeandmail Because news organizations repeat whatever they are told by public health leaders, without questioning how the data is manipulated - or whether the people who let COVID get out of control can be trusted to report the harms resulting from their own choices.
Just updated our preprint assessing the 2022 study that claimed medical masks to be noninferior to N95s for COVID. In addition to issues identified previously, a closer examination of the data revealed unexpected patterns unlikely to occur in nature: osf.io/preprints/meta…
A big thanks to my co-authors, @sameo416 @JuliaMWrightDal @jmcrookston @GosiaGasperoPhD @DFisman and Corinna Nielson. The study we examined has been described as "gold standard" and "best available evidence", calling into question the rigour of EBM guidance development processes.
If anyone is interested in the wording of the statements arguing against the Ontario Nurses Association in 2021, signed by several trial authors and 👉both MDs responsible for protecting the interests of the (mostly nurse) participants in the study👈:
Additional observations on the WHO terminology document (🧵)
1) The Technical Consulting Group provided input, but the document was actually written by "the WHO Secretariat" - Dr. van Kerkhove (long-time airborne spread denier, see link - huge COI) & co.
2) When the consultation was started under Dr. Swaminathan, there was a process for selecting TCG members. I and others would argue the whole thing was unnecessary, WHO (including Dr. Kerkhove) just needed to admit their mistakes, but at least it wasn't all just backroom deals.
3) This all rolled along for a year, used as an excuse to delay action by WHO - but not producing what they wanted.
Then, two days after the November 11th TCG meeting, Dr. Swamanithan suddenly left her position on - almost no notice, and we never found out the real reason.
If you're in Canada and you're not clear on just how early our cowboy IPAC muppets screwed us by removing airborne COVID precautions...there are some clues here.
HCW unions had it right from day 1. IPAC & PH ignored them. If you have #LongCovid - blame them.
February 7th, 2020:
It looks like just over two weeks later, the Cowboy IPAC Muppets (good name for a band, less so for the people who made us all sick) started campaigning to do the opposite.
HCW unions were right, IPAC decided to show them who's boss.
Started in Scarborough HN, looks like.
Some gloating over that from PHAC. Seems like having HCW unions do anything but bow down in front of the overinflated medical egos in PH & IPAC must have hit a nerve.
Also of course you can't go wasting PPE on peasants when important people might want it later.
@RFantinatto There are two distinct components of the anti-science. There's a boring, garden variety that has numbers, but there's a more interesting one that reflects the growing split between science and the "leadership" tiers of medicine.
Basically, a lot of what passes for science in...
@RFantinatto ..medicine, isn't. Influence within the medical bureaucracy is gained by playing the role of scientific authorities to fellow MDs. A lack of advanced research training can be overcome by taking advantage of EBM chauvinism to erase real experts.
@RFantinatto That's ultimately why the pandemic happened. The actual scientists who saw what was coming and would have stopped it were shut down by medicine's well-connected science cosplayers.
I do not understand ID docs celebrating yet another demonstration that they and their colleagues lack the ability to institute proper respiratory protection programs. It's like people who don't use soap flexing about how they stopped handwashing and infections didn't get worse.🤷
It's also pretty disturbing how easily the professional bodies go along with these constant attempts to manipulate pubic perception, in line with significant COIs. What's the closest we've got to a good-faith attempt at using standards-compliant PPE (N95+) in a Canadian hospital?
For example the N95 study authors *really* needed N95s not to work, and even with intermittent use they accidentally showed ~2-fold reduction in infections in the N95 arm when PPE was worn during exposure. Then they went overseas and moved the goalposts: