The authors and editors of @PNASNews should be fucking ashamed of themselves for publishing this study that is being picked up en masse in the media. It directly misrepresents its methods in its title by claiming causation (not correlation!) with a phenomenon it doesn’t study.🧵
So apparently other trauma, like kids watching their relatives die as I was during this time, didn’t stress them out, just “lockdowns.” Oh, and the study doesn’t control for covid infection? Which causes brain aging and is often asymptomatic or milder in children. You fools.
Reddit r/science knows what’s up better than the scientists who apparently wrote up this manuscript while on psychedelics. reddit.com/r/science/s/du…
There are 10+ articles on this small study with invalid conclusions on major news sites, liberal and conservative alike. Everyone’s dying to serve up another round of neuroinvasive virus to our kids so we can preserve the vibes. I’m so done with this.
@RetractionWatch take a look at this one.
Please excuse my colourful language, I was pretty upset last night as shoddy, dishonest research is immediately being used to further a media narrative all over the place.
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The Canadian Paediatric Society @CanPaedSociety, despite private requests to acknowledge the existence of Long Covid in kids and my public critique in @sciam of the baseless claims in their weak paediatric COVID vaccination guidance, still has not taken action. But it’s worse.
/1
Without releasing any guidance acknowledging pediatric long covid, which is proven to be a significant population health concern by an ever growing mountain of scientific evidence, they have now released this document that may harm kids needing care.
/2
Somatic symptoms and related disorders (SSRDs) are very controversial because this classification can act to recategorize physical illness into mental illness on the basis that an MD doesn’t know what’s going on. When pediatricians don’t know how to diagnose long covid…
/3
A @NatureComms study of over 15 million people showed the risk (HR) of an arterial thrombotic event, e.g. heart attack or stroke, on day zero of COVID infection was:
-73x higher for vaccinated people
-255x higher for unvaccinated.
Apparently I need to link to the sources my article uses to justify the estimate (stated noting uncertainty) of pediatric long covid incidence. Otherwise some will mislead into thinking I wrongly relied on a JAMA study designed only to describe symptoms:
🧵scientificamerican.com/article/long-c…
The 10-20% number (noting uncertainty) is directly pulled from this JAMA Editorial which cites three studies in support, that I link to below.
The unproven notion that public health measures were more harmful to kids than the disease is now codified dogma, and needs to be challenged on the basis of increasingly undeniable mounting research showing real physiological trauma to children from COVID-19.
/2
The idea that, with millions of children already affected by long covid symptoms in the US alone, we can safely continue on the path of periodic reinfection with new SARS-COV-2 variants is based on unwarranted hope that doesn’t accord with mounting scientific evidence.
To clarify, you framed them as spreading insidious misinformation. It’s important to reflect on the fact that guests consistently invited over years have a long history of being wrong. Yet continue to be invited rather than those with greater demonstrated accuracy.
/1🧵
In this sense there is very much a media “in-group” that other experts with evidence-based but less palatable conclusions about the pandemic, its outcomes and the potential sustainability of the current approach struggle to penetrate into.
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I understand from providing expert media commentary myself that once a relationship is established with an expert it is practical to go back to them. However we are talking about the most consequential event of the last several decades.
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A @UPennDBEI Professor of Biostatistics @takishinohara peer reviewed a highly publicized brain scan study, and allowed it to be published with a title claiming causation between brain maturation and an undefined variable not studied or controlled for, “lockdowns.”
Science™
I guess he needs a biostatistics 101 lesson on causation vs correlation.