Thread by @NickAnderegg

Want to see 13 academic cry-bullies throw a hilarious, peer-reviewed tantrum?

The real gold is in the 943-word "Competing Interests" section!

I also discovered that ONE OF THE AUTHORS WROTE HIS OWN WIKIPEDIA PAGE 🤣🤣

Thread...

1/19

Kasper P. Kepp "has been engaged in the pandemic debate in Danish media and social media, where he has been critical of the studied zero-covid groups"

It's wildly unethical to conduct a study *specifically* targeting entities you've personally had conflict with.

2/

"Kevin Bardosh is Director of Collateral Global, a UK-based research and education charity that is focused on understanding the impact of COVID policies around the world"

Let's have a look at the latest news from Collateral Global! Hmmm maybe not a neutral source either?

3/

Tijl De Bie led the writing of the Belgian anti-lockdown manifesto and testified against vaccine mandates.

This is someone who transparently values economic productivity over sustainable human health.

4/

Louise Emilsson "has published several papers on COVID." One of these papers uses mortality displacement—which has historically applied to *unexpectedly early* deaths—to explain that... low all-cause mortality the previous year led to increased deaths in 2020.

Ghouls.

5/

Let's be VERY clear what they are concluding: Because people avoided death more than usual in 2019, the increase in excess deaths in Sweden in 2020 was... because the *earlier* deaths of those elderly people was built into their assumptions.

That's "mortality debt" lmfao

6/

Justin Greaves "has engaged in the pandemic debate on social media," including arguing that the UK's Summer 2020 campaign "Eat Out to Help Out" (the fucking WHAT!?!) somehow wasn't harmful, uses misleading graphs, and pretends deaths don't lag cases.

7/

Graham Medley, the PI who is inexplicably not listed as an author, has the biggest conflict: He's responsible for the group that produced a whole bunch of early models that absolutely defied common sense and had to be walked back.

Why didn't he put his name on the paper?

8/

Tea Lallukka... is the only *potential* non-cry-bully in the whole bunch.

I'm only spending like 45 seconds digging in to each person (and only noting what jumps out to me), and I've got nothing here. Moving along...

9/

Taulant Muka seems to be a professional cry-bully.

Just FYI buddy, if all of your colleagues tell you that you have a bad idea and sharing it is harmful, perhaps consider that you may just have a bad idea, not that you're a victim of "mobbing"

10/

J. Cristian Rangel seems to be the most self-important hack on this list (all his papers are him huffing his own farts), and appears to be an anti-mitigation sycophant. His co-authors also mispelled his name on the paper without him noticing. Great attention to detail!

11/

Niclas Sandström neglected to state his competing interests or lack thereof, whichever the case may be.

You'd think a paper that criticizes undeclared conflicts of interest would declare all conflicts, wouldn't you?

12/

Michaéla Schippers is a "positive psychology" hack. Positive psychology is all about putting on a happy face instead of dealing with actual problems. LMFAO.

13/

Jonas Schmidt-Chanasit not only seemingly used his list of conflicts as a means of self-promotion, but he also wrote his own very self-promotional Wikipedia page. LMFAOOOOO

*cough* grifter *cough*

14/

Don't worry, I rectified the issue.

15/

Tracy Vaillancourt has published many papers that seem absolutely certain that public health measures are what harmed kids and ignores the fundamental trauma of a mass mortality event. Baffling.

16/

This is quite the team they put together. It seems like a group of people who are convinced everyone else is wrong joined up with another group of people who think they are god's gift to the world.

As I was writing this thread, I got my hands on a copy of the paper...

17/

This whole paper is egregious. I might write up a thread on it, but I need time to gather my thoughts. I'll definitely be writing a letter to the editor and pointing out that there's so much conflict the paper should be retracted.

18/

And I shit you not, this is the sloppiest qualitative analysis I've ever laid my eyes on: They cherry-picked a subset of tweets based on keyword searches... then claimed that there's a "high degree of thematic convergence."

They STARTED with the themes. YOU CANNOT DO THAT.

19/

OTOH, unlike most of these hacks, I'm actually qualified to do a thematic qualitative analysis. So maybe I'll just directly replicate their method on their own tweets (but actually do it right) and submit that to the same damn journal 🤣

20/20

Okay, I didn't notice this when I wrote up the thread last night, but they also specifically just... describe the concept of retweeting as if it's like a coordinated effort?... but they all have tweeted out this paper *and retweeted each other's tweets.* LMFAO, DARVO.

21/20

Oops, looks like Graham Medley forgot to log out of his Wikipedia account before he updated his own Wikipedia page! I did my civic duty and added the Conflict of Interest warning to his user page.

22/20

Also, this sentence makes NO FUCKING SENSE, right?

"The authors do research ... relevant to the claims made by the studied advocacy in the paper but with no direct association to the studied advocacy."

That is a direct conflict. Like... within one sentence.

23/20

Are they claiming they are the only 13 academics in the world who don't get defensive when their work is directly criticized?

24/20

And the first author is also the first to block me.

Why don't you like criticism, Kasper? Is it because you're a hack?

25/20