Let's hear scientists with different Covid-19 views, not attack them
statnews.com
statnews.com
Meanwhile, his hypothesis is still held by many prominent figures outside of the scientific community. So it's very hard to claim this is an example of valid ideas being at all squashed.
Worse, in this case we have hard evidence of some pretty catastrophic results from this virus. So trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example. We already have situations that are bad enough to warrant extreme counter measures.
A) This was published as a research paper but how much of a research paper was it? As mentioned, it selectively and fairly shallowly looked at some data (the Diamond Princess) while wholly ignoring other data (South Korea) without even providing a strong justification for its choices. It was more like "an essay with scholarly footnotes".
B) This article wasn't simply offered to scientific community. You can find a huge swath of mainstream media reports describing this paper and another large number of popular articles with by Ioannidis himself defending the positions he staked out in his article. This was essentially a media campaign.
C). The particular position Ioannidis staked out was just one of a series of positions one can find staked by a variety of figures, some real scientists, some right wing ideologues, some somewhat in between. Again, if you look, a well financed media campaign. Below is a series of link I've cobbled together I've cobbled together as documentation of this:
The American Institute for Economic Research (libertarian/right wing think tank) give it's of "significant" article: https://www.aier.org/article/vital-information-that-is-falli... Essentially a web of articles united by the need to avoid undue action on the virus (IE, not cost money).
A nice article describing the similarity of Covid-denial and Climate-change-denial: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d...
An article on the effort to spin the Santa Clara tests befor e they were even release: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-circulating...
What's on with Ioannidis: https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-...
Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, another Stanford Connected "minimizer" https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-corona...
A summary of several related minimizers, with a similar program: https://arcdigital.media/what-the-federalist-doesnt-get-abou...
Aljazeera gives a broader discussion, why real scientist would do this: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-herd-i...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
That isn't a scientific paper but rather an opinion piece. You're talking about the more recent paper he was involved with regarding immunity in a region of California.
trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example.
This might have made sense to say three weeks ago. The vast majority of places have now peaked already and have seen nothing worse than the flu. The strength of lockdown has made no difference whatsoever and there are good reasons to believe even having one at all may have no impact - bizarre but that's what some of the data is saying.
In other words if you're going to engage in argument by counter-example that Ioannidis was wrong in his essay, you're going to lose. If we judge what happened purely by counting examples and counter-examples, lockdowns would appear totally insane.
This! This, exactly! This, a million times over!
If I could teach people one scientific concept to help us get through this, it wouldn't be immunology or epidemiology. It would be an understanding of uncertainty, where it comes from, what it means, and how to handle it.
So, yeah, I'm going to set myself up for a fall here by saying I've got a pretty decent professional understanding of the topic.
They then proceed to ignore this and use a point estimate for their further calculations.
The right thing to have done would have been to test the assay further, or move the study to an area where there was higher positivity and they could get a more reliable signal.
My reading of the data to date (note: not including anything that might have shown up in the last few days) is more nuanced. Hydroxychloroquine most likely has a small positive effect, but the data are consistent with anything from a modest negative effect to a modest positive effect to absolutely nothing at all. From its long history of previous use, the drug has known negative effects, but these are unimportant or manageable for most COVID-19 patients. However, any positive effect it may have is limited; the studies to date, albeit limited, have been powerful enough to detect a "miracle cure".
None of this says a word about mechanism of action. Someone is bound to say, "But what about zinc? You need to consider zinc!" The thing is, we did. These analyses are independent of mechanism of action. It's entirely possible that hydroxychloroquine's small positive effect is mostly or entirely caused by zinc interactions. Or not. We don't know! We'd have to do a study designed around zinc to test that theory out.
In my opinion, again as a science-y but not doctor-y person, is that giving hydroxychloroquine to COVID-19 patients in most cases will not hurt them, and might help a little bit. The biggest danger, I believe, is that people think it's more powerful than it is. We should not stop and think that hydroxychloroquine is good enough or a "cure". Because it isn't. And if a patient receives hydroxychloroquine instead of better care because people misunderstand science, that is a failing.
(The above is definitely a tangent. But getting it off my chest somewhere was good for my mental health!)
"I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error."
"I’m serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t think they authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups. They’re the kind of screw-ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don’t look too carefully at what you might have done wrong."
source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...
a) Run op-eds in the WSJ and get on Fox News with their theories
b) Create a faulty study with biased data analysis (of all people, Ioannnidis should be very sensitive to this -- he's famous for his paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."
c) Publish the flawed paper as a preprint without peer review.
d) Publish the results of the L.A. serological survey without even a preprint so that the methods could be looked over.
If you publish a study that has huge societal implications before peer review, then Twitter is going to be your peer review. Deal with it.
The "standard" he set up was a straw man, and not how any practicing scientist I know actually looks at papers.
And when he allows his name to be used to push highly politci contrarian takes, all the weird attention his other papers received starts to make sense. It's not about the science, it's about being contrarian, at best, and at worst ways to subvert the public's view of science by deriving them on what it really means to publish a peer-reviewed paper.
What they actually said was:
> Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died
He also says it doesn't seem to have a higher chance of killing you than seasonal flu for each person infected:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPqmLoZA4s&t=1h9m50s
And says in there that Imperial college was dangerously wrong to use a 1% IFR estimate in their modeling. I believe this interview was near or after New York City's city fatality rate was already over 0.1%, yet he was still saying Imperial's estimate was an order of magnitude off.
Throughout the whole thing he cherry picked countries with recent extreme case growth and thorough testing to take advantage of the death lag and claim they point to a tiny CFR (and IFR). In each case it steadily rose after case growth slowed and lagged deaths continued, as expected.
In the Ioannidis serology study, one of the researchers's wives recruited people who wanted a test, saying it would let them know if they could get back to work (potentially biasing things for people who suspected they had had it).
Where do you see that? The data I see says the fatality rate of all forms has been dropping over time, as expected from prior epidemics where this also occurred. It's the Imperial papers that have been discredited by now, as their projections were way off in all respects - if they were right Sweden would be a bloodbath at the moment.
I agree the serology survey was not a perfect study - more for statistical/confidence interval reasons than the researcher's wife. But it may not matter. The general conclusions of the serology survey are matching many other pieces of data and evidence from around the world. For example:
"The latest figures from Italy show (pp. 12/13) that 60 of almost 17,000 doctors and nurses who tested positive died. This results in a Covid19 lethality rate of less than 0.1% for those under 50, 0.27% for those aged 50 to 60, 1.4% for those aged 60 to 70, and 12.6% for those aged 70 to 80. Even these figures are likely too high, as these are deaths with and not necessarily from corona viruses, and as up to 80% of people remain asymptomatic and some may not have been tested. Overall, however, the values are in line with those from e.g. South Korea and give a lethality rate for the general population in the range of influenza."
From https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ - the source document is in Italian but the data table is quite clear even to someone who doesn't speak it. In other words for Imperial's paper to have been reasonable they'd have to assume the entire population had the mortality profile of 60+ year olds, which is just wrong.
It was a study that was about an ongoing crisis that has led to hundreds of thousands of dead people in a couple of months that had a contrarian result, had not been through peer review, had not been double or triple checked and was still promoted heavily through news media.
That it happened to also be faulty made it a tragedy. It’s farcical nature had been established earlier.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...
Opinions don't need checking, peer review or double-blind controlled studies to be heard. That's why they're called "opinions".
"Opinions are like assholes: everybody's got one and they all stink!" - Unknown (NOT DeadPool; much older than that!)
Had the study simply been released and criticized, then much of this current controversy would've been avoided, but that didn't happen. Instead, Ioannidis did the rounds at several conservative news outlets in the wake of the study's release, and promoted the study's findings as the new "best evidence." This aided in pushing certain social and political agendas. Many scientists (especially on Twitter) found this specific behavior to be unacceptable, especially from a scientist that they also felt should "know better."
I understand why at the moment peer review is being short circuited by everyone, regardless of political or epidemiological position. The world is hungry for news and journalists will interpret papers with or without the help of the authors. Might as well have their assistance, in these circumstances.
Your remark about "conservative news outlets" shows what's really going on here, I suspect - just another day in politically biased academia-land. If you talk to anything other than CNN then you're bad and wrong. The same has been seen with Alex Berenson, a former NYT journalist turned novelist who has never really taken part in politics nor even really discussed it much in public. Once he started tweeting skeptically about the actions of governments and academics, all based on public data, he discovered only the conservative news outlets were willing to interview him. And then that mere fact alone was used by the left to attack him, although his points were all based on actual verifiable facts and had no pre-existing political bias.
Ioannidis made a lot of enemies by kickstarting the replication crisis. Now it looks like some see a chance to get back at him.
I skimmed through the article and, because I'm not a statistician, I could not follow what was so blatantly wrong, if we were to charitably assume that the two sets of authors may have different premises or interpretations.
Edit: In the spirit of the STAT article (edit: removed extraneous text), I searched for "Ioannidis Gelman" (the latter being the author of your piece) and found: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/20/feud-over-stanford-co...
> In response, on Sunday, the Stanford study’s authors said they are planning to soon release a detailed appendix that addresses many of the “constructive comments and suggestions” the team has received.
> “This is exactly the way peer-review should work in scientific work, and we are looking forward to engaging with other scholars as we proceed in this important work,” said Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, who along with colleague Dr. Eran Bendavid, also assisted with the USC study.
Edit2: I'm not sure if this is the appendix referred to (probably not because the file has an older date in it), but there is a statistical appendix in the cited article: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/medrxiv/suppl/2020/04/17/202...
They used a test with a false positive rate of about 2%, and found a positive rate of about 2%. It is impossible to use this information to establish a lower bound on the number infected. However, by screwing up the computation of the confidence interval, they claimed a huge lower bound.
> “We have been working very hard to address all the comments raised by many colleagues and I am always grateful to receive constructive criticism,” he said. “While we received thousands of congratulations for this work, I cherish far more the comments of the scientists who criticized our work and I thank them deeply for their comments.”
However, the damage has already been done. He's already done his media blitz, so no matter what happens next, effectively zero people will hear the correction (or more likely, subsequent retraction). It'll just become yet another piece of zombie information, which will appear in dishonest talking points or gish gallops. The quality of public discourse and the reputation of science will continue its decline, and we'll be talking about the next example of this tomorrow.
> The authors said by email that they used a built-in Stata function and aren't sure themselves how the software used the input weights. I suspect they misapplied that function (too complicated to tweet why) but I don't know Stata well enough to be sure; it seems neither do they.
https://twitter.com/wfithian/status/1252692357788479488
Then, Ioannidis probably didn't double check the work in depth because of confirmation bias and over-confidence in his protégés.
One claim Will Fithian makes is:
> The errors are not debatable and can be seen in these two screenshots of the supplement: 0.0034, the standard error meant to measure uncertainty about prevalence pi, is not the square root of 0.039, and the variance of a binomial estimate of proportion depends on the sample size.
My statistician friend says:
> In fact the math checks out in favor of the authors. Square root of .039, then divide by square root of 3330. .= 0034 just like reported.
> So the error is debatable.
> Now, sometimes you should be using the standard deviation, not the standard error, but that isn't his claim. The .0034 is absolutely the correct standard error, unless there is a difference in terminology for the field or something.
If they didn't know (a coauthor's wife sent the email), then it's just very very bad work.
To get good numbers, you need a population where lots of people have been infected. That will allow true positives to swamp the false positives, which is what happened in the NYC study that claimed 21% of people had already been infected. Even if it's really only 19%, that doesn't change much.
You also need a good random sampling procedure. IIRC, the NYC study tested people shopping for essentials at mid-day. This underrepresents essential workers, people who are really good at self-isolation, and people who are currently sick. But still, it's not too bad.
The New York City numbers suggest that very roughly 1% of people infected with the virus will die, depending on how you count probable but unconfirmed COVID deaths reported by NYC. This could be off by a factor of two in either direction, depending on how good the random sampling was, and the characteristics of a given population.
Now my nightly rant: I did this kind of false positive calculation in high school statistics, and I hated it. Still do. I hate that we're dealing with this BS. I hate that stupid people put us in this position, and that smart people aren't smart enough to not be absolute knobs.
That articles backed by solid data is certainly the desired state, but it is very far from the current state of affairs on COVID. There are many articles that tout opposing views that are pretty liberal with data. Requesting an official apology (which, in science is almost unheard of) is simply an attempt at harassment. Mistakes happen, you refute errors and move on.
Scientists must be allowed to explore and advocate non-traditional views. Otherwise (and very quickly if you let hecklers in) you create static beliefs that live on for a long time, whether true or not, because the bar for challenge is very high and an error ruins a career.
But the "good faith" part is precisely the problem. Though it is difficult to discern good faith from bad, those who argue in bad faith destroy the system entirely, and we need some kind of defense against them.
'Scientific consensus is important, but it isn’t uncommon when some of the most important voices turn out to be those of independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted. That’s not an argument for prematurely accepting his contestable views, but it is a sound argument for keeping him, and others like him, at the table'
In a free society information and ideas should flow freely, not be banned and originators punished as happens in closed societies. It is alarming the level of vitriol and blind adherence to 'the scientific method' aka accepted establishment viewpoint in some cases, particularly online.
For all the endless proselytizing about 'innovation' there are some remarkably closed minded people around, enabled and amplified by social networks
I learned second hand that apparently a lot of scientific acedemia is like that. Crazy.
In my experience a lot of people assume that because science and related disciplines are rational endeavors that the institutions and culture compassing them must also be rational, empirical, purely evidence-based, etc. Reality can be almost comically, and sometimes tragically, the opposite.
This kind of stuff would happen at conferences too, a couple notable cases of screaming matches from the audience to the presenter have happened. Sometimes vindictive professors will go to a rival professors's grad student's talk and just grill the poor kid, asking them impossible questions and being hypercritical. Usually the grad student's own professor has to step in and try to deflect the assholes line of questioning. Sometimes the professors are even in the same department. It's a total cringe moment for the rest of the audience, and is definitely a phenomenon that is slowly growing out of the field as professors retire.
Take a look at the comment section of this blog to see it first hand: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perf...
This is the bestknown public figure in Germany who supports the Imperial College Study and the drastic lockdown measures, but his public statements are mostly political, without proper evidence. Never mentioned the IFR, the R0, the absolute numbers, the curves. Our local panic guy.
My experience has been that these faults are expressed in irrational opposition to "the scientific method", and just as dramatically as you've described - and that irrational support of it is much less dramatic.
The phrasing of this makes it sound as though his views have become accepted.
They have not, in fact the absolute shambles of a "study" he did to support his conclusions (that COVID-19 is weaker than flu, and that almost everyone has had it already) are a huge embarrassment, or ought to be, except that he works for the Hoover Institute, which is explicitly ideologically opposed to things like Public Health efforts.
There is no reason to for such "science" to be anything but excoriated.
As someone said last week, maybe he just likes being a contrarian too much, and cannot look past the urge to contradict just to gain more notoriety.
Take cloth masks, there are doctors who say it helps and doctors who say it doesn't help much. Some the doctors who said it doesn't help were genuine.
But some of the doctors were saying it doesn't help were lying because they assumed people wouldn't social distance if they wore a mask, believing the increased risk due to not wearing masks was not worth what they believed would be a big decrease in social distancing. Some of the doctors were are saying they didn't help, were lying to preserve masks for health care professionals (including lying about n95 masks).
It's hard not to feel like attacking some one you believe is deliberately putting many lives at risk to forward a political or personal agenda.
This comes back into reasoning under uncertainty that someone else brought up in the thread. The medical community has had problems in the past because bad medical interventions typically impose high costs on patients so if they have little positive benefit then it can easily become a net-negative situation. So then you have a culture where anything that hasn't gone through an RCT with multiple confirming studies doesn't exist as an intervention.
Any scientist that had a differing viewpoint was a monster who didn't value human life. Any public health official who suggested maybe just the most vulnerable be isolated was met with scorn and a heap of emotional but illogical arguments.
Look up David Katz [1]. Only Fox News would let him talk until Bill Maher put him on. He's eminently sensible, and he was silenced by the media.
Blanket lockdown (that is, all ages locked down) for this virus has never made sense in Western democracies. China did it because they could, and they have a command economy and a willing populace. The UK knew it didn't make sense from day one, but caved to public pressure. Sweden is still going strong, thank God, as they will be the country that shows the rest of the world how to live with, and ultimately beat, this disease. Norway just let the youngest kids go back to school, smartly, to increase herd immunity with less personal impact.
It will be clear in several more months that the Sweden strategy is the only way to minimize total harm and navigate this crisis.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lze-rMYLf2E
[Edit]: Good job HN participants. Way to prove the story correct.
I heard their border was closed, but I think the exceptions make the rule, if there are any
Midsommar is celebrated on the countryside with the family. Get IKEA delivery of foods (available in some US locations), boil a ton of small potatoes and get some wormwood(Swedish:malört) spiced vodka.
Also, probably the wrong country to praise a capital G God about, but that's just a cultural thing.
(yeah, everyone says it does since a week ago but data is reported late and it has been showing a downward trend the last few days for many weeks, it's not)
Everybody likes to play the numbers and curves games, but don't make it political by deliberately faking it. Like the NY Times or FT curves lately.
Even euromomo.eu changed its curves recently so they do lookh more dramatic. Not backed by the absolute numbers. They suddenly invented 32.000 unaccounted new deaths out of the magicians hat, not telling us were these new numbers came from. Some countries forbid pathologies on COVID-19 cases and forbid classification post-mortem. But this only applies to elderlies dying at home alone. But this would only apply to countries like the US with no healthcare system. Like the New Jersey case of 70 seniors. Everybody else goes to the hospitals.
Suggesting it is the equivalent of a "weak flu season" is an outright lie. And the bit about our immune system being able to fight it off well due to a similarity with the common cold is just something you made up, right?
Around 2k deaths is a common but serious flu, and corona has passed that, and we don't see a peak.
At that point, they could end up in a situation where they experience the same deaths and have crippled their economy for months. Sweden would look very clever under such a scenario.
We will only know what strategies worked the best with benefit of hindsight.
For the vast majority of other countries delaying deaths will mean saving many lives, because of overwhelmed healthcare systems.
In the US, for example, healthcare systems are overloaded in places far from hotspots. If the lockdown had come a day or two later in places that are hotspots it would have been a catastrophe.
I think the big psychological driver was the situation in Italy and Spain: The overwhelmed hospitals, the localized rationing of certain medical care, and front-line medical workers who were getting sick (and sometimes dying). I guess it turns out that nobody wants to watch their medical system collapse?
> Any public health official who suggested maybe just the most vulnerable be isolated was met with scorn
So how would you imagine this working? Healthy people in their 70s who live in standalone homes might be able to self-isolate. (I know a handful of highly-disciplined people who are planning to remain isolated until we get a vaccine, even if it takes until the fall 2021.) But people who live in multi-generational homes, or who rely on assistance, or who live in apartment buildings probably can't self-isolate. And how would we handle people in assisted living? Do the caregivers "live in" for a month-long shift?
The death rates in the over-70 group are pretty bad (and even healthy people of that age usually have some pre-existing conditions), and the death rates in the over-80 group are ugly. For the population at large, it looks like ~0.2% of NYC is already dead, and ~20% of the population has antibodies. So we'd be looking at something like a 1% fatality rate, which would work out to over 2 million dead nationwide before we reached herd immunity. And that's not counting any long-term damage to survivors from blood clots, oxygen deprivation, or kidney damage (Wuhan is allegedly seeing an uptick in dialysis patients). I don't know how common or serious these complications are at a population level.
> It will be clear in several more months that the Sweden strategy is the only way to minimize total harm and navigate this crisis.
I wish I had a crystal ball, so that I could actually know what worked the best. You seem very certain that Sweden's on the right track. Some Asian countries seem to be focusing on minimizing gatherings, masking, contact tracing and isolation of the infected, which allows them to have a partially functioning economy.
All of these solutions are awful in different ways. I'm just not convinced that the right answer is as clear as you make it out to be, certainly not without a lot more detail about how to successfully isolate people over 70 from an airborne virus.
All very predictable though.
Ioannidis is the only real example provided in the article, and his opinion piece (and the related Stanford study) was criticized, not because he's an iconoclast, but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy). Not only that, but then, instead of engaging with the scientific community, his "expertise" was co-opted by the conservative media and its agenda.
is this not exactly what the original article cautions against? if it's bad science (which should be debatable) it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately.
The problem is that if, as a scientist, I know that people are likely to convert my findings into policy, then I have an extra duty to be especially diligent and extra thorough so that my findings are valid.
Ioannidis knew exactly what he was doing when he put this pile of garbage out there. The fact that it was shoddy methodology means that he should get ESPECIALLY torched for it as an object lesson to other "scientists".
First, the original article is actually about the exact opposite. It says nothing about attacking an opinion based on its merit, it talks about attacking an opinion based on dogma. When I say it's bad science, I'm saying it's bad science because of glaring problems with its methodology; I thought that was obvious (the term "bad science" being fairly common).
Second, I'm talking about the social policy argued for in Ioannidis' opinion piece. Social policy absolutely does not just directly follow the science; they are very different things and absolutely should be discussed separately. I find it a bit absurd to think that science inherently dictates a certain social policy.
Every side of the so-called debate throws it left and right, now which science do you believe in? As if belief is part of the equations.
And the other issue is that there are no debates. You send a tweet, and tag WHO or some authoritative figure and then we have to believe it. Those who don't believe it are not following the science.
Edit: Science is supposed to evolve as new data comes in. Today, we stop at the first sensational news. When a fact is updated or retracted, it doesn't make the news.
In the data starved regime, belief indeed does enter the equations in the form of a Bayesian prior.
Agreed that new data should update the results.
Anyway, i think the point of this article is that people that are not scientists themselves can debate with each other, but should avoid perturbing (i'd say polluting even) the scientific debate, whether its by disparaging an adversarial opinion or but elevating a scientits too high (see what has happened with the pr Raoult cult in France). This is too much noise and scientist are people too.
I don't agree with the premise that scientists should be silenced or suffer personal attacks for putting out controversial or even flat out "bad" science. I think we have seen that approach backfire, and lead to distrust of expert opinions and traditional news sources. Instead I think that we should be focusing on improving scientific literacy in the general population, and electing leaders who surround themselves with and take advice from competent scientists. And if people in certain countries, districts, etc. are not interested in doing so... well... they are certainly free to vote however they see fit and live with the results of that decision.
They shouldn't be silenced, but they should be criticized, and criticized intensely, for a botch a first-year grad student shouldn't make.
So some newer studies try to find out why and how this disease is so weak. Affected countries, like Belgium, Spain, NL, England, US like to know why their rates are higher. It's not the measures, it's not the weak ICU infrastructure. it's something else. Like age group, seniors living seperately of with the families, diabetes, obesity, air pollution, or other co-morbidities. Currently the numbers are not too troubling, but still would make an interesting study.
I don't think it's fair to say they "ignored" the effect of false positives. The paper very clearly states:
> We consider our estimate to represent the best available current evidence, but recognize that new information, especially about the test kit performance, could result in updated estimates.For example, if new estimates indicate test specificity to be less than 97.9%, our SARS-CoV-2 prevalence estimate would change from 2.8% to less than 1%, and the lower uncertainty bound of our estimate would include zero.
Some statisticians have accused them of being sloppy with their estimate of their lower uncertainty bound (among other things). The authors have stated that they disagree, and are working to put out additional data to show that their findings are "robust". I honestly don't know (I don't have enough of a background in stats to have an opinion either way), but I look forward to seeing what the authors put out next and how the scientific community responds to it. And more importantly than the results of this single study, I’m looking forward to more antibody testing in the future.
As the article notes, it is not a matter of agreeing but of treating other people in the scientific field with respect.
Also, some of those opinions may be wrong or just partially wrong, but we don't see that many mea culpa, if any.
These controversies are pretty local: they tend to flare up every now and then because most of these people are regularly invited (in presence or via video call) to TV shows.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/seven-year-legal-sag...
What, if anything, is more necessary to a free society than the free expression and debate of ideas?
This of course requires a literate and critical interpretation of the facts and data by all, but I digress. This is science.
At the same time, we are concerned by a chilling attitude among some [people], who are wrongly ascribing legitimate disagreements about [issues] to ignorance or to questionable political or other motivations.
The commons must be protected from bad actors, and bad faith whose purpose is to use the openness of society against itself. [1]
Just look at the 2 Bakersfield doctors this week.
IHME_UW has been making massive errors and no one seems to mind.
If you advance an argument that lack proper and vigorous proof, I have no reason to hear you. I will however tear your work to pieces. As many pieces as I can, so I can ride that train as long as I can.
That's how science advents currently. Otherwise all of us academics would be building our work on top of each others' collaboratively and productively. Minorities and women would not have been shunned out; graduate slave labor, and adjunct faculty would have been unthinkable.
If a scientist argues against saving human lives now, because of a man made economic systems inability to cope with the crisis might kill more people later, I say don‘t hear him, criticize him based on an ethical discourse. Save the lives now and adjust the system so people don‘t need to die.
We also see what we could have done to prevent and outbreak, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan seemed to be extremely prepared.
Germany followed the virologist, epidemiologist consensus (and is going now off track to open businesses again ... a lot of scientist believe too early).
We will see in the long run which approaches worked and which didn’t. Yet, calling for an opening of businesses (because we cannot be sure about the death rate), when none of the successful countries did that, is ethically dubious to me.
By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0]
It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines.
[0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...
It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.
Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.
It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.
I'm not really worried about creationism or climate stabilism competing given those conditions. And if those aren't the conditions, it's not scientific discourse.
The issue is not that scientists, or discerning non-scientists, will take those views seriously, it's that others might (or will, or do). Hence the issue is not with defining scientific discourse, it's with educating a population to be able to apply that definition (or formulate their own functional individual ones).
Should we give the 1% a voice? Yes
Should we consider the view of the 1% as equal to the 99%? No.
Here's what happens when someone vocally has a dissenting view: they get press coverage, both neutral and from agenda-driven perspectives. There is exactly one country (the US, maybe two if you count Australia) where a majority of those in decision making positions believe or act as if they believe that climate change is not real. They justify this by quoting the 1% and ignoring the 99%.
As such then the 1% are causing significant harm to the planet (assuming that the majority view is correct).
The same in a more vivid way is true for covid: those dissenting voices (eg the French doctor Trump ended up quoting) get a lot of coverage no matter how sound the science proposed by those dissenters is (or in this case unsound - a study on the medicine he recommended had to be ended due to heavy health impacts of the medicine).
These dissenters and rapidly published papers have led to deaths. No doubt, no questions, people have died due to those perspectives being pushed into the mainstream discussions.
So should they be heard by peers and their views be discussed? Yes. Should they get press coverage, blog their viewpoints out there, etc, even if it leads to thousands of deaths (or destruction of the planet)? I don't think so.
This is a role for media to filter (rather than blare everything into the ether), but also a self-constraint that any serious scientist should impose upon themselves. The public is not able to decide which old guy with a professor/Dr in front of his name is the one to trust.
"Hey maybe let's not do the one massively researched thing that we've done since times of the plague because there's not enough data" is neither of those things.
Open dialogue in science needs to take place in the forums already in place, not on clickbaity money-starved legacy media.
EDIT: Dear rando downvoters, please instead of lurking help foster debate by stating why in your opinion untestable indefensible claims should be allowed to pass as science in the name of "open dialogue".
That's happening on YouTube now.
Absolutely nothing? Unless you post misinformation, in which case, it will be left up but demonetized. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en
Where did you get the deletion and ban nonsense from?
What doesn't work so well is analogizing to things that are more emotionally intense. It comes from wanting your words to match the intensity of your emotions when the real thing is really not that bad.
Good. They should continue.
The article ends by saying the problem is that the issue has been politicized, which is quite correct. But author should have said this started when Trump and a large portion of the conservative media claimed that the whole thing was a hoax, that the scientists knew the coronavirus is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu, but decided, thousands of them, to lie to the public so as to undermine the US economy and prevent Trump from being re-elected in November.
>When major decisions must be made amid high scientific uncertainty, as is the case with Covid-19, we can’t afford to silence or demonize professional colleagues with heterodox views.
How much scientific uncertainty actually exists when it comes to climate change and its causes?
The debate has been poisoned by deniers pointing to any uncertainty as evidence of it all being fake. The intellectually honest approach is to consider the expected costs across all likely outcomes, and spend money on mitigations accordingly.
Want to see this go away? Remove FB/Insta/Twitter from the planet, along with the entire mainstream media, all of which have business models based on the aforementioned idiocy as well as non-stop conflict generation.
When you are done with that task go purge every sitting legislative body on the planet which in general are bought and paid for by those same special interests.
Then you'd have a clean slate to build on for intelligent dialog and meaningful efforts related to not just Covid 19, but many other pressing global concerns...</rant>
It's interesting to phrase this as "views." I'd prefer to see all relevant data.
Sometimes Scientists could have a gut feeling, and this may not have data to back it up. I think its still important to talk about it, while acknowledging that we're discussing a hypothesis, and not a proven fact.