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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

> and tweets links to The American Conservative.

Why do we care about this? Does he also have bad taste in summer outfits?

> which attracted opposition from many other scientists as inappropriate/unscientific (not simply wrong yet within the bounds of good-faith scientific inquiry)

That is incorrect. The counter arguments were narrow and about statistical methods, specifically risk ratio usage and confounders. Neither side appeared out of bounds in this debate.

> Peter McCullough appeared on an episode of Joe Rogan where even Joe Rogan correctly identified that his claims were implausible.

Your evidence here is an HN thread which restates the issue. Double infections are exceedingly rare (currently): https://nypost.com/2022/01/03/israel-reports-rare-double-inf...

Attack facts and claims, not people.

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The NY Post article you link to is about getting both Covid and influenza at the same time. That may be rare.

Getting covid a second time after having previously had it (which is what McCullough erroneously claimed was near impossible) is in fact increasingly common.

Do you have a citation?

> Cases of reinfection with COVID-19 have been reported, but remain rare .

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfe...

I agree that they are rare. Dr. McCullough's claim was that they were impossible, that Rogan's friend who got it twice actually had influenza or something one of the times - a diagnosis he made based on no information other than appearing to have gotten it twice.

If he merely claimed they were rare, that would not discredit him.

To recap, you are upset because a doctor on a podcast used the phrase "impossible" instead of "very rare"?

What's the point of professionals and experts if they don't communicate clearly and precisely? Why even have him on a podcast?

Communicating technical concepts to lay audiences is difficult, and a universal problem these days.

Very rare and impossible are nearly equivalent wrt policies that broadly and significantly impact personal health and liberty.

I agree that communicating these concepts is hard, but that characterization of "very rare" and "impossible" only makes it harder.

Pandemics are very rare. Flying unicorns shooting Ebola out of their horns are impossible.

Nope. Genetic engineering and bioweapons could very make the latter a reality. And that's why you don't try to be pendantic.

I'm hardly "upset" - I just think the doctor is not a reliable source of medical information and not operating in good faith.

Are you upset because I hold that view based on observable evidence? Like, genuinely, I'm confused why you're so invested in arguing against me. What's the thing I said that you disagree with? Are you saying that the doctor is a reliable source of medical information despite his entirely unsubstantiated pronouncement that there was no possible way Joe Rogan's friend could have gotten covid twice, and one of those cases must have been influenza or something?

Attack facts and claims, not people.

And as mentioned above, he later clarified that he was talking about pre-Omicron variants, where that was true. It now seems possible to get Omicron more than once, but since it has virtually no impact (most people never even know they have it, especially here in Austin in Dec-Feb "Cedar Fever" season), it really makes no difference, other than that it's not yet known if it works the other way, so that an Omicron infection may provide protection against prior variants.

This particular CDC page reports it was last updated in August.

Yes, but in the subsequent podcast with Joe Rogan and Robert Malone, Dr. Malone specifically says that Dr. McCullough asked that he let everyone know that he was basing his information on pre omicron variant and that reinfections are actually much more common with this variant.

Nah a lot of Delta cases where reinfections, I can't believe we are still arguing about wether COVID mutations can reinfect only because of McCullough.

Of course if you only look at the "variants of concern" that the media talks about you basically have to wait years until you have like 4 or 5 variants that went all around the world to see how common it is for it to mutate in a way that can reinfect, but considering Delta reinfections where common and now Omicron is also reinfecting everyone, I would just not loose any more time listening to McCullough. Note he says its _impossible_, not rare or weird or strange, _impossible_. He actually called bullshit on Rogan because Rogan said his friend got it twice because he got Delta and the first variant.

> Nah a lot of Delta cases where reinfections,

That is an amazing fact if true and you should alert the CDC immediately with your evidence.

The first serious reinfection study I saw for Delta was the NHS study, with like 350+ reinfections over more than 35000 health workers. I think the chances for a case on that study to be a reinfection was something like 1.2% to 1.5%

I consider that "a lot" special when compared to McCulloughs prediction of 0.0% because reinfection was impossible.

Not facts and claims...common sense.

Nothing suggests these folks are acting in good faith. They showed no willingness to bound an obviously over-scoped request. It is sad the judge didn't see this for what it is.

They are abusing the process to make the FDA and Pfizer look bad by requesting an absurd number of things and not scoping out things that they obviously are not entitle to. Pfizer, like it or not is entitled to have their trade secrets protected. Like it or not, Pfizer and teh FDA have a responsibility to protect the private healthcare information of patients who participated. That takes time. If I was a vaccine trial participant I would be suing the pants off these loons.

I feel like I'm living in crazy town...go read the emails that these loons attached of their own email conversation with the FDA. one person (the FDA rep) is trying to have a serious and productive conversation, the guy from PCP (or whatever) wants to stand on a street corner and shout. They attached this in support of their own lawsuit

Extraordinary claims require at least some effort. It isn't the job of everyone to engage and disprove everything stupid people say...at some point saying 'this dude is a loon' is a sufficient counter to 'why won't you debate me'. The preponderance of evidence, including engagement with things like the American Conservative and Joe Rogan as a source of healthcare information meaningfully suggest against taking these people seriously and that's all that is necessary.

[0] https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/032-Appendix-in...

Trust the science. Btw, my name is Science ;)

US citizens are legally entitled to this information.

>this information.

what information...exactly what information?

if I file a FOIA request for the presidents tax return and it gets denied for a legal exemption is that the government hiding something?

There is a FOIA process, there are things that are exempt from disclosure - that is part of the law as well.

FDA follows a process, outlined here: https://phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/023-FDA-Appendi... (page 5+)

In reality, the plaintiffs are the ones slowing the process of releasing this information down by being unreasonable. it means FDA is reviewing and denying OBVIOUSLY privileged or exempt documents that the group only asked for to then waive about the number of documents that the FDA 'wOuLdN't DiScLoSe'.

If you are playing quantitative games with FOIA request document numbers you are acting in bad faith. When you are trying to scope as many exempt documents as possible into your request so you can later use that number to push your narrative, you are acting in bad faith. Because when you aren't interested in the content of the documents, nothing you are doing has anything to do with serious efforts at transparency.

We are not talking about a request for POTUS tax returns.

The process is defined by the Freedom of Information Act itself and not the Department of Health and Human Services. Here is the act https://www.justice.gov/oip/freedom-information-act-5-usc-55... and by law there only 9 exemption categories that allow a US agency to withhold information. They are: 1. classified information for national defense or foreign policy 2. internal personnel rules and practices 3. information that is exempt under other laws 4. trade secrets and confidential business information 5. inter-agency or intra-agency memoranda or letters that are protected by legal privileges 6. personnel and medical files 7. law enforcement records or information 8. information concerning bank supervision 9. geological and geophysical information

> We are not talking about a request for POTUS tax returns.

You're right, we're talking about random private citizens medical information, which falls under 6. That's what the majority of the pages requested are, and why it'll take so long to redact them: they're mostly clinical notes about people like you and me. The relevant information that won't be redacted is already publicly accessible.

Dont worry, Federal agencies aren't shy to redact.

Or perhaps they’ll be “anonymized” which is tech’s go to term for running roughshod over our secrecy.

People like you and me who willingly participated in a public funded study. If Pfizer did not anonymize the data from the beginning that is foolish at best.

…they wouldn’t be allowed to anonymize data they submit to the fda

Honestly this discussion is insane, this entire discussion presumes a bunch of people selling snake oil are more credible than the people trying to make sure drugs are safe. The “well the fda screws up sometimes” is only useful to that argument if you have already picked the narrative you want. Otherwise it’s like saying I’d rather go to see with a cannibal I have never met than my younger brother because he bit me once when we were kids.

You gotta realize that these gov agencies give bad faith arguments to say that they can't release records routinely. These government agencies know full fucking well that these records will be responsive to FOIA and yet they still don't make efforts to make it accessible and releasable to the public. Same goes to Pfizer. It's our responsibility as a public to make sure important information like this isn't being hidden.

Their litigation is aggressive, there's no doubt there. But does that mean the information isn't any less important? Back when the pandemic started, a lot of FOIA nerds were hesitant to submit FOIAs because of the issues around quarantine, WFH etc. At the end though, transparency is such a fundamentally important part of our understanding of our own governance that it's important that we don't hold back on important issues like this.

It doesn't even really matter too much if the organization won't use the docs themselves. Their litigation is making it available to the public. If they're not going to look through them, someone will.

I have this old quaint idea that government shouldn’t have too many secrets. That an informed public requires open records.

to flip what you are saying around, I believe that every government record should be born publicly available unless explicitly rendered secret (under review, of course). That is, I shouldnt have to file a FOIA, the agency should file a “Request for Secrecy”

I think it’s quaint that HN is so confident they know what should and shouldn’t be kept confidential by the government without seeing them.

I dont. I specifically mentioned the mechanism that state secrets should be generated by: by the government proactively making something secret.

Otherwise everything is automatically an openly available record.

> Why do we care about this? Does he also have bad taste in summer outfits?

You can feign ignorance here but the answer is obvious. Anti-vax talking points are far more common in conservative media.

For the sake of argument even if they were conservatives or anti-vaxer or felons or insurrectionists the Freedom of Information Act still applies to them.

The initial statement was questioning their motives, not to remove the FOIA.

> My guess is it's a group of charlatans looking to sell their own COVID cures

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