by Judith Curry

Much has changed in science since the pandemic and much of it is change for the worse. The pandemic has highlighted the loss of credibility of the public health establishment and the often toxic nature of current public discourse. John Ioannidis stands out as perhaps the best example of a fine scientist who was smeared and denigrated mercilessly both online and in the literature. There was also a flood of fraudulent papers and badly flawed studies. This made claims that we should follow the “The Science” almost laughable, given the extremely poor quality of much of the science. The use of coercion was inexcusable when there was no rigorous basis for it.

John Ioannidis was perhaps the most famous victim of a broad ranging culture of censorship and suppression. As [1] summarizes:

“The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly ac- complished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health.”

Epidemiology

One of the first things that became obvious to me during the pandemic was that viral epidemiology was a primitive science dominated by crude mechanistic explanations that lacked quantification. One article that led me to this conclusion was [2]. I reproduce a part of the abstract here.

“The epidemiology of influenza swarms with incongruities, incongruities exhaustively detailed by the late British epidemiologist, Edgar Hope-Simpson. He was the first to propose a parsimonious theory explaining why influenza is, as Gregg said,”seemingly unmindful of traditional infectious disease behavioral patterns. Recent discoveries indicate vitamin D upregulates the endogenous antibiotics of innate immunity and suggest that the incongruities explored by Hope-Simpson may be secondary to the epidemiology of vitamin D deficiency. We identify – and attempt to explain nine influenza conundrums:

• Why is influenza both seasonal and ubiquitous and where is the virus between epidemics?

• Why are the epidemics so explosive?

• Why do they end so abruptly?

• What explains the frequent coincidental timing of epidemics in countries of similar latitude?

• Why is the serial interval obscure?

• Why is the secondary attack rate so low?

• Why did epidemics in previous ages spread so rapidly, despite the lack of modern transport?

• Why does experimental inoculation of seronegative humans fail to cause illness in all the volunteers?

• Why has influenza mortality of the aged not declined as their vaccination rates increased?”

It is blindingly obvious that the spread of viral epidemics is riddled with unknowns, is a badly ill-posed problem and models will all be wrong, and mostly badly wrong. Yet modeling played a significant part in motivating the policy response to Covid19.

The Role of the Media in Spring 2020

The list of issues where pseudo-science was used to make decisions is long. Mask mandates, lockdowns, school closures, vaccination recommendations, vaccination requirements for employment or university attendance, and travel restrictions. The public was often bullied and/or manipulated into compliance based on fear and/or media generated panic. Early statistics on Covid cases and deaths were shown endlessly in the spring of 2020. These statistics seemed to imply that 10-15% of those who got Covid would die, often horribly. This was gravely misleading without stating that the case fatality rate is not meaningful when testing is scarce and that infection fatality rate estimates always go down (often dramatically) as an epidemic progresses because testing becomes more accurate and treatment methods improve.

The well known fact that the vast majority of those dying from Covid19 were already quite ill or elderly was systematically hidden. Scientists who said this were ridiculed by this same narrative driven media. The media in the US at least are little more than ideologically driven (and now partially state controlled) purveyors of carefully screened “information” backing the elites in the West and their preferred ideologies [3, 4] and the public is becoming more and more convinced that they cannot be trusted. The media was and is a full participant in the culture of censorship and cancellation described below. Often their “reporting” is based on a single anonymous leak whose reliability is unknown by readers and in some cases the reporters. Of course, leakers usually have a partisan purpose and like to leak selectively to give a biased picture and/or support their interests or those of their employer.

Marginalizing Expertise

A must read is [5]. “Imperatives like skepticism and disinterestedness are being junked to fuel political warfare that has nothing in common with scientific methodology.” Ioannidis carefully lays out in detail a sad history of abuses and indeed in some cases, outright fraud. Ioannidis published prolifically during the pandemic and endured a public caning by a mob of online trolls and even fellow scientists and politicians. His is not an isolated example. Scott Atlas, Jay Battacharya, Martin Kuhldorff and Marty Makary are four more academic scientists who received similar treatment. I believe that the response to Ioannidis was particularly harsh because of his sterling reputation for being totally non-political and his incredible accomplishments. Thus, the online mob and the public health establishment realized that discrediting him was critical to preserving their own credibility.

As it turns out, these tactics backfired on our “expert class” as shown by the public’s abysmal uptake on the new vaccines. Sanity has returned to some European countries such as Denmark, where they recommend that those who are under 50 and healthy need not take any more Covid vaccines. But in the US, the CDC is putting the new Covid19 vaccine on their recommended list of childhood vaccinations in spite of very strong evidence that the harms of this vaccine vastly outweigh the benefits in the children and young adults [6].

Now we have the ultimate irony, an economics professor asking for amnesty for the terrible decisions and epidemic of lying and disinformation during the pandemic [7]. I for one am unwilling to give them amnesty without a full confession, apologies, and changes of personnel in leadership positions.

Perhaps fed by the pandemic, a new and disturbing trend is the prevalence of “zombie” trials in which there is no evidence there is any real data underlying the results [8]. This is further evidence of how weak the peer review system has become. The idea that fraud is widespread in science has moved from the fringes to the pages of the BMJopinion [9]. Ioannidis [5] cites a couple of covid papers in leading journals that were essentially fraudulent. At least one of these was still being cited over a year later!!

A Culture of Censorship and Cancellation

My previous post at Climate, Etc. [10] provided some references for the sad state of science pre-Covid. Basically, the replication crisis was in full swing. That post pointed to the serious problems in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and offered some ideas for addressing them. Things have changed for the worse post-pandemic. Perhaps the most salient fact about the pandemic was how politicized the science became, just as with the AIDS epidemic. There was a remarkable coincidence between a desire to “stop” the epidemic by any means necessary (regardless of how many collateral causalities there were) and climate alarmism that seeks to control the climate by eliminating fossil fuels. The complete playbook that made climate science’s culture deteriorate was deployed to Covid science and epidemiology, making meaningful scientific debate virtually impossible [1]. As described out below, the Covid panic went well beyond the climate science playbook. [1] is long and very detailed and worth a full read.

“Creating a false consensus by censoring information and preventing scientific debates might lead scientists, and thus also policymakers, to sink into the ruling paradigm, causing them to ignore other, more effective options to cope with the crisis or perhaps even prevent it. Such a “consensus” leads to a narrow worldview, which impairs the public’s ability to make informed decisions and erodes public trust in medical science and in public health (Cernic 2018; Delborne 2016; Martin 2014, 2015; Vernon 2017).”

“Yet, there are three main differences [with previous instances of suppression]. First, when it comes to COVID-related knowledge, the censorship tactics used against dissenters are extreme and unprecedented in their intensiveness and extensiveness, with scientific journals, and academic and medical institutions taking an active and involved part in censoring critical voices. In fact, as one of our respondents indicates, even pre-print servers and academic social networking sites censor scientific papers that do not align with the mainstream narrative, and this seems to be a growing trend.   Furthermore, what our respondents describe goes way beyond censorship, and includes a wide range of suppression methods intended to destroy their reputations and careers, solely because they dared to take a different position from that dictated by the medical establishment.”

As pointed out by Battacharya, this behavior is really analogous to the Middle Ages with ”The Science” being the new clerisy [11].

“We live in an age when a high public health bureaucrat can, without irony, announce to the world that if you criticize him, you are not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing “The Science” itself. The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.”

Collusion of The Deep State, Corporate Media, and Big Tech

The latest instantiation of this authoritarianism is the rise of a vast industry devoted to ferreting out and censoring “misinformation” and “disinformation” [12, 13]. The first piece is an excellent deep dive into the way the leaders of this complex view themselves. Of course, science often is the subject of these censors [14]. There is a large industry devoted to framing oneself as a “disinformation” expert, a category that is largely meaningless and has no well defined credentials. Just as there was competition over the last 30 years among non-scientists and political activists and a few activist scientists to hype climate catastrophes and sniff out and cancel the more realistic scientists, now political operatives, activists, the media and often the deep state and some scientists compete to see who can be in the forefront of rounding up the witches who spread “disinformation‘’ and burning them. This is just a new and much more pervasive form of Red baiting [13]. The Twitter Files [4] proved the existence of a broad collusion between the FBI, CIA, big tech, “disinformation” NGOs and corporate media to censor voices that appear to be suspicious of or contradict the “authorities,” with their often false and destructive narratives acting to deplatform these voices.

The range of issues and “information” that attracts their attention is quite broad. It extends even to ordinary Americans who were flagged as Russian trolls by the fraudulent Hamilton 68 dashboard, an oft cited source that was said to “prove” massive and consequential Russian interference in American elections.

This is detailed in [15]. This Taibbi Twitter files summary begins:

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