I looked at Twitter again today. Nothing’s changed. What a sad swamp.
- Every day, there are “experts” name-calling and bashing other experts for having different perspectives, calling them incompetent, without addressing the issues in contention. Very unprofessional.
- More “experts” call for mandatory lock downs and blaming capitalism (the Constitution, and so on) for the U.S. failing to have locked up the entire country under house arrest for months on end or forcefully detaining citizens in quarantine camps. I saw an “expert” saying this today, and his worshippers eagerly piled on in support of that. We should have been more like China, he said, where steel fences were erected around apartment buildings. Where front doors were chained or welded shut. Where if one person in a 500 resident apartment tested positive, then everyone was taken away to quarantine camps and locked in a cell for up to two weeks (at their own expense!). Where pets were killed. Yes, if only we had been more like China.
- I see inconsistent, contradictory guidance that is illogical and incoherent. If you get Covid in the U.S., you should isolate for 5 days and then can leave isolation. If you get Covid outside the U.S., then you must isolate for 10 days before you can leave isolation. Because SARS-CoV-2 virus knows its location?
- Every day, we see “expert” pronouncements about the future – which usually prove wrong – by a lot. No one goes back and holds them accountable. Instead, we eagerly look forward to their next frightening pronouncement. The scarier their pronouncements, the more worshipers they get on social media.
- Models failed spectacularly – yet we treat them as gospel. Models seem authoritative, and if real world data disagrees, then the real world is wrong. This is bizarre.
- Many experts enjoyed becoming media celebrities and make grand pronouncements based on little or no evidence. When n=1000, a finding is suggestive, but when n=0 based on expert opinion, the finding is rock solid.
- Many experts are condescending. When members of the public ask reasonable questions via social media, some have responded with “How dare you question me? I have X degrees and Y years of experience”. Translation, the public are idiots, experts are to be listened to and we have no right to be confused by inconsistent, contradictory, incoherent statements that are illogical. Stop asking stupid questions!
Besides having lost faith in public health, I’ve lost much confidence in the practitioners of science. The damage inflicted will not be restored in my lifetime. It’s that bad.
Others See the Problem Too
He’s a mathematician:
Examples of Public Health Professionalism
This is from an associate professor of public health at Yale University – so professional.
The above are the experts that know they are smarter than you – so shut up you stupid peon. You have no right question anything they order you to do.
(As of June 20th, 2022:
Here’s harrassment by an MD with lots of initials (Twitter made him delete this later) – Monica Gandhi and Vinay Prasad are professors of medicine at UC San Francisco:
The Twitter scientists are collegial, polite and so professional as in the next tweet from Canada. Canada has essentially identical demographics to the U.S., identical population density, identical population ethnicities and race and age distributions (that is satire if you haven’t caught on) – there are no other factors that account for differences between any countries – they are all identical! It’s amazing!
But – it’s okay, this rant is fine because he is a scientist, a lawyer, a professor, super highly educated and you are just a peon idiot – know your place!
This is a Canadian professor:
He is such a nice and professional guy:
Check out his student ratings. Ouch. Or his full wikipedia background (see “Controversies” section). Hmmm.
Others have noticed this ugliness in the professional community.
The lack of self-awareness by highly educated “experts” is stunning. Twitter has revealed much about the elite Experttm class and the experts are not what they want you to think they are!
Straight up Lying
It’s not safe to open schools ….
and then claims he did everything to keep schools open …
IF only we had been like China …
If we really cared, we’d have had martial law enforced by the military. But shame on us!
Early in the pandemic, everyone said lock downs were morally and ethically wrong.
Protesting was more important than fighting a virus, said the experts
We just spent 3 months being told to “Stay Home. Save Lives”. And just like that, protesting is now more important than fighting a virus (this is the tweet that began my loss of trust in science):
Within a day, 1,187 public health experts signed on to a petition saying the same thing. Within days I went from worshipping public health to despising them for their lies and realizing it was all politics, all the way down. There was no science.
The virus can tell the difference between a social gathering and a political protest gathering, hence, protests can be 8 times larger!
How They Think of You
They refuse to answer questions – many disable comments and questions, as shown above.
They Ignore Their Own Mandates
Prof Neil Ferguson of ICL was the architect of the UK’s lock down. Ten days after testing positive, he violated his own lock down program to have sex with his married lover.
His rules didn’t apply to him because he’s more important than you – geez, you should know your place snively little peon!
Later we would learn that Ferguson’s disease model projections were off by orders of magnitude. Still later, his model source coded ended up on GitHub and revealed a steaming pile of spaghetti code unsuitable for any purpose. The output of the model was random – each time it was run with the same input parameters, it produced different results. So he ran it multiple times and averaged the results, thinking this magic made it good.
Eric Feigl-Ding, PhD, a social media celebrity regarding all things Covid-19 and focused on scare mongering, advocated strongly for the closure of schools in the U.S. while secretly moving his family to Austria so their son could attend in person school. He could do this because of his and his wife’s privileged status. He was caught when his wife posted on social media:
I have (as of this writing) 120 single spaced pages devoted to the hypocrites who ignored their own Covid rules. See the right-hand side bar for the Covid hypocrites. There did not seem to be many (or may be any) “experts” who believed anything they were telling or enforcing on the general public – so many flagrantly violated their own rules.
Propaganda
Walensky lied. 15 days to flatten the curve has morphed into 15 booster shots to flatten the curve.
By 2023, we know the above was untrue. Walenksy had emails prior to making this statement where she was aware that the vaccines did not prevent you from getting Covid. She lied to the public and in one swoop destroyed all credibility. Combined with so many other lies, inconsistent and contradictory statements we know that public health literally did not know what they were doing.
It was near Halloween, and the OHA thought it appropriate to read the daily body count numbers dressed as a clown. This really happened.
Mask nonsense – this section could go on to infinity:
Models
I need a bigger blog for this category. Here is one example. From Oct 28 2020 to Feb 1 2021, OHA’s models, which only projected 3 weeks into the future, had a bad track record. In 11 out of the 13 projections, they had the sign wrong! They said cases would go down, but they went up, or vice versa. A coin toss would be more accurate!
Black line is actual – the colored lines are the projections.
I have dozens or in some cases, hundreds of examples.
By the fall of October 2022, the CDC stopped publishing their disease model ensemble, quietly noting that disease models as “low reliability”.
Name calling, illogical, inconsistent arguments, condescending attitudes, refusing to answer legitimate questions and arguing solely from an “appeal to authority” have ruined credibility of individuals and entire fields. What a mess.
And there were outright lies and the revelation that public health was 100% politicized (protesting more important than fighting a virus).
The social media personas of public health experts – physicians, epidemiologists, public health officials – and some scientists (most were better behaved than the physicians and epidemiologists) have destroyed confidence in all of science.
