Fediverse vs Disinformation

How do you deal with flawed papers?? Especially on this scale. Like as a social issue

I highly suggest reading the second half of the article at a minimum. Morris destroys this bullshit paper. But Morris is the director of biostatistics at UPenn. You can’t expect the average person to hold articles to the same rigor that he will. But for better or for worse the articles are available to all.

Like as a person who is educated on statistics and research methodology it is generally easy to find flaws in a deeply flawed paper like this (although some things, like the authors having a history of retracted papers, the journal not being listed in pubmed or medline, the journals mailing address being just some guys house, the journals board of directors all being antivax nuts, etc), take effort and research.

But the laymen can’t necessarily see this. Of course that’s why they bother to go to these lengths. To create an “alternative” (read: fake) journal. Because an article like this (hopefully) wouldn’t pass the review process in a legitimate journal. But a laymen doesn’t know that. They don’t know the difference between nature, Wiley, and whatever the fuck their kooky shit is called. The pdfs all look the same. It legitimizes their nonsense

In a time where people just read abstracts (or really just headlines) and call themselves experts, how do you combat this? I don’t know. This paper was shockingly easy to tear apart and here it is, in a congressional hearing, being presented as a potential valid source. Some of our congresspeople brought good papers to counter but even they didn’t seem to know how to tear this paper apart when it had such basic flaws. But all Kennedy had to do was not cite the Wakefield study and find one of the many kooky papers that have been written in its wake (lol) which they didn’t prep for.

This should’ve been a shutdown where he referenced that paper, they looked it over, and immediately fucking destroyed it. I was unfamiliar with that paper and found several issues on my first read like confounding variables mentioned in the article. This is a pretty big one but not as huge as the major one Morris mentions, which is the potential for vaccinations to have occurred outside of network, making their data and proposed outcome garbage!

It’s funny because when you work in a medical field you’re taught explicitly to stay in your lane. Ethical codes generally tell you to do this too. Not everyone does this obviously. But when someone is outside of this system, like rfk, they can do whatever the fuck they want. Like if an MD was sitting for this right now people could appeal to the AMA to pull their license. But RFK has no such authority over him. He can say whatever and do whatever. Libs love that of course but it means that he can push very harmful narratives with no evidence

Dark times. I genuinely don’t know how to handle something like this

And a reminder while anti vaccination goes wayyy back (it actually predates vaccines, oddly) the autism vaccine link is primarily due to the “Wakefield study” from 1998 linking the mmr vaccine to autism. This was (eventually, took forever) retracted because Wakefield both falsified data and had a vested financial interest in test kits (he stood to gain $43 million per year). He also had his medical license revoked. He has since shed all of that though and decided to ride the anti vaccination wave, which is quite lucrative. He has done podcasts, documentaries, “political activism”, and was hobnobbing with celebrities back when anti vaccination crunchiness was a weird lefty thing (he was even married to Elle McPherson for a few years). Like many sociopaths a grifter who does not give a shit about killing hundreds of thousands for financial gain and will likely happily adopt right wing politics (maybe he already has) once he realizes how easy that crowd is in terms of extracting money

Also a reminder that a study retraction is very uncommon, generally only done when fraud, errors, or misconduct are discovered