Some questionable ethics in recent studies are making the rounds.
The process and ethics of Didier Raoult's work, which led to the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a Covid treatment, was scrutinized in the latest Science Magazine.
Raoult was saying, ‘I understand everything, I have a solution,’ and people want that kind of information in troubled times, . . . If someone has such a presence in the media landscape, politicians have to listen to him—otherwise they will be really distrusted by the population. On 26 March—amid strong resistance from some other members of the scientific council—Véran issued a decree allowing HCQ to be prescribed to Covid-19 inpatients. . . . Elisabeth Bik decided to take a close look at the HCQ paper. A microbiologist by training, Bik already knew of Raoult and his reputation for prolific publication. On her blog she pointed to several problems she saw with the paper: Patients had not been randomly assigned to the treatment and control groups, which could have biased the results. . . . Besançon, too, was curious. He looked into the paper, which had been submitted to the journal on 16 March and accepted the next day, and noticed that one of the authors was also editor-in-chief at the journal. “So you have a very short reviewing time and editorial conflict of interest,” he says. “I just find this potentially a big red flag. But I thought, it’s just one paper.” . . .
Despite the growing skepticism from scientists and others, Raoult’s public support endured. . . . Meanwhile, Frank, Garcia, and other critics began their deep look into Raoult’s body of research. Bik says she focused first on images in his papers, because her specialty is detecting image manipulation. But, faced with insults from Raoult—and harassment from his colleagues and supporters—she channeled her frustration into assessing his vast back catalog, finding more studies that appeared to lack proper ethical approval. . . . Many of the papers involved children, and nearly half of them had been conducted outside of France—largely in various African countries—with no or hazy details of whether local ethical bodies had given approval for the research, according to Frank and his collaborators. “There have been so many breaches in ethics law, for so long,” . . . The fact that so many studies involved vulnerable populations, such as those living in homeless shelters, was “outrageous,” Bik says. Vulnerable people may feel they have no choice in whether to participate in a research study, says Lisa Rasmussen, a research ethicist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “They are not in a position to give authentic consent.” . . . The reports did not specifically blame Raoult for these failings. But they said he tightly held the reins of power in the institute, with testimonies from employees reporting that Raoult was “omnipresent” and the “final decision-maker,” and that other managers were “in total conformity” with Raoult’s views. . . . “Maybe tomorrow—I hope not—we’ll have SARS-3 … and the message sent will be, ‘Don’t worry about public health. Just show your face, say anything you want, and you will sell books, be famous, and get a lot of fans.’ It’s insane.”
Closer to home, The Journal of Infectious Diseases recently published a study on 4,900 school workers in Vancouver that looked at the benefit of using avidity (antibody-antigen binding) to identify reinfections since antibody levels wane rapidly. They took yearly Covid exposure questionnaires, blood samples, and used nasal swabs to confirm each suspected exposure.
"As public health authorities have now largely moved away from routine testing, drawing inferences solely based on viral testing data may carry a high risk of bias because it misses asymptomatic and/or unreported cases. The current method could be used to retrospectively track reinfections in existing cohorts. Even if most people have been infected multiple times, which may bolster their immunity, quantifying the trajectory of the health outcomes and incremental risk early on following the first few reinfections may be particularly important in understanding the resulting cumulative long-term health burden."
Being infected with Covid can do significant harm to the immune system. It doesn't always harm it, but it does not strengthen the immune system. The very best case scenario is that getting the virus provides very brief immunity (a couple weeks) from just the variant in question. And we're swimming in a soup of variants! Some of the researchers, like Goldfarb, also published an earlier influential study showing similar rates of Covid in schools as in the community and reprehensibly concluding that, therefore, infections aren't spread in schools. (A recent study of the air in schools found the "weekly probability of airborne detection of 34% for SARS-CoV-2 and 10% for other respiratory viruses." In other words, a 1 in 3 chance you'll find Covid in the air of a classroom.)
Social media comments on the article include,
"I feel sick. After selling the schools are safe, hybrid immunity bullshit, BC researchers used teachers' blood samples to develop a test for detecting re-infections. . . . If a researcher claims schools are safe, then studies reinfections in schools, isn't that a concerning conflict of interest and ethics? . . . IF THEY HAD 'IMMUNITY' WHY WERE THEY GETTING REINFECTED, BONNIE??! Horrors beyond my imagination. Time to go scream in the woodshed! . . . It's at the point where teachers are in school sick and unmasked because they're given up because everyone else has given up on them. It's a fucking disaster. . . . Covid has highlighted the huge COIs inherent in having people who influence decision-making on life-or-death issues control the research that assesses the consequences of those decisions. There's a reason we don't let Boeing lead the investigations of their own failures. At minimum the COI needs to be transparently reported. Even accepting a few hundred bucks from a drug manufacturer is considered essential to report. A role in policy decisions related to the research, that may have killed or injured people, is a far more serious COI than that."
Meanwhile, an article that clearly explains the disconnect within universities that praise and promote research in the field but refuse to actually follow any of it got questioned in the comments like this:
"There is a reproducibility crisis in science . . . new research that are hastily done and difficult and often impossible to replicate. . . . It is spurious to pretend that science has all the answer and can explain the world perfectly. Do we really know if masks were effective? Should we really trust MNRA [sic] vaccines when the pharmaceutical industry has failed us so completely in the past? Or have we already forgotten the Oxycodone crisis? Thankfully the masks are gone and things look to be getting better. Obviously, the virus is now endemic and very much part of us."
The implication of this is that science is sometimes wrong, and pharmaceutical companies are sometimes corrupt; therefore, we definitely shouldn't mask or vax. I wrote before about the danger of not understanding how to determine the validity of a science article here and here, and also the danger of stepping into the post-truth realm. We can't blindly trust any study that comes out, obviously. We need to look at who's involved, the credibility of their previous work, how the study was devised (random sample, random assignment...), how many were involved, and if their findings actually lead to their conclusion in a logical way. Also, anyone against Big Pharma, should be for N95s and filtered air. Pfuck Pfizer with an N95!!
Another commenter left this rebuttal:
"We know that masks are extremely effective, particularly P100/P3, N99/FFP3, N95/FFP2. The evidence is overwhelming. Facts are facts. The government should certainly not be trusted: they're the ones promoting the nutbar wackjob anti-mask lunacy."
They included links to this thread and this study. Also check out this and this, and this line I added to the bottom of all my posts for a while:
"N95s trap Covid using inertial impaction, diffusion, interception, and electrostatic attraction. They really work!! (2 minute video explanation)"
Sure, fit-tested masks work better, but an N95 that is tight to the face works almost as well and often equally well. Yes, the Covid molecules are tiny, but there are three layers to N95s, so it's like throwing a golf ball through three rows of staggered chainlink fences. They really stop the spread! But they work way better if more people wear them. It can't just be left to the immunocompromised to trust one-way masking.
But it's so bizarre that the first two studies got tacit approval, the first being influential, while well researched and replicated studies showing the same results with masks and vaccines, and publishing in Science and Nature and other very highly reputable journals, over and over for years now are called "spurious."
Anyway...
Steve Wilcox's article in question explains the role of neoliberal ideology in Canadian universities' reaction to the pandemic:
"In January 2023, Health Canada affirmed that the COVID-19 pandemic is not over. Nevertheless, weeks later on February 15, Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University abruptly notified its faculty, staff, and students that masks would no longer be required for instructional spaces on campus. . . . While university administrators across Canada decide whether and how to limit the spread of Covid-19, the faculty they represent continue to publish scientific peer-reviewed evidence of the short and long-term implications of contracting Covid-19, and the efficacy of masks in reducing transmission. For instance, in a study by researchers at the University of Waterloo (UW), Long Covid has been connected with lower brain oxygen levels, cognitive problems and psychiatric symptoms, a study UW’s media relations team were quick to promote on their social media feeds. Across campus researchers at UW’s Fluid Mechanics Research Lab have shared their findings on mask efficacy, including that they provide “significant benefits,” particularly when in close proximity to others, such as a classroom environment. . . .
The fact is, masks work, and the precautionary principle remains sound, responsible policy, at least if the intent is to minimize infections. To claim otherwise in the name of science is to so contort the word beyond recognition that it broaches on a post-truth discourse in which the research and evidence produced at today’s universities have little to no bearing on our lives. Beyond the science, the fact that masks can be seen in September of 2022 as a healthy, responsible public health measure, only to be deemed superfluous six months later indicates a capricious and easily swayed decision-making process. . . . Universities commodify the scholarship of their faculty, using their labour, expertise, and rigor to attract students, researchers, and funding. Institutionally, they borrow their prestige and scholarly reputations from their faculty. This works in principle as it generally benefits all parties. But in practice, what we’re seeing is leadership promoting the expertise of their faculty in public, while in private they are choosing to ignore that expertise and instead embrace the more politically expedient approach of decision-based evidence making. Throughout the pandemic, faculty at various institutions have been subjected to a mix of resounding silence and a steady stream of doublespeak from administrators. . . .
The risk here—beyond the short- and long-term harm Covid-19 poses to faculty, staff, and students—is a loss of trust in these institutions and their capacity to fulfill their social mission. Whether you work or learn at a university or not, we should all find it troubling to see leaders in higher education picking and choosing when evidence will inform their policies and practices. And we should hold in contempt those who promote science in public—for prestige and academic valour—and ignore it in practice. . . . The question that remains is if this is a crossroads for higher education or simply another step down a path towards the diminished and diminishing role of Canadian universities."
The populist mentality is not just in politics. It has infiltrated research organization and universities, and we have to push back on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment