Hold on Roger. This post is over the top. Are you saying that federal - taxpayer - support of research should NOT be "beyond reproach"? That it should NOT "withstand scrutiny", "foster cross disciplinary collaboration", and "remain free from bias or undue influence"? Pardon me but these are at least what a taxpayer should expect. And I think the problem here exactly is that you forget (or want to ignore) who the customers are. It's not scientists (who enjoyed great favor with Obama and Biden), it's us the voters (who might be getting better representation from Trump! Which I'm very sure grates to no end). And as both scientist and voter I'm pretty sick of scientific egos blocking our ability to ask challenging questions and get fair hearings before we commit to costly, burdensome, impractical and downright stupid policy and regulatory decisions. If this is the end of the postmodern progressive age of elite science that exists for reputations and not the public interest I am all for it. Time for some real honest brokering.
This post says that Biden and Trump each look exclusively to one side of a two-sided coin. They both are partially correct and have a huge blind spot as well. Effective scientific integrity policies need to consider both sides of that coin.
Roger there is nothing in the Trump EO that exceeds common sense. Nor does it represent one side of a coin. Transparency, reproducibility, the other stated goals are universal, or should be. The examples cited in the EO are ones we know and have looked at, some you've written about yourself. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/restoring-gold-standard-science/
For that matter, you need to correct your link RE Trump admin 2025 guidance and provide a correct link for the text you extracted.
What the EO states the purpose of the gold standard to be, for other readers, is this: "to ensure that federally funded research is transparent, rigorous, and impactful, and that Federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available. We must restore the American people’s faith in the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good. Reproducibility, rigor, and unbiased peer review must be maintained. This order restores the scientific integrity policies of my first Administration and ensures that agencies practice data transparency, acknowledge relevant scientific uncertainties, are transparent about the assumptions and likelihood of scenarios used, approach scientific findings objectively, and communicate scientific data accurately."
The political problems with climate science and the pandemic are very different.
The climate change "establishment" as never been willing to engage in open debate with a "red team of "dissident experts". The Establishment controls the IPCC and the message that reaches the public. The IPCC is a self-perpetuating organization began with activists and remains under their control because current members control their successors.
Dissidents over the pandemic never debated the establishment. The public's lack of understanding of the pandemic has resulted in an overthrow of the establishment by con men. Jay Bhattacharya publicly justifying withdrawing funding from mRNA vaccines targeted to real threats because the technology haven't received public acceptance. The truth is that the mRNA vaccines were the safest and most effective of those that were developed anywhere in the world. For example, after developing and widely distributing a vaccine made from inactivated virus, the Chinese developed and approved an mRNA vaccine of their own in May of 2023 (that was not as efficacious as ours).
I think Frank that you are whitewashing mRNA technology and perhaps are in denial about the very high prevalence of serious side effects compared to traditional vaccines. I believe the numbers I saw were 1 in 1400 for young men for significant side effects. And Makary and the Oxford group had a paper showing that the harms of University vaccine mandates were 7 times the benefits. You are lying about the lack of debate between elite scientists and "dissident" scientists. What happened was the the elite scientists refused to entertain any dissidents and tried to censor and silence them through campaigns of intimidation just as happened in climate science over the last 30 years. I have no idea how you can be so wrong and continue to have a childlike faith in public health and medical authorities after our best scientists proved them wrong -especially John Ioannidis who showed unusual bravery.
I've pointed this many times and you never acknowledge the critical facts here.
1. covid is and was never more than a cold for healthy adults under 50. That was known by Ioannidis in March 2020.
2. Almost everyone who died from covid was either already very ill with something else or elderly and frail.
3. The extreme panic was a mass hysteria event similar to episodes of witch hunting in the Middle Ages. In fact, virtually everyone was going to be exposed to covid and that is what happened.
4. The covid vaccines were a short term therapeutic only and in the long run the more shots you got the more likely you became to develop IG4 antibodies and get multiple covid infections. This is proven by the large 2021 Swedish study. You are hiding behind a largely irrelevant (but unsupported by citations) idea that the mRNA vaccines were the most effective. Well a -15% effectiveness against infection after 9 months is not really effective.
5. There is zero evidence lockdowns were beneficial in even slowing the spread of covid. In fact final population fatality covid rates prove that these policy measures were actually counterproductive. Sweden had one of the lowest rates in Europe and was less than 50% of the number for the US. Florida (led by the much maligned and slandered DeSantis) had about the same age adjusted rate as California which had a draconian regime of authoritarianism.
6. School closures were counterproductive as was mask mandates as the pre-existing science showed.
7. In fact population fatality rates seem to correlate with obesity rates. The obesity epidemic is a massive failure of the CDC and NIH. It causes huge unnecessary death and disability and directly caused the diabetes epidemic. Diabetes is a very serious disease that ultimately causes breakdown of capillaries often leading to blindness. RFKJ is right about this fact. We are a very unhealthy country and there is plenty of blame to go around especially for the CDC and medical establishments that colluded with the food industry to push the wrong hypothesis that saturated fat in the diet caused hearth disease. Low fat foods usually just added sugar or other empty carbs to make the food palatable.
I see Frank that you still like to denigrate fine scientists like Makary and Battacharia who were very brave in standing for good science during the pandemic while it was the charlatans like Fauci and Hotez and Birx who were disastrously in charge. The pandemic expanded the debt by at least $7 trillion most of which was wasted along with massive fraud. It causes about 9 months of learning loss in US children. It harmed not the laptop class who could work from home but the working classes who incidently are the most distrustful of the laptop class.
5) As you presumably know, the reproduction rate in a pandemic is the average number of new victims directly infected by each currently infected person. The reproduction rate is one of the best and simplest measures of efforts to control a pandemic because that can only be done by reducing transmission. The reproduction rate in the US dropped from about 3.6 on March 19 - cases doubling every 2.5 days, 8 fold/week - before lockdowns and NPI's began in California to 1.6 TWO WEEKS LATER (4/3/20) and 1.0 ON 4/15/20. Given the then 5-day incubation period, NPI's brought the pandemic under control to a steady state in about TWO WEEKS. The effectiveness of lockdowns is beyond challenge. Thanks to ongoing lockdowns, the US reproduction rate never rose above 1.5 until the more transmissible, but less deadly Omicron variant took over at the beginning of 2022. The US reproduction rate rarely dropped below 1.0, but was 0.75 when cases were falling in January of 2021 and 0.70 in June of 2021 when the most Americans were protect by vaccination. For God's sake David, go to ourworldindata.org and look at the reproduction rate data before you further embarrass yourself by saying lockdowns and other NPIs didn't work. Then stay away from places where REVISIONISTS are blatantly lying to you.
We also know that lockdowns and other NPI's were working because they totally suppressed the usual seasonal pandemic of another respiratory virus (flu) transmitted through the air in the winters of 2020-1 and 2001-2. Those who said that COVID was no more dangerous that seasonal influenza fail to keep in mind that more that one million Americans died from COVID despite drastic attempts to control it and unprecedentedly rapid development of a vaccine, while the same measures completely eliminated seasonal influenza.
What lockdowns prevented from happening in April and May of 2020 was what happened in China when they abandoned their zero COVID policy and all NPI's in early 2023. From excess deaths data, it is estimated that about 1.5 million Chinese died over the next two months, many without access to hospitals. This many died AFTER have gaining some protection from their VACCINE and from the Omicron variant - which was only about 10% as deadly as the original variant.
You can compare Sweden's death rate whatever European countries you want at ourworldindata.org and learn that is is a lie that Sweden had one of the "lowest death rates in Europe. The data changes depending on what period you choose and vaccinations began to have an impact in 2021. The Swedes suffered almost 1000 deaths per million in 2020, while their Nordic neighbors Finland, Norway and Denmark only suffered 116, 80 and 220 deaths per million. Naturally the Swedes kicked out the health minister responsible for this disaster and introduced new policies. They did modestly better than Italy and Spain (who had almost twice as many deaths by the end of April), the same as France, and 50% worse than Germany.
Frank you have parroted this silly dramatically oversimplified theory many times and its not useful for prediction or for analysis. R varies by orders of magnitude and depends on hundreds of variables including time of year, region you are talking about, strain of the virus, etc. etc. etc. Trying to use this fictitious number for an entire country is pseudo-science. And yes, there is evidence that lockdowns didn't work in the US by comparing Florida and California or New York. New York had a significantly higher population fatality rate than Florida despite Florida having a much older population. Why don't you explain why both the flu and covid (mostly) seemed to go into the background during the summer? If you can't explain this big R change, you can't explain anything. In any case, basically everyone was going to get exposed to covid and the best scientists knew this early on and in fact that is what happened. The least healthy individuals especially obese diabetic and/or frail individuals were doomed by Fauci's arrogance in funding GOF research with inadequate safeguards. But lockdowns and other authoritarian measures killed hundreds of thousands more from suicide, overdoses, and vaccine side effects.
You also have zero evidence what caused flu to "disappear" during covid. There is simply no evidence on this except anecdotal apologetics by foolish people.
Sweden's PFR was in the middle of the pack in Europe (I used the wrong population in my earlier calculations) but quite a bit lower than the US or the UK.
All the safetyism and panic you exhibit cannot hide the fact that this virus was not a threat to healthy younger adults at all. There was no evidence of children transmitting it to teachers.
The best strategy and one that would have saved 7 trillion dollars of your and my money the US borrowed to prop up a cratering economy and the trillions of lost GDP and the millions of years of lost learning for children could have been prevented by a targeted prevention strategy. Panicy 80 somethings like you Frank should have gotten vaccinated and not forced everyone else to do so and expose themselves to a therapy that was never tested in a medium double blind trial of the general population.
But you are afraid to admit that the vaccine was a short therapeutic at best and in the long term made you more likely to get covid. There is a growing body of evidence for this even in late 2021.
4) Your claim that the mRNA vaccine was a "short-term therapeutic" at best reflects your ignorance. Repeated mRNA vaccination has resulted in a shift towards IgG4 antibodies, which are believed to be less efficacious up-regulating other parts of the immune system. However, the neutralizing antibodies created by the mRNA vaccines DON'T NEED to up-regulate the immune system to stop or moderate infections. These "neutralizing" antibodies bind to the spike protein and stop viruses from entering through the ACE receptor. The same is true for DNA vaccines that code for part of the spike protein and Novovax's subunit of the spike protein vaccine. Instead of having a "polyclonal response" that makes antibodies to multiple viral proteins - each of which might create a harmful auto-immune response by chance, these vaccines only make a single antibody and the most effective kind - a neutralizing antibody.
Cell culture experiments determine how much serum from vaccinated or previously infected patients can be diluted and still prevent at least 50% of the cells from being infected. The rest of the immune system isn't present in such cell culture experiments, so efficacy in this assay depends only on the number and affinity of antibodies, not whether they are IgG4 or one of the other types. Efficacy in the community tracks reasonably well with efficacy in this cell culture assays of serum. When developing the mRNA vaccines, developers targeted a protocol producing serum antibody levels consistently more effective in cell culture assays than serum from those who had recovered from natural infections that had protected most victims from re-infection for about six months at the time. This was why they chose a two-dose protocol with doses 3 or 4 weeks apart. Researchers knew the efficacy of antibodies from natural infection in cell culture assays was falling over time, but believed both would be effective in the real world for several years.
When the Delta variant appeared, serum from vaccinated patients and those previously infected was more than an order of magnitude less effective at blocking entry of the Delta variant than the Alpha variant in these cell culture experiments. The natural decline over time in the ability of serum to block infection in cell culture suddenly became far more important. Neither natural immunity from infection nor from vaccination was preventing breakthrough infection after July of 2021. So the decline in efficacy against the newer variants was due to weaker binding of antibodies to mutated spike proteins and the decline in the number of antibodies, and not solely due to a shift to IgG4 antibodies. The same factors limited the efficacy of antibodies acquired from natural infections and from vaccination in these cell culture assays. If the shift to IgG4 antibodies were a problem, it wasn't a critical one. Fortunately, we found that the vulnerable suffering from breakthrough infections with Delta were 5-10 fold less likely to need hospitalization or die if they had been vaccinated even though they had only modest protection (2-fold?) against infection for less than about 6 months. My interpretation is that, if immunity from vaccination can simply DELAY the course of your illness until your body mounts an effective defense, one is less likely to get sick enough to need hospitalization or die.
My wife and I got boosters one month before our first trip in the late spring of 2022, and I tested positive near the end of the trip. Despite my nose gushing mucus and occupying a tiny Italian hotel room and traveling 12 hours home next to me, my wife never got sick and my illness was relatively mild. (Several year earlier needed help dealing with a severe case of influenza and only then bothered with flu vaccines.)
Today, we assay the ability of patient serum to block infection of cells by a panel of a dozen variants that are circulating, both before and after "boosting" with an updated vaccine. There is no doubt that serum from "boosted" patients has increased ability to block relevant viruses from entering through the ACE receptor, even when that serum has mostly IgG4 antibodies. The mutated mRNA vaccine targeted to the now dominant K.P.1 variant that I will be getting this fall has been shown to produce additional antibodies much more ability to block all important variants from entering my cells than my serum has today. The antibodies from mRNA vaccines are more effective than those from any other technology. You should get it!
There is another problem effecting the efficacy of all COVID vaccines that wasn't present in the first vaccines, including the mRNA vaccines that initially reduced infection by 95%. This problem is known as "original antigenic sin". When your body is infected by a closely related variant of a virus that has infected you in the past, your immune system doesn't invest much effort in selecting a new antibody that would be the tightest possible binder to the mutated spike protein. Instead your body simply rushes out more of the antibodies it already knows how to make and can make without spending the extra time to select an optimum antibody. So when you got infected by the Delta variant or hypothetically immunized by an mRNA coding for the spike protein made by the Delta variant, your body rushed out many more of the existing antibodies to the Alpha variant and only a few new antibodies that bound more tightly to the mutated spike protein. Nevertheless, those antibodies were good enough to reduce hospitalization and death 5- to 10-fold among the vulnerable, but not prevent infection for a full year. I say "hypothetically" because the key experiments were done with the Beta and Lambda? variants before Delta arrived and mRNA vaccines targeted to those variants boosted antibodies to the alpha variant the most. "Original antigenic sin" is why we didn't try to rush out a new mRNA vaccine targeting the Delta variant in the fall of 2021, and simply administered a booster to the vulnerable of the mRNA vaccine that worked on the alpha variant. Since then we have been giving mRNA vaccines targeting different variants of Omicron.
"Original antigenic sin" may also play a role in the decreasing effectiveness of flu vaccines. It limits both the immunity gained from natural infections and from vaccination, and is certainly not unique to mRNA vaccines. BTW, the alpha variant was never seen in the US after September 2021, probably because we finally created herd immunity from a combination of vaccination, a lot of alpha and earlier natural infections and relatively few Delta infections. No one noticed, because the Delta variant was killing a lot of mostly unvaccinated Americans.
More unsubstantiated narrative pseudo-science from Frank. You just admitted my main point, i.e., that the more boosters you get the more likely you are to catch covid. In the large Swedish study, effectiveness against covid infection declined to -15% after 9 months. That's real science while you offer nothing but crude mechanistic narratives that lack quantification.
I never said that the more boosters you get the more likely you are to catch covid. I said that boosters were demonstrated to significantly increase the antiviral activity in your serum against currently circulating variants.
The unvaccinated are re not an appropriate control group for assessing the benefits of vaccination. 95+% of those over 65 were vaccinated for example, so the unvaccinated were much younger. The unvaccinated most likely have gained immunity from repeated COVID infections. Since boosters provided limited protection against infection by later variants, after a few months, the unvaccinated with immunity from infections might well be experiencing fewer infections that the booster. To properly quantify the benefits of boosters after the arrival of the Delta variant, you need to compare the hospitalization and death RATES of the vaccinated and unvaccinated in similar age bands. That is where you find a 5-fold protection against hospitalization and a 10-fold protection and death from a booster in the last year.
In today's world, everyone will be getting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 either from natural infection or from mRNA vaccines? Many skeptics advocated getting that immunity from natural infection. Would you advocate getting immunity from a natural polio infection or from vaccination? Only about 1% of polio cases resulted in paralysis and 1% of COVID cases resulted in death. Yes, in some cases skipping vaccination IS pretty stupid. Let's properly compare getting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 from an mRNA vaccine and from natural infection. Unlike polio and polio vaccines, either form of protection from COVID is temporary. Before Omicron, natural infection came with an average 1% chance of death which was highly age dependent, a roughly 1% chance of long COVID (which isn't as age dependent and lasts months to years), an age-dependent average 5% chance of needing hospital care, a 50% chance of a week of misery, and an ethical obligation to isolate. 99% of the time, an mRNA vaccine costs you only a day or two of feeling "under the weather". An mRNA vaccine creates immunity by prompting a small number of cells in your arm (and the nearest lymph node) to express in a controlled manner part of the spike protein from SARS-CoV2. Infection with SARS-CoV2 occurs in an uncontrolled manner in many cell types in your body (lung, heart, nerves). In both cases, the cells expressing viral proteins are killed by your immune system. No wonder the medical establishment promotes vaccines and only kooks like RFK opposed them.
Today, however, general distrust of authority and a community of conspiracy theorists (starting with Q-anon) has created widespread vaccine hesitancy that led to the unnecessary death of about 300,000 Americans during the pandemic.
Let's look at the same problem from the climate change perspective, where we may agree. Those who deny that rising GHGs have any effect on climate are grossly wrong. Rising GHG's slow radiative cooling to space, but how much warming that causes before radiative equilibrium is restored at the TOA is a matter of controversy. My/our? friend SOD dispelled the scientific conspiracy theories used to justify denial, such as that the 2LoT makes it impossible for DLR from GHGs to be absorbed by the surface of the earth. He also exposed the weak underpinning of AOGCMs. All I'm trying to do here is explain the real science behind mRNA vaccines a replace the lies spread by skeptics. That includes the problem of original antigen sin.
For some reason you think that my politics (perhaps best described as a Reagan Republican) interferes with my scientific assessment of what is truth.
David It is a flat out lie that mRNA vaccines were not tested in even "in a medium double blind trial of the general population". All clinical trials are run with volunteers from the general population; we don't draft people from the general population to participate in clinical trials. Those volunteers are likely somewhat healthier than the general population, a problem that is addressed by post-approval surveillance (Phase IV). Knowing that elderly patients would be top priority for vaccination, the trials were required to contain an unusually large number of elderly patients. The sponsors of the Oxford-Zeneca vaccine never tested their vaccine on elderly patients or in one large Phase III study and the FDA refused to consider it for approval.
In the two US Phase III clinical trials of mRNA vaccines, 20,000 volunteers were randomly assigned to receive one vaccine or placebo from identical barcoded vials in more than 100 hospitals. No one at the hospitals knew what the barcodes meant until the study was unblinded, especially not the doctors asked to evaluate the most serious side effects. All the data was remotely entered into a central database by the personal who collected it, making cheating virtually impossible. All the hospitals involved have local ethics committees that review all aspects of the trials they participate in. IIRC, about 70,000 received each mRNA vaccine counting trials elsewhere in the world.
These are the trials that when unblinded 95% of those who tested positive in roughly the first month had received placebo and 90% after six months. About 2% of those receiving vaccine and 1% of those receiving placebo suffered side effects more serious than "feeling under the weather" for a day or two. The trials didn't contain enough young males to have detected myocarditis. If the trial had consisted of only young males of correct age, a case or two of myocarditis might have occurred after the second dose.
All your BS is irrelevant Frank. In fact after as I recall 60 or 90 days the trial was ended by offering the vaccine to everyone. That is a SHORT TERM study which is what I said. It is you who can't read what I wrote and instead slander me by calling a true statement a lie. That means you are the liar.
After consulting with developers and experts who responded with comments, the FDA initially defined an approvable COVID vaccine as as one that reduced infection by at least 50% with a 95% confidence interval of +/-10%. To meet that standard with the 10,000 volunteers who received vaccine and 10,000 who received placebo, the trial needed to be run until roughly 190 (IIRC) of the volunteers had tested positive for COVID. At the point, the trial could be unblinded and the reduction in transmission calculated to the desired level of precision even if those testing positive were roughly 1/3 got vaccine and 2/3 got placebo (and 50% reduction). Since the pandemic had intensified dramatically since the trial was planned, the average participate waited two weeks after his second dose and then another month before enough patients tested positive. Unblinding showed that 95% of those testing positive by PCR had received placebo. Then the volunteers were followed (unblinded) for another 5 months to determine how long protection lasted for. There was a 90% reduction in those testing positive compared with controls after six months.
Yes once the trial was unblinded many in the placebo group got vaccinated to protect themselves. Once an efficacious treatment is available, it is unethical to deny it to those who received placebo, even it the science would be clearer that way. AI tells me Pfizer vaccinated those who received placebo on March 1, which would have been about 4 months after unblinding.
With 95% reduction infections for the first month after getting two doses of vaccine, the FDA gave "emergency (temporarily) approval" for the vaccine, something that is routinely done with treatments for conditions for which no satisfactory treatment exists. When the six months were complete and protection was maintained and no intolerable side effects had appeared, the vaccine was given full (permanent) approval as planned almost a year earlier.
Serum from patients in the earliest small trials months earlier had been followed for its ability to prevent virus from infecting cells in vitro. So had serum from those who gained immunity from natural infection. Serum from the vaccinated was actually more protective than from those previous infected. So we had evidence protection from vaccination was expected to be superior that from natural infection. That protection wasn't "short-term" protection.
This wasn't the "first rodeo" for the scientists doing this vaccine development and for those deciding what standards a COVID vaccine would need to meet. Many had spent decades working on vaccines, just like you worked on fluid dynamics calculations for decades (if I understand correctly). Despite what conspiracy theorists had been misled into believing, they didn't approve a vaccine based only on efficacy for one month beginning two weeks after the second dose.
David: Following chains of infection, children are known to the the most important transmitters of influenza. That is one reason why communities close school for a week or two in communities hard hit by influenza.
We know that SARS-CoV-2 grows equally fast in children and adults. When their nasals passages or throats are swabbed and the amount of virus quantified by PCR, similar amounts virus are found in both. So there isn't an obvious reason why children should transmit less often than adults. Studies inside households have shown that the first infected person is a child in 70% of cases. Child to child transmission inside household was least common at 6% (which is promising for opening schools), adult to adult transmission occurred in 9% of cases, adult to child in 20%, and child to adult in 30% of cases. Adults may hug children more than other adults and children hug children. Your claim that children never infect adults is totally wrong.
Infected droplets are sprayed from the upper respiratory tract when people sneeze and one droplet can hold enough virus particles to infect a person. However, those droplets fall from the air almost immediately. Infected aerosols are sheered from the narrowest moist passages in the lungs and they immediately equilibrate with moisture in the air. The lighter they are the longer they remain suspended in the air. So dry air in winter may aid in the transmission of influenza, along with the tendency to stay inside more in the winter. And most of the time we may be near herd immunity most of the time with some flu strains, causing causing flu season to end in winter. COVID seemed to peak in both winter (and summer in the South) for similar reasons and didn't reach herd immunity until omicron arrived. (These are my personal rationals.)
David: Obviously you don't have the slightest idea about the meaning of the most basic mathematical concept in epidemiology, the reproduction number R, sometimes referred to as the reproduction rate. R is used in several different contexts. R0 is the average number of new victims infected by each infected person at the beginning of a pandemic before people begin to change their behavior out of fear or governments imposed NPIs that reduce contacts where transmission might occur between people. By definition, R is a dimensionless number and shouldn't be called a rate (which implies a change with time). The higher R0, the more transmissible the disease is. Measles, chickenpox and mumps have R0 from 10-12 (and 18 for measles). Obviously the odds of transmission are greater in densely populated urban areas with public transmission and crowded public areas, so R0 varies modestly with where the earliest transmission occurs. However, pandemics are mostly an urban (or suburban) phenomena, so estimates of R0 tend to cluster.
If R0 for COVID were 4 and 75% of the population had been infected and were immune, and people were having a normal number of risky contacts then R would be down to 1 and the pandemic would no longer be capable of growing. This situation is known as herd immunity and is reached once 1/(R0 -1) have become immune through infection or vaccination. For COVID, that would have been about 70% for the early variants.
R or R(t) is the reproduction number at any time during a pandemic (which is how I've been using the term.) If N people test positive today, on average after one incubation period later, N*R people will be infected. For COVID at the beginning of the pandemic, it typically took 5-6 days from contact with an infected person to produce symptoms (and more importantly the ability to transmit to others. However, the Omicron variant is so much better adapted to living in human cells that the typical incubation period is down to three days and its R0 was about double that of the earliest variants. R(t) is calculated from the data from the time course of the pandemic.
Now you can go look at the data at ourworldindata.org and perhaps have some idea of what it all means.
R and R0 have nothing to do with how deadly an infection is. The fraction of infected patients who die is known as the Infection Fatality Rate or IFR. IFR varies with the age distribution and health (co-morbidities) of a population. We only know for certain the number of people who test positive (confirmed cases) and the fraction of those who die called the Case Fatality Rate or CFR. One of the biggest mysteries of the pandemic was the ratio of total infections (producing immunity) to detected infections. Those with mild or asymptomatic infections normally would not get a PCR test, but could have acquired immunity. We did seropositivity surveys to assess the total fraction of the population with antibodies, but COVID tended to strike the poorest and least healthy part of the population, while those willing to participate in such surveys tended to more affluent more likely to have their infections confirmed by PCR. Makary and friends constantly over-estimated this ratio, making it look like we were closer to herd immunity that we really were.
On March 24, 2020 in the WSJ, Bhattacharya infamously estimated that we were detecting fewer than 1 in 100 cases producing immunity and that we would reach herd immunity within 20,000-40,000 American deaths and therefore didn't need lockdowns. 40,000 Americans were dead within one month of his prediction! However, if we were really only detecting 1 out of 100 infected, how could we have ever found out that COVID was a communicable disease? About February 20, 2021, Dr. Makary used his personal estimate that 6.7 people had gained resistance for every case detected by PCR (the consensus then was 3-4) to predict in the WSJ that with vaccinations we would reach herd immunity by April. That resulted in Makary's article being censored by Facebook. The number of detected cases actually started growing modestly and reached a local peak on April 15! Makary's "personal estimate" was impossible because some of the hardest hit communities had about 15% of their population who had tested positive and 100% would be immune using Makary's personal estimate of 6.7. In both cases, they irresponsible took their un-peer-reviewed calculations with gross mistakes to their libertarian friends at the WSJ. They also sold the Great Barrington Declaration there, a fraud because they had no practical scheme for protecting the vulnerable.
Frank's estimate: By June 1, 43% of Americans were fully vaccinated and 9.6% of Americans had tested positive and some were both. Israel had reached herd immunity with at 9.2% of population having tested positive and 50-55% of the population fully vaccinated. To reach herd immunity with 70% immune, about 20% more Israelis would have needed to have gained immunity from infection or about twice as many as tested positive. However, some were vaccinated after recovering from confirmed COVID and some US communities had ongoing pandemics with nearly twice the average number of people having tested positive.
The US had a CFR of about 1.8% before the Delta variant arrived, which would be an IFR of about 0.9% with two people gaining immunity for every case detect by PCR, 0.6% if three (which isn't likely given the above data). The idea that COVID was no more deadly than seasonal influenza (IFR of 0.1) was complete nonsense. An AI search I just ran says the IFR for COVID is 0.5%-1.0%. (Damn, I'm good.)
I do understand the theory based on R. Its a childishly oversimplified theory that can't predict anything because its based on a fictitious number that varies by orders of magnitude and can't be meaningfully defined. I think in 2020 there was a paper estimating R for all countries I believe in the summer and found it varied by orders of magnitude depending on the country. It is obvious that it varies by orders of magnitude depending on the season of the year just as it does for flu. You have admitted it is higher in urban areas too. In fact, we have little understanding of the details of transmission and why some get sick and others don't. The uselessness of the theory is proven by the very bad modeling results based on it. These were inevitably off by factors of 2 to 10. That's because just as for climate modeling this theory is badly ill-posed and that guarantees that modeling will be useless.
And you can't resist the authoritarian smear of Makary and Battacharia. You might as well repeat the lie about Ioannidis too. Most people were wrong about the pandemic at least in part. It proves nothing and you should know this. Ioannidis said in March 2020 that if five million are infected we might expect 10,000 deaths based on the Diamond Princess data. Smear artists and liars then said that over 1,000,000 died and portrayed Ioannidis as a terrible scientist. That is irrelevant of course. Ioannidis' statement was in fact precocious. Since almost everyone was infected, Ioannidis' IFR rate was rather close to the correct one.
You are not citing the best evidence on IFR either. Ioannidis' et al wrote a paper I think in 2022 looking at all the evidence worldwide and concluded that IFR varied significantly but a good median value was 0.03. This is much closer to the Santa Clara study's 0.023 than to the alarmist numbers pushed by alarmist scientists.
In any case, the case is still persuasive that lockdowns had more negative consequences than positive ones and led to a sharp decline in life expectancy in the US. Sweden did not see this sharp decline. The worst consequence just as for WWI (the authoritarian response to which was similar to covid) was financial ruin for the great powers and the great depression. You many not live to see it but I will. Unless Trump succeeds with his budget cuts, downsizing of the Fed workforce, and money generating tariffs, we will be in for something perhaps as bad the the Depression. The Democrats don't care about it because they will have another crisis to justify further erosion of our Constitutional Republic and our rights and freedoms.
It is easy to devise a targeted protection strategy. You have nursing home personnel live in until the pandemic is over. You focus daily testing on health care facilities and don't waste it on the general public. You vaccinate the most vulnerable first and make it optional for those with low risk. You allow people to go outside and conduct their daily lives if they are at low risk. Being outside is in fact the safest place during a pandemic like this. This is what DeSantis did in Florida and it worked compared to New York's authoritarian and politically motivated response. You are aware that Florida is gaining hundreds of thousands of new residents and New York and California are losing hundreds of thousands probably per year. Texas is also gaining hundreds of thousands.
Unlike the excellent article from five days ago (“A takeover of the IPCC”), I find this article highly useless and even somewhat misleading.
The most important thing that I’ve learned from Roger since I’ve been subscribing to THB is that, regardless of what one thinks of the IPCC reports, their findings are misrepresented in an unscientific, systematic and willful way by activists, the legacy media and most politicians, in order to justify and propagate climate alarmism. Thanks to Roger’s article from five days ago, we know that from now on we’ll see a new onslaught of “climate porn”, but this time fully rubber stamped by the IPCC. That means that Roger has done a great job, and the climate interest groups are now aware that their misrepresentation of IPCC’s results has been revealed to the public, hence the need for IPCC’s takeover, to be able to spew their lies under the cover of “scientific consensus”.
So now to the current post by Roger. I am highly pessimistic that the Trump Administration can significantly improve the current situation in climate science, not just because the obvious shortcomings of this administration but simply because the rot is deep and pervasive. Just one question for Roger: do you think that anything that Trump might do will reverse the takeover of the IPCC and the tidal wave of pseudo-scientific claims that will follow? Do you think that a Democrat president would even want to do it?
What’s the point of even comparing Trump vs Biden (or whoever took decisions in his name) on “scientific integrity”? Could Trump or any other president eliminate the pressure that currently exists on each and every climate scientist to provide only results that don’t go against alarmist narrative? Could they change the mind of or eliminate the establishment that has been corrupt for the last three decades, from academia to formerly scientific publications to agencies like the NOAA to legacy media? Could any president force a publication like Nature to give up its dirty tricks and activism? Could any president get us rid of pseudo-journalists who confuse journalism with activism, because that’s all they learned in journalism school, where their professors long subscribed to the neo-Marxist idea that objectivity and truth are relative categories? Isn’t it just childish to imagine that any administration can really make a difference when the rot is so deep?Unfortunately, as a scientist I have to admit that probably the only way that change will come is when public distrust in widely compromised science and scientists will hit where it hurts, which is the money that allows the system to run. That’s scary, because that would imply an immensely damaging hiatus for western science.
However, wishful thinking or trying to reduce this to a petty “Trump vs Biden” game doesn’t take us anywhere.
In fact Trump's administration is making progress by defunding climate science inside NASA and refocusing it on space. I also think his instincts about RFKJ, Makary and Battacharia are right. If anyone can make reforms to the science establishment these are the ones to do it. The defunding epidemic is mostly a good thing. USAID was little more than a money laundering operation for leftist NGO's and regime change abroad and since 2016 here in the US. The push to eliminate gender affirming care for minors is excellent. The elimination of the billions going to DEI initiatives is excellent. Only Trump could have assembled a group of very competent loyalists to try to change the decay of Western institutions including science. I am gratified that this is happening. No other Republican would have dared to do this because they are mostly cowards who value the cocktail circuit approval in the swamp. Trump has a good chance to reform the intelligence agencies with Gabbard and the FBI with Patel and the DOJ with Bondi. They are chopping Federal personell as never before in our history. Bessent says the deficit is down 26% from Biden's last year. Armed Forces recruitment is way up as are applications to become federal law enforcement. There is a real chance to replace 50% of the swamp with a new breed of Americans.
By contrast, Biden's administration was a disaster in science related areas. Biden's covid response was authoritarian and unconstitutional regarding vaccine mandates. Biden and Co. constantly pushed lies such as that the vaccinated couldn't get covid or transmit it. They allowed school closures to continue. They wasted trillions on green energy, EV subsidies, wind farms, and solar. But perhaps worst of all was the infusion of the lie of DEI throughout the government as much of our elite institutions. This ideology is full out science denial because it relies on the fictional concept of "race." In fact, mankind exists on a broad genetic spectrum with wide variation. Race was generated in the 19th Century as a way to justify slavery and discrimination and even eugenics often touted by "progressives". This corrosive ideology was a large part of the seeming reduction of competence in many fields of science and medicine. I even saw it at Boeing where I saw a deterioration of competence. That seems to be changing now which is a very good thing.
“do you think that anything that Trump might do will reverse the takeover of the IPCC and the tidal wave of pseudo-scientific claims that will follow? Do you think that a Democrat president would even want to do it?”
As I said, I don’t think that the Trump Administration, with its blunt and controversial methods, would be able to make much of a dent in a rot so complex and extensive. However, with the new EPA report they have at least tried, for the very first time, to bring into public discussion common sense aspects that were never before part of an official document, because the climate lobby outlawed them. This is something that Biden, Harris or any foreseeable Democrat president would never do, because the Democrats are fully invested in climate alarmism, which at this point is one of their main levers for forced transformation of the American society. There’s nothing, nothing at all about any of that in your article and its value seriously suffers as a result. There’s only that much of value that can be said without getting down from the fence.
Roger, since you definitely do not want to acknowledge the elephant in the room, let me put it like this:
Let’s say I’m a scientist who just defected from N Korea. I know nothing about US politics, Democrats and Republicans are all the same to me, but I hear that the US has problems with scientific integrity, such as in climate science in the last three decades or dealing with the pandemic from a scientific basis. I would like to know - is there one political side that drapes itself in the mantle of “science”, who claims to “follow the science” in order to impose its will on the ordinary people , a side who benefits most and systematically from lack of scientific integrity?
Do I get any real answer to that simple, basic question from an article titled “Trump vs Biden on scientific integrity?”, because at least the title suggests I should get an answer.
It’s an honest, sincere question. I did not come from N Korea but I grew up and worked in a communist country. I did not come here for politics, but I don’t like when the elephants are ignored; I already had too much of that.
One thought I did not see in this excellent article was the difference (in my mind) between science and policy. Science can show, forecast, and even prove certain conclusions. But I think policy extends (almost always) into the realm of society and the land of trade-offs. In this respect, I do not think scientists are any more or less equipped than the rest of us when we inform ourselves. Covid is a good example. The science of epidemiology said many things (some of which were right and some of which were very wrong). But the translation of that into the imposition of certain policies necessarily entailed a move into hard choices involving economics, social values, community, etc. In this way, we will never be able to simply "follow the science." Even when we know what it is.
In fact, as I dug into epidemiology I discovered that it was a primitive field dominated by crude mechanistic narratives that lacked quantification. The whole modeling effort was actually worse than climate models in terms of skill, and that should have been an easy hurdle to surpass. The spread of an epidemic is a very ill-posed problem however so modeling was doomed to failure from the start. The literature is a mess and cratered during covid as Ioannidis pointed out with wrong or even fraudulent papers becoming the norm. Covid brought out the worst tribalism in science I've ever seen.
This is a great, thought-provoking piece, Roger. Timely with a capital TIMELY.
I worry about a repeat of advisory boards of the Gina McCarthy EPA era. An overwhelming majority were also receiving grants from the EPA. Full Disclosure of all parties seems like it would be mandatory for better functioning and less politics over time.
What does THB think of the National Association of Scholars’ recent report of how to ensure scientific papers are transparent and reproducible? It seems we have a major problem in all (?) areas of science due to “find what they want you to find” and “tell us something exciting “.
You know that many readers will wonder if you favour any party or if your article is agnostic. Readers will be looking for special pleading for Repub v. Dem. Is there a way for you to dismiss your leaning (if any) as a factor in your article?
This problem is widespread, not particular to you or your article. Geoff S
Skepticism is the horse that the scientific method rides in on. That should fit the mutual R vs D arrangement well enough as far as scientific research goes, but only if both parties are assumed to be guided by the Constitution. Which since the arrogant Woodrow W has not at all been the case, as the behavior of FDR clearly demonstrated.
Heclo was writing in a different era before the internet and the loss of trust in our elite institutions by the public. If indeed half of all papers are wrong as Ioannidis argues, then one can make the case for a 50% funding cut. Probably we are training many times the number of scientists who can get jobs in their field as well. But Universities have become a racket partly funded by the Government through student loans. I would argue that Universities have drifted away from their core mission to give an unbiased education to Americans and have become factories to create ideological true believers. This has been driven in part by the Democrat talking point that everyone should have the opportunity to go to college. In reality 60 years ago everyone recognized that only perhaps 25% of High School graduates would benefit from a college degree.
I am firmly in the reform through defunding camp. Part of the problem is scientific associations themselves which have been taken over by ideologically and politically radical ideas such as gender affirming care which is totally anti-scientific. In so far as these are funded by government, cutting that funding is a good idea. Same goes for the IPCC which climategate revealed to be politicized in some ways.
When I was in (Engineering) grad school in 1980, there was some debate on the wisdom of government funding science. The intellectual side of me clearly saw the “He who pays the piper calls the tunes” risk. The naive 21 year old thought “Nah. That could never happen.”.
And now we have massive political corruption of science, and trillions of dollars ensuring it is entrenched.
Fund fewer studies. In these fewer studies, have a "Team X" undertake research and "Team Y" to carp, reproduce if possible, cavil and otherwise counter Team X's findings. Team Y receives a bonus for changes induced in Team X's procedures, inferences, conclusions, etc. Team X receives a bonus for reproducibility by Team Y. They must jointly write a final research paper to which each subscribes. If they cannot agree on that final document, a coin flip shall determine which team writes the "opinion" and which writes the "dissent". All data and all computer code archived for easy public access. The pursuit of knowledge, like everything else, is a matter of incentives. In my view current incentives are perverse and these perverse incentives result in perverse outcomes, such as touting RCP 8.5 as realistic.
Scientific integrity must start with basics: what is, and is not, science. Many people do not know.
Profs. Lindzen and Happer recently explained they agree with the Supreme Court that “‘scientific knowledge’ … must be derived by the scientific method.” Daubert v. Merrell Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
They explained that the scientific method is simply and profoundly: validating theoretical predictions with observations and rejecting theories when they do not work. Nobel physicist Richard Feynman elaborated:
"[W]e compare the result of [a theory's] computation to nature, ... compare it directly with observations, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science."
``They also explained what is not science, including:
Government Opinion. Richard Feynman also stated a fundamental principle of science:
"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles."
The importance of this scientific principle is tragically underscored by what happened when Stalin made Trofim Lysenko the czar of Russian biology and agriculture. Lysenko’s government imposed biological theories, which rejected well-established genetic science, resulted in millions of Russians dying.
• Consensus
• 97% of Scientists’ Opinion. Science is not a popularity contest. The only thing that matters is whether a theory works with facts.
• Theoretical Models That Do Not Work
• Cherry picked, Fabricated and Falsified Data
• Peer-Review. Scientists consider peer reviewed literature all the time, but it does not determine scientific truth. A small fraction is correct and useful. Moreover, climate science journals have had their editorial boards hijacked so that research papers with scientific findings contrary to the dogma of climate calamity are rejected and editors know they will be fired if they publish them.
Unfortunately, government does what it often does, takes a standard, here science, and changes through the political process to its own purposes.
As to science, Peter Drucker explained: "In government, there is now a strong tendency to judge science by what is politically expedient or politically fashionable; that is, to attempt to subordinate science …to value-judgments that are the reverse of, and largely incompatible with, any criteria one could possibly call scientific."
Accordingly, science in government cannot escape the political process. No independent group of scientific experts can escape politics. Instead, I suggest that the Supreme Court’s approach to scientific experts be adopted by government. Require that scientific experts follow what is and is not science. More details available on request.
juvenile Republican penchant for “owning the libs.” I don't kowwhat you mean by that, bit it sounds like an unnecessary cheapshot. I don' t recall you doing that to Democrasts. I thought you were nore evenhanded than that.
I am a conservative, and I’ll be the first to admit that it is a juvenile (and additionally, unproductive and unpersuasive) thing. It’s not a cheap shot as much as it is a productive nudge. Trump derangement syndrome is the same thing on the left (unproductive an unpersuasive). Serious people who are honest about their intentions and truly desire to make things better will leave these petty things to the X/Twitter/Truth-sphere. Let’s get to work supporting science that is truly peer-reviewed with results that can be replicated, instead of “hypotheses looking for data.” The scientific method requires it. Science should never be in quotes. It should invite challenge and improvement, not stifle it.
I agree with that strategy, since that requires having a coherent argument that is meant to persuade, not just ridicule. A prime example of an effective implementation was the conservative attack on the radical trans stuff. It asked serious questions and moved the needle with a lot of folks.
How does integrity in science work? What percentage of scientists must have integrity for science to have integrity? If 10% of scientists lack integrity does that that mean that science has an integrity problem? Who determines who has integrity and who does not? If a scientist is judged to have integrity does that mean that she should be trusted and her views taken more seriously than one that lies and cheats and sues his comrades? Too many questions and so few answers.
Scientists like Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen, Will Happer, THB, Steve Koonin, John Christy have all demonstrated high levels of integrity in their work and careers. Yet they have all been the subject of hit jobs and character assassination by the climatariat. Nobodies at Government Labs or second rate schools that couldn't carry Richard Lindzen's pencil dismiss him as an old quack. Science, at least climate science, is so screwed up that I can't figure out where to start but we can start with leadership. Few would argue that recent Presidents have demonstrated what integrity means. I voted for Trump and I like a lot of what he is doing but it's hard for me to believe that much of his behavior models integrity. The head of the IPCC seems to be asleep at the switch. How does the President of Penn State let Herr Mann get away with his outrageous behavior? THB has to leave the University because he gets no support from leadership. I could go on.
What caused the climate research curriculum to go off track was the massive influx of Federal Dollars controlled by Washington groups with political agendas. An honest researcher could not get a project funded unless it was was written to support the party line. The conclusion was a great distortion of the development of the science. The Climate Research Industry suffered from the same disease as USAID - too much money badly managed. Both lead to bad decisions.
I can’t read that table on my phone. Something is off with the colors.
Hold on Roger. This post is over the top. Are you saying that federal - taxpayer - support of research should NOT be "beyond reproach"? That it should NOT "withstand scrutiny", "foster cross disciplinary collaboration", and "remain free from bias or undue influence"? Pardon me but these are at least what a taxpayer should expect. And I think the problem here exactly is that you forget (or want to ignore) who the customers are. It's not scientists (who enjoyed great favor with Obama and Biden), it's us the voters (who might be getting better representation from Trump! Which I'm very sure grates to no end). And as both scientist and voter I'm pretty sick of scientific egos blocking our ability to ask challenging questions and get fair hearings before we commit to costly, burdensome, impractical and downright stupid policy and regulatory decisions. If this is the end of the postmodern progressive age of elite science that exists for reputations and not the public interest I am all for it. Time for some real honest brokering.
This post says that Biden and Trump each look exclusively to one side of a two-sided coin. They both are partially correct and have a huge blind spot as well. Effective scientific integrity policies need to consider both sides of that coin.
Roger there is nothing in the Trump EO that exceeds common sense. Nor does it represent one side of a coin. Transparency, reproducibility, the other stated goals are universal, or should be. The examples cited in the EO are ones we know and have looked at, some you've written about yourself. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/restoring-gold-standard-science/
For that matter, you need to correct your link RE Trump admin 2025 guidance and provide a correct link for the text you extracted.
What the EO states the purpose of the gold standard to be, for other readers, is this: "to ensure that federally funded research is transparent, rigorous, and impactful, and that Federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available. We must restore the American people’s faith in the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good. Reproducibility, rigor, and unbiased peer review must be maintained. This order restores the scientific integrity policies of my first Administration and ensures that agencies practice data transparency, acknowledge relevant scientific uncertainties, are transparent about the assumptions and likelihood of scenarios used, approach scientific findings objectively, and communicate scientific data accurately."
That people are in an uproar - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02770-w - is, to me, just a de facto admission of the state of affairs.
“ the hot glare of Democratic opposition to President Trump and the juvenile Republican penchant for “owning the libs.”
Everyone has their biases and blind spots. The word juvenile exposes yours.
Plenty of commentators have listed policies Trump has proposed that democrats supported until that moment.
Is that juvenile as well?
The political problems with climate science and the pandemic are very different.
The climate change "establishment" as never been willing to engage in open debate with a "red team of "dissident experts". The Establishment controls the IPCC and the message that reaches the public. The IPCC is a self-perpetuating organization began with activists and remains under their control because current members control their successors.
Dissidents over the pandemic never debated the establishment. The public's lack of understanding of the pandemic has resulted in an overthrow of the establishment by con men. Jay Bhattacharya publicly justifying withdrawing funding from mRNA vaccines targeted to real threats because the technology haven't received public acceptance. The truth is that the mRNA vaccines were the safest and most effective of those that were developed anywhere in the world. For example, after developing and widely distributing a vaccine made from inactivated virus, the Chinese developed and approved an mRNA vaccine of their own in May of 2023 (that was not as efficacious as ours).
I think Frank that you are whitewashing mRNA technology and perhaps are in denial about the very high prevalence of serious side effects compared to traditional vaccines. I believe the numbers I saw were 1 in 1400 for young men for significant side effects. And Makary and the Oxford group had a paper showing that the harms of University vaccine mandates were 7 times the benefits. You are lying about the lack of debate between elite scientists and "dissident" scientists. What happened was the the elite scientists refused to entertain any dissidents and tried to censor and silence them through campaigns of intimidation just as happened in climate science over the last 30 years. I have no idea how you can be so wrong and continue to have a childlike faith in public health and medical authorities after our best scientists proved them wrong -especially John Ioannidis who showed unusual bravery.
I've pointed this many times and you never acknowledge the critical facts here.
1. covid is and was never more than a cold for healthy adults under 50. That was known by Ioannidis in March 2020.
2. Almost everyone who died from covid was either already very ill with something else or elderly and frail.
3. The extreme panic was a mass hysteria event similar to episodes of witch hunting in the Middle Ages. In fact, virtually everyone was going to be exposed to covid and that is what happened.
4. The covid vaccines were a short term therapeutic only and in the long run the more shots you got the more likely you became to develop IG4 antibodies and get multiple covid infections. This is proven by the large 2021 Swedish study. You are hiding behind a largely irrelevant (but unsupported by citations) idea that the mRNA vaccines were the most effective. Well a -15% effectiveness against infection after 9 months is not really effective.
5. There is zero evidence lockdowns were beneficial in even slowing the spread of covid. In fact final population fatality covid rates prove that these policy measures were actually counterproductive. Sweden had one of the lowest rates in Europe and was less than 50% of the number for the US. Florida (led by the much maligned and slandered DeSantis) had about the same age adjusted rate as California which had a draconian regime of authoritarianism.
6. School closures were counterproductive as was mask mandates as the pre-existing science showed.
7. In fact population fatality rates seem to correlate with obesity rates. The obesity epidemic is a massive failure of the CDC and NIH. It causes huge unnecessary death and disability and directly caused the diabetes epidemic. Diabetes is a very serious disease that ultimately causes breakdown of capillaries often leading to blindness. RFKJ is right about this fact. We are a very unhealthy country and there is plenty of blame to go around especially for the CDC and medical establishments that colluded with the food industry to push the wrong hypothesis that saturated fat in the diet caused hearth disease. Low fat foods usually just added sugar or other empty carbs to make the food palatable.
I see Frank that you still like to denigrate fine scientists like Makary and Battacharia who were very brave in standing for good science during the pandemic while it was the charlatans like Fauci and Hotez and Birx who were disastrously in charge. The pandemic expanded the debt by at least $7 trillion most of which was wasted along with massive fraud. It causes about 9 months of learning loss in US children. It harmed not the laptop class who could work from home but the working classes who incidently are the most distrustful of the laptop class.
5) As you presumably know, the reproduction rate in a pandemic is the average number of new victims directly infected by each currently infected person. The reproduction rate is one of the best and simplest measures of efforts to control a pandemic because that can only be done by reducing transmission. The reproduction rate in the US dropped from about 3.6 on March 19 - cases doubling every 2.5 days, 8 fold/week - before lockdowns and NPI's began in California to 1.6 TWO WEEKS LATER (4/3/20) and 1.0 ON 4/15/20. Given the then 5-day incubation period, NPI's brought the pandemic under control to a steady state in about TWO WEEKS. The effectiveness of lockdowns is beyond challenge. Thanks to ongoing lockdowns, the US reproduction rate never rose above 1.5 until the more transmissible, but less deadly Omicron variant took over at the beginning of 2022. The US reproduction rate rarely dropped below 1.0, but was 0.75 when cases were falling in January of 2021 and 0.70 in June of 2021 when the most Americans were protect by vaccination. For God's sake David, go to ourworldindata.org and look at the reproduction rate data before you further embarrass yourself by saying lockdowns and other NPIs didn't work. Then stay away from places where REVISIONISTS are blatantly lying to you.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
We also know that lockdowns and other NPI's were working because they totally suppressed the usual seasonal pandemic of another respiratory virus (flu) transmitted through the air in the winters of 2020-1 and 2001-2. Those who said that COVID was no more dangerous that seasonal influenza fail to keep in mind that more that one million Americans died from COVID despite drastic attempts to control it and unprecedentedly rapid development of a vaccine, while the same measures completely eliminated seasonal influenza.
What lockdowns prevented from happening in April and May of 2020 was what happened in China when they abandoned their zero COVID policy and all NPI's in early 2023. From excess deaths data, it is estimated that about 1.5 million Chinese died over the next two months, many without access to hospitals. This many died AFTER have gaining some protection from their VACCINE and from the Omicron variant - which was only about 10% as deadly as the original variant.
You can compare Sweden's death rate whatever European countries you want at ourworldindata.org and learn that is is a lie that Sweden had one of the "lowest death rates in Europe. The data changes depending on what period you choose and vaccinations began to have an impact in 2021. The Swedes suffered almost 1000 deaths per million in 2020, while their Nordic neighbors Finland, Norway and Denmark only suffered 116, 80 and 220 deaths per million. Naturally the Swedes kicked out the health minister responsible for this disaster and introduced new policies. They did modestly better than Italy and Spain (who had almost twice as many deaths by the end of April), the same as France, and 50% worse than Germany.
Frank you have parroted this silly dramatically oversimplified theory many times and its not useful for prediction or for analysis. R varies by orders of magnitude and depends on hundreds of variables including time of year, region you are talking about, strain of the virus, etc. etc. etc. Trying to use this fictitious number for an entire country is pseudo-science. And yes, there is evidence that lockdowns didn't work in the US by comparing Florida and California or New York. New York had a significantly higher population fatality rate than Florida despite Florida having a much older population. Why don't you explain why both the flu and covid (mostly) seemed to go into the background during the summer? If you can't explain this big R change, you can't explain anything. In any case, basically everyone was going to get exposed to covid and the best scientists knew this early on and in fact that is what happened. The least healthy individuals especially obese diabetic and/or frail individuals were doomed by Fauci's arrogance in funding GOF research with inadequate safeguards. But lockdowns and other authoritarian measures killed hundreds of thousands more from suicide, overdoses, and vaccine side effects.
You also have zero evidence what caused flu to "disappear" during covid. There is simply no evidence on this except anecdotal apologetics by foolish people.
Sweden's PFR was in the middle of the pack in Europe (I used the wrong population in my earlier calculations) but quite a bit lower than the US or the UK.
All the safetyism and panic you exhibit cannot hide the fact that this virus was not a threat to healthy younger adults at all. There was no evidence of children transmitting it to teachers.
The best strategy and one that would have saved 7 trillion dollars of your and my money the US borrowed to prop up a cratering economy and the trillions of lost GDP and the millions of years of lost learning for children could have been prevented by a targeted prevention strategy. Panicy 80 somethings like you Frank should have gotten vaccinated and not forced everyone else to do so and expose themselves to a therapy that was never tested in a medium double blind trial of the general population.
But you are afraid to admit that the vaccine was a short therapeutic at best and in the long term made you more likely to get covid. There is a growing body of evidence for this even in late 2021.
4) Your claim that the mRNA vaccine was a "short-term therapeutic" at best reflects your ignorance. Repeated mRNA vaccination has resulted in a shift towards IgG4 antibodies, which are believed to be less efficacious up-regulating other parts of the immune system. However, the neutralizing antibodies created by the mRNA vaccines DON'T NEED to up-regulate the immune system to stop or moderate infections. These "neutralizing" antibodies bind to the spike protein and stop viruses from entering through the ACE receptor. The same is true for DNA vaccines that code for part of the spike protein and Novovax's subunit of the spike protein vaccine. Instead of having a "polyclonal response" that makes antibodies to multiple viral proteins - each of which might create a harmful auto-immune response by chance, these vaccines only make a single antibody and the most effective kind - a neutralizing antibody.
Cell culture experiments determine how much serum from vaccinated or previously infected patients can be diluted and still prevent at least 50% of the cells from being infected. The rest of the immune system isn't present in such cell culture experiments, so efficacy in this assay depends only on the number and affinity of antibodies, not whether they are IgG4 or one of the other types. Efficacy in the community tracks reasonably well with efficacy in this cell culture assays of serum. When developing the mRNA vaccines, developers targeted a protocol producing serum antibody levels consistently more effective in cell culture assays than serum from those who had recovered from natural infections that had protected most victims from re-infection for about six months at the time. This was why they chose a two-dose protocol with doses 3 or 4 weeks apart. Researchers knew the efficacy of antibodies from natural infection in cell culture assays was falling over time, but believed both would be effective in the real world for several years.
When the Delta variant appeared, serum from vaccinated patients and those previously infected was more than an order of magnitude less effective at blocking entry of the Delta variant than the Alpha variant in these cell culture experiments. The natural decline over time in the ability of serum to block infection in cell culture suddenly became far more important. Neither natural immunity from infection nor from vaccination was preventing breakthrough infection after July of 2021. So the decline in efficacy against the newer variants was due to weaker binding of antibodies to mutated spike proteins and the decline in the number of antibodies, and not solely due to a shift to IgG4 antibodies. The same factors limited the efficacy of antibodies acquired from natural infections and from vaccination in these cell culture assays. If the shift to IgG4 antibodies were a problem, it wasn't a critical one. Fortunately, we found that the vulnerable suffering from breakthrough infections with Delta were 5-10 fold less likely to need hospitalization or die if they had been vaccinated even though they had only modest protection (2-fold?) against infection for less than about 6 months. My interpretation is that, if immunity from vaccination can simply DELAY the course of your illness until your body mounts an effective defense, one is less likely to get sick enough to need hospitalization or die.
My wife and I got boosters one month before our first trip in the late spring of 2022, and I tested positive near the end of the trip. Despite my nose gushing mucus and occupying a tiny Italian hotel room and traveling 12 hours home next to me, my wife never got sick and my illness was relatively mild. (Several year earlier needed help dealing with a severe case of influenza and only then bothered with flu vaccines.)
Today, we assay the ability of patient serum to block infection of cells by a panel of a dozen variants that are circulating, both before and after "boosting" with an updated vaccine. There is no doubt that serum from "boosted" patients has increased ability to block relevant viruses from entering through the ACE receptor, even when that serum has mostly IgG4 antibodies. The mutated mRNA vaccine targeted to the now dominant K.P.1 variant that I will be getting this fall has been shown to produce additional antibodies much more ability to block all important variants from entering my cells than my serum has today. The antibodies from mRNA vaccines are more effective than those from any other technology. You should get it!
There is another problem effecting the efficacy of all COVID vaccines that wasn't present in the first vaccines, including the mRNA vaccines that initially reduced infection by 95%. This problem is known as "original antigenic sin". When your body is infected by a closely related variant of a virus that has infected you in the past, your immune system doesn't invest much effort in selecting a new antibody that would be the tightest possible binder to the mutated spike protein. Instead your body simply rushes out more of the antibodies it already knows how to make and can make without spending the extra time to select an optimum antibody. So when you got infected by the Delta variant or hypothetically immunized by an mRNA coding for the spike protein made by the Delta variant, your body rushed out many more of the existing antibodies to the Alpha variant and only a few new antibodies that bound more tightly to the mutated spike protein. Nevertheless, those antibodies were good enough to reduce hospitalization and death 5- to 10-fold among the vulnerable, but not prevent infection for a full year. I say "hypothetically" because the key experiments were done with the Beta and Lambda? variants before Delta arrived and mRNA vaccines targeted to those variants boosted antibodies to the alpha variant the most. "Original antigenic sin" is why we didn't try to rush out a new mRNA vaccine targeting the Delta variant in the fall of 2021, and simply administered a booster to the vulnerable of the mRNA vaccine that worked on the alpha variant. Since then we have been giving mRNA vaccines targeting different variants of Omicron.
"Original antigenic sin" may also play a role in the decreasing effectiveness of flu vaccines. It limits both the immunity gained from natural infections and from vaccination, and is certainly not unique to mRNA vaccines. BTW, the alpha variant was never seen in the US after September 2021, probably because we finally created herd immunity from a combination of vaccination, a lot of alpha and earlier natural infections and relatively few Delta infections. No one noticed, because the Delta variant was killing a lot of mostly unvaccinated Americans.
More unsubstantiated narrative pseudo-science from Frank. You just admitted my main point, i.e., that the more boosters you get the more likely you are to catch covid. In the large Swedish study, effectiveness against covid infection declined to -15% after 9 months. That's real science while you offer nothing but crude mechanistic narratives that lack quantification.
I never said that the more boosters you get the more likely you are to catch covid. I said that boosters were demonstrated to significantly increase the antiviral activity in your serum against currently circulating variants.
The unvaccinated are re not an appropriate control group for assessing the benefits of vaccination. 95+% of those over 65 were vaccinated for example, so the unvaccinated were much younger. The unvaccinated most likely have gained immunity from repeated COVID infections. Since boosters provided limited protection against infection by later variants, after a few months, the unvaccinated with immunity from infections might well be experiencing fewer infections that the booster. To properly quantify the benefits of boosters after the arrival of the Delta variant, you need to compare the hospitalization and death RATES of the vaccinated and unvaccinated in similar age bands. That is where you find a 5-fold protection against hospitalization and a 10-fold protection and death from a booster in the last year.
In today's world, everyone will be getting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 either from natural infection or from mRNA vaccines? Many skeptics advocated getting that immunity from natural infection. Would you advocate getting immunity from a natural polio infection or from vaccination? Only about 1% of polio cases resulted in paralysis and 1% of COVID cases resulted in death. Yes, in some cases skipping vaccination IS pretty stupid. Let's properly compare getting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 from an mRNA vaccine and from natural infection. Unlike polio and polio vaccines, either form of protection from COVID is temporary. Before Omicron, natural infection came with an average 1% chance of death which was highly age dependent, a roughly 1% chance of long COVID (which isn't as age dependent and lasts months to years), an age-dependent average 5% chance of needing hospital care, a 50% chance of a week of misery, and an ethical obligation to isolate. 99% of the time, an mRNA vaccine costs you only a day or two of feeling "under the weather". An mRNA vaccine creates immunity by prompting a small number of cells in your arm (and the nearest lymph node) to express in a controlled manner part of the spike protein from SARS-CoV2. Infection with SARS-CoV2 occurs in an uncontrolled manner in many cell types in your body (lung, heart, nerves). In both cases, the cells expressing viral proteins are killed by your immune system. No wonder the medical establishment promotes vaccines and only kooks like RFK opposed them.
Today, however, general distrust of authority and a community of conspiracy theorists (starting with Q-anon) has created widespread vaccine hesitancy that led to the unnecessary death of about 300,000 Americans during the pandemic.
Let's look at the same problem from the climate change perspective, where we may agree. Those who deny that rising GHGs have any effect on climate are grossly wrong. Rising GHG's slow radiative cooling to space, but how much warming that causes before radiative equilibrium is restored at the TOA is a matter of controversy. My/our? friend SOD dispelled the scientific conspiracy theories used to justify denial, such as that the 2LoT makes it impossible for DLR from GHGs to be absorbed by the surface of the earth. He also exposed the weak underpinning of AOGCMs. All I'm trying to do here is explain the real science behind mRNA vaccines a replace the lies spread by skeptics. That includes the problem of original antigen sin.
For some reason you think that my politics (perhaps best described as a Reagan Republican) interferes with my scientific assessment of what is truth.
I’ve let this go on
But please tone it down
If you’d like to insult each other please exchange emails and carry on there 👍🙏
David It is a flat out lie that mRNA vaccines were not tested in even "in a medium double blind trial of the general population". All clinical trials are run with volunteers from the general population; we don't draft people from the general population to participate in clinical trials. Those volunteers are likely somewhat healthier than the general population, a problem that is addressed by post-approval surveillance (Phase IV). Knowing that elderly patients would be top priority for vaccination, the trials were required to contain an unusually large number of elderly patients. The sponsors of the Oxford-Zeneca vaccine never tested their vaccine on elderly patients or in one large Phase III study and the FDA refused to consider it for approval.
In the two US Phase III clinical trials of mRNA vaccines, 20,000 volunteers were randomly assigned to receive one vaccine or placebo from identical barcoded vials in more than 100 hospitals. No one at the hospitals knew what the barcodes meant until the study was unblinded, especially not the doctors asked to evaluate the most serious side effects. All the data was remotely entered into a central database by the personal who collected it, making cheating virtually impossible. All the hospitals involved have local ethics committees that review all aspects of the trials they participate in. IIRC, about 70,000 received each mRNA vaccine counting trials elsewhere in the world.
These are the trials that when unblinded 95% of those who tested positive in roughly the first month had received placebo and 90% after six months. About 2% of those receiving vaccine and 1% of those receiving placebo suffered side effects more serious than "feeling under the weather" for a day or two. The trials didn't contain enough young males to have detected myocarditis. If the trial had consisted of only young males of correct age, a case or two of myocarditis might have occurred after the second dose.
All your BS is irrelevant Frank. In fact after as I recall 60 or 90 days the trial was ended by offering the vaccine to everyone. That is a SHORT TERM study which is what I said. It is you who can't read what I wrote and instead slander me by calling a true statement a lie. That means you are the liar.
After consulting with developers and experts who responded with comments, the FDA initially defined an approvable COVID vaccine as as one that reduced infection by at least 50% with a 95% confidence interval of +/-10%. To meet that standard with the 10,000 volunteers who received vaccine and 10,000 who received placebo, the trial needed to be run until roughly 190 (IIRC) of the volunteers had tested positive for COVID. At the point, the trial could be unblinded and the reduction in transmission calculated to the desired level of precision even if those testing positive were roughly 1/3 got vaccine and 2/3 got placebo (and 50% reduction). Since the pandemic had intensified dramatically since the trial was planned, the average participate waited two weeks after his second dose and then another month before enough patients tested positive. Unblinding showed that 95% of those testing positive by PCR had received placebo. Then the volunteers were followed (unblinded) for another 5 months to determine how long protection lasted for. There was a 90% reduction in those testing positive compared with controls after six months.
Yes once the trial was unblinded many in the placebo group got vaccinated to protect themselves. Once an efficacious treatment is available, it is unethical to deny it to those who received placebo, even it the science would be clearer that way. AI tells me Pfizer vaccinated those who received placebo on March 1, which would have been about 4 months after unblinding.
With 95% reduction infections for the first month after getting two doses of vaccine, the FDA gave "emergency (temporarily) approval" for the vaccine, something that is routinely done with treatments for conditions for which no satisfactory treatment exists. When the six months were complete and protection was maintained and no intolerable side effects had appeared, the vaccine was given full (permanent) approval as planned almost a year earlier.
Serum from patients in the earliest small trials months earlier had been followed for its ability to prevent virus from infecting cells in vitro. So had serum from those who gained immunity from natural infection. Serum from the vaccinated was actually more protective than from those previous infected. So we had evidence protection from vaccination was expected to be superior that from natural infection. That protection wasn't "short-term" protection.
This wasn't the "first rodeo" for the scientists doing this vaccine development and for those deciding what standards a COVID vaccine would need to meet. Many had spent decades working on vaccines, just like you worked on fluid dynamics calculations for decades (if I understand correctly). Despite what conspiracy theorists had been misled into believing, they didn't approve a vaccine based only on efficacy for one month beginning two weeks after the second dose.
David: Following chains of infection, children are known to the the most important transmitters of influenza. That is one reason why communities close school for a week or two in communities hard hit by influenza.
We know that SARS-CoV-2 grows equally fast in children and adults. When their nasals passages or throats are swabbed and the amount of virus quantified by PCR, similar amounts virus are found in both. So there isn't an obvious reason why children should transmit less often than adults. Studies inside households have shown that the first infected person is a child in 70% of cases. Child to child transmission inside household was least common at 6% (which is promising for opening schools), adult to adult transmission occurred in 9% of cases, adult to child in 20%, and child to adult in 30% of cases. Adults may hug children more than other adults and children hug children. Your claim that children never infect adults is totally wrong.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/more-70-us-household-covid-spread-started-child-study-suggests
https://bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12887-022-03175-8
Infected droplets are sprayed from the upper respiratory tract when people sneeze and one droplet can hold enough virus particles to infect a person. However, those droplets fall from the air almost immediately. Infected aerosols are sheered from the narrowest moist passages in the lungs and they immediately equilibrate with moisture in the air. The lighter they are the longer they remain suspended in the air. So dry air in winter may aid in the transmission of influenza, along with the tendency to stay inside more in the winter. And most of the time we may be near herd immunity most of the time with some flu strains, causing causing flu season to end in winter. COVID seemed to peak in both winter (and summer in the South) for similar reasons and didn't reach herd immunity until omicron arrived. (These are my personal rationals.)
David: Obviously you don't have the slightest idea about the meaning of the most basic mathematical concept in epidemiology, the reproduction number R, sometimes referred to as the reproduction rate. R is used in several different contexts. R0 is the average number of new victims infected by each infected person at the beginning of a pandemic before people begin to change their behavior out of fear or governments imposed NPIs that reduce contacts where transmission might occur between people. By definition, R is a dimensionless number and shouldn't be called a rate (which implies a change with time). The higher R0, the more transmissible the disease is. Measles, chickenpox and mumps have R0 from 10-12 (and 18 for measles). Obviously the odds of transmission are greater in densely populated urban areas with public transmission and crowded public areas, so R0 varies modestly with where the earliest transmission occurs. However, pandemics are mostly an urban (or suburban) phenomena, so estimates of R0 tend to cluster.
If R0 for COVID were 4 and 75% of the population had been infected and were immune, and people were having a normal number of risky contacts then R would be down to 1 and the pandemic would no longer be capable of growing. This situation is known as herd immunity and is reached once 1/(R0 -1) have become immune through infection or vaccination. For COVID, that would have been about 70% for the early variants.
R or R(t) is the reproduction number at any time during a pandemic (which is how I've been using the term.) If N people test positive today, on average after one incubation period later, N*R people will be infected. For COVID at the beginning of the pandemic, it typically took 5-6 days from contact with an infected person to produce symptoms (and more importantly the ability to transmit to others. However, the Omicron variant is so much better adapted to living in human cells that the typical incubation period is down to three days and its R0 was about double that of the earliest variants. R(t) is calculated from the data from the time course of the pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number
Now you can go look at the data at ourworldindata.org and perhaps have some idea of what it all means.
R and R0 have nothing to do with how deadly an infection is. The fraction of infected patients who die is known as the Infection Fatality Rate or IFR. IFR varies with the age distribution and health (co-morbidities) of a population. We only know for certain the number of people who test positive (confirmed cases) and the fraction of those who die called the Case Fatality Rate or CFR. One of the biggest mysteries of the pandemic was the ratio of total infections (producing immunity) to detected infections. Those with mild or asymptomatic infections normally would not get a PCR test, but could have acquired immunity. We did seropositivity surveys to assess the total fraction of the population with antibodies, but COVID tended to strike the poorest and least healthy part of the population, while those willing to participate in such surveys tended to more affluent more likely to have their infections confirmed by PCR. Makary and friends constantly over-estimated this ratio, making it look like we were closer to herd immunity that we really were.
On March 24, 2020 in the WSJ, Bhattacharya infamously estimated that we were detecting fewer than 1 in 100 cases producing immunity and that we would reach herd immunity within 20,000-40,000 American deaths and therefore didn't need lockdowns. 40,000 Americans were dead within one month of his prediction! However, if we were really only detecting 1 out of 100 infected, how could we have ever found out that COVID was a communicable disease? About February 20, 2021, Dr. Makary used his personal estimate that 6.7 people had gained resistance for every case detected by PCR (the consensus then was 3-4) to predict in the WSJ that with vaccinations we would reach herd immunity by April. That resulted in Makary's article being censored by Facebook. The number of detected cases actually started growing modestly and reached a local peak on April 15! Makary's "personal estimate" was impossible because some of the hardest hit communities had about 15% of their population who had tested positive and 100% would be immune using Makary's personal estimate of 6.7. In both cases, they irresponsible took their un-peer-reviewed calculations with gross mistakes to their libertarian friends at the WSJ. They also sold the Great Barrington Declaration there, a fraud because they had no practical scheme for protecting the vulnerable.
Frank's estimate: By June 1, 43% of Americans were fully vaccinated and 9.6% of Americans had tested positive and some were both. Israel had reached herd immunity with at 9.2% of population having tested positive and 50-55% of the population fully vaccinated. To reach herd immunity with 70% immune, about 20% more Israelis would have needed to have gained immunity from infection or about twice as many as tested positive. However, some were vaccinated after recovering from confirmed COVID and some US communities had ongoing pandemics with nearly twice the average number of people having tested positive.
The US had a CFR of about 1.8% before the Delta variant arrived, which would be an IFR of about 0.9% with two people gaining immunity for every case detect by PCR, 0.6% if three (which isn't likely given the above data). The idea that COVID was no more deadly than seasonal influenza (IFR of 0.1) was complete nonsense. An AI search I just ran says the IFR for COVID is 0.5%-1.0%. (Damn, I'm good.)
I do understand the theory based on R. Its a childishly oversimplified theory that can't predict anything because its based on a fictitious number that varies by orders of magnitude and can't be meaningfully defined. I think in 2020 there was a paper estimating R for all countries I believe in the summer and found it varied by orders of magnitude depending on the country. It is obvious that it varies by orders of magnitude depending on the season of the year just as it does for flu. You have admitted it is higher in urban areas too. In fact, we have little understanding of the details of transmission and why some get sick and others don't. The uselessness of the theory is proven by the very bad modeling results based on it. These were inevitably off by factors of 2 to 10. That's because just as for climate modeling this theory is badly ill-posed and that guarantees that modeling will be useless.
And you can't resist the authoritarian smear of Makary and Battacharia. You might as well repeat the lie about Ioannidis too. Most people were wrong about the pandemic at least in part. It proves nothing and you should know this. Ioannidis said in March 2020 that if five million are infected we might expect 10,000 deaths based on the Diamond Princess data. Smear artists and liars then said that over 1,000,000 died and portrayed Ioannidis as a terrible scientist. That is irrelevant of course. Ioannidis' statement was in fact precocious. Since almost everyone was infected, Ioannidis' IFR rate was rather close to the correct one.
You are not citing the best evidence on IFR either. Ioannidis' et al wrote a paper I think in 2022 looking at all the evidence worldwide and concluded that IFR varied significantly but a good median value was 0.03. This is much closer to the Santa Clara study's 0.023 than to the alarmist numbers pushed by alarmist scientists.
In any case, the case is still persuasive that lockdowns had more negative consequences than positive ones and led to a sharp decline in life expectancy in the US. Sweden did not see this sharp decline. The worst consequence just as for WWI (the authoritarian response to which was similar to covid) was financial ruin for the great powers and the great depression. You many not live to see it but I will. Unless Trump succeeds with his budget cuts, downsizing of the Fed workforce, and money generating tariffs, we will be in for something perhaps as bad the the Depression. The Democrats don't care about it because they will have another crisis to justify further erosion of our Constitutional Republic and our rights and freedoms.
It is easy to devise a targeted protection strategy. You have nursing home personnel live in until the pandemic is over. You focus daily testing on health care facilities and don't waste it on the general public. You vaccinate the most vulnerable first and make it optional for those with low risk. You allow people to go outside and conduct their daily lives if they are at low risk. Being outside is in fact the safest place during a pandemic like this. This is what DeSantis did in Florida and it worked compared to New York's authoritarian and politically motivated response. You are aware that Florida is gaining hundreds of thousands of new residents and New York and California are losing hundreds of thousands probably per year. Texas is also gaining hundreds of thousands.
Unlike the excellent article from five days ago (“A takeover of the IPCC”), I find this article highly useless and even somewhat misleading.
The most important thing that I’ve learned from Roger since I’ve been subscribing to THB is that, regardless of what one thinks of the IPCC reports, their findings are misrepresented in an unscientific, systematic and willful way by activists, the legacy media and most politicians, in order to justify and propagate climate alarmism. Thanks to Roger’s article from five days ago, we know that from now on we’ll see a new onslaught of “climate porn”, but this time fully rubber stamped by the IPCC. That means that Roger has done a great job, and the climate interest groups are now aware that their misrepresentation of IPCC’s results has been revealed to the public, hence the need for IPCC’s takeover, to be able to spew their lies under the cover of “scientific consensus”.
So now to the current post by Roger. I am highly pessimistic that the Trump Administration can significantly improve the current situation in climate science, not just because the obvious shortcomings of this administration but simply because the rot is deep and pervasive. Just one question for Roger: do you think that anything that Trump might do will reverse the takeover of the IPCC and the tidal wave of pseudo-scientific claims that will follow? Do you think that a Democrat president would even want to do it?
What’s the point of even comparing Trump vs Biden (or whoever took decisions in his name) on “scientific integrity”? Could Trump or any other president eliminate the pressure that currently exists on each and every climate scientist to provide only results that don’t go against alarmist narrative? Could they change the mind of or eliminate the establishment that has been corrupt for the last three decades, from academia to formerly scientific publications to agencies like the NOAA to legacy media? Could any president force a publication like Nature to give up its dirty tricks and activism? Could any president get us rid of pseudo-journalists who confuse journalism with activism, because that’s all they learned in journalism school, where their professors long subscribed to the neo-Marxist idea that objectivity and truth are relative categories? Isn’t it just childish to imagine that any administration can really make a difference when the rot is so deep?Unfortunately, as a scientist I have to admit that probably the only way that change will come is when public distrust in widely compromised science and scientists will hit where it hurts, which is the money that allows the system to run. That’s scary, because that would imply an immensely damaging hiatus for western science.
However, wishful thinking or trying to reduce this to a petty “Trump vs Biden” game doesn’t take us anywhere.
In fact Trump's administration is making progress by defunding climate science inside NASA and refocusing it on space. I also think his instincts about RFKJ, Makary and Battacharia are right. If anyone can make reforms to the science establishment these are the ones to do it. The defunding epidemic is mostly a good thing. USAID was little more than a money laundering operation for leftist NGO's and regime change abroad and since 2016 here in the US. The push to eliminate gender affirming care for minors is excellent. The elimination of the billions going to DEI initiatives is excellent. Only Trump could have assembled a group of very competent loyalists to try to change the decay of Western institutions including science. I am gratified that this is happening. No other Republican would have dared to do this because they are mostly cowards who value the cocktail circuit approval in the swamp. Trump has a good chance to reform the intelligence agencies with Gabbard and the FBI with Patel and the DOJ with Bondi. They are chopping Federal personell as never before in our history. Bessent says the deficit is down 26% from Biden's last year. Armed Forces recruitment is way up as are applications to become federal law enforcement. There is a real chance to replace 50% of the swamp with a new breed of Americans.
By contrast, Biden's administration was a disaster in science related areas. Biden's covid response was authoritarian and unconstitutional regarding vaccine mandates. Biden and Co. constantly pushed lies such as that the vaccinated couldn't get covid or transmit it. They allowed school closures to continue. They wasted trillions on green energy, EV subsidies, wind farms, and solar. But perhaps worst of all was the infusion of the lie of DEI throughout the government as much of our elite institutions. This ideology is full out science denial because it relies on the fictional concept of "race." In fact, mankind exists on a broad genetic spectrum with wide variation. Race was generated in the 19th Century as a way to justify slavery and discrimination and even eugenics often touted by "progressives". This corrosive ideology was a large part of the seeming reduction of competence in many fields of science and medicine. I even saw it at Boeing where I saw a deterioration of competence. That seems to be changing now which is a very good thing.
“do you think that anything that Trump might do will reverse the takeover of the IPCC and the tidal wave of pseudo-scientific claims that will follow? Do you think that a Democrat president would even want to do it?”
No and no
And that’s the point
As I said, I don’t think that the Trump Administration, with its blunt and controversial methods, would be able to make much of a dent in a rot so complex and extensive. However, with the new EPA report they have at least tried, for the very first time, to bring into public discussion common sense aspects that were never before part of an official document, because the climate lobby outlawed them. This is something that Biden, Harris or any foreseeable Democrat president would never do, because the Democrats are fully invested in climate alarmism, which at this point is one of their main levers for forced transformation of the American society. There’s nothing, nothing at all about any of that in your article and its value seriously suffers as a result. There’s only that much of value that can be said without getting down from the fence.
Thanks for the feedback ... there is plenty of climate analyses here at THB, this post is about something different.
Roger, since you definitely do not want to acknowledge the elephant in the room, let me put it like this:
Let’s say I’m a scientist who just defected from N Korea. I know nothing about US politics, Democrats and Republicans are all the same to me, but I hear that the US has problems with scientific integrity, such as in climate science in the last three decades or dealing with the pandemic from a scientific basis. I would like to know - is there one political side that drapes itself in the mantle of “science”, who claims to “follow the science” in order to impose its will on the ordinary people , a side who benefits most and systematically from lack of scientific integrity?
Do I get any real answer to that simple, basic question from an article titled “Trump vs Biden on scientific integrity?”, because at least the title suggests I should get an answer.
It’s an honest, sincere question. I did not come from N Korea but I grew up and worked in a communist country. I did not come here for politics, but I don’t like when the elephants are ignored; I already had too much of that.
Thanks … If you are asking who is better/worse Rs or Ds … then I pick, wrong question. They both are horribly bad on science in politics.
I pick neither.
Both side need to do better.
One thought I did not see in this excellent article was the difference (in my mind) between science and policy. Science can show, forecast, and even prove certain conclusions. But I think policy extends (almost always) into the realm of society and the land of trade-offs. In this respect, I do not think scientists are any more or less equipped than the rest of us when we inform ourselves. Covid is a good example. The science of epidemiology said many things (some of which were right and some of which were very wrong). But the translation of that into the imposition of certain policies necessarily entailed a move into hard choices involving economics, social values, community, etc. In this way, we will never be able to simply "follow the science." Even when we know what it is.
In fact, as I dug into epidemiology I discovered that it was a primitive field dominated by crude mechanistic narratives that lacked quantification. The whole modeling effort was actually worse than climate models in terms of skill, and that should have been an easy hurdle to surpass. The spread of an epidemic is a very ill-posed problem however so modeling was doomed to failure from the start. The literature is a mess and cratered during covid as Ioannidis pointed out with wrong or even fraudulent papers becoming the norm. Covid brought out the worst tribalism in science I've ever seen.
Agreed!
This is a great, thought-provoking piece, Roger. Timely with a capital TIMELY.
I worry about a repeat of advisory boards of the Gina McCarthy EPA era. An overwhelming majority were also receiving grants from the EPA. Full Disclosure of all parties seems like it would be mandatory for better functioning and less politics over time.
Thanks Stephen!
What does THB think of the National Association of Scholars’ recent report of how to ensure scientific papers are transparent and reproducible? It seems we have a major problem in all (?) areas of science due to “find what they want you to find” and “tell us something exciting “.
Can you post the link? I'll be happy to have a look. I can't imagine anyone would be against transparent and reproducible ;-)
Roger,
You know that many readers will wonder if you favour any party or if your article is agnostic. Readers will be looking for special pleading for Repub v. Dem. Is there a way for you to dismiss your leaning (if any) as a factor in your article?
This problem is widespread, not particular to you or your article. Geoff S
I published my results on the political compass a while back here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/rogerpielkejr/p/end-the-week-with-thb
😎
Skepticism is the horse that the scientific method rides in on. That should fit the mutual R vs D arrangement well enough as far as scientific research goes, but only if both parties are assumed to be guided by the Constitution. Which since the arrogant Woodrow W has not at all been the case, as the behavior of FDR clearly demonstrated.
Heclo was writing in a different era before the internet and the loss of trust in our elite institutions by the public. If indeed half of all papers are wrong as Ioannidis argues, then one can make the case for a 50% funding cut. Probably we are training many times the number of scientists who can get jobs in their field as well. But Universities have become a racket partly funded by the Government through student loans. I would argue that Universities have drifted away from their core mission to give an unbiased education to Americans and have become factories to create ideological true believers. This has been driven in part by the Democrat talking point that everyone should have the opportunity to go to college. In reality 60 years ago everyone recognized that only perhaps 25% of High School graduates would benefit from a college degree.
I am firmly in the reform through defunding camp. Part of the problem is scientific associations themselves which have been taken over by ideologically and politically radical ideas such as gender affirming care which is totally anti-scientific. In so far as these are funded by government, cutting that funding is a good idea. Same goes for the IPCC which climategate revealed to be politicized in some ways.
When I was in (Engineering) grad school in 1980, there was some debate on the wisdom of government funding science. The intellectual side of me clearly saw the “He who pays the piper calls the tunes” risk. The naive 21 year old thought “Nah. That could never happen.”.
And now we have massive political corruption of science, and trillions of dollars ensuring it is entrenched.
Fund fewer studies. In these fewer studies, have a "Team X" undertake research and "Team Y" to carp, reproduce if possible, cavil and otherwise counter Team X's findings. Team Y receives a bonus for changes induced in Team X's procedures, inferences, conclusions, etc. Team X receives a bonus for reproducibility by Team Y. They must jointly write a final research paper to which each subscribes. If they cannot agree on that final document, a coin flip shall determine which team writes the "opinion" and which writes the "dissent". All data and all computer code archived for easy public access. The pursuit of knowledge, like everything else, is a matter of incentives. In my view current incentives are perverse and these perverse incentives result in perverse outcomes, such as touting RCP 8.5 as realistic.
Scientific integrity must start with basics: what is, and is not, science. Many people do not know.
Profs. Lindzen and Happer recently explained they agree with the Supreme Court that “‘scientific knowledge’ … must be derived by the scientific method.” Daubert v. Merrell Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
They explained that the scientific method is simply and profoundly: validating theoretical predictions with observations and rejecting theories when they do not work. Nobel physicist Richard Feynman elaborated:
"[W]e compare the result of [a theory's] computation to nature, ... compare it directly with observations, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science."
``They also explained what is not science, including:
Government Opinion. Richard Feynman also stated a fundamental principle of science:
"No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles."
The importance of this scientific principle is tragically underscored by what happened when Stalin made Trofim Lysenko the czar of Russian biology and agriculture. Lysenko’s government imposed biological theories, which rejected well-established genetic science, resulted in millions of Russians dying.
• Consensus
• 97% of Scientists’ Opinion. Science is not a popularity contest. The only thing that matters is whether a theory works with facts.
• Theoretical Models That Do Not Work
• Cherry picked, Fabricated and Falsified Data
• Peer-Review. Scientists consider peer reviewed literature all the time, but it does not determine scientific truth. A small fraction is correct and useful. Moreover, climate science journals have had their editorial boards hijacked so that research papers with scientific findings contrary to the dogma of climate calamity are rejected and editors know they will be fired if they publish them.
Unfortunately, government does what it often does, takes a standard, here science, and changes through the political process to its own purposes.
As to science, Peter Drucker explained: "In government, there is now a strong tendency to judge science by what is politically expedient or politically fashionable; that is, to attempt to subordinate science …to value-judgments that are the reverse of, and largely incompatible with, any criteria one could possibly call scientific."
Accordingly, science in government cannot escape the political process. No independent group of scientific experts can escape politics. Instead, I suggest that the Supreme Court’s approach to scientific experts be adopted by government. Require that scientific experts follow what is and is not science. More details available on request.
Feynman is endlessly quotable on this topic.
Too bad I can't find the exact quote I wanted!
Ah: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool."
juvenile Republican penchant for “owning the libs.” I don't kowwhat you mean by that, bit it sounds like an unnecessary cheapshot. I don' t recall you doing that to Democrasts. I thought you were nore evenhanded than that.
I am a conservative, and I’ll be the first to admit that it is a juvenile (and additionally, unproductive and unpersuasive) thing. It’s not a cheap shot as much as it is a productive nudge. Trump derangement syndrome is the same thing on the left (unproductive an unpersuasive). Serious people who are honest about their intentions and truly desire to make things better will leave these petty things to the X/Twitter/Truth-sphere. Let’s get to work supporting science that is truly peer-reviewed with results that can be replicated, instead of “hypotheses looking for data.” The scientific method requires it. Science should never be in quotes. It should invite challenge and improvement, not stifle it.
It’s not “owning the libs”.
It’s forcing (or tricking) them into admitting support for ideas and policies the vast majority think are misguided at best and insane at worst.
That is good politics.
If your opponent is off base, get them talking.
I agree with that strategy, since that requires having a coherent argument that is meant to persuade, not just ridicule. A prime example of an effective implementation was the conservative attack on the radical trans stuff. It asked serious questions and moved the needle with a lot of folks.
Open borders is another
Guilty as charged.
I am not a fan of either R or D approach to politics these days.
Roger has voted for the Democrat in the last several presidential elections.
I'll be the first to admit that my own politics do not fit well into the US D-R dichotomy.
Not remotely.
Oh no! My heart is broken.
How does integrity in science work? What percentage of scientists must have integrity for science to have integrity? If 10% of scientists lack integrity does that that mean that science has an integrity problem? Who determines who has integrity and who does not? If a scientist is judged to have integrity does that mean that she should be trusted and her views taken more seriously than one that lies and cheats and sues his comrades? Too many questions and so few answers.
Scientists like Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen, Will Happer, THB, Steve Koonin, John Christy have all demonstrated high levels of integrity in their work and careers. Yet they have all been the subject of hit jobs and character assassination by the climatariat. Nobodies at Government Labs or second rate schools that couldn't carry Richard Lindzen's pencil dismiss him as an old quack. Science, at least climate science, is so screwed up that I can't figure out where to start but we can start with leadership. Few would argue that recent Presidents have demonstrated what integrity means. I voted for Trump and I like a lot of what he is doing but it's hard for me to believe that much of his behavior models integrity. The head of the IPCC seems to be asleep at the switch. How does the President of Penn State let Herr Mann get away with his outrageous behavior? THB has to leave the University because he gets no support from leadership. I could go on.
What caused the climate research curriculum to go off track was the massive influx of Federal Dollars controlled by Washington groups with political agendas. An honest researcher could not get a project funded unless it was was written to support the party line. The conclusion was a great distortion of the development of the science. The Climate Research Industry suffered from the same disease as USAID - too much money badly managed. Both lead to bad decisions.