Ask Us Anything!
As we move into the third year of Sensible Medicine, we thank you and talk about the future
We are incredibly grateful for our subscribers and readers.
We are humbled by the numbers of subscribers and for the intelligent, thought-provoking, and (overwhelmingly) kind and good humored comments on the posts. More and more people are submitting essays to us and the site seems to be evolving into the resource and community that we had hoped it would.
We plan to keep doing what we think we do best: “showcasing a range of ideas and opinions about all things bio-medicine.” We also hope to throw some new things into the mix.
Our “letter to the editor” idea is beginning to shape. Here, people with important points to make about articles, who have taken the time to write a letter to the editor, one which the journal had declined to publish, are welcome to submit their letter to us and we will try to give it a home on Sensible Medicine.
Another thing we would like to do is offer a little extra to those subscribers who have chosen to pay for their subscription. This generosity is gracious and appreciated and really stimulates us to work harder to make Sensible Medicine great. (We do still all have busy day jobs.)
So, below, for paid subscribers, ask us anything!
We will answer these questions on a podcast in the coming weeks. We will read questions and will try not to dodge any of them. You can address the questions to one or all of us.
Again. Thanks so much. Looking forward to another great year.
Addendum. We closed comments on 9/28/24 so we can record the podcast (or maybe podcasts). Given the reception, we will definitely to this again.
Photo By Adi Goldstein
I love all three of you, but no softball questions today. Thanks for your time and thoughts.
To any or all:
I subscribed just to ask this question. There are many reasons I believe the mRNA vaccines should have never been authorized or given to anyone. But I want to ask your opinions why you do or do not consider the following one point to be a sufficient reason in itself to disavow these vaccines. That point is data transparency. There are at least a couple papers that I am aware of that tried to systematically reanalyze a bunch of trials by obtaining raw data. Both concluded the study conclusions are at very high risk of being changed when independently analyzed. One journal editor who did one of these studies basically concluded something like “the time has come that clinical trials should be assumed fraudulent until proven otherwise by independent analysis”.
There had never been a moment where data transparency had been more vital for the following reasons:
1. Pfizer was a historically criminal organization. This included a history of clinical trial fraud.
2. Pfizer and Moderna had immense financial incentive to produce favorable results.
3. The products were going to be used billions of times.
4. Vaccines had historical failures that include probably killing more people than they save, such as whole-cell DTP and high-titer measles vaccines.
5. The mRNA platform was new.
6. The target organism was new.
7. The vaccines were developed in record time.
8. It was a controversial product that people were hesitant to get
9. The product could be mandated.
I ask if any of you can even create a hypothetical scenario where data transparency was more crucial than in this moment? And if data transparency can’t happen here, then when in the world can it happen? This to me is an utterly irredeemable failure. No recognized experts in the field published any peer-reviewed papers independently analyzing raw data from either trial. I find no evidence that such people even prominently requested such data. And doctors everywhere had no problem recommending the products. Is there any particular reason the FDA couldn’t just have said “no data for the scientific community = no authorization”? And if not, shouldn’t they have done so?
The methodological problems of both the trials and real-world studies is a separate subject. But suffice it to say that real-world studies cannot be cited as corroborating trial results when those trial results are themselves in need of self-corroboration. Why am I to trust someone’s glowing book report? A core tenant of science if replicability. Without independent analysis, how do you even know what it is you are trying to replicate? Therefore, at this juncture, I believe that dutifully accepting the seminal trial results as useful is literally not an act of science, but of anti-science. To what extent do you agree or disagree, and why?
The FDA was sued after refusing to fulfill FOIA requests for what Pfizer data they had from EUA application. They asked the court for 70 years to release the data piecemeal, citing lack of manpower to do the redactions. So they have enough manpower to review all that data, but not enough to make a single redacted copy of it? To me, it is hard to deem this as anything other than a lie. Do you agree or disagree? The judge ruled against the FDA and the data is now in the public domain. Several people have published results of independent analyses, but not anywhere that people would read. The things they have found are harrowing to the point that - if correct - it appears Pfizer could have literally made chocolate chip cookies 95% effective. The same thing more recently happened with Moderna’s data. The FDA tried to sit on it again, and a judge likewise didn’t buy it. But by now all the people who were doing independent analysis are exhausted and have lives to get back to. So whose job is it to be responsible for all these raw data?
Please be complemented by the fact that I feel safe to even ask such questions here. Thank you.
I am a Hospitalist and would love to hear you guys deep dive into the issue of anticoagulation with atrial fibrillation. I have maintained that the net benefits are much oversold and god knows there is a lot of money at stake in this area. It’s such a common matter in my workday and no doubt also in the outpatient world. I am confident that there would be a lot of interest if you took this subject on.