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The Great Santini's avatar

As an Engineer I have frequently been appalled by the poor levels of evidence, weak analysis, and over the top promotion of medical interventions. I used to hold my medical colleagues in high esteem and rarely checked their work. My journey began with dietary claims when I discovered the poor or outright false statements on that subject. During the pandemic I began reading medical papers. I was stunned by the obvious attempts to denigrate somewhat effective and cheap treatments for the virus. I was still deluded in thinking that the vaccines had been properly tested. But over the intervening months I have learned just how artificial and erroneous the initial reports were. I also discovered how mendacious the authors were. They knew that they were lying about effectiveness and were definitely obscuring the abysmal safety profile of these vaccines. I no longer trust the medical community in general. I trust a few doctors who I know to be honest. But now I check everything.

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Dr. K's avatar

John, Sensible Medicine is on a roll. I have published many papers -- I know you have as well. I have been an editor (still am). But the real problem is with your final sentence. In almost all of these situations money is the ONLY issue THAT MATTERS...the only other one is some variation of POWER.

The entire coverup of the covid debacle (the NPIs uniformly did not work as described [or work at all], the spikeshots were woefully undertested and mostly given to those who demonstrably had more harm than good taking them, etc.) showed better than at least I had realized how corrupt the entire process had become. I could give you many examples as egregious as the ones you have noted -- while important and accurate articles are being squelched from any kind of circulation (such as the McCullough et al article up for 24 hours last week on the Lancet preprint server -- then mysteriously pulled down for, literally, no reason). And it is not just covid. Read this article from today in the Free Press about a similar article made to disappear because it was against the narrative -- in this case about gender. The article is solid -- but the truth doesn't matter...only the narrative. https://substack.com/inbox/post/134179542

I have lifetime subscriptions to NEJM and others -- I have stopped reading them because I have stopped believing there is truth in there. Marcia Angell pointed this out more than a decade ago. We all should have listened. And yes, it is sad...devastatingly so. We are now dependent on known-flawed papers that deliver the desired results rather than the true ones. And if there are papers that are correct, we will suspect those, too.

A disaster, the implications of which we have yet to begin to fully realize -- but if the covid debacle is a hint, we are in for massive increases in morbidity, mortality, and pharma spend (yes...related).

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