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KP's avatar

It's pretty obvious to me that you need to look at the "funding and disclosures" section of any research publication to decide be aware of the very potential bias and influence behind the conclusions any paper has arrived at. And of course as I understand it , majority of clinical trial data from studies are not available without a FOIA. We must have transparency and accountability in research, journal publications and the pharmaceutical industry to accurately interpret data.

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Dr. K's avatar

John, excellent piece -- thanks. The most important point here is that the incentive/pressure to support The Narrative(TM) is profound. Masking has long been known to be worthless...there are more studies than one can count if one aggregates them all. Some are better than others, but the only couple (excluding a piece of cloth in a clean room) that seem to show any kind of positive effect are the weakest of all. As Cochrane properly concluded, there is no evidence that masks have value from the studies they analyzed. The scandalous piece was their non-scientific "retraction" of marvelous results and then the repeated echo chamber of wrongthink such as you illustrated here in support of the bad science. Wish you had a bullier pulpit from which to shout this. Most people just emerge confused which is the point of those trying to call decent results into question, but that is bad for science, bad for scientists, bad for physicians and, worst of all, bad for patients. So keep these kinds of pieces coming, please.

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