The credibility of this blog post should be severely reduced, if not utterly collapse, for any reader who simply visits the Wikipedia page for the approvinging cited anti-vaxxer organization Children’s Health Defense:
Here's how I recommend making sense of this blog post: it's a product of too little rather than too much trust.
>>> People often disqualified as “irrational” or “gullible” in public discourse, such as “conspiracy theorists” or “anti-vaxxers,” deploy sophisticated verification strategies to “fact-check” the news in their own way (Tripodi, 2018) and produce “objectivist counter-expertise” (Ylä-Anttila, 2018) by doing their “own research” (Marwick & Partin, 2022). For instance, a recent in-depth analysis of around 15,000 comments, based on mix-methods, showed how “anti-vaxxers” cite scientific studies on Facebook groups to support their positions and challenge the objectivity of mainstream media (Berriche, 2021).
Given people’s skepticism toward information encountered online and the low prevalence of misinformation in their media diet, interventions aimed at reducing the acceptance of misinformation are bound to have smaller effects than interventions increasing trust in reliable sources of information (Acerbi et al., 2022). More broadly, enhancing trust in reliable sources should be a priority over fostering distrust in unreliable sources (Altay, 2022). <<<
There were definitely failures of vaccine/COVID maximalism, but regular science and science processes has pretty much gotten the win on this stuff. The pointlessness of community masking, the vastly diminishing marginal utility of endless boosters, The bad cost:benefit ratio of vaccines for young men (where myocarditis risk drowns out reduced COVID morbidity easily after 1 shot given already lot base rate risk). The pointlessness of masking/vaccinating children. Just normal peer reviewed research in normal institutional channels established these things, not hysterics on youtube or substack. The hysterics are actually inhibiting correction to these bad policies by discrediting narrowly targeted critique. https://youtu.be/lfzUvHjZPd0
This is a great critique, but I think the most intellectually charitable summary of the Cochrane Review is that the evidence base is of too poor quality to draw any conclusions. (Perhaps one could argue it was thus imprudent or unethical for them to publish their review.)
The burden of proof is traditionally on the claimant to disprove the null hypothesis; in this case, that masking has no effect on SARS-CoV-2 spread. My reading of the Cochrane Review is that this burden has not been -- but may yet be -- met:
"The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.
"There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.... Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.
"There is a need for large, well‐designed RCTs addressing the effectiveness of many of these interventions in multiple settings and populations, as well as the impact of adherence on effectiveness, especially in those most at risk of ARIs."
Listen to Prasad's last 2 videos about this. The argument isn't that masking doesn't work in close controlled one in one settings. It's community masking that is the issue. The analogy is that if you are going to play Russian Roulette a few times you want as few bullets in the gun as possible. If you are going to play thousands of times, it doesn't matter. Community masking doesn't work for the obvious reasons Prasad has covered a ton of times - because people aren't going to mask in a well fitted N95 every second they are in public. And once exposures exceed certain density of trials, halving the frequency of those exposures makes no difference to transmission rates. The death rate from Russian Roulette will be the same whether there is one or five bullets in the gun when you play thousands of times.Your chances of getting COVID are 100%.
I think I did a pretty fair job in the piece of including various points of view. At least on certain topics, Wikipedia is going to show a clear bias while pretending to be neutral (unlike CHD, which has a clear and stated mission, whether or not you agree with them).
Oh, your piece was fine - glad you wrote it. I was just thinking more about the broader phenomenon of "do your own research" as an admonition to avoid "captured" media when I think that framework sort of misses the problem of failures of authority and expertise. I mean, we have the question in both cases if the bias is driving the interaction with evidence or it is born of honest neutral interaction with the evidence.
Yes, everything is a Rorschach test these days. At least in my longer pieces, I try to include a variety of viewpoints and then let people make up their own minds. They will probably see what they want to see but at least I may throw a few people off a little and make them think. I don't know entirely what to think myself in a lot of cases.
Because of the novel mRNA vaccines, coupled with mandates (including for public school and college students), it makes sense to me that interest and donations would increase to CHD. Was it really a "far right" conference? I have my doubts as anything that doesn't align with the current official ideology is branded as "far right." It seems like that article is smearing him without directly refuting any of the CHD claims. I'm not saying that claims by CHD couldn't be refuted, just that I don't see evidence of that kind of serious engagement in the article.
It reminds me of needed pushback on gender identity theory - just normal science-based institutions rather than ideological wingnuts screaming about groomers, moral decay and Jesus (who just discredit the needed critique with their transparent equally ideological motivations) are what is needed.
I'm genuinely curious about the heuristic proposed here.
In the first place, I find the characterization of the citation to Children's Health Defense as "approvingly" to be significantly editorialized. The author states matters of verifiable fact: "Children’s Health Defense is suing the FDA to obtain their reports on the COVID-19 vaccines, which have not been made public" and "Children’s Health Defense is a nonprofit 501(C)3 that solicits donations; I was unable to find names of corporate donors, if any." There's no judgment expressed one way or the other on the organization, and one might rather be curious why it should take a lawsuit to gain access to such information in the first place.
Secondly, the author cites numerous primary sources (AHRQ grant report, US FDA, US HRSA) and quality secondary sources (ACOG, academic papers), in addition to sources that are *critical* of how VAERS has been used to raise doubts about the COVID-19 vaccinations (Reuters fact check, McGill Office for Science and Society).
Yet the heuristic put forward --
"The credibility of this blog post should be severely reduced, if not utterly collapse, for any reader who simply visits the Wikipedia page for the approvinging cited anti-vaxxer organization Children’s Health Defense"
-- is that if a single dubious source is cited (for the sake of discussion, let's assume Children's Health Defense is utterly without merit or credibility), then the remainder of the entire work can be written off. How much of journalism survives this heuristic? Of academic research? I think this heuristic is ultimately indefensible.
It's a blatantly sanitized presentation of CHD. No reputable mainstream media journalism would fail to provide the reader with at least hyperlinks articulating its sordid background as a polluter of the infosphere.
Assume we agree. That's sufficient cause to throw out the rest of the work?
I actually think you could strike all references to CHD and the rest of the post remains intact. The purpose of the post is not to defend CHD, it's to discuss access to and the availability of information about vaccine adverse events. CHD just happens to be suing the government to make this information available. If/when their suit is successful, the resulting information would be just another primary source in the public record. Access to information -- which, in one way or another (or more than one) was taxpayer subsidized to begin with -- seems like a win.
The credibility of this blog post should be severely reduced, if not utterly collapse, for any reader who simply visits the Wikipedia page for the approvinging cited anti-vaxxer organization Children’s Health Defense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Health_Defense
Here's how I recommend making sense of this blog post: it's a product of too little rather than too much trust.
>>> People often disqualified as “irrational” or “gullible” in public discourse, such as “conspiracy theorists” or “anti-vaxxers,” deploy sophisticated verification strategies to “fact-check” the news in their own way (Tripodi, 2018) and produce “objectivist counter-expertise” (Ylä-Anttila, 2018) by doing their “own research” (Marwick & Partin, 2022). For instance, a recent in-depth analysis of around 15,000 comments, based on mix-methods, showed how “anti-vaxxers” cite scientific studies on Facebook groups to support their positions and challenge the objectivity of mainstream media (Berriche, 2021).
Given people’s skepticism toward information encountered online and the low prevalence of misinformation in their media diet, interventions aimed at reducing the acceptance of misinformation are bound to have smaller effects than interventions increasing trust in reliable sources of information (Acerbi et al., 2022). More broadly, enhancing trust in reliable sources should be a priority over fostering distrust in unreliable sources (Altay, 2022). <<<
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051221150412
Unfortunately, Wikipedia has lost all credibility with me.
There were definitely failures of vaccine/COVID maximalism, but regular science and science processes has pretty much gotten the win on this stuff. The pointlessness of community masking, the vastly diminishing marginal utility of endless boosters, The bad cost:benefit ratio of vaccines for young men (where myocarditis risk drowns out reduced COVID morbidity easily after 1 shot given already lot base rate risk). The pointlessness of masking/vaccinating children. Just normal peer reviewed research in normal institutional channels established these things, not hysterics on youtube or substack. The hysterics are actually inhibiting correction to these bad policies by discrediting narrowly targeted critique. https://youtu.be/lfzUvHjZPd0
I would give credit to several Substackers and other individuals for pushing closer examination of the policies by more mainstream sources.
A critique of the recent Cochrane Review on mask efficacy:
https://theconversation.com/yes-masks-reduce-the-risk-of-spreading-covid-despite-a-review-saying-they-dont-198992
This is a great critique, but I think the most intellectually charitable summary of the Cochrane Review is that the evidence base is of too poor quality to draw any conclusions. (Perhaps one could argue it was thus imprudent or unethical for them to publish their review.)
The burden of proof is traditionally on the claimant to disprove the null hypothesis; in this case, that masking has no effect on SARS-CoV-2 spread. My reading of the Cochrane Review is that this burden has not been -- but may yet be -- met:
"The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness and the concomitant measures of mask adherence which would be highly relevant to the measurement of effectiveness, especially in the elderly and in young children.
"There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect. The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.... Harms associated with physical interventions were under‐investigated.
"There is a need for large, well‐designed RCTs addressing the effectiveness of many of these interventions in multiple settings and populations, as well as the impact of adherence on effectiveness, especially in those most at risk of ARIs."
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full
Listen to Prasad's last 2 videos about this. The argument isn't that masking doesn't work in close controlled one in one settings. It's community masking that is the issue. The analogy is that if you are going to play Russian Roulette a few times you want as few bullets in the gun as possible. If you are going to play thousands of times, it doesn't matter. Community masking doesn't work for the obvious reasons Prasad has covered a ton of times - because people aren't going to mask in a well fitted N95 every second they are in public. And once exposures exceed certain density of trials, halving the frequency of those exposures makes no difference to transmission rates. The death rate from Russian Roulette will be the same whether there is one or five bullets in the gun when you play thousands of times.Your chances of getting COVID are 100%.
"Everything that doesn't endorse what I already believe has no credibility". This is pretty much everyone's argument.
I think I did a pretty fair job in the piece of including various points of view. At least on certain topics, Wikipedia is going to show a clear bias while pretending to be neutral (unlike CHD, which has a clear and stated mission, whether or not you agree with them).
Oh, your piece was fine - glad you wrote it. I was just thinking more about the broader phenomenon of "do your own research" as an admonition to avoid "captured" media when I think that framework sort of misses the problem of failures of authority and expertise. I mean, we have the question in both cases if the bias is driving the interaction with evidence or it is born of honest neutral interaction with the evidence.
Yes, everything is a Rorschach test these days. At least in my longer pieces, I try to include a variety of viewpoints and then let people make up their own minds. They will probably see what they want to see but at least I may throw a few people off a little and make them think. I don't know entirely what to think myself in a lot of cases.
You can see how Wikipedia developed the article here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Children%27s_Health_Defense&action=history
How about the Associated Press?
https://twitter.com/MRSmithAP/status/1471130262683664387
Because of the novel mRNA vaccines, coupled with mandates (including for public school and college students), it makes sense to me that interest and donations would increase to CHD. Was it really a "far right" conference? I have my doubts as anything that doesn't align with the current official ideology is branded as "far right." It seems like that article is smearing him without directly refuting any of the CHD claims. I'm not saying that claims by CHD couldn't be refuted, just that I don't see evidence of that kind of serious engagement in the article.
RFK Jr. just gave this long interview... I have only listened to the beginning but give it a try and listen and then see what you think. https://rumble.com/v288tw7-conversation-with-robert-f.-kennedy-jr.-how-the-powerful-captured-the-publi.html
It reminds me of needed pushback on gender identity theory - just normal science-based institutions rather than ideological wingnuts screaming about groomers, moral decay and Jesus (who just discredit the needed critique with their transparent equally ideological motivations) are what is needed.
I'm genuinely curious about the heuristic proposed here.
In the first place, I find the characterization of the citation to Children's Health Defense as "approvingly" to be significantly editorialized. The author states matters of verifiable fact: "Children’s Health Defense is suing the FDA to obtain their reports on the COVID-19 vaccines, which have not been made public" and "Children’s Health Defense is a nonprofit 501(C)3 that solicits donations; I was unable to find names of corporate donors, if any." There's no judgment expressed one way or the other on the organization, and one might rather be curious why it should take a lawsuit to gain access to such information in the first place.
Secondly, the author cites numerous primary sources (AHRQ grant report, US FDA, US HRSA) and quality secondary sources (ACOG, academic papers), in addition to sources that are *critical* of how VAERS has been used to raise doubts about the COVID-19 vaccinations (Reuters fact check, McGill Office for Science and Society).
Yet the heuristic put forward --
"The credibility of this blog post should be severely reduced, if not utterly collapse, for any reader who simply visits the Wikipedia page for the approvinging cited anti-vaxxer organization Children’s Health Defense"
-- is that if a single dubious source is cited (for the sake of discussion, let's assume Children's Health Defense is utterly without merit or credibility), then the remainder of the entire work can be written off. How much of journalism survives this heuristic? Of academic research? I think this heuristic is ultimately indefensible.
It's a blatantly sanitized presentation of CHD. No reputable mainstream media journalism would fail to provide the reader with at least hyperlinks articulating its sordid background as a polluter of the infosphere.
Assume we agree. That's sufficient cause to throw out the rest of the work?
I actually think you could strike all references to CHD and the rest of the post remains intact. The purpose of the post is not to defend CHD, it's to discuss access to and the availability of information about vaccine adverse events. CHD just happens to be suing the government to make this information available. If/when their suit is successful, the resulting information would be just another primary source in the public record. Access to information -- which, in one way or another (or more than one) was taxpayer subsidized to begin with -- seems like a win.
Fair points. You've convinced me that my response was excessive and I should've been more circumscribed.