By that standard, this entire website and most of the software industry is misinformation. In fact, most political speech is misinformation.

> If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".

GP is saying that the conversation is, and should be recognized as, more nuanced than that. There sure is an undercurrent of people making narratives but that's not a new problem. The left and right have weaponized narratives to the detriment of this country ad infinitum. If you're arguing we should only have evidence based discussion and that anecdotes and opinions don't matter, then you have new problems. The new problems will alienate and harm anyone that your current telemetry (and understanding) doesn't reflect. To me, that's an age-old problem where some value technocracy while others value bureaucracy; my personal opinion being that both are valuable but they need a distribution model in government that optimizes for problem solving.

> If you're publishing your opinion, or if you're discussing your research before it's been peer-reviewed, you have the responsibility to make that clear, and even to point out that it does not agree with the current scientific consensus (if any exists).

I agree, but it seems GP was indicating this doctor was doing just that and was still silenced.

Sure, if we ignore the context of my statement and this whole discussion, which happens to be about COVID vaccines.

Also, please note that what I said -- and what you quoted -- is that if your claim is not supported by peer-reviewed scientific research, then you're offering your opinion. I didn't say that offering your opinion is the same as spreading misinformation.

It's only when you're presenting your opinion as a fact that you're engaging in misinformation, which is what I said in the next sentence that you didn't quote.

> GP is saying that the conversation is, and should be recognized as, more nuanced than that.

"Having a nuanced discussion" and "being responsible with how you say things" are not mutually exclusive propositions.

> If you're arguing we should only have evidence based discussion and that anecdotes and opinions don't matter, then you have new problems.

Anecdotes and opinions should be clearly presented as such, so that everyone who encounters them can decide how much they matter to them. That's what I'm arguing.

> I agree, but it seems GP was indicating this doctor was doing just that and was still silenced.

I see nothing there that indicates whether the doctor was doing that or not. Like I said, I don't know whether the doctor "insisted" in a way that made it clear it was his opinion, unsupported by current research.

> Anecdotes and opinions should be clearly presented as such, so that everyone who encounters them can decide how much they matter to them. That's what I'm arguing

Agreed. Though, even data driven analysis is best-effort these days and that is a fact that folks like to ignore in these kinds of discussions. If someone has to make abundantly clear that something is anecdotal or opinion based I can agree to that, but I think a counter-weight needs to be assigned to data: explain the potential for gaps and how historically fraught this area of data has been. That arms folks with the information to assign weights themselves.

And this sentence is a peer-reviewed fact, or just your opinion that you failed to label appropriately i.e. misinformation?

No, by that standard, this entire website is offering its oppinion. Which in fact it is.

Now there's an understatement.

The fact is that they are all misinfoming. Just yesterday in the congressional testimoney, Gen Milley, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Gen McKenzie - all said they informed the president for keeping 2,500 troops in May. President Biden couple of weeks ago denied that he had any recommendation from the generals or anyone in the government.

So which one is true?

https://badgut.org/information-centre/a-z-digestive-topics/n...

(To be clear I think the current scientific consensus that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective is correct.)

Was there an established practice of peer-reviewed research back in 1847? My understanding is that the scientific community evolved that system because it helps reduce the potential for errors and makes it easier to trust the research.

> Most of us with a STEM education spent years learning about example after example of a great scientist or whistleblower that was scorned by the medical or scientific community, and it turned out that countless lives could have been saved if people had kept a more open mind.

"Open mind" and "communicating responsibly" are not mutually exclusive.

> I am greatly disappointed in anyone who claims to be educated but thinks that censorship is acceptable in a free society.

I am just as disappointed in anyone who thinks that requiring responsible communication is the same as censorship.

Semmelweis was basically lynched (and ruined) by his peers. As usual.

> responsible communication

Yes but the contextual issue here is that of censorship. Or if you proposed a method to filter general publication through criteria involving responsibility, that would require more details.

Not necessarily. What is the bar to be defined as "scientific research"? What is the bar for "peer review"? Considering the massive amount of evidence that a large amount of "peer review" doesn't review much and that a measurable amount of "scientific research" is inadequate and sometimes outright fraudulent, any pursuit of truth shouldn't be built exclusively on such a weak foundation. But to your point, good research should hold more weight (and does!).

> If you're pushing a narrative that implies that you shouldn't get vaccinated, then yes, that's "anti-vax".

And yet concerns about the long-term safety of these vaccines are, by definition, untested. The long term efficacy of these vaccines are certainly in doubt. Both are reasonable concerns worth debating and exploring. But will get classified as "anti-vax" and will become subject to censorship "for our own good".

I am vaccinated. I believe these vaccines represent an astounding accomplishment. I believe people should have access to all information in order to make the best decisions for themselves.

I also have some skepticism regarding the messages and messaging that comes from the CDC and NIH. I also distrust the role they've played in any discussion regarding the origins of Covid.

Why we (in America at least) can watch abject government incompetence in the DoD, FBI, CIA, ICE, IRS, and on and on but pretend the CDC and the NIH, the ultimate gatekeepers of the Covid and vaccine narratives, are immune to such failings is beyond me.

First, historically, no vaccine has caused adverse effects beyond about 2 months. Second, millions have been vaccinated for nearly 9 months already. Third, the mRNA vaccine is metabolized in the body and leaves no trace of itself past 11-14 days. Fourth, it is not a daily medication.

A reasonable analogy of drinking a beer and being worried the after effects might hit you a year after the fact, because it's untested, is obviously approaching absurd.

Freedom of choice is an American value that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world to the degree that it does here. Freedom to decide what you do with your body trumps public health. Half of Americans believe this, and the other half doesn't.

Finding the compromise between those two viewpoints is exceptionally challenging. Each group has the temptation to view the other as being "willfully evil," whether for being selfish or for imposing tyranny.

I hope the solution is that our high vaccination rate of 70+% of adults and the prevalence of the spread of Delta (which creates natural immunity) will combine to reach herd immunity and we can get out of this craven, horrible timeline we find ourselves in.

No all freedoms are given by eastablished law, many are implicit. Then later some freedoms can be restricted by the law.

Is there a law banning catching COVID or spreading COVID? I don't think so.

> It's also why we don't allow smoking in restaurants, etc.

Some establishments do allow it. It's your choice, if you want to visit them or not.

> And it's also related to seat belt laws.

It's not.

> George Washington forced our soldiers to take a smallpox innoculation and it was pivotal to us winning.

Yes, soldiers usually submit to wished of their commanders because otherwise their stance in the military deteriorates. Most people do not submit to military organization.

There’s plenty of bad/fraudulent/wrong stuff that gets through peer review, perhaps even a majority.

Peer reviewing is hard. Reproducibility is hard.

Neither of these things being hard invalidates the value of peer review compared to gut ideas from random people.

There is a better alternative to listening to random people I think which is to follow the work of individual scientists whom we trust because we have been following their work over a long period of time and because they exhibit Jacob Bronowski's 'habit of truth'.

Unfortunately, I don't know any immunologists or epidemiologists! I'm guessing that censorship on balance makes it harder rather than easier to find them.

You don't need to blindly trust science but also don't be blind to it. Assuming everything is false just leads to guts dominating which is unhelpful.

Similarly if there isn't studies done then relying on the ideas put forth by those who are in the field is better than arbitrary people looking for their five minutes of fame.

The peer review problem is "maybe we need to find a way to find good papers in addition to blocking bad ones" and the reproducibility problem is "people tend to focus so much on novel results that we end up effectively p hacking across all the studies we do".

Neither of those is the way it is usually referred to in layman's terms as "science is broken" that is an exaggeration but hey we do live in a world where that is how people talk...

> We conclude that the reviewing process for the 2014 conference was good for identifying poor papers

When it comes to peer review that is the actual goal. Have a filter that prevents bad things from getting published.

In an ideal world we would have a process that allows good papers to be published as well.

However I think we can all agree that is a secondary concern. Especially since pre-publish announcements are common anyway, so it isn't like no one is looking at papers that aren't published.

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/09/surgical-mask...

Cloth masks showed no statistically significant reduction in the spread of Covid-19. (surgical masks - different story)

Yet I'm still surrounded by people - wearing predominantly cloth masks - that are full of outrage for the maskless. I've not heard any updates from the CDC on this issue.

This is a completely false characterization of the article you just linked.

There were significantly fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with surgical masks compared with the control villages. (Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.) This aligns with lab tests showing that surgical masks have better filtration than cloth masks. However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.

“Unfortunately, much of the conversation around masking in the United States is not evidence-based,” Luby said. “Our study provides strong evidence that mask wearing can interrupt the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. It also suggests that filtration efficiency is important. This includes the fit of the mask as well as the materials from which it is made. A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.”

--- We find clear evidence that surgical masks lead to a relative reduction in symptomatic seroprevalence of 11.2% (aPR = 0.89 [0.78,1.00]; control prevalence = 0.80%; treatment prevalence = 0.71%). For cloth masks, we find an imprecise zero, although the confidence interval includes the point estimate for surgical masks (aPR = 0.95 [0.79,1.11]; control prevalence 0.67%; treatment prevalence 0.62%). ---

If you go to the chart, you find a 5% relative reduction with a p-value of 0.540 (!)

Regarding reduction in symptoms:

--- Additionally, when we look separately by cloth and surgical masks, we find that the intervention led to a reduction in COVID-like symptoms under either mask type (p = 0.000 for surgical, p = 0.048 for cloth), but the effect size in surgical mask villages was 30-80% larger depending on the specification. In Table A10, we run the same specifications using the smaller sample used in our symptomatic seroprevalence regression (i.e. those who consented to give blood). In this sample we continue to find an effect overall and an effect for surgical masks, but see no effect for cloth masks. ---

There's no intellectually honest way to interpret this data other than "cloth masks have very little effect, if any".

However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.

EDIT: here: https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-...

That summary is really hard to draw conclusions from;

“However, cloth masks did reduce the overall likelihood of experiencing symptoms of respiratory illness during the study period.”

And “ A cloth mask is certainly better than nothing. But now might be a good time to consider upgrading to a surgical mask.”

But also “ Although there were also fewer COVID-19 cases in villages with cloth masks as compared to control villages, the difference was not statistically significant.”

"Statistically insignificant" is the same as "no reason to believe it is true".

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1104821

Do the interventional cardiologists want to stop stenting people? Not really. The orthopedic surgeons still want to mess with your meniscus, etc.

This is a story that does not apply to our times. There've been many regular scientific revolutions even in the last few decades, the Church hasn't persecuted scientists, and the modern scientific consensus has followed with the revolutions. Whether it's the matter of the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction, the revolutions in molecular biology, revolutions in astronomy, or other areas where advances are regular, those outliers actually advancing science have only briefly been ahead of consensus in the real world, but most outliers are cranks, and only those with an expert training in a discipline are likely to be able to identify real advances over crank science. The Galileo model of believing outliers virtually always leaves you in the wrong unless you are a domain-specific expert on the topic.

Look at using MRNA as a medical treatment as another example of a recent revolution, one that's now available in a safe, effective vaccine form.

Scientific consensus provides a means for bad science/scientists to escape ostracism (I use this with the full intensity of its definitions). Because it provides a thick and opaque veil behind which the clergy (all scientists) instructs the laity (the rest of us). Individual scientists no longer stand and fall on their own. So call them cranks if you want but the individuals standing on the banks of the "scientific consensus" stream are arguably the closest we have to 16th and 17th century scientists tinkering away in their private labs, making discoveries that continue to bear their names.

Now, to a philosophy of science I subscribe to: Popper's Falsifiability Test. An undercurrent (probably prominent, even) theme is this: new confirmatory experiments add nothing new if they don't deviate materially from the original experiment. Following this, the whole enterprise of scientific consensus stands on shaky grounds since it adds nothing. It transforms science into a faith-based exercise (akin to bishops at a synod throwing their weights behind certain theories and declaring other bishops as cranks/heretics). This I do not accept.

To my knowledge theories proposed that way in modern science aren't taken seriously and in our present time are not the norm for any recent major scientific discoveries or research. Those days are long past. New science is done in expensive labs with very expensive equipment and gets funded by grants. The Alvarez Hypothesis was possible because of cutting edge nuclear science that could identify the iridium. LIGO, and every space science and astronomical discovery are driven by really expensive ever growing scopes. In astronomy, chem, physics, molecular biology, paleontology, et al today you'll need an expensive lab and very large grants to do cutting edge work. At this point we're building colliders many kilometers in length. Modern Science is a product of well funded labs with staffing and equipment funded largely by research grants. There are cases in domains like macrobiology where individuals could do field work and find a new species, but the domains where the individual scientist is doing meaningful work are dwindling to none, and you should update your model of how modern science actually operates and is funded, it's interesting.

That points to a bad system, but one that has nothing to do with the modern world we live in, and which if applied by analogy will fit so poorly as to be a bad analogy.

Also the Church conducted scientific experiments regularly, since a number of priests through the ages were scientists, and it was a result of priests taking observations in later, better telescopes that updated the Church's position on heliocentrism.

That aside, individual priest carried out their experiments, not in the name of the Church. The Church had already leaned towards scholarship by this time (post-Bologna) and being the dominant component of all European cultures, it only made sense that it would attract people with interests in science and experiments. (By the time we had scientist-priests people didn't know why they were Christians, to begin with.) This is discounting roles in Church or its bodies—usually monasteries—that required a vow to dumbness.

What do you mean?

The real gatekeeping comes in what research gets grants and funding, but if you look into what's happening there, it's not comparable to the Church proscribing things - it mostly means that the DoD, petrochem, and a few industries have outsized influence on what research is done.

That's not how science has worked, especially in this pandemic. Most of what we know about SARS-CoV-2 came to us through biorxiv preprints and posts on forums like virological.org; the added value of peer review has typically been minimal (but often adding 3-12 months of delay in disseminating information). Even the role of peer review as a gate keeper has been wanting, lots of garbage studies about Covid-19 with glaring confounders keep getting published in peer reviewed journals. You could probably find a few hundred trials with systematic age differences between treatment groups that have been published in respectable venues. Some of these studies even contribute significantly to misinformation about the efficacy of sham treatments like hydroxycholoroquine and ivermectin.

There is unfortunately no short-cut to the development of individual scientific literacy, no trusted tier of experts which can safeguard us from misunderstanding and falsehood. We're all more or less on our own.

What evidence do they have that that there is no chance of complications for certain individuals?

They need to be held to the same standard they are holding their end users.

In the last year social media platforms have suppressed facts and discourse pre-emptively and only months later do we find out that there was truth in the censored content. They can't be the final arbitraters of truth.

Unironically, I would consider your opinion here, to be dangerous mis-information. Yes really.

We do not have to throw out the entire body of past medical work, for every single "new" question that comes up.

So there are absolutely some, scientifically supported, conclusions, that we can come to, about diseases, using this past body of medical work.

If we listened to you it would result in people refusing to do basic things, like wash our hands and socially distance, because we haven't yet completed a full study, for a specific new disease that is going around.

And for people who might contest the "peer review" dimension, it's not so much about having peer reviewed things, it is about clearly disclosing the basis from which you're putting forward a statement you claim to be true.

That said, I'm not doubting that the YouTube mechanisms for suppression of irresponsibly disbursed information and misinformation has a high false positive rate especially when addressing similar topics. And hopefully YouTube can address that over time.

That's actually a higher bar.