Guy Hatchard has a piece in TCW on the role of pharmaceutical PR in the way New Zealand handled the coronavirus debacle.
We should not understate the naivety of the government, media and scientists during the pandemic. The tabloid-style stories of severe Covid outcomes, the authoritative voice of Dr Anthony Fauci (who has financial conflicts of interest), the allure of the word vaccine, and the exaggerated death toll in foreign lands all combined into a convincing call for immediate and coercive action. Yet behind the stories, the highly profitable pharmaceutical PR system was running at full steam playing on the fear factor. New Zealand fell head over heels in love. Love knows no reason and that was certainly the case here.
The whole piece is worth reading, but to my mind one of the comments makes a better point about the wider issue of academic failings.
JohnInCambridge
"The British Medical Journal agrees. On March 16 it published an article which said: ‘Evidence-based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation and commercialisation of academia.’"
A reliably socialist rant from the BMJ. I have a different take on the matter. Most medical practitioners are not scientists. They get in the habit of drawing conclusions from evidence wholly inadequate from the strictly scientific point of view. That is the nature of their job since a lot of the time they can't do nothing for the patient sitting in front of them. The ability to rigorously analyse scientific data quantitatively is very rare and that is before the quality of data is considered which in human clinical studies is often poor (lack of proper controls, poor 'blinding' when comparing treatments, over-reliance on patients' self-reporting etc). None of which inhibits ambitious docs from churning out papers for medical journals. Commercial reasons for distortions can occur although awareness of that potential has been high for a long time and failure to declare such interests is now very dangerous professionally. Rather, academic failings are more down to ambition not supported by ability and by the spirit of 'publish or perish'.
Attacks by laymen on the medical profession are felt to be dangerous... "in case my doctor then refuses to treat me". 'Commercial interests', on the other hand are everyone's favourite Aunt Sally. Like the royal family, the pharmaceutical industry for the most part says nowt. There is no point in offering mere facts in response to juicy conspiracy theories.
5 comments:
A fine comment. I find it impossible to debate with most doctors online - they eschew logic and evidence; they argue from (spurious) authority. On the whole they have no grasp of what is meant by "correlation is not causation". And they are almost all innumerate.
Amazingly some of these inabilities seem to evaporate when doctors retire. What can it mean?
"Ambition not supported by ability" indeed. There's also a wider social problem complicating these issues and spreading beyond medicine.
It's "The Gap". The gap between breathless reporting of scientific findings and their translation into treatments. The gap between a politician promising changes to the law, and those changes often taking years to implement. The gap between ordering a bespoke electric car and its delivery (over a year). The gap between ordering a bespoke 3 piece suite and its delivery (20 weeks). The gap between starting a diet (or other self improvement) and achieving the desired end (a long time, often never).
And these gaps are exploited by people nudging, slowing, and redirecting the smaller steps of a long process for their own ends. Think how long it has taken for the health risks of smoking to become 'established'. Think how long it has taken for Doctors to stop handing out anti-depressants and antibiotics like smarties. Think how long it has taken for Brexit to be implemented (and not yet complete).
I want it all, and I want it now... but there's lots of people making a living in slowing things down.
This sounds interesting.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/nhs-in-crisis-covid-19-vaccines-a-duty-of-care-and-why-doctors-are-leaving-the-nhs
Who is this writer? Why hasn't he been eliminated by the Blob? "The ability to rigorously analyse scientific data quantitatively is very rare" indeed! The very allusion to considering the 'quality of the data', should get him cancelled - letting the cat out of the bag like that. Pah!
dearieme - I don't know what the problem is with doctors, but middle class professionals can be very conformist. Perhaps doctors feel they have to be to protect themselves in nthis way and when they retire the problem disappears. Or medical cowardice is far more common than we are expected to assume.
DJ - you are right, there are powerful incentives to slow things down. I saw a good deal of it. IT projects can suffer from it as specifications become more and more complex and even change as the project grinds along.
dearieme - it is interesting. I don't see how the vaccination of children against Covid ever got through the medical profession without a huge row, but it did and we have to draw conclusions from that.
Tammly - he may not have been eliminated by the Blob, but he will be if he doesn't get the narrative right.
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