Jan 25, 2022 06:08 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 25, 2022 08:08 PM by C C.)
(Brazil) Government evaluates appointing a pro-chloroquine doctor to ANVISA
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacio...visa.shtml
INTRO: President Jair Bolsonaro is looking for names to join the top of National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) and respond to the dispute with the head of the regulatory body, Antonio Barra Torres. The idea is to nominate someone with a profile aligned with the government and in favor of Bolsonaro’s Covid denialist rhetoric for the director’s position, which will become vacant in July. Hélio Angotti, a pro-chloroquine doctor who heads the Ministry of Health’s Science and Technology Secretariat, has been submitted as a candidate... (MORE - details)
RELATED: COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil ..... Bolsonaro claims he's not a denialist of COVID-19
The dumbest epidemiology paper you'll read this week
https://www.science20.com/hank_campbell/...eek-255892
EXCERPTS: Epidemiology pushes out a lot of dumb papers. [...] It's easy to see why the public believes horse de-wormer cures COVID-19, it was in an epidemiology paper, and that methodology was just as valid as a paper this week 'linking' olive oil to longer life.
But neither of those is as bad as [...the...] unsubstantiated epigenetics to say something so dumb last week that I don't even feel mean ridiculing it. The worst epidemiology paper ... I read claims that you may be fat because your grandmother smoked cigarettes - before age 13. ... It is worrisome at a time when we need the public to trust the science that is helping reduce deaths from COVID-19.
Epidemiology has produced a lot of bad papers this century. [...] Want to believe a vegetarian diet leads to worse grades in school? Epidemiology is the way to go. The field that was once so evidence-based and conservative they were last to accept a genetic risk of cancer is now ... rife with nonsense ... If you are one of those California anti-vaccine people because a British kook used epidemiology to claim vaccines cause autism, you won't like that autism is also linked to organic food.
But your grandparents' dumb habits made you fat? That is truly special [...]
We can't be too mean about people of the past, because you can bet 50 years from now pundits will be laughing that our [...] health experts (if you believe the best go into government, anyway) claimed pulling cloth masks up and down between sips of water on an airplane prevented disease spread [...] Yet we bought it because we don't want to be called science deniers or, worse, Republicans by talking heads on Twitter.
Smoking was known to be harmful by the 1960s, but it was dismissed because it was just epidemiology. [...] but that was a much different epidemiology than the ... Food Frequency Questionnaires enabled by the statistical significance fetish. The irony is that epidemiology showed smoking causes cancer, but its newfound legitimacy due to that led to a rush of people entering the field, and they all wanted to find the next smoking gun.
So sketchy outfits like Harvard School of Public Health began linking every food and chemical to some benefit or harm. Then in 2010 the U.S. taxpayer-funded National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences well full-on crackpot, embracing the dangerous activist nonsense that has made anti-vaccine sentiment common among the left and now, with COVID-19, among the right also.
An anti-vaccine movement that used to be mostly wealthy progressives in California is now so bipartisan that Republicans cheer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when he claims Anne Frank - the Dutch girl murdered in a German gas chamber during the Nazi regime - had it easier than Americans do because cell phones are everywhere.
[...] it is time for credible epidemiologists to take a stand against gibberish wrapping itself in the flag of science... (MORE - details)
https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacio...visa.shtml
INTRO: President Jair Bolsonaro is looking for names to join the top of National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) and respond to the dispute with the head of the regulatory body, Antonio Barra Torres. The idea is to nominate someone with a profile aligned with the government and in favor of Bolsonaro’s Covid denialist rhetoric for the director’s position, which will become vacant in July. Hélio Angotti, a pro-chloroquine doctor who heads the Ministry of Health’s Science and Technology Secretariat, has been submitted as a candidate... (MORE - details)
RELATED: COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil ..... Bolsonaro claims he's not a denialist of COVID-19
The dumbest epidemiology paper you'll read this week
https://www.science20.com/hank_campbell/...eek-255892
EXCERPTS: Epidemiology pushes out a lot of dumb papers. [...] It's easy to see why the public believes horse de-wormer cures COVID-19, it was in an epidemiology paper, and that methodology was just as valid as a paper this week 'linking' olive oil to longer life.
But neither of those is as bad as [...the...] unsubstantiated epigenetics to say something so dumb last week that I don't even feel mean ridiculing it. The worst epidemiology paper ... I read claims that you may be fat because your grandmother smoked cigarettes - before age 13. ... It is worrisome at a time when we need the public to trust the science that is helping reduce deaths from COVID-19.
Epidemiology has produced a lot of bad papers this century. [...] Want to believe a vegetarian diet leads to worse grades in school? Epidemiology is the way to go. The field that was once so evidence-based and conservative they were last to accept a genetic risk of cancer is now ... rife with nonsense ... If you are one of those California anti-vaccine people because a British kook used epidemiology to claim vaccines cause autism, you won't like that autism is also linked to organic food.
But your grandparents' dumb habits made you fat? That is truly special [...]
We can't be too mean about people of the past, because you can bet 50 years from now pundits will be laughing that our [...] health experts (if you believe the best go into government, anyway) claimed pulling cloth masks up and down between sips of water on an airplane prevented disease spread [...] Yet we bought it because we don't want to be called science deniers or, worse, Republicans by talking heads on Twitter.
Smoking was known to be harmful by the 1960s, but it was dismissed because it was just epidemiology. [...] but that was a much different epidemiology than the ... Food Frequency Questionnaires enabled by the statistical significance fetish. The irony is that epidemiology showed smoking causes cancer, but its newfound legitimacy due to that led to a rush of people entering the field, and they all wanted to find the next smoking gun.
So sketchy outfits like Harvard School of Public Health began linking every food and chemical to some benefit or harm. Then in 2010 the U.S. taxpayer-funded National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences well full-on crackpot, embracing the dangerous activist nonsense that has made anti-vaccine sentiment common among the left and now, with COVID-19, among the right also.
An anti-vaccine movement that used to be mostly wealthy progressives in California is now so bipartisan that Republicans cheer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. when he claims Anne Frank - the Dutch girl murdered in a German gas chamber during the Nazi regime - had it easier than Americans do because cell phones are everywhere.
[...] it is time for credible epidemiologists to take a stand against gibberish wrapping itself in the flag of science... (MORE - details)