Mark Ungrin

Trump’s cronies aren’t what broke public health The structural blind spots that undermine medical progress and how to fix them.

🧵 A chunk of the issue is the culture in healthcare in particular that insists facts are subjective for the right people, who then pronounce them into objective reality for everyone else.

It's an authoritarian grab for power over science, and if we don't smack them down *hard*, science is dead.

EBM = "Evidence Based Medicine" btw, for anyone landing here who hasn't run into it before. It started as a policy on taking shortcuts, and then the people running EBM Inc discovered it was a way to grab power over science without having to understand any of it.

Natural allies for Trump-world.

🧵:

And when I say science is dead if we don't smack them down, that's not an exaggeration. They're already using their ties with the Trump admin to accelerate their takeover of all the science the US government can touch.

What's going on at NIH, NSF etc is just the start - here's their 12-pt plan (🧵):

The key is it's not new. RFK et al are evil, but they're a symptom, not a cause. It is beyond comedy that medicine accepts this kind of thing as normal, but it is *common*. The study in this thread was cited by the WHO panel that set policy in 2020 and botched airborne transmission, and...physics 😬.

Trump’s cronies aren’t what broke public health The structural blind spots that undermine medical progress and how to fix them.

🧵 A chunk of the issue is the culture in healthcare in particular that insists facts are subjective for the right people, who then pronounce them into objective reality for everyone else.

It's an authoritarian grab for power over science, and if we don't smack them down *hard*, science is dead.

Expression of Concern: Medical Masks Versus N95 Respirators for Preventing COVID-19 Among Health Care Workers | Annals of Internal Medicine

Looks like the authors of the notorious flawed Annals masks vs respirators trial have been dinged by the university of Calgary research ethics board

It’s a start

@jvipondmd.bsky.social @carlzimmer.com

www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/...

Not that the one-dimensional "access journalism" that makes up 99% of the standard corporate slop has any interest in covering any of this stuff.

Or...y'know...this.

Guy whose highest science degree was a BSc in the 1970s shouts down PhD scientist providing accurate warnings *in her area of expertise, where she is considered one of the top scientific experts in the world*, as part of what may be the single deadliest medical error in history.

Reason #473 why it's an unbelievably stupid idea to trust the federal government to combine all the personal data they have on everyone into a single massive centralized database of everyone's medical, employment, tax, criminal etc records (or allow billionaire oligarchs to copy it all).

Think turning control of all cancer research funding over to big tobacco, only for all of science the US government can touch.

Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to improve the process of Federal

Here we go with the next step in implementation. US science isn't just being cut - it's being handed over to pseudoscience. It will quickly become impossible to get *any* funding unless you reliably produce the results they want to see, and/or know the right people inside the administration.

This Executive Order represents a key step in the hostile takeover of science laid out in their 12-point plan. Have a look at the thread below to see what else is coming.

It's critical to understand this isn't just about cuts. They aim to 👉kill and replace the concept of science entirely👈.

Trump’s cronies aren’t what broke public health The structural blind spots that undermine medical progress and how to fix them.

Some are already underway. The "Thin White Line" mentality runs pretty deep, as does the contempt for everyone outside the fantasy world of "Evidence Based Medicine", so I suspect success willl depend on the plaintiffs making it about real science rather than status within the medical profession.

BTW in case anyone's wondering if "memorized a bunch of misinformation about aerosols in medical school" is hyperbole, it is not.

E.g. the University of British Columbia taught their med students deadly misinformation that's nearly a century out of date, and AFAICT has never corrected it.

🦆🦆

The 2018 Gosport Independent Panel report into deaths at the National Health Service’s Gosport War Memorial Hospital. Does the culture of the medical profession influence health outcomes? The 2018 Gosport Independent Panel report into deaths at the National Health Service’s Gosport War Memorial Hospital highlighted numerous organisational failings. With the aid of systems theory, th...

It's also a great opportunity to watch how medical leaders learn from outside experts.

Do they accept the information and use it to save lives?

Or does institutional medicine's hubris and "culture of collusion" push back yet again, showing us all that matters to them is grabbing for more power?

UK British Occupational Hygiene Society clarifies that surgical masks are not PPE, and following IPAC guidelines does NOT fulfill an employer’s legal duty to provide respiratory protection.

“The report reinforces that employers have a legal duty under the Health and Safety at Work Act and COSHH to

provide suitable and adequate Respiratory Protective Equipment (RPE) — such as FFP3 respirators — when there is a residual risk of airborne infection. It also challenges the misconception that following Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) guidance alone is sufficient to protect staff.”

Protecting Healthcare Workers: COSHH & Respiratory PPE Clear guidance on legal duties under COSHH and proper use of respirators to protect healthcare workers from airborne hazards.

shh-uk.org/protecting-h...

Report available here.

H/t to a dedicated legally trained colleague for this info!

"While Fluid Resistant Surgical Masks (FRSMs) are designed for patient protection and infection prevention, they are not considered Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) under COSHH regulations and do not protect the wearer from inhaling airborne pathogens."

✅ Calling out what should be obvious.

This is outstanding, and hugely important. The culture of impunity in IPAC can literally kill you, because your life is less important than the hurt feelings of some asshat who memorized a bunch of misinformation about aerosols in medical school and hasn't learned anything since.

What really burns me up about this is how much damage was done when the science cosplayers in public health doubled down on their insistence that they somehow magically knew COVID wasn't airborne. How many lives lost, just because they couldn't scrape together the integrity to admit they screwed up?

The Venn diagram intersection of climate change and an imploding public health system is a bad place to be.

ICE is hiring! US immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking for highly motivated, morally indifferent individuals to join our team. Open positions include: Senior Goon Racism Enforcement Office Unmarked Van Driver (Part-Time) Experience with children a plus usajobs.gov

From this month's edition of The Onion.

Masks and respirators for prevention of respiratory infections: a state of the science review | Clinical Microbiology Reviews SUMMARY This narrative review and meta-analysis summarizes a broad evidence base on the benefits—and also the practicalities, disbenefits, harms and personal, sociocultural and environmental impacts—o...

Can we talk about how N95 respirators are effective protections against infectious aerosols?

The takeover of public health by pseudoscience means critical public education is blocked for political reasons, and it's important to know there are practical steps people can take to protect themselves.

Congress wants to cut the smartest investment taxpayers ever made Virtually every smartphone on the planet runs on a chip paid for by American taxpayers — a chip that I helped invent. Now Congress is moving to cut funding for the National Science Foundation that …

Congress wants to cut the smartest investment taxpayers ever made

An important statement by Professor David Patterson of UC Berkeley.

Truth. Pass it on. 👇

thehill.com/opinion/tech...

This is just the beginning - it's going to get *so much worse*.

Here's the 12-point plan to rebuild the NIH in their own image from the hobby-science types who botched the pandemic, and they won't stop there. EBM-world thinks it (as "evidence synthesis") should control all of science.

🧵:

Again, concerns about some future AI apocalypse are a distraction from the fact that 👉we're living through the AI-assisted oligarch apocalypse today👈.

And they only have to keep us distracted a little bit longer to cement this into a permanent, AI-assisted, pedofascist, eugenicist dictatorship.

"Radical leftist" just means "anyone who is not a current member of the subset of fascist political organizations currently on the speaker's approved list". AFAICT the only principle Prasad cares about is power.

(It *is* pretty funny watching him screw that up just like everything else though.)

In Denmark, farmers are required by law to grow field flowers for bees on 5 % of their land…. 💐🐝
I think that’s a fantastic solution to a big problem, they can do it here too ❤
catharinaweb
aliveonallchannels

Study Reveals Symptoms Of Long COVID In Young Kids – Here's What To Look Out For The authors say it’s proof a “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t work with this condition.

Toddlers with long covid, truly dystopian. This is the new normal only if we allow it to be. Or we can all fight for clean air and better vaccine access. www.iflscience.com/first-of-its...