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French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

skeptic.org.uk

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Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#51

Post by dmix »

raverbashing wrote: post #37
dmix wrote: post #30

Technically the Chinese Wuhan Institute was first to recommended hydroxychloroquine as a possible solution (among at least one other drug) months before this guy and the politicians ever published anything about it. There was also a small town US doctor who claimed anecdotal success among his hundreds of clients who was highly influential very early on. And tons of other speculative ‘experts’ talking about it on YouT…

There was a small suspicion and some previous studies that maybe (a big maybe) HCQ would help in some infections (parasitic and virotic - well, it does help with Malaria) But that was that, a suspicion, not to take it as the holy grail of the disease

Of course but there are always people who will be desperate to get ahead of the curve before the science fully comes out (including nation states) and were willing to take risks.

It’s almost like everyone didn’t expect a basic human reality among a subset of the population to be a reality.

Fear has always been one of our strongest base motivations.

I’m generally cynical about all politicians and the lowest common denominator which is a hell of a lot of people. But I also don’t think the support for it during the early days was limited to just mom and pops boomers or whatever.

There’s plenty of blame to go around but I also think there was plenty of signals early on where the seriousness of the guilt is less than a lot of smug Twitter idealists are willing to admit.

My only question was why this one guy to target among a sea of other signals. But I also think from a purely skeptics (publication) perspective it’s fair they target the ones who aren’t ‘supposed’ to be among the stupid group and should know better (which would then exclude random family doctors, early recommendations for exploration, and the perpetually dumb politicians) and this guy was super influential as a microbiologist. So it might make more sense in that context.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#52

Post by glitcher »

gameswithgo wrote: post #33
helen___keller wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mother-in-law is an architect by training but she was convinced (by youtube) that she ought to have some HCQ so she had family members ship us some. She's even suggested out of the blue that she should start taking it as a preventative for no particular except that she read amazon workers have been contracting covid and we get a lot of amazon packages. When we told her that's not a good idea she felt compelled to…

The cries if mainstream media are so weird, because what even is mainstream any more? I wish such a thing still existed really. Yet one gets accused of being naively trusting of this extinct thing any time one is rational.

I don't think mainstream media is anywhere near extinct, but instead it's evolving and growing. I would argue that all the people who jumped on the HCQ bandwagon without sufficient evidence were also victims of mainstream media!

The real epidemic is the deficit of critical thinking among those who primarily look for media content to fit what they want to hear, and then close themselves off to any other input, evidence, or scrutiny.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#53

Post by ekianjo »

hyper_reality wrote: post #39
ekianjo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.” Or the WHO themselves claiming that masks do not work for months then suddenly reversing their position in the middle of the pandemic. But "Trust Science" they said.

I'm fed up of people repeating this over-simplified putdown of WHO on HN. The advice about masks was on their website on March 2020 largely because they were worried about mass public buying of masks, leaving a shortage for frontline medical workers ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who/ma... ). The guidance was updated as more evidence came in and production of masks scaled up. This should not…

> The advice about masks was on their website on March 2020 largely because they were worried about mass public buying of masks,

That did not change the fact that they lied and misled the public and killed people.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#54

Post by ekianjo »

jariel wrote: post #43
ekianjo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “It is hard to find an example of quackery that has spread so far, influencing the public health response to a deadly pandemic and creating widespread confusion across the entire globe.” Or the WHO themselves claiming that masks do not work for months then suddenly reversing their position in the middle of the pandemic. But "Trust Science" they said.

"Or the WHO themselves claiming that masks do not work for months then suddenly reversing their position in the middle of the pandemic. But "Trust Science" they said" Public Communications and Science are different things. If masks are very scarce, and we need to ration, then we want to prioritize certain groups. Once they are plentiful, the marginal benefit of masks becomes beneficial to the extent it doesn't interf…

> If masks are very scarce, and we need to ration, then we want to prioritize certain groups.

Then why didn't they say so instead of lying to the public? "masks work, but we need to allocate them to health workers because we don't have enough of them". Anyone can understand that.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#55

Post by GuB-42 »

_Wintermute wrote: post #11

As an actual pharmacologist I find it fascinating how the general public has suddenly taken such a poorly informed interest in drug discovery. For the HN audience it would be like people taking an almost tribal approach to go-lang vs rust, debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is.

Illustrated here: https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2020/05/26/experts/?setLocale...

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#56

Post by FrancisOfAssisi »

The article incorrectly states the nominating committees intentions: Raoult was given the "Rusty Razor Award" so that he could buy a new electric shaver to replace his old (and indeed rusty) razor, which had long since lost it's edge and been abandoned by the good doctor.

Didier Raoult before Covid research:

http://www.antimicrobe.org/Didier_Raoult3.JPG

Didier Raoult after Covid research:

http://www.d1softballnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/bie...

France has for many years been chastised for its failure to properly fund scientific research and Raoult is yet another example of this sad neglect. Note also that "The Skeptic" is a British organization, Raoult is French, and that this is yet one more shot fired in two seemingly endless barrages across the Channel in both directions.

Article re the Award:

https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2020/11/french-scientist-didier-r...

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#57

Post by jariel »

ekianjo wrote: post #54
jariel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Or the WHO themselves claiming that masks do not work for months then suddenly reversing their position in the middle of the pandemic. But "Trust Science" they said" Public Communications and Science are different things. If masks are very scarce, and we need to ration, then we want to prioritize certain groups. Once they are plentiful, the marginal benefit of masks becomes beneficial to the extent it doesn't interf…

> If masks are very scarce, and we need to ration, then we want to prioritize certain groups. Then why didn't they say so instead of lying to the public? "masks work, but we need to allocate them to health workers because we don't have enough of them". Anyone can understand that.

"Then why didn't they say so instead of lying to the public?"

? They quite clearly told us that they were prioritizing medical workers.

Read the WHO's guidelines yourself.

Here's the WHO guidance as of April [1] June [2], which is pretty early. You can see the guidance evolve during that time and it was still early.

Here is the CBC's public notice on March 25, a couple weeks before the epidemic hit hard in Canada [3]

"The advice on whether or not to wear masks to reduce the spread of COVID-19 has shifted since the start of the pandemic. Public health officials now say that wearing masks can prevent some potentially infectious respiratory droplets from spreading to others, but most still recommend that N95 masks, above, be reserved for health care settings."

Frankly, the only thing I remember about masks early on was 'get them to the front line workers' to the point where in my family we were going to donate our own N95s to the hospital, but they were already used.

[1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/331693/WHO-...

[2] https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-...

[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/masks-coronavirus-1.5507186

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#58

Post by FrancisOfAssisi »

_Wintermute wrote: post #24
hocuspocus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it fascinating, or concerning and scary? Tell me if I'm wrong, but low quality papers get published all the time, in all domains. But nobody cares about Rust vs Go in the current crisis. Then the media take results at face value because they're constantly looking for breaking news, they give a platform to people with strong opinions rather than nuanced ones (good scientists probably don't have time for that anyway…

I don't blame people for taking an interest, it's the tribalism of it that I find so weird and fascinating, I'd be concerned if in the future, drug-discovery efforts for things other than coronavirus get so political and emotional to people. Yes, low quality papers indicating that existing drug X may be effective in disease Y get published all the time, probably several a day. Fortunately most of these are left to pa…

_Wintermute says>"Yes, low quality papers indicating that existing drug X may be effective in disease Y get published all the time, probably several a day. Fortunately most of these are left to pad academic's CVs and don't really influence the pharmaceutical industry."And some of them are correct.

Re: French Scientist Didier Raoult Given Rusty Razor Award For Pseudoscience

#60

Post by FrancisOfAssisi »

_Wintermute wrote: post #11

As an actual pharmacologist I find it fascinating how the general public has suddenly taken such a poorly informed interest in drug discovery. For the HN audience it would be like people taking an almost tribal approach to go-lang vs rust, debating it on national television, without any of them knowing what a loop is.

How does an "actual pharmacologist" differ from a "pharmacologist"?
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