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Jeoffry Gordon, MD, MPH's avatar

Thanks for the important details, insights and criticism as HHS evolves into unscientific ideological corruption. Only harms can follow.

John Stiller's avatar

Cosmetic revisions that leave foreseeable harm, no ethical justification, and absent IRB approval intact are not corrections. They are confirmations.

John Fontaine, Phm's avatar

Once again another informative post & another new word, thank you NW.

"epistemically dishonest" another defining characteristic of the Trump cohorts.

JJF Phm 🇨🇦

Maureen Finegan's avatar

The Pershing Square Foundation is run by Bill Ackman, supporter of RKK Jr and Trump.

Nicholas Weininger's avatar

It seems like there's a very general issue this points to with public perception of research design. Namely, in any study, you have to choose an appropriate default baseline to which to compare your novel hypothesis or treatment. It's often hard for non-experts to tell whether you've done this properly. And if you are epistemically dishonest about what you are trying to find out, and/or ethically slipshod in your attitude toward the people affected by the experiment, you can massage your justification of a bad baseline so that to a casual observer it looks OK. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding, but from your description it sounds like that's the core bad thing that this study design does.

How common is this problem more broadly? Is this an egregious one-off, or something that needs systemic reform beyond just this study?

Rachel Isaacs's avatar

Thanks yet again for sharing! Haven't plowed through this yet but as long as the whole trial exists at all, it can't be good ...High school and college students would do well to learn to read and understand protocols like this-- as well as the geographies and cultures involved. That would be the beginning of the end of this kind of abuse of taxpayer money and trust.