Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Alex Washburne's avatar

The arguments of Provost and Derome - that pandemic burden models used to drive policy were dramatically overestimating burden - are supported empirically by my own analyses of US outbreaks.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.03.21256542v2

The paper above also ultimately led to my leaving academia. In peer review, the paper got locked up because one reviewer thought it would be dangerous to publish the possibility that US outbreaks depleted susceptible populations in the Fall of 2020. That paper above has a long story behind it:

https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-science-not-shared

But the big picture is that, as a mathematical biologist with a PhD from Princeton and well versed in epidemiology, I concur with the professors' arguments not only as a fair point one can make, but as an important direction in our scientific debates over pandemic epidemiology. It saddens, but does not surprise, me that university administrators are interfering as referees in a scientific debate, in a field which the administrators have no experience - we saw the same thing with the media throughout COVID, declaring as "misinformation" the science that was just ahead of its time and refuting the publicly stated oversimplifications and old theories from popular epidemiologists.

We can win this longer-term struggle, but only if we get a careful accounting of anomalies that are not explained. Models overestimating burden, even completely outrageous overestimates, can always say the difference between reality and their model is some fudge-factor of our "behavioral changes". For this reason, my paper focused on places close to home like South Dakota which had basically no "behavioral changes" and yet they converged to the same mortality burden as places like NYC that tried to do everything. It's scientifically possible that our mitigation efforts did little to reduce the final burden of SARS-CoV-2 outbreaks across vast swaths of US and Europe, with only a few pockets of successful containment that are the exception, not the norm.

Expand full comment
Nick's avatar

And the insanity continues! It is such a tragedy what is happening to the universities. Academic freedom no longer exists. Professors are regarded as mere employees or minions of a corporatist machine. Truth is no longer valued. This is very troubling indeed.

Expand full comment
23 more comments...

No posts