Free Republic

Cornell says Brian Wansink “committed academic misconduct,” and is leaving the university. He’s a cautionary tale in bad incentives in science. Thirteen of Wansink’s studies have now been retracted, including the six pulled from JAMA Wednesday. ...To date, 13 of his papers have been retracted. And that’s stunning given that Wansink was so highly cited and his body of work was so influential. Wansink also collected government grants, helped shape the marketing practices at food companies, and worked with the White House to influence food policy in this country.

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of pandemic policies. “Because I don’t.”

Early in the pandemic, “trust the science!” could actually be used in a debate without attracting derisive laughter. But as the flip-flops, mistakes and, yes, lies have accumulated, a consensus seems to be forming that the health care authorities are no more trustworthy than the people running Congress or the Fed.For proof, let’s start with vitamin D, which sure seems to lessen the severity of coronavirus infections. As the chart below illustrates (couldn’t find the source, but google “covid vitamin D” and you’ll find lots of studies that track with this data), people with higher levels of vitamin D in...

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) - The storming of the U.S. Capitol is a jarring but natural product of years of violence and hateful rhetoric stoked by disinformation and conspiracy theories, experts on far-right extremism said as they pored over images of Wednesday’s riot. Members of far-right groups, including the violent Proud Boys, joined the crowds that formed in Washington to cheer on President Donald Trump as he urged them to protest Congress’ counting of Electoral College votes confirming President-elect Joe Biden’s win. Then they headed to the Capitol. Members of smaller white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups also were spotted in...

Yesterday, RedState reported on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s sudden change of heart about opening schools (see The Exalted Doctor Fauci Changes His Mind Again Because Our Experts Are Cowards). That came after he spent most of the year refusing to back President Trump’s calls to do just that. It’s almost like so much of Fauci’s advice was politically time, right? None of that sat well with Tucker Carlson. He went on air last night and unleashed a blistering monologue targeting Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, and our expert class in general. Tucker: Experts finally admit they were wrong from the beginningCarlson begins by...

In recent weeks, Joe Biden has made his willingness to “listen to the scientists” a central pillar of his campaign and a major point of contrast between himself and Donald Trump. He has even said that he would shut down the nation’s economy again to stop the coronavirus if scientists recommended it. Unsurprisingly, Biden has since been endorsed by Scientific American and Nature, as well as 81 Nobel laureates, who praised him for “his willingness to listen to experts.” All told, this represents a startling readiness on Biden’s part to cede much of his decision-making power to a small, unelected intellectual...

The problem isn’t just the China Virus. It’s that we adopted the China Model to fight it. Public health experts adopted China’s draconian lockdowns without knowing how well they really worked and in a country that, fortunately, lacks the power to truly enforce them. China’s deceptiveness and lack of transparency meant that we did not know how well anything that the Communist dictatorship did to battle the virus that it spawned actually worked. Despite that, our public health experts, and those of most free countries, adopted the China Model. We don’t know how well the China Model worked for the...

On Oct. 4, 2020, three preeminent experts — Dr. Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard University; Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and epidemiologist at Stanford University — delivered the following declaration, calling for a different approach to dealing with the novel coronavirus than the lockdown model: As infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists, we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental-health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted...

Anyone else notice the silence coming from Drs. Fauci and Birx since Thursday evening when Hope Hicks tested positive quickkly followed by the devasting news of our President and FLOTUS testing positive as well? It appears as though both have gone MIA. I appreciate their silence. But why?

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on the 2020 presidential election (all times local): 12:40 p.m. Joe Biden is receiving a virtual briefing from a former U.S. surgeon general and a collection of health experts on how best to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Biden’s campaign created a virtual studio that connected the former vice president via video with former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and six other experts at a theater in downtown Wilmington, Delaware on Wednesday. Biden will give a speech on the topic later in the day.

Ordinary Americans are growing wary of the so-called experts. This phenomenon extends well beyond the biased purveyors of fake news. Most of us gave up on the liberal media long ago. According to Gallop, we are now an overwhelming majority.  Today we include a growing group of experts and insiders, otherwise known as the elites. We’ve been mislead. We’ve been talked down to and dismissively treated like children who can’t handle the truth. Opinions are presented as facts. Decisions and pronouncements that were supposedly data driven regularly ignore data at odds with the decision makers’ opinions. The infamous hockey stick...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quietly changed its guidance on Monday to now say that asymptomatic people do not need to be tested for coronavirus, even if they have been in close contact with an infected person. The agency made the move by updating its website but did not make any public announcement or explain the reasoning behind the major revision. The guidance now states: “If you have been in close contact (within 6 feet) of a person with a COVID-19 infection for at least 15 minutes but do not have symptoms: You do not necessarily need a...

As Americans entered summer with a glimmer of hope that COVID-19 might recede, those hopes were quickly dashed after a rapid resurgence of the virus in Sun Belt states. Now approaching midsummer, the numbers continue to surge across the South and Western regions of the United States. Florida and Texas, two of the hardest-hit states besides California and New York, have broken record numbers of cases in the last several weeks. Florida recorded an all-time high of about 15,200 cases in a single day July 11.

If you watch the news, you’d think Anthony Fauci was not only president of the United States, but also part God. Some version of “Listen to Dr. Fauci,” or “According to Dr. Fauci” is uttered every hour on cable news. When Fauci is unavailable, they simply replace his name with “experts.” One thing missing from all of this “news” and “analysis” is just how wrong these “experts” have been. Dr. Fauci came to national prominence in the 80s for his work on an AIDS vaccine. Somehow that work has imbued him with authority second only to God on everything COVID-19...

A recent Foreign Affairs essay predictably gives the public a false binary choice, blames the current administration, and defends the foreign policy establishment. Who do you think is responsible for the current coronavirus foreign influences fiasco? If you ask the Washington foreign policy establishment, the answer is evident. It is President Trump’s disdain for “the foreign policy establishment” that has led to this current crisis.This is their same answer for every problem humanity has faced since 2016. If only we listened to the establishment! If only they learned their lesson in 2016. Apparently not, if you go by the Foreign...

The basic national divide between conservative America and liberal/left America that has existed for decades – really since the 1960s – is continuing on in the new environment caused by the coronavirus crisis. The American Right continues to want a society informed by its Judeo-Christian heritage, given force by a government in which the original intent of the Constitution prevails, and its objective of limited government. The American Left continues to want an expansive government with a messianic character, empowered to do whatever is deemed necessary for its vision of “a better world,” and aided by science and technology. The...

As our health care system and economy teeter under the strain from COVID-19, elected officials are making some of the most important decisions of our lifetimes. Especially at the state level, many are emerging as competent leaders. Others, though, are undermining their authority and the public trust by hiding behind a wall of secrecy. Americans have never put up with “don’t ask questions, just trust me” for long — especially in a crisis. In Pennsylvania, for example, Gov. Tom Wolf initially was an open book in dealing with the coronavirus threat, holding daily news conferences and providing updates. But then...

Did anyone listen to me? No. But they’re listening to me now. And I’ve suddenly become quite expensive. For 19 days, I lay in my bedroom, shades drawn, very still. I wasn’t sick, least not physically. This is just something I do when I need to think in times of crisis. Like a snake molting its skin, I must shed old ideas to come up with new ones. From down the hall, I could hear the endless hacking cough of my beleaguered manservant, Roger, punctuated by occasional moans and creakings in the hall, like he was Marley’s ghost rattling his...

The Thin Façade of Authority As we continue to debate about numerators and denominators in determining the real impact of this virus, one common denominator remains certain about the elites advising, crafting, and developing our response: they aren’t touched by the impact of their decisions. The virus will teach us many things, but one lesson has already been relearned by the American people: there are two, quite different, types of wisdom. One, and the most renowned, is a specialization in education that results in titled degrees and presumed authority. That ensuing prestige, in turn, dictates the decisions of most politicians,...

One of the least appealing aspects of the American character is the residual Puritanism that still compels a certain percentage of our countrymen, women and others, to nag, pester, and generally annoy the rest of us by trying to make us conform to their stick-up-the-Lieu vision of propriety. These people – these obnoxious Karens, for lack of a better FCC-compliant term – are delighted by the Chinese Bat Biter grippe and the opportunity it presents for them to try to impose their arbitrary will upon the rest of us. These mewling Mussolinis need to be slapped back, verbally if not...