He has over 1000 publications??? According to Wikipedia, he got his Masters in Public Health in 1994. Over 1000 publication in 28 years? That means he has published 1 paper every 10 days for 28 years!!
I guess he must count letters to the editor and blog posts as publications! I can’t say I would place much trust in anyone who claimed to “publish” every 10 days for 28 years straight.
He is probably a co-author on most of the papers and when you “publish” papers in lower tier journals, it requires much less effort than publishing a peer-reviewed paper on a top-tier journal.
Oh no, he’s prolific for sure. About 170 first authored papers, looks like. Although not generally experimental stuff, just research and review stuff (i.e., nothing that requires stats). About 6 papers a year, which is academically respectable. Mostly on cardio and renal stuff until the pandemic happened and he went nutty and started making outrageous claims about covid and government conspiracies to depopulate the planet through vaccine databases. Sad end to what was shaping up to be a reasonable legacy. I’d be fascinated to know how he got from A to B, but do not anticipate ever knowing.
There was a very highly regarded bio professor while I was going through school who started breaking weird–his papers got very strange and he started wearing capes to conferences. I believe it ended up being a neuro issue, but it took some time to get from “That’s odd, I wouldn’t expect him to say something so obviously incorrect” to “something is seriously wrong”. Pretty sad.
I’m absolutely not saying that I think Peter McCollough has a brain tumor. Just that I really don’t know how to explain his behaviour.
@Neville You bring up a point that I’ve often wondered about, which is why McCullough, Malone, Kirsch and so many others are spewing out their misinformation and misleading so many lay people. I don’t understand what they are trying to accomplish, what their upside is and how they can live with themselves. I get that politics are more polarized now than any time in recent history and especially how much the left and right hate each other, but I don’t understand how people can suspend their brains to believe this nonsense, regardless of their politics.
It’s not really so many, honestly. They’re loud, but when you consider them against the number of people with similar credentials who are vaccinated, the “lone truth-tellers” are pretty few. One consequence of extended years in the academy is that you end up with an extended international network of friends and colleagues and acquaintances in the field because you meet them at conferences or your lab mate worked with them during their masters or their supervisor and your supervisor had the same supervisor and so on, dozens and dozens of gossipy PhDs whose favourite thing is to argue with eachother. And everyone I know who holds a science PhD is vaccinated. Further, the whole construction of science is that you move ideas forward by convincing your colleagues. Especially when it comes to medical treatment, you have to have enough evidence to convince a bunch of other carefully chosen experts, and that process protects the public against quack medicine. These guys like McCollough are guys who failed to convince their colleagues, but instead of gathering better evidence and refining their arguments they moved to trying to convince the public instead. Seems almost like anti-science to me, although I understand that to some that is the appeal.
But why do they happen? I don’t know. I was saying to another forum member that I often wonder whether there’s a weird feedback loop from the attention media whereby you say something outrageous, your clicks (and renumeration) jump up, and so you say something a little bit more outrageous and so on and so on. I’m not even sure it’s necessarily a purposeful grift so much as a pays-to-believe situation. And it weirdly skews towards particular sorts of MDs.
The suggestion robots also aren’t helping us. Your vulnerable aunt clicks on one scary-sounding antivax link and the robots are like, “Oh, you like that? Here are ten other antivax articles. Here’s an entire newsfeed full of antivax material and I’ve helpfully hidden all the boring information for you. P.S., users who liked the links you clicked on also like Q-anon, give it a try!” And because facebook connects to everything else, now she’s also getting Joe Rogan recommendations on spotify and vaccine detox recommendations on amazon. Of course then your aunt wonders how you can schedule your booster when there is just so much news about how vaccines are toxic. We’re being polarized in exactly the same way.
Ok, you’re credentialed. You can go along with 95% of your peers and be another face in the crowd, or you can be different. You can be known and loved by a large swathe of the population. You’re that free-thinking guy who refuses to knuckle under. You’re aligned with some very powerful people. If you’re lucky you might be made surgeon-general of your state!
Yeah, I can see the appeal.
Personally, I have had all 3 vaccines for Covid… But, for the first 2 directly after vaccination, my hearing dropped dramatically, but it came back after a few days, on both occasions… I assume due to some reaction, with the vaccine? It could have been coincidental, but it happened twice, but thankfully not on the third occasion… Now, knowing this, did not deter me in the slightest, the vaccine was the most viable option, given my age, and other underlying health conditions, it was for me a no-brainer to take the plunge, and go for it! Had, I lost all my hearing, that would have been a small price to pay, in comparison to the hundreds of thousands whom lost their lives worldwide! Yes, there are risks with any new medication/vaccine, but in my mind the alternative wasn’t a feasible option… I do try to understand the anti_vaxers viewpoint, people are just frightened, and some questionable influencers will sadly try to exploit that fear… I assume they are acutely aware of the harm they are doing, but they probably don’t care! I somehow don’t think I would have survived Covid, without being vaccinated, and when I eventually succumbed, I was very ill, but thankfully I came out the other end, relatively unscathed, so for me I believe, I made the correct call… Others unfortunately listened to these naysayers, and paid the ultimate price! Cheers Kev.
At the heart of the issue is politics…
US democrats publicly announced during the previous administration that they wouldn’t touch any drug that was associated with Trump.
Immediately after the new administration was in office, the vaccine was the greatest thing on earth.
The US government gave 100% immunity to the drug companies that developed the vaccines…
Then politicians and health officials mounted a campaign blitz. Several states ran special lotteries giving money to those who were vaccinated.
“If you get the vaccine, you won’t get covid.”
“If you get the vaccine, you can’t transmit it”
" its a pandemic of the unvaccinated"
“Unvaccinated people are to blame for spreading it”
People were fired from their jobs over vaccine decisions. Unvaccinated were treated like lepers, banished from entering restaurants out of fear they’d infect others. Vaccination cards were required to enter places of business.
Whether you call it evolving science or outright lies, it’s you’re prerogative.
The current facts are that getting the vaccine doesn’t stop you from getting it. It doesn’t stop transmission. There’s no guarantee that the symptoms will be minimal after getting the vaccine.
In the US, the data proves that being over 70 years old with underlying health problems are the most at risk. Then comes younger people who have underlying health issues. Its an extremely rare occasion when a young person in perfect health has severe diagnosis.
Now hospitals & government offices are quietly rehiring those unvaccinated people. The US military is considering giving lost back pay to the soldiers discharged.
Personally, i believe that we may never know the whole truth about any side effects from the vaccine. Especially when the big pharma has zero liability.
More details are coming out showing that the government manipulated data to support their position. They tried to censor anyone who disagreed on social media platforms.
Pfizer and J&J are in the top 5 most penalized for their drugs and cover-up about side effects.
Its not “anti-vax”, it’s rightfully questioning the politicians and health officials.
A dozen billion doses at least, some 70 million a day. Bloomberg - Are you a robot? The facts are clear.
I found out something interesting the other day. The state where I live in Australia and the ACT had half the Covid deaths per capita of the rest of the country. We also had the highest rates of vaccination and lockdowns and mask mandates were imposed quickly (and lifted quickly once they’d achieved what they were supposed to).
Australia as a whole suffered less compared to the USA. I read an article comparing the outcomes in the two countries. Some quick maths on my part showed that if we’d followed the same path as America we would have lost an extra 70,000 people. That’s 70,000 human lives people. So maybe less focus on rare side effects and trampling on your rights and more focus on lives saved?
It is very rare. And yet, 16,000 vaccine-preventable covid deaths in the under 20 group in America still seems a bit too much. We’ve implemented other childhood vaccines for less.
I’ve read this retelling, but it wasn’t at all the story I lived. To be fair, I don’t follow the American news media and wouldn’t find it a shock that they might be downright awful science-communicators and have led people to believe things about the vaccines that the science never claimed.
I’ve yet to have covid, or at least symptoms or a positive test. It’s starting to feel a bit odd.
Why do I keep reading this post?
I am wondering if we (general we, not anyone specifically) feel the same way about other vaccines?
Like the chicken pox vaccine?
Specifically, I would like to point out that my three month bout (yes, you read that correctly) with the chicken pox at 16 - despite being exposed to it many, many times as a child and never contracting it - is a direct contributor to my 75 percent loss in the left ear and 68 percent in the right ear. How do I know? Because a week before I contracted chicken pox, my hearing was tested and it was “perfect.”
And the vaccine appeared in America less than a year later. I invite everyone to meet my mother and have her say, “I should have just driven to Canada - packed you and your sister in the car and drove across the border - and demanded it.” My sister had a worse case of it, and now is 90 percent deaf in her left ear.
Don’t mistake me - I believe that some people can contract (name of disease here) and be just fine. Some people end up very sick but recover. Some people have permanent damage from their bout with (illness) but are still among us (this is me with chicken pox) and some people die horrible, slow deaths.
I’m lucky. I’m still here. I’m here with all of you and I lie if I say I’m not grateful. But…you know…I would rather not be here, dealing with this loss every day.
Dr. Fauci didn’t convince me to get the shot, just like McCullough and his ilk didn’t convince me not to. I did it because I decided it was not going to be another chicken pox for me. I decided, since I have a very hard time with upper respiratory infections, it was the right thing to do. If it meant I had to deal with the repercussions of the choice - good and bad - then I would.
Shout out to the people who, after I recovered from my pulmonary embolism last March, stated it was because I got the COVID vaccine, including my sister, who didn’t vaccinate her, her husband or my nieblings. I bet there’s a bunch of support for that viewpoint too.
It hurts. It really does.
We saw a lot of issues around here with things like the measles vaccine. Measles was almost non-existant for a while because of very high rates of vaccination. Then parents were “influenced” against it and possibly thought that if every other kid was vaccinated there was no need for theirs to be. Vaccination rates fell and we’re getting outbreaks of measles.
Babies die from whooping cough caught from the unvaccinated. They can’t be vaccinated themselves until 6 weeks. There’s a well-known science presenter in Australia known as “Dr. Karl” who quit his job as a pediatrician out of anger at the number of children dying unnecessarily because of their parents’ choices. He’s spent his life since promoting science. This stuff is not new.
Edit: More on Dr. Karl. Interesting guy. Karl Kruszelnicki - Wikipedia
People too easily forget or they simply don’t care that just because they think they aren’t at risk, that’s all their decision to get vaccinated is based on. As you said, anyone who gets COVID-19 or whatever can give it to others. Suppose your kid got COVID-19 and gave it to your parent, and he or she died. How would you feel? How would your kid feel? The reason measles outbreaks are getting more frequent is because of morons not getting their kids vaccinated.
Also, the claims that people “aren’t at risk” are disingenuous. Anyone of any age with or without preexisting conditions can get sick and die from COVID-19. Even completely healthy people can get COVID-19 and die. Thousands of completely healthy people, including children have died of COVID-19. Virtually none of these people were vaccinated. The rate of death among young people who were vaccinated is extremely low, much lower than unvaccinated people.
I’ve listened to many of John Campbell’s videos. He refers to himself as Dr. but he is a nurse practitioner, not a doctor. He’s not an immunologist or an epidemiologist. He famously cherry-picks and misconstrues information.
