Bhattacharya and his co-authors were “fringe epidemiologists” whose proposal needed a “quick and devastating” rebuttal, Collins wrote in an email that later came to light through a public-records request. Collins doubled down on this dismissal in a media interview a week later: “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he told The Washington Post. “This is not mainstream science.” ... The “fringe” is now in charge.


Sing it.

When the Senate vets my appointees
Honey here's the way it's gonna be
They will get behind a team of anti-vaxxers
In the thickest fringe you ever see!

Young and old and weak better scurry
Those who want to live better worry
NIH is gone in a hurry - with the fringe on top!

Leopold Bloom does a fart walk through Dublin at the end of the Sirens chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

***************************

Prrprr.

Must be the bur.

Fff. Oo. Rrpr.

Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram. Kran, kran, kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa. Written. I have.

Pprrpffrrppfff.

Done.

*************************

A century plus later modern science informs us that an evening fart walk should be part of our health regime. And not only that.

There are alternatives to fart walks as well. As long as the physical activity is vigorous enough but not too vigorous, it can suffice. So, fart texting, for example, probably doesn’t move enough of your body around enough. But fart cycling (as long as it is not too vigorous), fart yoga, fart squats, fart lunges or fart marching could do the trick. 

Heroes of mine, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, authors of the indispensable Retraction Watch, note that with RFK jr’s appointment, we are now officially drowning in junk.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t subscribe to the Atlantic, by the way – the magazine gives you three free paragraphs, and that’s all you need in order to get their despondency-making point.

With RFK jr incoming, this is just the beginning!

As if we needed a headline in Live Science – in this political season – to tell us that.

Nicely buttoned up and a med school prof at CUNY but for almost ten years he’s reportedly gotten multiple millions in NIH grants by the simple expediency of making shit up. I’m curing Alzheimer’s! Look at these results!

Happens a lot. The rewards are for results, so you produce results.

****************

Here’s another result. Stock in the company pushing this guy’s drug just plummeted.

Here’s another. The guy could go to prison for 55 years.

But he won’t. Too buttoned down. CUNY will dump him and he’ll have to pay some of the money back. He’ll leave the States for a job in Saudi Arabia. End of story.

 15 percent fewer U.S. medical-school graduates applied to Kentucky residency programs in the 2023-24 academic year, part of a trend related to states’ strong anti-abortion laws enacted after the federal right to abortion was abolished… In OB-GYN programs, there was an even sharper 23% decline… Kentucky hospitals are already dealing with an “acute shortage” of health care workers, with nearly 13,000 job vacancies in hospitals at the end of 2022…  [M]ore than half of Kentucky’s 120 counties didn’t have a single OB-GYN specialist in 2022-23…

“You wouldn’t come if you’re a young woman and know that if something happens to you, you might die because they aren’t gonna let you get the health care you need,” [explained one local pediatrician.]

*******************************

It’s already one of our very worst states, without adding a health system composed of the dumbest, most desperate MDs in America… or forget MDs… Kentucky will offer its populace their pick of degree mill grads from Dagestan and Irkutsk.

CNN

Our mentally retarded, dog-gunning states are now out of the closet – they’re the states with humongoid abortion bans. Turns out new MDs of all kinds don’t want to start their careers there, while significant numbers of established ob/gyns can’t get out fast enough.

UD sees this as a win-win. Kristi Noem’s rabid pack doesn’t believe in science, anyway; they’re happy to pray to the lord for healing. Physicians want to help people who want to be helped. It all works out.

Next to go – medical schools in the earth is six thousand years old states?

Fine list of schools there, and who knew they all house mouse-killing factories? Who knew all of these fine schools host entire departments that acquire animals, give them cancer, write pretend articles about them, and then kill them? Cue Lenny, Of Mice and Men …

It seems a demoralizing sort of thing to do with the tax money you and I fork over… Makes us feel like idiots to know that for sixteen years we’ve been subsidizing bigtime a pointless bloody charade, a riot of animal torture in the name of careerism.

But at least the research fraud at Columbia University has seriously set back progress toward a cure for cancer! That much at least we can take pride in!

… makes his debut.

UN Reno’s new engineering dean owns a business – a bogus journal that for a couple hundred bucks a pop from its, er, contributors, will pump out, say, a seven-sentence article with five authors.

No questions asked. Publication faster than you can say No peer review.

Many of the articles were authored by said dean, his son, and his son’s wife – the sort of family affair that puts UD in mind of Italian university departments where much of the faculty shares the same last name (“The University of Bari, in the southern region of Puglia, springs to mind. The economics faculty must seem like a home from home for Professor Lanfranco Massari as he bumps into sons Lanfranco Jr, Gilberto and Giansiro, or his five grandchildren who work in the same department.”).

Nosy Andrew Gelman, hailing from a respectable university, brought the whole We Are Family thing to the attention of UNR’s student paper, which, as it takes down a dean, should be a contender for the same Pulitzer as that kid at Stanford.

*************

You know what’s gonna happen, right? After an indignant defense of the miscreant, the school takes forever to investigate. Eventually it issues a statement downplaying it all (“… made some mistakes…”), and then in a year or so it ever so quietly removes the dude from the deanship but keeps him in the engineering dept at the same salary (close to $400,000) he made as dean. Ta da!

**************

UPDATE: Students who spend $1,499 for Jones’s three-hour RFID certification course receive a free copy of his [self-published] book …

Gets better and better.

 [S]teroid injections [are sometimes] given to women undergoing elective Caesarean sections to deliver their babies. These injections are intended to prevent breathing problems in newborns. There is a worry that they might cause damage to a baby’s brain, but the practice was supported by a review, published in 2018… However, when [a group of scientific sleuths] looked at this review, they found it included three studies that they had noted as unreliable. A revised review, published in 2021, which excluded these three, found the benefits of the drugs for such cases to be uncertain.

***********************

[C]ritically ill patients undergoing surgery were once sometimes given starch infusions to boost their blood pressure. This was based in part on seven now discredited studies by Joachim Boldt, a German anaesthesiologist. A revised round-up of the evidence published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 2013, after his fabrications were discovered, concluded that giving starch infusions in these circumstances caused kidney damage and sometimes killed people.

**********************

 [F]or more than a decade cardiac patients in Europe were given beta-blockers before surgery, with the intention of reducing heart attacks and strokes—a practice that rested on a study from 2009 which was eventually determined to have been based, at least in part, on fabricated data. By one estimate, this approach may have caused 10,000 deaths a year in Britain alone. And a systematic review showing that infusion of a high-dose sugar solution reduces mortality after head injury was retracted after an investigation failed to find evidence that any of the trials included in it, which were all ascribed to the same researcher, had actually taken place.

**********************

… amid all the plagiarism misconduct, so Harvard’s Khalid Shah has arrived not a moment too soon.

Time was UD followed bogus stem cell studies constantly, with this almost immediately discontinued 2005 Korean stamp

the high point of the bogosity. But maybe word got around that bogus stem cell results were getting caught and careers ruined, because stem cell naughtiness kind of fell away.

But bogus, brain-related, stem cell research seems to be what has done in the much-laureled, over-extended, madly-publishing Shah, a man unfortunate enough to have been on the receiving end of one of Elisabeth M. Bik’s punishing data analyses.

Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.

Yeah you read dat right. 32 authors coming out of what —- one million thirty two labs, schools, departments, clinics, each location populated by poohbahs professors grad students scoundrels standers-by and why oh why is anyone surprised that research protocols like this generate longterm fraud??

SO reminds UD of an earlier tinpot dictator, Harvard’s disgraced Marc Hauser:

In 2007, a member of the laboratory wanted to recode an experiment involving rhesus monkey behavior, due to “inconsistencies” in the coding.

“I am getting a bit pissed here. There were no inconsistencies!” Hauser responded, explaining how an analysis was done.

Later that day, the person resigned from the lab. “It has been increasingly clear for a long time now that my interests have been diverging sharply from what the lab does, and it seems like an increasingly inappropriate and uncomfortable place for me,” the person wrote.