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The Incumbency with the Fringe on the Top
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!



Margaret Soltan, March 8, 2025 9:10AM
Posted in: march of science

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6 Responses to “The Incumbency with the Fringe on the Top”

  1. Rita Says:

    The “fringe” epidemiologists at…Stanford? You might be interested in this book by some fringe politics scientists at fringe Princeton: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691267135/in-covids-wake.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, a position at an excellent university is no guarantee of respectability of thought.

  3. Rita Says:

    Lol true, but looking at the blurbs on that Macedo/Lee book, the fringe position seems to be winning sufficient support to start looking kind of mainstream.

  4. Matt McKeon Says:

    Blurbs. Well, I guess they’re shorter and easier to understand then peer review.

  5. Rita Says:

    Might be of interest: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-coronavirus-consensus-was-wrong?sra=true.

    I suppose Princeton UP still puts manuscripts through peer review.

  6. TAFKAU Says:

    Ah, nothing like a pair of political scientists armed with 20/20 hindsight (or, in this case, I guess we’d call it 2020 hindsight). But since this conversation started with a discussion of Dr. Bhattacharya, we should note that the good doctor’s initial contribution to the discourse was a coauthored WSJ oped piece (in March 2020) suggesting that fear of the virus was likely wildly overstated, and that the final death toll could be as low as 20,000. Such a take was fringey at the time, and has obviously been rendered permanently fringey in the wake of over one million American deaths. If Collins, Fauci and the rest got several things wrong, their mistakes were at least grounded in a firmer understanding of the potential lethality of the virus than Bhattacharya possessed. Unfortunately, Macedo and Lee hadn’t yet figured it all out, so Fauci and colleagues had to do their best in real time with overwhelmed hospitals, inadequate equipment, and a president who was recommending horse dewormer and Clorox. (This is not a knock on Macedo and Lee, who are good social scientists. I’m sure their intention is to inform future pandemic-fighting efforts rather than providing grist for the inevitable army of Monday morning quarterbacks.)

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