An academic study purporting to find 278,000 deaths from C***D v******tions thrilled the anti-v*****e crowd. The failings that led to its retraction have a lot to teach us about bogus science.
Back in January, an academic study gave heart to critics of C****-** v*****es by estimating the number of U.S. deaths from the v*****es at 278,000.
That was a bombshell, if true. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited only 19,476 reports of deaths after C***D v******tion in a national database of unverified adverse reactions to the shots.
Since even that surely inflated figure, which reflects an unknown number of deaths from unrelated causes, amounted to less than three-thousandths of a percent of the 672 million doses of C***D v*****es administered in the U.S., the CDC properly judged the shots "safe and effective" and severe post-v*****e reactions "rare."
Yet the study, by economist Mark Skidmore of Michigan State University, was taken as gospel t***h by a legion of anti-v*****e activists.
And why not? It had been published in BMC Infectious Diseases, a peer-reviewed medical journal associated with the Nature publishing group, which lent it a gilt-edged luster. Indeed, it ranked as the most-viewed paper in the journal's history.
Now take a deep breath. BMC Infectious Diseases retracted the Skidmore study on Tuesday, specifically citing doubts about "the validity of the conclusions" related to death statistics because of flaws in its methodology. Skidmore disagrees with the retraction.
The retraction, which followed months of dickering between Skidmore and the journal's editor over the nature and text of the retraction notice, points to some important questions about how the spread of misinformation about C***D affects public health.
It also raises questions about how the piece got published in the first place. As Stephanie M. Lee of the Chronicle of Higher Education has pointed out, the flaws in Skidmore's paper were virtually self-evident from the moment it reached print.
Veteran p***********e debunker David Gorski identified them within a day of its official publication, calling the paper "a*****x propaganda disguised as a survey," noting Skidmore's record of anti-v*****e commentary, and asking: "How on earth did BMC Infectious Diseases publish such dreck?"
The journal hasn't answered that question. It did, however, publish the comments of the two peer reviewers of Skidmore's paper, one of whom wished to remain anonymous.

Democrats support the indictment of former President Donald Trump whether it has legal standing or not because convicting him is a life-or-death struggle for their political survival, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.

"I do think it's sort of a parallel to crossing the Rubicon, which was the moment when Roman Law was shattered," Gingrich said on "Life, Liberty & Levin."

"I would say that what happened was that Donald Trump came out of nowhere and is the first person to have the courage and the willpower to take on the entire corrupt, extremist establishment, and they're fighting in the fight of their life — they are faced with extinction."

Gingrich said Trump's threat to the political left and establishment is similar to that of former President Ronald Reagan's place as a threat to the Soviet Union.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/democrats-ignore-weakness-trumps-indictment-because-case-is-life-death-them-gingrich

No, not at all...the DOJ would like to have it on video so that the people of this country can see it with their own eyes, versus trump and FOX would prefer to be able to spin their version of what went on as trump gets slapped around.

This court has a history of not allowing cameras, to allow them this time would be a departure that could be seen as a partisan move to break with long standing tradition...

...so no, this was this judge following the law and their precedent...nothing more than good court protocol.

It's hard to be nice in terms of calling people who keep believing really stupid things...

The hardest part is where it goes past the part where someone falls for wanting to believe something that may be hard to believe in the first place, but then we see proof as time goes on, and they refuse to accept the t***h and facts no matter how solid they are. At a certain point it gets impossible to say it nicely, it gets to where the stupidity can only be referred to in terms that fully express the degree of stupidity we are talking about...that's where seriously derogatory names come into play.