Trisha Greenhalgh on ME/CFS and Long Covid

Leila said:
What does GBD mean?
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Ah sorry I should have explained. Great Barrington Declaration. This was the group that can shoulder much of the blame for the current (Covid, not monkeypox) and ongoing pandemic disaster. Their position was that vaccines were unnecessary, lockdowns harmful and that everyone should rush to get infected with SARS-CoV-2 in order to develop herd immunity.

Even at the time this position was not scientifically justifiable. It is now clear that there is no long term protective immunity. They were also anti-mask and deniers of long Covid.

The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.
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From my perspective, NZ did very well in the first 18 months of the pandemic. The elimination strategy kept the population safe and life (within the country) was completely normal - including rugby games and concerts. International travel was severely compromised, however. With that penalty NZ had one of the lowest mortality rates. Australia was similar. Having abandoned elimination in favour of (fairly modest) mitigation, NZ and Aus have the 2nd and 5th highest mortality rates currently (although overall both are still very low).
 
TG said:
"EBM's problem is that it systematically devalues other kinds of evidence and *suppresses deliberation* on how different kinds of evidence might be brought to bear on a problem."
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Surely the problem is the studies are crap - they're unreliable ---- that's all the deliberation you need --- trying to read something into unreliable studies isn't "deliberation" it's failing to objectively assess the evidence.
All the studies point to a small positive effect --- but they're all unblinded and use subjective controls (questionnaires) ---- Oh and the limited objective data collected (which couldn't be suppressed/hidden/lost) shows these interventions don't work.

This salutation shows why scientific method matters --- Trisha Greenhalgh #IStandWithUkraine ----Professor of Primary Care, University of Oxford.
With a role like that you'd expect reliable interpretation of data --- rather than just making up some crap to prove your (unfounded) opinions are correct ---
 
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SNT Gatchaman said:
Having abandoned elimination in favour of (fairly modest) mitigation, NZ and Aus have the 2nd and 5th highest mortality rates currently (although overall both are still very low).
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Excuse me being lazy but are these deaths in the vaccinated but vulnerable (underling health conditions) seems a bit worrying.
If they're in the unvaccinated then that's slightly different.
 
FMMM1 said:
are these deaths in the vaccinated but vulnerable (underling health conditions) seems a bit worrying.
If they're in the unvaccinated then that's slightly different.
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From [Preprint] Zero-COVID policy or Living-with-COVID policy? Analysis Based on Percent Excess Mortality (2022) —

For this article: PEM = "Percent excess mortality"; ZC = "zero COVID" (elimination strategy); LWC = "living with COVID" (mitigation strategy).​

four countries (Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand) that have shifted to the LWC policy and one region (Hong Kong) with a significant Omicron outbreak were selected as research objects. Percent excess mortality (PEM), which is the percentage of excess mortality over expected mortality, was selected to assess the effectiveness of different anti-pandemic policies in controlling the mortality burden within the same country/region during the pandemic.
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In the examined four countries, PEM fluctuated around 0 and was lower than 10% most of the time under the ZC policy. After shifting to the LWC policy, PEM usually exceeded 10%, and countries with high population density experienced a peak PEM of 20-70%. New Zealand was the only country in our analysis that achieved approximately 10% average PEM during the Omicron outbreak under the LWC policy.
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Ultrahigh vaccination coverage significantly helped New Zealand to control average PEM well during the Omicron outbreak under the LWC policy.
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Keela Too said:
I think she blocked far wider than just people who sent or liked abusive tweets. Pretty sure I haven’t liked anything abusive, and certainly not sent anything.

Is this another round of blocking? I was blocked in the first mass blocking episode. :(
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Sounds like the social media equivalent of the person who surrounds themselves with 'yes men'

and using the old-worn by BPS tactic of then claiming that anticipatorarily (whatever the word is) blocking anyone who reads science assuming they might say anything other than 'yeah read the abstract you are wonderful' was instead blocking people who 'insert disparaging term to undermine others from listening to them'.

I can only assume from her comment about finding some 'clever trick' means some tool that allows her to look up anyone with 'ME or CFS' or 'follows s4me' or whatever in reality - is that possible?
 
Andy said:
Trish Greenhalgh on how Long Covid isn't all in the mind......

Code: 
https://youtu.be/2fXwWF4KoG4?t=1171
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Are the clots not pretty universal? The immune system changes, the metabolic adjustments. We don't need a complete picture of the disease to start using these tests to confirm sufferers. Its infuriating that the world will happily roll on with a PCR test that is about 95% effective and a Laterol flow test that requires substantual viral load and detects about 80% of infections but a few different blood tests that find the vast majority of Long haulers is not acceptable. When did perfect become the goal and why does it only apply to ME/CFS and related diseases?

There is something that irritates me a little on the Vaccine verses Virus safety right after. They give statistics about how many lives the vaccine saves but they don't give stats for how many people have been harmed, people have been harmed by the vaccination and not acknowledging that is a problem, if you are going to say the balance is for the vaccination you have to present the data for both sides or you failed to scientifically dismiss the myth.
 
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Greenhalgh demonstrates her complete lack of understanding of how you judge scientific literature. She seems to assume that the reports of immune changes and microclots are real - maybe 'just in some people'. The reality is that these findings are at a stage where nobody should regard them as adequately established as real. The literature is full of findings like this that prove impossible to replicate and are probably due to errors in methodology.

So I am sorry to say @BrightCandle that I would suggest the opposite. There is nothing there at all for clinical use at present. Greenhalgh is as gullible as a Guardian journalist.

It is remarkable that she is now guilty of exactly the same mistake that has made ME 'activists' look foolish in the past - overegging doubtful studies as a basis for the claim that the illness is real. You can tell the illness is real if you listen to people describing it. And she is supposed to be a great GP listener to lived experience. She spins round like a weather vane.
 
A long time ago when I was in college they made us read Greenhalgh’s book How to read a paper. This woman was venerated like a god for some reason. Scrolling through her Twitter feed is pretty hilarious. Block everyone who disagrees, block anyone who follows anyone who disagrees, Reddit-tier understanding of science, Ukrainian flag in bio - the whole package.
 
TG on Twitter.

"Writing a paper. Can anyone point me to studies published early in the pandemic which dismissed long covid as "functional" or "all in the mind"? (Just to be clear: this isn't a view I share but I want to analyse the reasoning of those who said it). THANKS all. Will post summary."

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If she hadn't blocked the whole ME community, I'm sure she'd get lots of help with this one.

I see Alan Carson assist her though with:

If you’re willing to be open minded i d be happy to take you through why many in neurosciences think this

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Maybe the problem is your use of dismissed which implies one form of aetiology as more worthy than another- as far as neurological symptoms go there is mounting clinical and scientific evidence of a functional cause but this doesn’t mean the patient is any less sick or deserving
 
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