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DeSci: Can crypto improve scientific research?

An insider account of the DeSci origins story a new movement of citizen scientists, open-access scientific research and crowd-sourced peer-review funded…

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2 years ago

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An insider account of the DeSci origins story a new movement of citizen scientists, open-access scientific research and crowd-sourced peer-review funded by crypto thats gathering pace in 2022.

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At ETHDenver in February, decentralized science became a thing.

It was like the good old days of crypto: Like-minded spirits met and then crashed at each others rented places. Ideologies and open research were respectfully debated. DeSci panels were well attended with renewed energy for figuring out hard problems. Heated discussions were had. Many committed themselves to decentralized science, whatever that would mean. DeSci is, of course, very new and untested.

This could well be the first insider account of the DeSci origin story. Think Peter Parker citizen scientists funded by crypto.

Decentralized science?

Research is hard and problematically peer-reviewed. Commercializing science and tech is complex and often not profitable. Intellectual property protection is time-consuming. So, scientific research isnt rife with speculators, rent-seekers and low-hanging fruit like other parts of Cryptoland.

The newly coined DeSci is about championing true decentralization, rejecting institutional influence (read big pharma, and the peer review system) and encouraging citizen science in pursuit of truth.

COVID-19 has spurred its development. The speed at which multiple COVID-19 vaccines and endless studies were delivered was a pivotal moment. If COVID-19 research could be produced that quickly, why couldnt decentralized movements do it too?

Could crypto, tokenomics and decentralized autonomous organizations play a role in new models of research and commercialization?

This is a story of a band of committed activists who want to make that happen, one of whom is Erik Van Winkle who grew up wanting to be a scientist, had a core role at ConstitutionDAO, and has now found his sweet spot as a community organizer for DeSci Labs a project working on new technologies to improve the accessibility, reliability, transparency, and value sharing of scientific publications, as well as the DeSci Foundation.

He says the mission is broadly Can we make science more efficient? and while it wont happen overnight, it will happen:

DeSci is possible it just has a long road ahead of it. Blockchain took time; DeFi took time. DeSci will get there.

He adds its already attracting some of the best minds.

People are excited to be there; they are excited by the mission. Attracting developers is very hard. This is an area that has a good story behind it.

Building upon existing science

According to a recent article by Sarah Hamburg, co-founder of Web3 advisory Phas3 and blockchain-based biometric data company Lynx, DeSci lies at the intersection of two broader trends.

1) Efforts within the scientific community to change how research is funded and knowledge is shared, and 2) efforts within the crypto-focused movement to shift ownership and value away from industry intermediaries.

DeSci communities are expected to be largely made up of those already involved in both crypto and science. How they interact with the wider scientific community is key.

Most DeSci advocates are keen to respect existing research communities while harmoniously building new ones. This reflects an important slogan for the DeSci movement, best summed up by Hamburg in a letter to Nature encouraging scientists across all disciplines to join DeSci.

Dont work against us join us.

 

 

DeSci Foundation
The DeSci Foundation is one of the leading organizations in this new sector. Source: DeSci Foundation

 

 

Hippocratic Oath for DeSci?

Josh Bate has become a high-profile figure in the burgeoning DeSci space. A community organizer with high visibility, he agrees ETHDenver was a catalyst for DeSci.

Bate, a DeFi guy who was once the head of community for the Free Julian Assange campaign and began in crypto by using Bitcoin just for buying things on the dark web. Hes pretty forthright when he talks. How did he earn his position of visibility in the community? Just put myself about, he says.

Bate founded and funds DeSci World, a peer-to-peer research platform, and a DeSci aggregator of info. It aims to create a dashboard akin to DeFi Pulse for DeSci.

He also believes DeFi practices are crucial to DeSci business models, but DeSci needs more than Web3 tooling to improve on the current state of affairs.

He tells Magazine that he fears a dark DeSci and a regular DeSci, so hes been campaigning for a Hippocratic Oath for DeSci. He made the case at a talk at ETHDenver:

Its so early, but we can choose a Hippocratic Oath for DeSci now no institutional finance, just pure science. He asked the crowd for a show of hands on whether DeSci should have an explicitly stated ideology and estimates that maybe 5% voted no, 20% yes, and the rest were too confused by the many variables and held out to see the outcome.

How to peer review as a decentralized public good

Lets jump back a step to consider the complex problems with existing research models.

Theres a need to improve:

  1. Research funding
  2. Open access to research
  3. Overhaul the academic peer-review process.

Of course, theres no proof that grafting crypto onto this process is the best way to improve it. Is creating a coin around a research project a good way to fund it? What do holders of that token get out of it? Is it more out of altruism than a financial return?

LabDAO is an open community of wet and dry labs for citizen science. Founder Niklas Rindtorff tells Magazine that tokenomics cant directly change research.

But tokenomics can generate new mechanism design and incentives. In a time where most academic research is following the same set of incentives, I am hopeful new funding agencies and tokenomics models can help diversify the ways research is being done.

 

 

DeSci
Artists impression of the DeSci Future.

 

1. Crowdsourcing research funding

Funding is the bane of scientists existence, and the process does not always reward merit. Scientists waste a lot of time writing grants applications. Hamburg wrote:

Funding is an especially acute pain point for scientists, who spend up to half their time writing grant proposals. Success in getting funding is heavily tied to metrics such as the h-index, which quantifies the impact of a scientists published work. The resulting pressure to publish or perish incentivizes the pursuit of novel research over work thats critical but less likely to grab headlines. Ultimately, inadequate and unreliable funding not only reduces the amount of science being done, but also biases which projects scientists choose, contributing to issues such as the replication crisis.

The replication crisis means that the results of perhaps more than 50% of published studies cannot be replicated by other scientists carrying out the same experiments or research.

Passion projects
DeSci can help mobilize those most affected and motivated to contribute to research to help improve their lives.

DeSci proponents argue that funding gatekeepers hinder scientific progress. Hamburg, a neuroscientist who has researched innovative ways of treating Alzheimers by using light known as entrainment, explains to Magazine that funding bodies are too slow for innovative therapeutics. She was building a phone app for entrainment treatments but ran out of funding. She still believes the trial would have proved fruitful for treating Alzheimers.

In addition, traditional funding mechanisms arent great for new and different research approaches.

For example, DeSci will unleash the growth of digital therapeutics [wearable biometric devices], which will enable large numbers of people across many different locations to participate in digital-based studies and pool their data, she argues. DeSci trials could be done with fewer biases and better-pooled data on a blockchain.

Like the open-source nature of AI research, Hamburg suggests that medicine of the future will be algorithms in one way or another. Pooled data will be very important for generating new insights.

Thats the vision. The question is whether the decentralized science movement has the capabilities to better decide what should or shouldnt be funded.

How do you conduct peer-reviewed research and collaborate with the harmoniously scientific community? Will DeSci crowdsource both the funding and the peer review, or does it just fund the research and get out of the way? For now, experimentation may be the only option.

SCINET.io co-founder Kaitlin Cauchon believes DeScis success is inevitable because the current academic funding model is broken.

How to get scientists on board the DeSci train? Democratize funding. Funding is the biggest centralization of science.

SCINET is an early-stage project that is currently focused on building a decentralized crowdfunding platform for life sciences research. Once done, they will turn their attention to an electronic lab notebook built on on-chain, according to Cauchon. Open access and replicability are the problems they seek to solve

 

 

DeScie events
DeSci events are now highly visible in 2022, and female representation is unusually strong for Cryptoland.

 

 

2. Open access for citizen science

Information access is another big problem for science today, Hamburg noted in her article.

Despite the fact that science is the epitome of a global public good, a lot of scientific knowledge is trapped behind journal paywalls and inside private databases. Making all types of data more accessible is the main objective of the Open Science movement, which emerged over a decade ago.

Peer review is slow and anonymous, and this can lead to turf wars as journals are gatekeepers of knowledge. (FYI, see this 2018 review of the peer review system.) Two major players are Clarivate and Elsevier, who are the Web2 equivalents of academic research. Scientific journals are an oligopoly of for-profit companies. Articles are protected by copyright.

The two leading business models of journal publication companies are pay-for-access and pay-for-publication. Even for independent observers, this does seem like a perversion of incentives.

In recent years, preprint platforms Arxiv, bioRxiv, medRxivand SSRN have allowed academics to post early versions of their manuscripts online and have emerged and found favor. However, this is prior to the peer review process, and academics may not divulge key findings at this stage

The problem is clear: paywalled science. And the benefits of fixing the problem are even starker.

Citizen science

Hamburg, who has had a chronic pain condition called fibromyalgia since she was 19 and long COVID over the past two years, believes that by making research more available, DeSci can crowdsource ordinary people working together to help solve problems, especially those affected by an illness who are the most motivated.

With many chronic conditions, theres a strong biohacker mentality that emerges, as people are left to track flare-ups and the impact of interventions themselves, with inadequate know-how and tools to do so. There is very little crossover (if any) between these citizen science experiments and traditional science and medicine, so insights are missed, and many illnesses remain under-researched despite the millions they impact worldwide.

 

 

DeSci research
DeSci Labs plans to store research on ledgers and to chip away at the reproducibility crisis.

 



DeSci Labs is working to create a ledger of scientific records that stores and validates manuscripts, data and code in a transparent way that is accessible to everyone.

Making science truly open involves transforming science from solitary PDFs into dynamic research objects. We plan to showcase our first product, DeSci Nodes, at the DeSci Day on April 20 in Amsterdam to demonstrate how a pre-print can be turned into a reproducible research object stored on IPFS containing data, code and video to evidence work and chip away at the reproducibility crisis, Van Winkle tells Magazine.

One innovative approach that might improve open access is being taken by the Smart Contract Research Forum. Its a community for industry and researchers to share research and peer reviews that is decoupling review from publication.

Operations leader Eugene Leventhal tells Magazine, Today, peer review is only available for those vying for those coveted journals and conferences. The majority of the Web3 space, with the exception of the underlying cryptographic primitives, has mostly been built outside of academia, and most researchers publish more on their blogs and Twitter than in traditional venues.

Thats why we think its important to start a series of open peer review experiments supporting independent researchers in the space, and were starting to coordinate with meta-science researchers to ensure that were not re-inventing the wheel with our experimentation.

They will announce their plans for 2022 at ETHAmsterdam on April 20.

So, more open and pooled data is one key to more research from concerned citizens. But should tokenomics mean that reproduction of data sets along with all research data is incentivized?

 

 

 

3. Overhaul the academic peer review process

Patrick Joyce worked at a tumor biology lab at the famed Johns Hopkins University. He also dropped out of med school and a Ph.D. program working on molecular biology.

Hes far from the only person who tells me that good science isnt always super citable. This creates weird perverse incentives driven by money flowing from citations.

He adds, Higher prestige journals lead to better citations. But paywalls mean the world cant benefit in real-time.

In 2016, before Joyce discovered crypto, he decided to build a Reddit-like platform for science called Knowledgr. Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong invested in his company, but the project soon sputtered out. Joyce then joined Armstrongs ResearchHub a sort-of GitHub for science, with utility behind the paper in 2020 as chief science officer.

ResearchHub is a good example of where DeSci may be heading. ResearchHub has hired 60 editors, he says, people who are qualified to review scientific papers.” Its really an economies-of-scale issue, enough editors and support, and the reviews will be almost universally respected. Its currently on the hunt for preprints or draft research manuscripts to receive peer reviews.

ResearchHub isnt trying to conduct research, but to create a platform for independent science. The editors are paid in ResearchCoin, which essentially equates to governance rights on the platform.

Like open source, we hope to tear down the Ivory tower so a barefoot biochemist in Yugoslavia can unlock clever science.

They recently added digital object identifier (DOI) citations to papers to help integrate ResearchHub with existing research models. DOIs aid researchers to find original references.

Joyce says the project started as a pure DAO, but that didnt work out. It is still kind of a DAO but more CEO-run. Its hard to organize people. We had to carefully delineate what the DAOs should decide. For example, should we ban a eugenics hub? that question goes to the DAO.

But he adds in DeSci, Now theres an expectation that youre a DAO.

 

 

 

 

DAOs are crucial to DeScis moment

In the wake of ETHDenver, new DeSci DAOs have been emerging almost weekly.

The fledgling stdDAOs mission is to fund sexually transmitted disease research in the hopes of finding cures. The founders are crypto people remaining anonymous, as everyone in the DAO has personally contracted an STD all of them know someone who has a more serious STD.

Founder CarmenCrypto says they seek to get access to the industry outside of big pharma. They are looking for cures, and not just another side effect treatment, which are what is only available on the market today. They plan to first focus on STDs, such as herpes simplex types 1 (cold sores) and 2 (genital) and to further gene editing and stem cell research.

We run the business, the DAO; outside specialists will help us with the research. The DAO can be cross-border, can move funds, can cut across projects.

They have in-kind goodwill from lawyers, finance pros and charities all willing to help (and everyone has crypto skills).

Being an anonymous DAO is well suited to the cause of No one is shamed by saying they have cancer, but, unfortunately, they still are when it comes to STDs.

Side-stepping United States clinical trial regulations, they want to fund research wherever scientists and researchers may be.

 

 

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They are also looking to capitalize on existing open research. CarmenCrypto says the DAO is looking for highly knowledgeable professionals, such as doctors, scientists, researchers, philanthropists and entrepreneurs, to help provide insight to our community on innovative medical techniques with a high potential to cure STDs that stdDAO should fund.

Its very new, and very experimental. Are decentralized clinical trials even possible, or ethical? Its so early that tokenomics design is still a vague high-level discussion.

 

 

 

 

Tokenized science is still evolving

Despite the enthusiasm, the path to tokenizing science may be slow, says DeSci Labs co-founder Professor Philipp Koellinger, adding:

Its too early for a tokenomics model of science. Most scientists are risk-averse and not familiar with Web3 yet. Tokenomic models for DeSci must be very well thought through and, ideally, developed together with and tested by the scientific community to gain widespread adoption and acceptance. It is glaringly obvious to most scientists that the current incentive system is misaligned with the purpose of science. The possibility for incentive design is one of the most powerful features of Web3 technologies. If done well, it could solve a lot of problems in science. Give it some time.

DeSci Labs believes that a decentralized peer review system can be achieved by autonomous research communities of the best researchers in every field, who are incentivized and rewarded for providing open, timely, and high-quality peer review and who select the most important contributions to be highlighted in a transparent way.

This would be a dramatic improvement on the current practice of closed-door peer reviews of journals that rely on unpaid time of scientists, which is haunted by collusion, gate-keeping and bias.

DeScis breakout moment in Amsterdam?

Renee Davis is another who was inspired by ETHDenver. She asked Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at the event what the top five research problems were facing DeSci.

Of the five Buterin stated, four of them are already being worked on by the community, she says, listing onboarding, governance protocols, token distribution and decentralized identity systems.

Im so glad I went to ETHDenver, she says, adding, My ROI was massive from bonding with the DeSci community.

She quit Deloitte consulting to join BanklessDAO and then founded the Journal of Decentralized Work, an open-source journal for the study of DAOs and delegated tokenomic research and TalentDAO.

TalentDAO is trying to create a new science of DAOs, helping to make sure DAOs dont fail. It has partnered with Arweave and Ocean Protocol.

At ETHAmsterdam, part of Devconnect Amsterdam, DeSci Day will take place on April 20. Itll give the community a chance to see how far DeSci has progressed since ETHDenver in February. Davis, for one, thinks its progressing in leaps and bounds, and the sky is the limit.

Crypto disrupted finance; NFTs disrupted culture; and DeSCi will disrupt knowledge in the next 1224 months.

 

 

 

 

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Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…

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6 hours ago

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March 17, 2024

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Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.

Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”

And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.

Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.

And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …

And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …

And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …

And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”

And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …

Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …

… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 23:20

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Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A…

Published

9 hours ago

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March 16, 2024

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Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Harvard Medical School professor who refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine has been terminated, according to documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.

Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist and statistician, at his home in Ashford, Conn., on Feb. 11, 2022. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, was fired by Mass General Brigham in November 2021 over noncompliance with the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate after his requests for exemptions from the mandate were denied, according to one document. Mr. Kulldorff was also placed on leave by Harvard Medical School (HMS) because his appointment as professor of medicine there “depends upon” holding a position at the hospital, another document stated.

Mr. Kulldorff asked HMS in late 2023 how he could return to his position and was told he was being fired.

“You would need to hold an eligible appointment with a Harvard-affiliated institution for your HMS academic appointment to continue,” Dr. Grace Huang, dean for faculty affairs, told the epidemiologist and biostatistician.

She said the lack of an appointment, combined with college rules that cap leaves of absence at two years, meant he was being terminated.

Mr. Kulldorff disclosed the firing for the first time this month.

“While I can’t comment on the specifics due to employment confidentiality protections that preclude us from doing so, I can confirm that his employment agreement was terminated November 10, 2021,” a spokesperson for Brigham and Women’s Hospital told The Epoch Times via email.

Mass General Brigham granted just 234 exemption requests out of 2,402 received, according to court filings in an ongoing case that alleges discrimination.

The hospital said previously, “We received a number of exemption requests, and each request was carefully considered by a knowledgeable team of reviewers.”

“A lot of other people received exemptions, but I did not,” Mr. Kulldorff told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Kulldorff was originally hired by HMS but switched departments in 2015 to work at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is part of Mass General Brigham and affiliated with HMS.

“Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls,” an HMS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “Hospital-based faculty, such as Mr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to maintain an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School.”

HMS confirmed that some faculty, who are tenured or on the tenure track, do not require hospital appointments.

Natural Immunity

Before the COVID-19 vaccines became available, Mr. Kulldorff contracted COVID-19. He was hospitalized but eventually recovered.

That gave him a form of protection known as natural immunity. According to a number of studies, including papers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, natural immunity is better than the protection bestowed by vaccines.

Other studies have found that people with natural immunity face a higher risk of problems after vaccination.

Mr. Kulldorff expressed his concerns about receiving a vaccine in his request for a medical exemption, pointing out a lack of data for vaccinating people who suffer from the same issue he does.

“I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency,” Mr. Kulldorff wrote in an essay.

In his request for a religious exemption, he highlighted an Israel study that was among the first to compare protection after infection to protection after vaccination. Researchers found that the vaccinated had less protection than the naturally immune.

“Having had COVID disease, I have stronger longer lasting immunity than those vaccinated (Gazit et al). Lacking scientific rationale, vaccine mandates are religious dogma, and I request a religious exemption from COVID vaccination,” he wrote.

Both requests were denied.

Mr. Kulldorff is still unvaccinated.

“I had COVID. I had it badly. So I have infection-acquired immunity. So I don’t need the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times.

Dissenting Voice

Mr. Kulldorff has been a prominent dissenting voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, countering messaging from the government and many doctors that the COVID-19 vaccines were needed, regardless of prior infection.

He spoke out in an op-ed in April 2021, for instance, against requiring people to provide proof of vaccination to attend shows, go to school, and visit restaurants.

“The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune,” he wrote at the time.

Mr. Kulldorff later co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of people at high risk while removing restrictions for younger, healthy people.

Harsh restrictions such as school closures “will cause irreparable damage” if not lifted, the declaration stated.

The declaration drew criticism from Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who became the head of the CDC, among others.

In a competing document, Dr. Walensky and others said that “relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed” and that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity(3) and mortality across the whole population.”

“Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades,” Mr. Kulldorff later said in an EpochTV interview. “I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.”

Surveys indicate that people have less trust now in the CDC and other health institutions than before the pandemic, and data from the CDC and elsewhere show that fewer people are receiving the new COVID-19 vaccines and other shots.

Support

The disclosure that Mr. Kulldorff was fired drew criticism of Harvard and support for Mr. Kulldorff.

The termination “is a massive and incomprehensible injustice,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, an ethics expert who was fired from the University of California–Irvine School of Medicine for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine because he had natural immunity, said on X.

“The academy is full of people who declined vaccines—mostly with dubious exemptions—and yet Harvard fires the one professor who happens to speak out against government policies.” Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiologist at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote in a blog post. “It looks like Harvard has weaponized its policies and selectively enforces them.”

A petition to reinstate Mr. Kulldorff has garnered more than 1,800 signatures.

Some other doctors said the decision to let Mr. Kulldorff go was correct.

“Actions have consequence,” Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a Canadian doctor, wrote on X. He said Mr. Kulldorff had “publicly undermine[d] public health.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 21:00

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Correcting the Washington Post’s 11 Charts That Are Supposed to Tell Us How the Economy Changed Since Covid

The Washington Post made some serious errors or omissions in its 11 charts that are supposed to tell us how Covid changed the economy. Wages Starting with…

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10 hours ago

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March 16, 2024

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The Washington Post made some serious errors or omissions in its 11 charts that are supposed to tell us how Covid changed the economy.

Wages

Starting with its second chart, the article gives us an index of average weekly wages since 2019. The index shows a big jump in 2020, which then falls off in 2021 and 2022, before rising again in 2023.

It tells readers:

“Many Americans got large pay increases after the pandemic, when employers were having to one-up each other to find and keep workers. For a while, those wage gains were wiped out by decade-high inflation: Workers were getting larger paychecks, but it wasn’t enough to keep up with rising prices.”

That actually is not what its chart shows. The big rise in average weekly wages at the start of the pandemic was not the result of workers getting pay increases, it was the result of low-paid workers in sectors like hotels and restaurants losing their jobs.

The number of people employed in the low-paying leisure and hospitality sector fell by more than 8 million at the start of the pandemic. Even at the start of 2021 it was still down by over 4 million.

Laying off low-paid workers raises average wages in the same way that getting the short people to leave raises the average height of the people in the room. The Washington Post might try to tell us that the remaining people grew taller, but that is not what happened.

The other problem with this chart is that it is giving us weekly wages. The length of the average workweek jumped at the start of the pandemic as employers decided to work the workers they had longer hours rather than hire more workers. In January of 2021 the average workweek was 34.9 hours, compared to 34.4 hours in 2019 and 34.3 hours in February.

This increase in hours, by itself, would raise weekly pay by 2.0 percent. As hours returned to normal in 2022, this measure would misleadingly imply that wages were falling.

It is also worth noting that the fastest wage gains since the pandemic have been at the bottom end of the wage distribution and the Black/white wage gap has fallen to its lowest level on record.

Saving Rates

The third chart shows the saving rate since 2019. It shows a big spike at the start of the pandemic, as people stopped spending on things like restaurants and travel and they got pandemic checks from the government. It then falls sharply in 2022 and is lower in the most recent quarters than in 2019.

The piece tells readers:

“But as the world reopened — and people resumed spending on dining out, travel, concerts and other things that were previously off-limits — savings rates have leveled off. Americans are also increasingly dip into rainy-day funds to pay more for necessities, including groceries, housing, education and health care. In fact, Americans are now generally saving less of their incomes than they were before the pandemic.

This is an incomplete picture due to a somewhat technical issue. As I explained in a blogpost a few months ago, there is an unusually large gap between GDP as measured on the output side and GDP measured on the income side. In principle, these two numbers should be the same, but they never come out exactly equal.

In recent quarters, the gap has been 2.5 percent of GDP. This is extraordinarily large, but it also is unusual in that the output side is higher than the income side, the opposite of the standard pattern over the last quarter century.

It is standard for economists to assume that the true number for GDP is somewhere between the two measures. If we make that assumption about the data for 2023, it would imply that income is somewhat higher than the data now show and consumption somewhat lower.

In that story, as I showed in the blogpost, the saving rate for 2023 would be 6.8 percent of disposable income, roughly the same as the average for the three years before the pandemic. This would mean that people are not dipping into their rainy-day funds as the Post tells us. They are spending pretty much as they did before the pandemic.

 

Credit Card Debt

The next graph shows that credit card debt is rising again, after sinking in the pandemic. The piece tells readers:

“But now, debt loads are swinging higher again as families try to keep up with rising prices. Total household debt reached a record $17.5 trillion at the end of 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And, in a worrisome sign for the economy, delinquency rates on mortgages, car loans and credit cards are all rising, too.”

There are several points worth noting here. Credit card debt is rising, but measured relative to income it is still below where it was before the pandemic. It was 6.7 percent of disposable income at the end of 2019, compared to 6.5 percent at the end of last year.

The second point is that a major reason for the recent surge in credit card debt is that people are no longer refinancing mortgages. There was a massive surge in mortgage refinancing with the low interest rates in 2020-2021.

Many of the people who refinanced took additional money out, taking advantage of the increased equity in their home. This channel of credit was cut off when mortgage rates jumped in 2022 and virtually ended mortgage refinancing. This means that to a large extent the surge in credit card borrowing is simply a shift from mortgage debt to credit card debt.

The point about total household debt hitting a record can be said in most months. Except in the period immediately following the collapse of the housing bubble, total debt is almost always rising.

And the rise in delinquencies simply reflects the fact that they had been at very low levels in 2021 and 2022. For the most part, delinquency rates are just getting back to their pre-pandemic levels, which were historically low.  

 

Grocery Prices and Gas Prices

The next two charts show the patterns in grocery prices and gas prices since the pandemic. It would have been worth mentioning that every major economy in the world saw similar run-ups in prices in these two areas. In other words, there was nothing specific to U.S. policy that led to a surge in inflation here.

 

The Missing Charts

There are several areas where it would have been interesting to see charts which the Post did not include. It would have been useful to have a chart on job quitters, the number of people who voluntarily quit their jobs during the pandemic. In the tight labor markets of 2021 and 2022 the number of workers who left jobs they didn’t like soared to record levels, as shown below.

 

The vast majority of these workers took other jobs that they liked better. This likely explains another item that could appear as a graph, the record level of job satisfaction.

In a similar vein there has been an explosion in the number of people who work from home at least part-time. This has increased by more than 17 million during the pandemic. These workers are saving themselves thousands of dollars a year on commuting costs and related expenses, as well as hundreds of hours spent commuting.

Finally, there has been an explosion in the use of telemedicine since the pandemic. At the peak, nearly one in four visits with a health care professional was a remote consultation. This saved many people with serious health issues the time and inconvenience associated with a trip to a hospital or doctor’s office. The increased use of telemedicine is likely to be a lasting gain from the pandemic.

 

The World Has Changed

The pandemic will likely have a lasting impact on the economy and society. The Washington Post’s charts captured part of this story, but in some cases misrepr

The post Correcting the Washington Post’s 11 Charts That Are Supposed to Tell Us How the Economy Changed Since Covid appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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