There is no genuine consensus on secondhand smoke, of course, just a lot of shouting to drown out reason, just a loud attempt at enshrining a pseudo-scientific political fraud notably promoted by the US Surgeon General. What we have here is mindless parroting representing a serious problem of institutional corruption.
In this excellent article – be sure to click the link and read it through – an excellent point stands out particularly:
"In an August 2005 essay in PloS Medicine, Tufts University epidemiologist John Ioannidis explains:
"‘There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.’
"Ioannidis writes that when tens of thousands of researchers are conducting thousands of small and short-term epidemiological studies, all of them seeking to find evidence of a small or nonexistent effect, and when academic journals are predisposed to publish studies claiming positive correlations (no matter how small) that support the conventional wisdom, the result is that ‘most published research findings are false.’"
Enough said on that.
There is another curious kind of parroting, recently emergent in Europe, which doesn’t seem to have landed in the USA as yet. The European smoking prohibition pushers (who usually likewise push the obesity and the global warming scares, and alcohol prohibition, with all the usual pseudo-science and "esteemed expert" endorsements) are rather consistently labelling their critics as "anti-science."
US readers: let us know when you first hear this in your neighbourhood. The prohibitionist parrots of America are sure to pick up the call soon.
0 Comments