I’m so curious how someone goes from being a professor to a science denier? I simply can’t imagine that journey.

The very concept of merit has been destroyed and replaced with judgement calls on celebrity (necessary for leadership role) and subservience to the political whims of the last 15 minutes (and you had better switch in the next 15 minutes or you're out).

This guy is a disaster. But really it's not just him. It's the entire organizational structure that puts him, or any other one person, in the position that they have the power to do this. There is simply no one qualified.

We need to have expert scientists to set up trials and review the design of the trials and conduct the analysis of the data. This is something that is generally objective and not able to be done without skills and experience. But then you have to make a decision based on those results. And the decision is some sort of risk reward trade off. While science can quantify what that tradeoff is, which path to take is fundamentally outside of the scope of science.

Trade offs are not objective determinations at all because they are based on subjective preferences. And therefore it makes no sense to force it into a one size fits all approval or denial by some centralized body. The only rational approach to such a trade off is to allow each individual to choose for themselves. The only person's opinion on whether the risk justifies the reward for the experimental Huntington's disease treatment is the patient's. The best we can do with science is to use it for its intended purpose to produce good data for him to make his choice.

In the United States, pharma companies make money when insurance companies (and the government, but less so than in many other nations) buy their product to give to patients. In practice, very few people are paying for vaccines out of pocket.

Insurance companies in particular hate, hate, hate giving anybody money for any reason. They will not pay for something unless you beat them over the head with how well it works. And if they don't believe you, they'll do their own analyses. Better to blow a few million on a study than spend a few billion on unnecessary treatments. (This is the same reason that there's a car-insurance funded highway safety institute crash-testing cars.)

And yet, every year, they insist on making the flu and COVID vaccines free and pushing it on as many people as possible! I guarantee you if you call your insurance company and ask if they think you should get a flu or COVID vaccine, or any vaccine, really, they'll say, yes please.

Why would they do that if these vaccines were going to cost them money by a) being useless or b) being harmful? There is simply no incentive!

The reason everybody wants you to get the damn shot is that the shots work, and the downside risks of them are smaller and cheaper than the downside risks of the things they prevent. Capitalism would make it very difficult to repeatedly sell vaccines that don't work, or hurt you; you might get away with it once, but after that, the reward's just not there.

I don't know how one responds to that, if one distrusts vaccines, other than to suggest a much larger and more complex evil conspiracy than is plausible to most people.

This article has no data about why mRNA flu vaccines will improve these outcomes, and has no data about the risk/benefit ratio or how it was calculated. It doesn't even cite the "studies" it mentions. It's a remarkably bad article written for low information readers by a low information author.

Hard pass until I see some hard data.

Here's the top-line comparison:

Healthcare encounter:

new: 80 (0.4)

existing: 120 (0.6)

Each group had roughly 20k participants, mostly white.

No actual control group, no independent third party study. Junk.