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Comment by rimunroe

10 days ago

> These biases and trends are facts most people may not be aware of, but big pharma certainly is.

I have a hard time believing that “most people” also means “most epidemiologists” or “most medical organizations” would be unaware of such an obvious problem. It seems like it would be day one of school stuff.

It seems trivially obvious to me, someone whose closest qualification to being able to debate the actual science here is having a bachelor’s in physics and very technically being involved in some academic research. I’m not going to second guess the overwhelming majority of scientists and medical professionals I’ve heard comment on this because of something like that.

I mean laymen. All epidemiologists and the like are certainly aware of such problems. You'll see these biases and many others buried in the discussion/limitations or other such section in any study. Here's [1] a random one from the CDC:

- "confounding might exist because the study did not measure or adjust for behavioral differences between the comparison groups"

- "these results might not be generalizable to nonhospitalized patients who have ... different health care–seeking behaviors"

Along with many more. The problem is that there was no meaningful public debate whatsoever. You were on board with absolutely anything and everything, or you must be an "anti-vaxer" and just wanted everybody's grandmother to die, and probably also thought COVID was caused by 5G.

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7044e1.htm