I'm going to conclude my March blog entries with a quick mention of three articles that everyone should read, regardless of science training.
1) The first is a paper from The Journal of Pediatrics. Published March 25, the title is "Persistent Cardiac MRI Findings in a Cohort of Adolescents with post COVID-19 mRNA vaccine myopericarditis." The lead author is Jenna Schauer, MD. This paper follows a small group of adolescents at Seattle Children's Hospital. They suffered severe myocarditis issues after their second dose of Pfizer mRNA vaccine. Three to eight months later, some damage had resolved, and some had not. One particular category of damage, in fact, showed no evidence of resolving at all.
This is one of those papers that, as I read it, put a knot in my stomach, almost like a scene from a horror movie. It was a quiet, ominous paper. I hope it turns out to be a freakish anomaly, but I doubt that's the case. The paper unnerved me. Everyone should take a look at it.
2) My second recommendation is a "step back and smell the coffee" paper, an essay published March 16 in The British Medical Journal, which has been around for 180 years. The title is "The illusion of evidence based medicine," and lead authors are Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry. The paper tackles the academic, capitalistic, and cultural problems with medical research.
I've read a number of papers touching on these topics in academia in general, but when these massive structural flaws in integrity take place in medicine during a pandemic, the consequences become real, dire, and ubiquitous, affecting literally everyone. It's one thing for a self-fulfilling and self-enriching academia to grift regarding the inconsequential. It's another when profiteering sets the agenda with billions of lives at stake. This paper is a warning to wake up to the corruption and hypocrisy defining medical regulation and academia itself.
3) My third recommendation, after the truly frightening ramifications of the first two, is somewhat lighter in tone. It's Carol Tavris' "You Can't Say That" in last month's Volume 26, Number 4 of The Skeptic. Those who follow me know I'm not an advocate of wokespeak, and Tavris does a fine job of pointing out the drawbacks of wokeness in writing. I've been a fan of Tavris for a long, long time. It's an entertaining read.
That's it for today. I'll be tackling more Covid-centric articles next month. Some even scarier studies have been published and, horror movie or not, we owe it to ourselves to take a look.
Bob Dietz
March 31, 2022
