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How the Government ENSURES Health Research Fraud

Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?

Health research is based on trust. Health professionals and journal editors reading the results of a clinical trial assume that the trial happened and that the results were honestly reported. But about 20% of the time, said Ben Mol, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash Health, they would be wrong. As I’ve been concerned about research fraud for 40 years, I wasn’t that surprised as many would be by this figure, but it led me to think that the time may have come to stop assuming that research actually happened and is honestly reported, and assume that the research is fraudulent until there is some evidence to support it having happened and been honestly reported. The Cochrane Collaboration, which purveys “trusted information,” has now taken a step in that direction.

As he described in a webinar last week, Ian Roberts, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, began to have doubts about the honest reporting of trials after a colleague asked if he knew that his systematic review showing the mannitol halved death from head injury was based on trials that had never happened. He didn’t, but he set about investigating the trials and confirmed that they hadn’t ever happened. They all had a lead author who purported to come from an institution that didn’t exist and who killed himself a few years later. The trials were all published in prestigious neurosurgery journals and had multiple co-authors. None of the co-authors had contributed patients to the trials, and some didn’t know that they were co-authors until after the trials were published. When Roberts contacted one of the journals the editor responded that “I wouldn’t trust the data.” Why, Roberts wondered, did he publish the trial? None of the trials have been retracted.

Later Roberts, who headed one of the Cochrane groups, did a systematic review of colloids versus crystalloids only to discover again that many of the trials that were included in the review could not be trusted. He is now sceptical about all systematic reviews, particularly those that are mostly reviews of multiple small trials. He compared the original idea of systematic reviews as searching for diamonds, knowledge that was available if brought together in systematic reviews; now he thinks of systematic reviewing as searching through rubbish. He proposed that small, single centre trials should be discarded, not combined in systematic reviews.

Mol, like Roberts, has conducted systematic reviews only to realise that most of the trials included either were zombie trials that were fatally flawed or were untrustworthy. What, he asked, is the scale of the problem? Although retractions are increasing, only about 0.04% of biomedical studies have been retracted, suggesting the problem is small. But the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan. Most of the trials were zombies. Ioannidis concluded that there are hundreds of thousands of zombie trials published from those countries alone.

Others have found similar results, and Mol’s best guess is that about 20% of trials are false. Very few of these papers are retracted.

Continue reading…

From The BMJ, here.

War = Welfare for the Rich

It’s Saigon in Afghanistan

07/06/2021 Ron Paul

The end of the 20-year US war on Afghanistan was predictable: no one has conquered Afghanistan, and Washington was as foolish as Moscow in the 1970s for trying. Now, US troops are rushing out of the country as fast as they can, having just evacuated the symbol of the US occupation of Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base.

While perhaps not as dramatic as the “Fall of Saigon” in 1975, where US military helicopters scrambled to evacuate personnel from the roof of the US Embassy, the lesson remains the same and remains unlearned: attempting to occupy, control, and remake a foreign country into Washington’s image of the United States will never work. This is true no matter how much money is spent and how many lives are snuffed out.

In Afghanistan, no sooner are US troops vacating an area than Taliban fighters swoop in and take over. The Afghan army seems to be more or less melting away. This weekend the Taliban took control of a key district in the Kandahar Province, as Afghan soldiers disappeared after some fighting.

The US is estimated to have spent nearly 100 billion dollars training the Afghan army and police force. The real number is likely several times higher. For all that money and 20 years of training, the Afghan army cannot do its job. That’s either quite a statement about the quality of the training, the quality of the Afghan army, or some combination of the two.

Whatever the case, I am sure I am not the only American wondering whether we can get a refund. The product is clearly faulty.

Speaking of money wasted, in April, Brown University’s Cost of War Project calculated the total cost of the Afghanistan war at more than two trillion dollars. That means millions of Americans have been made poorer for a predictably failed project. It also means that thousands of the well-connected contractors and companies that lurk around the US Capitol Beltway pushing war have become much, much richer.

That’s US foreign policy in a nutshell: taking money from middle-class Americans and transferring it to the elites of the US military and foreign policy establishment. It’s welfare for the rich.

Reprinted with permission.

From Mises.org, here.

A Perfect Storm: How Jew Hatred Became the NEW NORMAL

To Antisemites, A Jew Is A Jew Is A Jew

3:45 pm

The antisemites came for Israelis.

They relentlessly attacked the lone democracy in the Middle East and the realization of a 3,500-year-old vision, with the aim of its destruction. No sovereignty allowed for nearly seven million Jews!

They attacked Israelis at home and abroad through rockets and missiles, tunnels, kidnappings, plane hijackings, bus bombings, incendiary balloons, and embassy assaults. Meanwhile, their supporters and enablers added on 24/7 demonization, delegitimization, flotillas, BDS campaigns, and legal maneuvers.

But, hey, I wasn’t Israeli, so it didn’t really touch me.

For decades, they repressed millions of Soviet Jews.

They identified those Jews by internal Soviet passports that declared a person’s nationality based on the nationality of the parents — and, since the days of Stalin, Jews were officially deemed a nationality. No escape from that. Through scapegoating and vilification, they made life impossibly difficult for Jews when it came to education, jobs, street life, and more. And they sought to ensure that Jews had no access to accurate information about Judaism, Jewish history and tradition, Hebrew language, or Israel — in other words, cultural genocide.

But, hey, I wasn’t a Soviet Jew, so it didn’t really touch me.

They made life tough for Ethiopian Jews.

Frequently the targets of persecution and discrimination, Ethiopian Jews, one of the world’s most ancient communities, lived in constant fear of their non-Jewish neighbors, to the point that thousands died while seeking to escape on foot to neighboring Sudan — and eventually found refuge in Israel at the center of their millennia-long prayers.

But, hey, I wasn’t an Ethiopian Jew, so it didn’t really touch me.

They emptied most Arab countries of their Jewish communities.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews, who had lived for centuries in what are today Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, all fled hatred, deadly mobs, and unending persecution. Only small communities remained in Morocco and Tunisia. And the Jewish populations in neighboring Iran and Turkey declined dramatically, while in Afghanistan the Jews are no more.

But, hey, I wasn’t a Mizrahi or Sephardic Jew, so it didn’t really touch me.

Beginning just over 20 years ago, the antisemites re-emerged with a vengeance in Europe.

Jews were targeted and killed in Paris, Toulouse, Brussels, Burgas, and Copenhagen. Synagogues and cemeteries were assaulted and desecrated. Jews became, once again, the targets of outlandish conspiracy theories. Anti-Israel protesters went into the streets of European cities waving the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, genocidal terrorist groups. Some public schools became impossible for Jewish children to attend. A number of Jews, especially in France, had to change neighborhoods because of threats. Thousands of Jews made aliyah.

But, hey, I wasn’t a European Jew, so it didn’t really touch me.

Continue reading…

From Matzav.com, here.

הרב ברנד במצות כיבוש מלחמה בהר הבית: ולא יירא ולא יפחד ולא יחשוב לא באשתו ולא בבניו

לא צריך נשק – כולנו מצטרפים למלחמה

Jul 13, 2021

ריבוי יהודים בהר הבית מחזק את אחיזתנו בהר • ככל שעולים יותר יהודים, כך מתרבה עבודת ה’ במקום • העליה להר הבית היא חלק מהמלחמה על ארץ ישראל • לא צריך נשק • צריך לטבול ולעלות • הדיבורים נגד העליה להר הם עורבא פרח • אסור לאסור את המותר • קומו ונעלה • הרב יצחק ברנד • בית המדרש בהר הבית

מאתר יוטיוב, כאן.