By Matt Ridley, The Times 06/01/14
It’s not only Tamiflu where inconvenient data goes unpublished. Try climate science and psychology too
Perhaps it should be called Tamiflugate. Yet the doubts reported by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee last week go well beyond the possible waste of nearly half a billion pounds on a flu drug that might not be much better than paracetamol. All sorts of science are contaminated with the problem of cherry-picked data.
The Tamiflu tale is that some years ago the pharmaceutical company Roche produced evidence that persuaded the World Health Organisation that Tamiflu was effective against flu, and governments such as ours began stockpiling the drug in readiness for a pandemic. But then a Japanese scientist pointed out that most of the clinical trials on the drug had not been published. It appears that the unpublished ones generally showed less impressive results than the published ones. […]
To illustrate how far this problem reaches, a few years ago there was a scientific scandal with remarkable similarities, in respect of the non-publishing of negative data, to the Tamiflu scandal. A relentless, independent scientific auditor in Canada named Stephen McIntyre grew suspicious of a graph being promoted by governments to portray today’s global temperatures as warming far faster than any in the past 1,400 years — the famous “hockey stick” graph. When he dug into the data behind the graph, to the fury of its authors, especially Michael Mann, he found not only problems with the data and the analysis of it but a whole directory of results labelled “CENSORED”.
This proved to contain five calculations of what the graph would have looked like without any tree-ring samples from bristlecone pine trees. None of the five graphs showed a hockey stick upturn in the late 20th century: “This shows about as vividly as one could imagine that the hockey stick is made out of bristlecone pine,” wrote Mr McIntyre drily. (The bristlecone pine was well known to have grown larger tree rings in recent years for non-climate reasons: goats tearing the bark, which regrew rapidly, and extra carbon dioxide making trees grow faster.)
Mr McIntyre later unearthed the same problem when the hockey stick graph was relaunched to overcome his critique, with Siberian larch trees instead of bristlecones. This time the lead author, Keith Briffa, of the University of East Anglia, had used only a small sample of 12 larch trees for recent years, ignoring a much larger data set of the same age from the same region. If the analysis was repeated with all the larch trees there was no hockey-stick shape to the graph. Explanations for the omission were unconvincing.
Given that these were the most prominent and recognisable graphs used to show evidence of unprecedented climate change in recent decades, and to justify unusual energy policies that hit poor people especially hard, this case of cherry-picked publication was just as potentially shocking and costly as Tamiflugate. Omission of inconvenient data is a sin in government science as well as in the private sector.
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h/t to The GWPF
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I second federico’s point.
We are a community of climate skeptics.
We are not a community of flu treatment or vaccine skeptics.
Losing focus on this hurts our main effort.
There’s a word in the dictionary for it: fraud.
It would really be nice if supposedly intelligent people could learn simple things, like the difference between “effect” and “affect”, or “then” and “than” (in many other comments).
/pedant
This is so common it’s almost not worth mentioning, but it probably should be mentioned even though everyone knows this. It’s common to show data and say that it is “typical data” but everyone knows that “typical data” really means “the best data we could get.”
And between “loses” and “looses”. *rollseyes*
Anthony Watts looses credibility upon a populace inured to deception.
Thinking here now that an anticipatory application before the next big family get-together might be a good idea …
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Paraphrasing: ‘The sins of the son reflected onto the father?’ “Can’t we all just get along” (- R. King) … or: take the post within the context of what it was intended?
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Don’t forget that the shelf life of Relenza is far inferior to the shelf life of Tamiflu. I recall studies that Relenza had a much better target profile than Tamiflu, with less resistance, but in no way is Tamiflu an antiviral for all influenza types. the shelf life of Tamiflu was recently extended to 10 years, and it is probably more than that! Relenza is 7.
Science for sale is a huge problem. it comes down to legalized bribery. At the individual level they can be swayed by generous “speakers fees”, at the corporate level it is advertising dollars and at the academic level it is “I’ll give you funding and here are the results I want”.
We have the scientific method to thank for everything in our world. We abandon it now at our own peril.
TAD –
You wrote a pile of retarded nonsense about Tamiflu and how it was designed to treat a specific type of influenza virus only.
You annotated you comment with bombastic bile to berate Matt Ridley…
quote: “mol bio guy will tell you that Tamiflu was designed for a very specific 3D conformation of a very specific influenza.”
But you were wrong—-confidently and arrogantly WRONG.
Any mol bio guy will tell you that.
Maybe you should apologize to Mr. Ridley.
When it comes to trust, prestige, and influence, scientists (especially in medicine and climatology) are “eating their own seed corn”. They are using all the assets piled up in the past (by other sciences, largely) and trying to use them to push through products like Tamiflu and agendas like AGW-mitigation that would crumble if treated with true scientific rigor.
Big write-offs like the Tamiflu scandal and Turkey-gate have severely depleted the storage bins. Soon they’ll come to Mother Hubbard’s state: “But when she got there / The cupboard was bare”. Then listen to the poor dogs howl.
Speaking of H5N1,Canadian is first to die from H5N1 bird flu in North America.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/canadian-first-to-die-from-h5n1-bird-flu-in-north-america/article16244697/
Canada has recorded the first human death from H5N1 bird flu in North America in a traveller who just returned from China.
The Alberta resident was hospitalized on New Year’s Day and died Jan. 3.
Government officials stressed there is no risk to the general public from the highly unusual case.
“The risk of getting H5N1 is very low,” said Rona Ambrose, Canada’s Minister of Health. “This is not the regular seasonal flu. This is an isolated case.”
The article is at Ridley’s blog. No commenting. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-real-risks-of-cherry-picking-in-science.aspx