That F%$#ing Paper

This is a very well deserved take down of Pamela Paul's paean to Dr. Marty Makary in her latest New York Times OP/ED.

Dr. Makary has written a book bemoaning the tendencies of the so-called "Medical Establishment" to discard and suppress any argument that challenges the orthodoxy.

What she neglects to mention is that this doctor has been a proponent of the "Herd Immunity" strategy to address the Covid-19 pandemic, and has refused to acknowledge that he was deeply and disastrously wrong on:

Dear Ms. Paul,

I recently read your article title The Medical Establishment Closes Ranks, and Patients Feel the Effects. [link removed, I am not sending Pamela Paul  or the NYT clicks] Your article was an homage to a Dr. Marty Makary. I am very familiar with Dr. Makary. You had nice things to say about him and his calls for medical professionals to abandon incorrect positions. You wrote about children peanut allergies and said:

This avoidable tragedy is one of several episodes of medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence that Marty Makary, a surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, examines in his new book, “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health.”…

While these mistakes are appalling, more worrisome are the enduring root causes of those errors. Medical journals and conferences regularly reject presentations and articles that overturn conventional wisdom, even when that wisdom is based on flimsy underlying data. For political or practical reasons consensus is often prized over dissenting opinions.

“We’re seeing science used as political propaganda,” Makary told me when I spoke to him by phone. But, he argues, mistakes can’t be freely corrected or updated unless researchers are encouraged to pursue alternative research.

You told your readers that Dr. Makary’s book would educate them about medical authorities sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence

That’s ironic.

Since 2021, there have been few better examples of someone sticking to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence than Dr. Marty Makary himself. To pick one example amongst many, in February 2021, Dr. Makary authored the article We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April. Listen to what he had to say then.

………

All of this is just a small sample of some of Dr. Makary’s pandemic pronouncements. He spread gross misinformation about COVID’s risk to children, as well as the vaccine’s risk to them. He wrote error-filled articles with titled such as The Flimsy Evidence Behind the CDC’s Push to Vaccinate Children. In the interview below Dr. Makary says that natural immunity is 27 times better than vaccine immunity, even though natural immunity killed 1.2 million Americans. Meanwhile Jim Jordan spins conspiracies about the COVID’s origins. Just watch. I can give you volumes of such material.

And yet, I have never seen Dr. Makary acknowledge he was wrong about any of this. Maybe he does so in his book, but I’ve not seen him write an article titled I Was Wrong About Herd Immunity or Natural Immunity Wasn’t So Powerful After All or As It Turns Out, the Delta and Omicron Variants Mattered.

Incredibly, despite his track record, you depicted Dr, Makary as an exemplar of a brave medical truth-teller, a maverick with integrity, a rightful correction to those dastardly “medical authorities” who stick to erroneous positions despite countervailing evidence.

You want to read the whole thing, but more generally it is a take-down of  how the New York Times appears determined to take the worst that the Ivy League produces, and make them the arbiters of acceptable discourse.

If you have a subscription to the Times, cancel it now.