Podcast: Science Journalism Is Shrinking–Along With Public Trust In Science

[chuft]

Science Journalism Is Shrinking–Along With Public Trust In Science

Last year was a tough one for science journalism. National Geographic laid off all of its staff reporters, and Wired laid off 20 people. And the most recent blow came in November, when Popular Science announced it would stop publishing its magazine after a 151-year run, and laid off the majority of its staff.

Beyond talented journalists losing their jobs, many people seem to be losing trust in science in general. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that only 57% of Americans think science has a mostly positive effect on society, down considerably since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is the waning trust in science reflected in the shrinking of science journalism?

Ira talks about the current state of science journalism with Deborah Blum, science journalist, author, publisher of Undark magazine, and director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Sabrina Imbler, author and science reporter for Defector.

[LazyPooky]

Vary vague story reading this as a scientist. How did the results come about? What method did they use? If the margin of error is +/-10% then the results are not significant, though you could compare dem/rep although those results are predictable in advance and is not really the isssue. It also depends on which part of science.

I like to use Google scolar as simple search option.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?a...+science+world

[chuft]

I am unsure from your post whether you listened to the podcast or read the Pew article linked about the surveys,

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/...ue-to-decline/

I don't see anything in there about a 10% margin of error, not sure where you saw that?

[LazyPooky]

I don't see anything in there about a 10% margin of error, not sure where you saw that?

The 10% was just an estimate based on my experiences with reports like that. It could be 2% as well.
I see some mentions in the Methodology on page 6 in your last link, but not in the results. I would have liked that it was calculated as well so you can see if the results/discussion has any value.

But, to get back to the point of the post. If it's all true, then it's sad to see trust in science decreases.

[chuft]

I don't know what it is like in other countries. In the US, part of the blame is definitely on one political party. The President, despite launching an operation to produce a vaccine quickly, refused to wear a mask and refused to publicly get the vaccine (although he did in private).

I think part is also on the health authorities who made a number of blunders and, frankly, said things they either knew were untrue ("Masks don't work"), or didn't know but said they did ("it's not airborne"), or withheld information that, as a result, later discredited them in many people's eyes (the vaccine would not prevent infection very long and would have to be an annual or even twice-a-year thing). Long covid was also not talked about (and still isn't) by the CDC.

I have heard multiple statements by doctors and other health figures which are flat out wrong. For example, the statement that the virus is cleared after a week or two and people in the ICU are afflicted with some lingering inflammatory syndrome. I read scientific papers on covid every week and this is just flat out wrong. Autopsies on people who were infected years ago show spike protein accumulation in the skull. Lavages of lung tissue show replicating virus in deep airways 18 months after infection. Tongue biopsies of people with continuing taste disorders find replicating virus six months after infection. On and on. Yet people with long covid are told it's all in their heads. The CDC downplays the risks of infection and how every one has a risk of long covid.

Similarly I saw someone claiming to be an epidemiologist say that the reason rapid tests weren't working for Omicron was because the vaccines work - the body had a faster immune response due to the vaccine, when the virus level was still too low to be detectable, thus you would get symptoms due to the immune response, not viral load. He stated this with enormous conviction. (Typical of the misinformation I see on social media all the time.)





It all looks very convincing - and is very wrong. (There is an error by the way, the guy standing on the 2 really should be standing on a 0 since that is the day of exposure.) I read a study a few months ago where they found very high levels of viral RNA in the nasal passages within a few days, but low levels of nucleocapsid protein, from Omicron. The protein is what the rapid tests look for. So they test negative even though your viral load is very high. PCRs on the other hand detect a significant infection. This is very different from the original strain, Delta, etc where the RNA and protein fragments in the nasal passages both peaked around days 5-6 so a rapid test could detect an infection right around the time viral load was high and you were infectious.

The failure of rapid tests to detect Omicron infections until days 5-6, while the viral load (and symptoms) are high beginning days earlier, is very important, because Paxlovid prescriptions are based on how many days of symptoms you have had. People often get symptoms but test negative and then either think they don't have it, or they don't test positive until the weekend when they can't reach their doctor, and by the following Monday they are on day 6 of symptoms and don't qualify for Paxlovid.

I know lots of people who take a rapid test as soon as they get symptoms, test negative, and assume they have a cold or something else and not covid, and they do not test again, and come to work with covid. The CDC has never explained this dynamic, they just say to take a rapid test if you get symptoms. Even my doctor's office just uses rapid tests and seems unaware of the timing issues this creates with trying to get Paxlovid over a weekend or the holidays.


But getting back to the vaccines:

Anyone who works in vaccine development is familiar with the info in this graphic.




Grey boxes are successful vaccines, white ovals are not, although flu vaccine has to be repeated frequently because it doesn't last very long.


Because antibodies fade within a few months (otherwise the blood would be nothing but antibodies) the immune response of even a trained immune system is going to take time to spin back up if the pathogen/antigen is encountered again. If the virus has a long incubation period, the immune system will win the race. This leads to life time immunity or at least very long term immunity as a result of vaccination.

If the virus has a short incubation period, like influenza and now Omicron strains of covid, it is impossible for the immune system to react in time to prevent symptomatic infection. The period of protection is relatively brief because it's only as long as the antibodies generated in response to the vaccine are in the blood in large numbers, which is only a few months. There is still much protection against severe disease because T cells can react much more quickly than a naive immune system to find and kill the infected cells that are making more virus, but it's much better to have those antibodies right up front as well.

Health experts all knew this before the vaccine was even released, but nobody said it when the covid vaccines were introduced. They still have never publicly explained this simple fact. As a result a lot of people think the vaccines don't work because they know people who got them (or got them themselves) and got sick a few months later. This was happening in summer 2021 even before there were any significant mutations - and mutations add another layer to vaccines losing their effectiveness. Covid as it turns out mutates even more rapidly than flu, but that was not known early on. In some ways this was bad luck - covid now has the shortest incubation period and most frequent mutation rate of any virus known, I believe. But some of it was vaccine authorities not being up front about how long the vaccines would work. Even the original strain had an incubation period that could be 5 days or less. The idea of a long term effective vaccine was always dicey.

I know people who get the flu vaccine every year because they know it doesn't last very long (not even the full length of flu season but for some reason they won't let you get it twice in one year), but won't get covid boosters because they think it doesn't work (rather than it, like flu vaccine, only protects against infection for a few months). They also know the flu vaccine has different strains in it every year because flu mutates a lot and it's hit or miss whether it will be a good match by the time flu season starts. Covid mutates fast too and old vaccines are now totally ineffective, at least there is no statistical difference between them and not being vaccinated (since most of these people have had prior infections).

The health authorities here never explain this basic biological fact about incubation time, or about mutation rate, and as a result, people don't understand what is going on and don't trust them anymore.

[boredjedi]

I've been rather watching House MD again off and on.
An episode he rants about the overuse of Antibiotics.
Then the other day this comes my way

9:44 What happened during the Covid outbreak

Reminds me of past chats where we talked about this.

[chuft]

Yeah I just had a nasty course of antibiotics recently. I think a lot of dental and medical procedures run the risk of not being viable in the future if antibiotics stop working. Already there are a lot of antibiotic resistant bacteria causing procedures like root canals to fail. In the case of a root canal I'm not talking about a pill, I mean the chemicals they wash the inside of the tooth with after cleaning out the pulp to try to kill bacteria in side canals and tubules. Endodontist told me root canals can fail due to antibiotic resistant bacteria in there.

I think that video is a little misleading. By squinting at the screen I was able to find the paper he flashed

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8286398/

The problem is saying "only 3% had a confirmed bacterial infection" is misleading because it's very difficult to confirm a bacterial infection of the lungs without doing some kind of sampling of the lung tissue like bronchial aspiration or bronchoalveolar lavage. They aren't going to do that for most patients so most won't have a confirmed bacterial infection. That kind of stuff is typically only done in studies or for critically ill patients where they are trying everything to figure out what is going on.

Rather, I think patients were given antibiotics as soon as they were admitted to try to prevent pneumonia coinfections. The whole point of such therapy is preventive. Most people who died in the 1918 flu pandemic died of bacterial coinfections, bacteria really go to town when a virus and the immune system are battling it out in the lungs. So I don't think the patients were "misdiagnosed" so much as they were given antibiotics to try to prevent bacteria from taking advantage of the situation as the patient fought the covid virus.

Naturally if you give everyone antibiotics starting the day of admission, very few of them are going to have bacteria in their lungs later, even if you test them for it, and most won't even be tested if they are getting better.

Still, I think he does have a point. This is from CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnessota), a source I trust on health matters:

"This analysis shows that despite decreases in total antibiotic use, the majority of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 continued to receive antibiotics on admission, regardless of clinical severity," they wrote. "Antibiotic stewardship interventions that improve the diagnosis and treatment of community-onset respiratory tract infections may reduce unnecessary antibiotic use and as a result, improve quality of care and patient outcomes."

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/antimicro...tics-admission

[boredjedi]

Already there are a lot of antibiotic resistant bacteria causing procedures like root canals to fail. In the case of a root canal I'm not talking about a pill, I mean the chemicals they wash the inside of the tooth with after cleaning out the pulp to try to kill bacteria in side canals and tubules. Endodontist told me root canals can fail due to antibiotic resistant bacteria in there.

I never gave that a thought. I thought that was just a saline purified water wash. Never looked into that.