The way this year has gone, it'll probably turn out to be some bizarre shared Lovecraftian cult thing out of a book found in a bunker in 1945, involving involuntary bone marrow donors, amphetamines, and last-days-of-the-third-reich demon worship.

That'd be funnier if I was sure I was joking.

When we finally get rid of the dead weight and bring in competent leadership and structures that are fit for purpose, public health and infection control of the 2020s will be chiefly remembered for never having missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Clinicians who are sick of being dictated to by medicine's management class with the excuse that science overrides clinical expertise, connect with real scientists - you'll discover they try to dictate to us with the excuse that clinical expertise overrides science!

It's all just power games.

A particular danger of AI in medicine is that it will accelerated the trend of concentrating more and more power in less and less understanding. Jockeying for power is so extreme that it's already normalized to claim actual experts must be excluded from decision making, reserving power for insiders.

The replacement of judgement with algorithm is not just a problem on the front end, where clinicians are required to robotically obey guidance because it's "science" - behind the curtain these algorithms are too often just formalized opinion laundering, replacing science with dangerous rent-seeking.

For example, here's the medical school at the University of British Columbia, teaching their students information that was 👉known to be incorrect before their parents were even born👈

Anyone claiming these failures *don't* represent norms needs to explain what they're personally doing to fix them.

This is literally the method they used for aerosol droplet sample collection.

Thanks! I'd maybe say *proportionately* few, there are a lot of other people fighting the anti-PPE / aerosol denial pseudoscience. It just looks that way because a lot of the bad guys have floated to the top of institutional medicine and can draw on big PR slush funds to bury their mistakes.

For a deeper dive into this, here's a giant long thread on it I did a while back.

The original paper is *bad*, but read down to what we got when we asked @springernature.com to have it retracted.

🤯

There's an asterisk next to everything in ARIC now because...how much more like this is there?

🤷

People may think that @jhuff.bsky.social is being hyperbolic here, but actually no, this is a real problem. Many medical schools literally teach that an opinion or editorial from a clinician outweighs all of science, engineering, OHS etc.

WHO guidance development for COVID is built on that belief.

And then after THAT...

...it gets even worse...

Haha, true.

Here's the link if anyone's wondering. It doesn't get much more Dunning-Kruger than this. "Doing science" with no idea how anything works and an ego that says you have no need to talk to real experts to find out.

If you're doubtful the pandemic could really just be one giant screwup...