You're being duped. Here's how to spot it.

It struck me recently that anti-vaxxers, quacks, dictators, populists, and other would-be autocrats all follow the same playbook. They all want to sell you something for their own personal gain, and all of them are willing to lie to get what they want.

These lies have a purpose, and it’s rarely good.

Let's look at a few of the most damaging lies from recent events, starting with medicine and then moving on to politics. (Lies are in italics.)

If you believe that vaccines don't work, you've been duped.

If you believe that vaccines cause autism, you've been duped.

Vaccines are the greatest invention in the history of medicine. They've saved billions of lives, dramatically increased human life expectancy, and in many ways enabled the growth of civilization itself. The Covid-19 vaccines are more than 90% effective, and without them we'd have no chance to end the pandemic.

And yet many anti-vaxxers claim that vaccines don't work. They also claim there's a massive conspiracy to hide the (extremely rare) harms caused by vaccines. 

The anti-vax movement is led by people like Andrew Wakefield, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Joe Mercola (whom I wrote about  in 2010, in 2014, and last year), and other members of the Disinformation Dozen who use social media to spread vaccine misinformation. They make a great deal of money selling books, seminars, and (in the case of Mercola) bogus treatments for the diseases that vaccines prevent. These people simply make stuff up and then demand that scientists devote time to disproving it. 

Science doesn’t work that way. If you make a claim, you first have to prove it, by producing evidence and rigorously-done studies that go through peer review. You can't just throw out garbage claims and insist that other people do the work of disproving them. Nope.

If you believe that ivermectin is a cure for Covid-19, you've been duped. 

As I’ve explained in this column, ivermectin doesn’t help at all in treating Covid-19, and it’s dangerous if you take too much of it. But if you prefer to get medical advice from right-wing zealots like Tucker Carlson, go ahead.

If you believe that hydroxychloroquine is a cure for Covid-19, you've been duped.

The misinformation about hydroxychloroquine started with an egocentric French microbiologist, who posted an over-the-top video claiming he had the solution to Covid-19, a claim that was quickly debunked. That didn’t stop politicians and right-wing television pundits from promoting it, even as evidence emerged that it was nonsense.

Hawkers of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and other fake Covid-19 cures have profited by claiming, first, that the government is lying and that vaccines don't work, and second, that they have a truly effective treatment that they can sell you. This is a double lie, but a necessary one, because if they can't convince you that vaccines don't work, then they won't be able to sell your their snake oil. 

For instance, a sketchy right-wing group called America’s Frontline Doctors (which is not, despite the name, a group of doctors working on the front lines of any disease) was selling $90 online “consultations” where they provided prescriptions for ivermectin. The $90 didn’t include the cost of the drug: it’s just a fee that went straight into their pockets.

By the way, if you've been duped about a Covid-19 cure, you’re in good company. Early in the pandemic, doctors at Yale Medical School were duped into believing that hydroxychloroquine was an effective Covid-19 treatment, as I explained at the time. They figured out their error eventually, but not before they boldly advertised their treatment protocol on their website and via Twitter.

Now let’s look at a few examples in the political realm.

If you believe that Trump won the 2020 election, you've been duped.

This is utterly false, of course: Biden won by over 7 million votes, and he won the Electoral College 306-232. Trump is a loser, and his Big Lie is possibly the worst case of being a sore loser in the history of politics. And yet, according to some polls, 60% of Republicans believe his latest lie (or at least that's what they tell pollsters). They’ve been duped.

Trump lied over 30,000 times during the course of his presidency, as was documented, painfully, by the Washington Post, and he's still doing it. This frequent lying is part of a strategy to "flood the zone with shit," as Trump minion Steve Bannon openly boasted a couple of years ago. The idea is to make up lies far faster than the opposition can shoot them down. After all, it's easy to make up a claim when you don't have to produce any evidence, and it takes much longer to disprove it. If you take these people seriously and try to play their game, they will always win–because by the time you debunk one lie, they've produced ten more.

If you believe that Ukraine is threatening war against Russia, you've been duped. 

As I write this, Vladimir Putin is flooding his own citizens with a huge lie, trying to convince them that Ukraine is threatening war against Russia, when just the opposite is true: Russia has sent over 100,000 troops to its border with Ukraine, while Ukraine has done nothing of the sort.

If you don't believe that Russians helped shoot down Malaysia Air flight MH17 in 2010, you've been duped.

A few years ago, after Putin's soldiers near the Ukrainian border shot down a civilian Malaysian Airlines plane, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, he used the Russian media to publish multiple confusing theories, all of them simply made up, to convince his audience that Russian soldiers had nothing to do with it. An independent investigation concluded that a Russian missile, shot from a base in Russia, downed the plane. And yet many Russians today are still unaware of this.

If you believe any of Putin’s claims about Ukraine, you've been duped. 

And yet because Putin controls all the media in Russia, it is likely that many Russians do believe him. He's also claiming, falsely, that many Ukrainians actually want Russia to take over their country.

Politicians, quacks, and pseudoscientists are all con artists. They lie to gain money, power, and fame. Some of them lie without any sign of discomfort whatsoever, a trait that is characteristic of sociopaths. To people who find lying uncomfortable–which is most people–the boldness of these lies in itself is convincing.

In skeptical circles, this strategy is called the "Gish gallop," named after a creationist who used this strategy in debates where he challenged the theory of evolution. His idea was to put out so many lies and half-truths that his opponent would simply be overwhelmed. In a live debate, this tactic can be particularly effective when the audience doesn't know the topic well. 

One way to combat con artists is to expose how much they’ve gained at other people’s expense. Vladimir Putin is not only powerful, but he’s also incredibly wealthy, as a result of stealing many of his own country's assets. Putin’s biggest political foe, Alexey Navalny, released a video that showed a $1.35 billion palace that Putin built for himself, paid for with money that Putin had stolen from his own people:

Navalny got very popular in Russia. Putin first poisoned and nearly killed him, and now is holding Navalny in prison. It’s not likely Navalny will survive.

Here in the U.S., Donald Trump profited in countless ways, documented in excruciating detail by the Washington Post and the New York Times, by using the tools of government to direct business to his hotels and resorts. As just one example, hundreds of companies and foreign officials stayed at the Trump Hotel in D.C. during Trump’s presidency, in what was essentially an open bribe to the sitting President.

How can one avoid being duped?

First, always ask what the person has to gain. If they’re making money or gaining power from their claims, we should be skeptical.

Second, look at the reliability of the source. When someone lies constantly, we really can’t believe anything they say. At this point, virtually nothing claimed by some of the people I’ve highlighted in this column (Trump, Putin, Wakefield, Mercola) can be trusted.

Third, question the expertise of the source. When Tucker Carlson spews out claims about ivermectin, you shouldn't believe a word of it. When politicians make claims about science and medicine, they rarely know what they're talking about. (There are exceptions, but they are infrequent.) 

Even when the claims come from a scientists, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. Modern science has thousands of specializations, for good reason: biology, medicine, physics, chemistry, and other disciplines are amazingly complex. So if you want to know about global warming, don't ask a doctor. If you want to know about vaccines, don’t ask a biophysicist, even if he has a Nobel Prize, and certainly don’t ask a surgeon who’s running for political office. And for answers to any of these questions, don't ask a politician.

A new Russian Covid-19 vaccine looks promising, but did they fabricate some of their data?

Last week, a team of Russian scientists published the results of two phase 1/2 vaccine trials for a new Covid-19 vaccine developed in Russia. The study appeared in The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals.

This vaccine has already received tremendous attention after Russian leader Vladimir Putin announced they would start administering it widely, before any phase 3 trials were under way. As I wrote last month, it’s not a good idea to skip these Phase 3 trials.

Nevertheless, the results from the early stage trials of both vaccines look quite good. Although the trials were small, with just 76 subjects, 100% of the subjects had a strong antibody response, and none of them had anything more than mild reactions to the vaccine. This suggests that both vaccines might be effective, although it’s too soon (after just 76 people) that it will be safe on a large scale.

There’s another problem, though.

Within 3 days of the paper’s publication, Enrico Bucci from Temple University described a series of apparent duplications in the figures presented in the Russian paper. He published his findings on his website as a “note of concern” that dozens of other scientists have signed.

I’ve read the paper and looked at all the figures, and it’s clear that something is wrong with the data.

Let’s look at one example to see what is going on. Here’s a small part of Figure 2A from the paper:

Each box shows a different group of 9 subjects. Notice that the two boxes have identical patterns, with the box on the right shifted slightly down.

FROM FIG. 2A OF LOGUNOV ET AL., THE LANCET, DOI:HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31866-3

Each little column of dots shows a distinct group of 9 subjects, where the height of a dot indicates the level of antibodies found in that subjects. Notice that the 9 subjects in the red box (boxes added for emphasis) on the left have an identical pattern to those in the box on the right. These are completely independent subjects, and such a pattern is exceedingly unlikely.

It’s possible that this happened by chance, but then the problem is that this isn’t the only apparently duplication. Prof. Bucci identified at least 13 instances where sets of results are identical or near-identical between two different time points or two different sets of subjects. The other duplications look a lot like the one shown here.

The simplest explanation is that the data for some of the experiments were simply copied over from other experiments. As reported in The Moscow Times, the lead author of the study, Denis Lugonov, said there were no errors in the data. Because the authors of the Russian study didn’t provide their raw data, and The Lancet didn’t require it, other scientists can’t really check.

What are we to make of this? The details of the study are clearly explained, and the Russian vaccines use a design (an adenovirus modified to contain the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein) that is similar to other vaccines that so far seem safe and effective. Thus it’s quite possible that this vaccine will work–and it will be good for the world if it does. But the questionable data raise questions about whether the scientists behind this phase 1/2 trial have really done all of the experiments that they describe. The study concludes by noting that a phase 3 clinical trial with 40,000 participants is planned. Let’s hope that one yields positive–and genuine–results.

[Hat tip to Retraction Watch for drawing my attention to this study.]

Putin muzzling science in Russia: a return to the Soviet era?

Vladimir Putin looking skeptically at a scientist.

In a surprising development this past week, Russia has notified all scientists at Moscow State University (MSU) that they must submit their research papers to the state security service before they will be permitted to publish them. Nature News reports that Russia is imposing this policy on universities and research institutes throughout the country.

Perhaps this should not be a surprise. Vladimir Putin has steadily imposed ever greater restrictions on the media, to the point where most Russians are not even aware that Russian-backed fighters shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 last year. This new move towards censorship is just one more step towards imposing Stalin-esque restrictions on all Russians. Requiring scientists to submit their manuscripts to the security services will severely cripple their ability to publish anything even remotely novel or interesting. Why take the chance?

Mikhail Gelfand, a prominent scientist in my own field of bioinformatics, told Nature that:

“This is a return to Soviet times when in order to send a paper to an international journal, we had to get a permission specifying that the result is not new and important and hence may be published abroad.”

Exactly: Putin is returning Russian to the bad old days of the repressive USSR, when the state controlled all media and ordinary citizens were afraid to speak. For now, a few scientists were willing to speak to Nature, but we shouldn't be surprised if even those voices are silenced in the future.

In a bit of absurdist theater, under the new policy Russian scientists who write their papers in English (as is commonly required for publication) must translate them into Russian, because the security service personnel (apparently) cannot read English. I doubt too that the Russian security services have the expertise to understand even a fraction of the papers that they are demanding to see.

Russia has a long history of scientific innovation across all fields of science, particularly mathematics and physics. Under the repressive Soviet regimes of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors, many Russian scientists fled to the West, where they could work without fear of being thrown into a gulag. The U.S. and Europe–and the world–benefitted greatly from their expertise.

Russia’s scientific output has been lagging in recent years, according to an article in Nature earlier this year. There have been a few bright spots, though, such as (in my own field) the recently-created Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics at St. Petersburg State University, which has already published some outstanding papers. Now I wonder how long that new center will last.

Ironically, the famous geneticist Dobzhansky, after whom the new St. Petersburg institute is named, left Russia as a young man in 1927 and moved to the U.S., where he went on to do his groundbreaking work in evolutionary biology.

Putin’s obsession with power and control might be an opportunity for the rest of us. Here’s a call to Russian scientists: follow Dobzhansky’s example and come to the U.S. We may have our flaws, but you can publish your work freely, and you can even write a blog criticizing the leaders of your university, or your former university's football policy, or your political leaders.

Governor Scott Walker's attack on academic freedom in Wisconsin

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker really doesn’t like professors. He seems to have a special grudge against the University of Wisconsin, against which he has launched a two-pronged attack this year.

It’s rare for a governor to attack the flagship university in his own state. Governors usually do just the opposite, promoting their universities to the rest of the world whenever the opportunity arises. 

What's more, Walker is currently campaigning for the Republican nomination for President. Presidential candidates usually try to make new friends and influence voters. It’s rare for a candidate to single out a large non-political group (other than foreign enemies of the United States, or other obvious bad guys) and systematically go after them.

Thus it’s surprising–startling, really–to observe how Scott Walker is waging a war on academic freedom in his home state of Wisconsin. Let's look at what he's doing, and then ask why.

First, back in January he proposed an enormous $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin’s budget, at a time when other state universities are finally recovering from the recession. Now he’s proposing to get rid of academic tenure, not only threatening faculty jobs but also destroying academic freedom for professors at the University of Wisconsin.

Walker’s attack on tenure was just endorsed by a major committee in the state legislature, which voted 12-4 to eliminate tenure from state law. The Wisconsin faculty responded that this new policy, if implemented,

“will inflict lasting damage on a highly successful institution that was built and nurtured with major investments by Wisconsin taxpayers over a period of 167 years.... It would be difficult to overstate how destructive and unnecessary the [legislature's] proposed changes to tenure and shared governance are.”

Why is Governor Scott Walker (aided by his legislature) attacking his own state’s leading university? One could hypothesize that he harbors some resentment over the fact that he himself never graduated from college: he quit school in his senior year at Marquette University. Susan Milligan at US News argues that this disqualifies him as a candidate; perhaps this criticism bothers Walker. But plenty of people succeed in demanding careers without a diploma–just look at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Perhaps the reason behind Walker’s dislike of academia is that he thinks that professors are too liberal. If true, this is deeply disturbing: it means he wants to stifle speech that he disagrees with. This kind of repression of scholarship is one of the most important reasons for tenure in the first place. One doesn’t have to look far–hello, Vladimir Putin?–to find examples of how powerful politicians can suppress speech, to the detriment of their societies. As UC Irvine’s Mark Levine wrote this week,

“none of academia’s core functions could occur without tenure and the assurance of academic freedom it enables.”

I wrote to Governor Walker's office to ask the question above, and also to ask if he thinks his actions will weaken the University of Wisconsin. His press secretary, Laurel Patrick, didn't answer directly, but responded that 

"the Governor’s original budget proposal removed all references to the UW from state statute in order to allow for the proposed authority to create its own policies.  This would allow the UW Board of Regents to address the issue of tenure going forward."

The leaders of a national university governing board association disagreed, pointing out that under Walker's proposed new policy,

"decisions about a tenured faculty member's service could be based less on performance and institutional finances and more on the political or personal views of board members."

I’ve observed the benefits of tenure directly many times, both at Johns Hopkins University and at my previous academic home, the University of Maryland. While at UMD, for example, I wrote several articles highly critical of the university president for his boneheaded decisions about the football coach. Many of my colleagues expressed similar views to me in private, but the untenured ones were unwillingly to speak openly. If we want scholars to speak truthfully, they need to be free of fears of retribution.

Governor Walker’s actions make even less sense when viewed from outside the state, where the University of Wisconsin is considered one of the nation's top public universities (currently ranked 13th among public schools). With his draconian budget cuts and his assault on the tenure system, Walker is sending a message that professors at Wisconsin should sit down and shut up. Some of them–those most able to move, which likely includes some of their best talent–might now be looking for greener pastures elsewhere. Come to think of it, we are recruiting for 50 new endowed professorships at Hopkins, thanks to Michael Bloomberg; perhaps I should be thanking Governor Walker.

It’s disturbing that Wisconsin's governor is using his power not only to weaken one of the state's biggest assets, but also to attack the free expression of ideas. I can't come up with any explanation for his actions that doesn't appear vindictive and short-sighted. This isn’t the kind of behavior I want in any politician, and certainly not in someone who wants to be the most powerful politician in the nation.