Here’s an example of an honest-to-God scientific controversy where the researchers were eventually proven “right” (i.e. it is now the majority opinion, though it still has its detractors) - the Alvarez hypotheses of dinosaur extinction. I took my first college biology course in the Fall of 1985, when the idea was still fairly new and the consensus was fairly anti-Alvarez. My biology professors were dubious, primarily based on the timing of extinctions. It was interesting enough to be broached in classrooms, but was considered one of a number of scenarios and one of the less likely. Luis Alvarez himself was an aggressive blowhard who did not hesitate to publicly shit on his and his son’s critics, which did not endear himself to the paleontology/biology community. But by and large their hypothesis seems to have prevailed in the debate.
You got it all - a physicist and a geologist weighing in on a controversy in a different field, paleontology. The lead researcher was a piece of work, happy to call his opponents idiots. The hypothesis was considered clever but sensationalist and was largely held to be unlikely by the scientific community.
However you’ll note the difference between them and a crank like Malone. They were presented with an intriguing problem, bounced it off other scientists, did careful investigation and then published a peer-reviewed paper in a prestigious journal. Their evidence was quite real, the only question was whether it proved what they hypothesized it did. More importantly their hypothesis was testable and over a thirty-year period more and more evidence gradually came to light and more research was published vindicating their initial idea. Now it is the rough consensus. This is how science is done.
Malone isn’t doing science. He is doing what the brilliant Linus Pauling did for vitamin C advocacy, only far less so. Picking up on an idea that he found intellectually appealing and stubbornly running with it despite research mostly debunking the premise.
That’s how it seems now, in retrospect after their ideas prevailed. The key question is how they were perceived at the time. Would their then-critics have said at the time some of the same things being said about Malone in this thread?
I would suggest the possibity (and I’m not asserting this because I don’t know, but this is what needs to be considered) that people’s attitudes about these guys might have been roughly the same as current attitudes about Malone. But what’s changed is what you do about people you hold in such regard - and particularly on such hot-button politically charged issues as covid has become.
If you just say “hey, I think this guy’s methodology is lacking and his reasoning is faulty and therefore his conclusion is unwarranted” but you continue to allow the guy to make his case and publish further studies etc., then you allow for the possibility that the consensus can change. But if you start demanding that the guy be banned from all sorts of platforms, then that is highly unlikely to happen, so your actions create a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Yes. Also, there is lots and lots of real-world experience happening right now with vaccine effectiveness and the ineffectiveness of other treatments (like ivermectin, urine, etc.). So, while Malone is spewing his bullshit, people on the ground are collecting data and finding out that those who are vaccinated are dying at a rate of 1/20th of those who are not, hospital beds are dominated by the unvaccinated, and so on.
Also, I doubt that the Alvarez folks were trying to make their case on the Merv Griffin show. They were doing the work to back up their hypothesis.
There are a few pretty easy ways to spot someone spreading misinformation rather than debate a minority position.
They jump from “fact” to “fact” without backing up their assertions. Malone’s claims on COVID and vaccines are all over the place. He never seems to stick to one particular claim long enough to determine it’s truthfulness.
They are more interested in media than doing the work. Dr. Malone, to my knowledge, hasn’t done any original research in the area of mRNA vaccines since the early 1990’s.
They don’t act on their own claims. Dr. Malone, by his own admission, has received two doses of the Moderna mRNA vaccine. Quacks don’t tend to use their own snake oil, but rather push it on others (for various reasons, often financial).
They rely heavily on their persona/life story/credentials vs. actual data. Dr. Malone very heavily relies on his claim to be the “inventor of mRNA technology” to give weight to his claims.
If Dr. Malone were making his claims in a forum where he would be challenged, with hosts that had access to the facts, and on a topic where false claims didn’t lead to the deaths of thousands of people, then this would not be an issue. But instead he’s given an open platform with no pushback interviewed by a former MMA fighter. That is not airing a minority scientific opinion - it is media quackery.
Nope. Their hypothesis as I said was presented as one of a number of competing hypotheses about the extinction of the dinosaurs in a major-level introductory biology course. It was given about as much attention as was to various competing theories of taxonomy about the modern biological kingdom count In my day five was the consensus, these days the U.S. seems to lean towards six. Or for another example the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock and Margulis, controversial to this day.
Like I said they had real evidence for their claim. It was just thought at the time they didn’t have enough evidence. They were considered cranky and arrogant, but not cranks if that distinction makes sense. Malone has far, far less than that. Far less. He basically claiming near-certitude based mostly on an opinion. I sincerely doubt any accredited university biology course is teaching his ideas on COVID-19 as being potential real science. Because the science isn’t really there. The Alvarez team were never debunked, Malone’s pet theories have been.
I think your points #1 and #3 are related and resolve each other. AFAICT, Malone is not an anti-vaxxer and he is not saying no one should take the shots (though that may be the position of some of the people who interview him). Best as I can tell, his main point about vaccines seems to be that the side effects are potentially more serious than is currently known and/or acknowledged and this needs to be considered when advising younger and healthier people to take them. But Malone himself is in his 60s.
I don’t know about #2 or how significant it might be.
I don’t get your point #4. Anyone claiming to be an authority on anything has to rely on his persona/life story/credentials. I’ve seen numerous very reputable mainstream scientists do this countless times. If a guy is being interviewed and expressing any sort of viewpoint, obviously it’s highly relevant to know what his standing is to hold such views. I don’t see anything in this at all.
We can point to people who were deemed “crackpots” who later turned out to be correct.
The issue is how society proceeds at the time.
We go with the consensus best information at the time. It is what we teach in schools, it is how we build buildings and bridges, it is how we practice medicine.
If some person comes up with a crazy new idea they need to sell it to the experts in that field behind the scenes (in that profession’s circles). And they may face stiff opposition to the point of ruining their careers. It has happened. But, the truth tends to leak out and, eventually, the crazy idea can come to be accepted (see: plate tectonics).
All that said, in mainstream society we go with best practices at the time. How could it be otherwise?
More serious and/or more likely that COVID and long COVID? Seems unlikely. Anyway, if he has evidence to that effect, or even a potential investigation path, he should be talking to researchers, not Joe Rogan.
Misinformation is often identified by the variety of the claims and their scatter-shot nature. That has nothing to do with identifying characteristic #3, which is that the purveyors tend not to actually act on their claims. Malone is careful to say he isn’t anti-vaccine, while promoting various half-truths and outright falsehoods that attack both the safety and the efficacy of the vaccines. Then he turns around and gets himself vaccinated.
The point of #4 is that often someone’s claims are given additional weight solely based on tangential life experiences. In this particular case there is very little reason to believe that Dr. Malone’s past experience with mRNA technology - over 30 years ago - give him any special insight into the safety or effectiveness of the vaccines. Yet media is breathless with headlines about how “mRNA Vaccine Inventor claims Vaccines are Dangerous”.
I see no reason to believe that Dr. Malone has any special knowledge about this based on his past experience. Unlike, for example, Dr. Fauci. Yet they are both given equal standing as “experts” in the field, when they clearly are not in an equivalent position to make claims.
The stronger point, I think, is #2 (which others have also highlighted). Scientific debate happens in scientific circles - journals, trade publications, universities. Misinformation is spread by the media - podcasts, TV news, blogs, social media.
This is an exaggeration and part of the problem is that Malone is the one doing the exaggerating. Introducing mRNA into cells was first published in the early 70’s. Hell, using liposomes to protect the mRNA and increase efficiency was published in the late 70’s. People were using mRNA technology throughout the 80’s before Malone published a paper on simply improving the method.
After that, he published sporadically. And his career in academia is short-lived, which is okay, but his attempts at pharmaceutical research don’t seem to have gone anywhere.
Giving himself the label of “Inventor of mRNA technology” is a huge red flag. Most modern science is highly collaborative. Rarely does one person “invent” something anymore.
The thing is, though, he could have all the bona fides he claims, and his current argument would still be transparent bullshit because the methodology around it is nonexistent. It is, again, not about the CV, but about rigorous respect for the process.
The fact that he’s inflating his CV doesn’t help, but it’s also not the chief problem.
It’s important to remember that there is no such thing as “authorities” in science. There are, of course, experts, and when an expert says something is so, you would be prudent to listen, because an expert is probably correct (because if they weren’t probably correct, their expertise would be sufficient to tell them not to say so). But if an expert does say something is so, but it’s not, then no amount of expertise will give them the authority to make it so.
But again, unless you’ve established that Malone is opposed to people in his situation being vaccinated, then you’ve not established that he did anything inconsistent with his positions. What you (& others) seem to be doing is just vaguely saying “hey, this guy Malone is saying a lot of stuff that’s similar to what anti-vaxxers say” so he’s inconsistent if he got vaccinated himself.
I don’t think his past experience would give him any extra knowledge per se. But it testifies to his understanding of the science, and to his ability to assess a broad spectrum of studies and make an overall conclusion. Which is all he’s claiming to be doing here AFAICT. (People in this thread have been pointing out that if Malone has any studies which prove his point he should publish them, but that’s a distortion of what Malone is saying.)
That’s all fine, but mainstream scientists also come around and discuss their positions and conclusions in the media, TV news etc. You see this all the time.
Actually what they usually do is publish a paper and then send out a press release about the paper that they published in a peered review journal. Alternatively they will be called on by the media to provide expert opinion on a matter in which case they tend to explain the scientific consensus as they understand it.
I would also point out that unlike its portrayed by certain CT factions there isn’t a scientific cabal that attempts to suppress those ideas that don’t match the consensus. They instead evaluate them often with a large amount of skepticism but let them rise and fall on their own. As two examples I would present the OPERA scientists who published that they had found faster than light neutrinos. This was complete heresy that would completely demolish our understanding of the laws of physics. But since they accurately published their results in a reputable peer reviewed journal, they weren’t cast out and rejected by the scientific community. Their research was carefully considered hypotheses were offered and eventually the error was discovered. Science worked.
As a second example consider discussion over the Oumuamua object. Most scientists think its natural but some think that its evidence of extra terrestrial life. But again papers are being published ideas are being taken seriously and no one is being cast out.
However if the scientists in these two examples and run to the papers saying Einstein is wrong or Aliens exist without first opening themselves up for review by their colleagues it would be a different story.
It’s a perfectly fine essay, though I think their proposed solution is a bit pie in the sky. But notice how they write that
On the other hand, to articulate now in any public forum that hydroxychloroquine is a treatment for COVID-19 would be to spread incorrect information that could potentially cause harm. It doesn’t work for COVID-19 and taking it for this purpose only puts one at risk for potentially serious adverse side effects. We now have sufficient clinical trial data and the guidance of respected health organizations telling us that hydroxychloroquine isn’t to be prescribed for COVID-19. We would have no problem with a social media company electing to censor a statement claiming efficacy for the drug from its platform.
The same applies to Malone’s statements. Some of them might have been valid concerns and topics of discussion at some point earlier in the pandemic, but the weight of the evidence now is that he’s spreading dangerous misinformation.
What would convince you that he isn’t? Is whatever that is a plausible solution to the question in the thread title?
Step one would be to realize that accomplished researchers can indeed be cranks, even within their field of expertise. What do you think would let you realize that in general? And, step two, what would be required for you to realize that for a specific individual?