Ad Hominem Replaces Reason
There has been much media coverage of Dr. Vinay Prasad’s retracted invitation to speak at a conference because about 20 people out of thousands of attendees didn’t like Dr. Prasad’s perspective on COVID research. Like so much of what goes on today, why does any organization allow 10 to 20 complainers to cause an organization to renege on an invite?
In a podcast discussion about the incident between Dr. Prasad, Dr. John Mandrola, and Dr. Adam Cifu, Dr. Prasad made a particularly compelling comment. He said he never uses ad hominem arguments in his research assessments. That comment alone should have reserved his speaker’s position at any convention covering scientific research.
Once the critics of scientific research resort to ad hominem arguments, they have left the halls of valid scientific research in the dust. Over 50 years ago, before the scientific community had descended into the habit of attempting to defend flawed research with ad hominem arguments, Darrell Huff wrote How to Lie with Statistics. Huff explains many ways the numbers of the statistician are distorted to portray the statistical conclusion to be something it is not.
Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers brings about a suspension of common sense.
Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics, p.142
Interestingly, at that time, Huff evidently didn’t see ad hominem as a threat to medical research. When Huff wrote his book, ad hominem was usually associated with snake oil salesmen or politicians.
So what has shot ad hominem into the spotlight on assessments of scientific research today? It’s no longer just the snake oil salesmen and the politicians flinging ad hominem slurs around, but medical doctors who should, as Huff says, have more common sense. An extremely popular version of ad hominem today is to label any questioned research conclusion misinformation or disinformation. These labels often do not actually tell the reader what the alleged misinformation is. In other words, there’s no evidence of the misinformation. Just the highly proclaimed hollow label cast out to social media.
When most of us grew up, we learned discernment and discretion. We learned to listen more and to talk or write less. We learned that some bells can’t be un-rung. Some words and some actions can’t be undone. And most importantly, we learned to separate which battles we can win from those we cannot.
Somewhere in growing up we also developed a sense of decorum, that which is socially acceptable from that which is not. Have you ever heard a eulogy which taints the legacy of the deceased? Those at a funeral would have the sense not to do that because the dead could provide no defense, allowing the venomous remarks to live on long after the burial. Furthermore, there’s no reason to cause family members more trauma, especially when the accusations are often not true.
Suzanne Somers died recently, yet has come into a lot of criticism for the choices she made in her cancer treatment. Those criticizing her healthcare decisions seem to have forgotten that physicians may not agree with the choice of treatment a patient makes, but the patient has the final say. Remember informed consent? One of the complaints is that her public comments on the course of treatment she chose has caused innumerable deaths by promoting a treatment the medical community considers ineffective. In truth, there is no way to know whether there are any people who have had their lives shortened by listening to how Suzanne Somers chose to treat her cancer. She lived for 23 years after her first diagnosis of an aggressive breast cancer. She evidently did something right.
On the other hand, you might take a look at Wyeth, a company who for 60 years carried on an incestuous relationship with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) promoting all the wonderful benefits of Premarin before the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) studied Premarin and reported that its use was so dangerous the study had to be stopped prematurely. How many women are unnecessarily dead because of those biased studies and because the FDA endorsed those studies? As I wrote in a previous Substack article about the research bias in the WHI study, the issue was choosing the wrong end point. There was the mistaken assumption that there was causation between the levels of low density lipids (LDL) and later death.
Money really does talk. The lucrative business of Big Pharma produces vast wealth and influence. So, where is the protection of the public which is supposed to be provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), FDA, and National Institutes of Health (NIH)? These organizations failed miserably in providing the public with accurate information about COVID. Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson spent a fortune to grease the wheels of favorable conclusions about their COVID products. Any assessment of the research which raised questions about the results was labeled misinformation and physicians who actually saw some problems with the research were likely to lose their licenses. Does the Middle Ages practice of poisoning wells ring a bell?
If you can’t specifically say what is wrong with a research finding you disagree with, forget the name calling, including labeling whatever it is disinformation when you can’t articulate what you disagree with. When those criticizing a research study stoop to ad hominem slurs about the person making the observations—run, don’t walk—in the other direction.