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Sanjoy Mahajan's avatar

Thank you for this detailed response to Hammond. You are more even-tempered than I could be. On the (in)validity of the controls, I had taken up that point in his article's comment section, as I had got distressed seeing Hammond patronize Christine Massey and call her FOIA results a "hoax." He seems to be a garden-variety bully.

He's also not very bright. He quickly resorted to his usual tactic of demanding that anyone who fundamentally disagrees with him "demonstrate good faith" by agreeing with his rubbish. Finding no agreement, he banned me.

I'll repeat here my last comment to Hammond:

"You are just gaslighting by repeating your refuted points with more words surrounding them each time. But you can demonstrate some good faith by acknowledging that you materially misquoted Christine Massey by deleting “in the Methods section” from what she wrote.

"You seem keen to promote the belief in the Convid virus. But your arguments are not convincing. If you would like to convince people who disagree with you about, for example, the issue of control experiments in virology, which leads to the larger question of whether virology is a science or pseudoscience, then those people need the details of the alleged control experiments so that they can form their own judgment.

"Thus, at the risk of telling you how to do your job, you could bring forth a full description of Harcourt et al.’s so-called control. What exactly did they do? Where is it described? (Being mentioned in the Results section doesn’t count as a description of a procedure.) Their lab notes on this point would make a good start. Somehow these notes are not being released despite multiple FOIA requests, perhaps because they don’t exist or because they reveal that the controls were nothing of the sort.

"I am by no means telling you what to do. It’s up to you. Ban me from commenting, don’t ban me, it doesn’t matter to me. But don’t be surprised if your claims that “they used a control” are not believed — except by people who already believed them."

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Jo Waller's avatar

Yes from the beginning is was assumed that what couldn't be seen was causing the disease.

If they want to use CPE as evidence clearly they have to do appropriate controls, even the ones they do use are not treated in the same way. An adequate control would be a sample from sick patients with the same severity of symptoms, hopefully containing a similar amount of biologically active substances, though not thought to be sick from 'what couldn't be seen'. Cells are constantly signalling and altering each others gene expression. It's a whole big thing.

Even if only 'what couldn't be seen' caused CPE it still wound't mean it was a virus. It would have to be correlated with all others with 'what couldn't be seen' and not occur in healthy people with 'what couldn't be seen'. Experiments on transmission of both 'what couldn't be seen' and also disease symptoms would also have to be shown between 'hosts' and then from them to other hosts.

Jo

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