It's over - Ivor Cummins discusses the data (Let's stick with COVID) - this title got UNfiddled
I have totally, and I mean TOTALLY, lost faith in Ivor. No longer follow him on Twitter or anywhere. He thinks heâs âscientificâ, but his knowledge is wrong many times and heâs reading everything to benefit his theory, but not discussing theories that go against his.
I now wonder about everything else he has said in the past.
Give you an example. The miracle Tcells that are supposed to save everyone. This Week in Virology interviewed someone who graduated MIT and studies viruses and Tcells for a living. He said that heâs tested cross-cell reactivity for Tcells using âoldâ (stored) blood from donors, pre-covid-19. There is cross-cell reactivity between the âcommonâ coronaviruses and covid, for many people, for Tcells.
He does not know what this means. It could even be bad. Yes, bad, not good. He THINKS itâs good, but does not know.
Lest you think heâs someone who doesnât know anything, heâs a coauthor on this paper, and they also discuss another of his papers in the podcast:
And of course, Ivor would read this and say âcross-reactivity of common cold coronavirus means many are IMMUNE to covidâ, which is not supported scientifically.
I have stopped following many low carb gurus, because they think they KNOW whatâs happening with covid, when they do not. No one does.
Link to TWiV:
Not sure why so many low-carb doctors feel the need to ring in on their opinions regarding COVID-19. They donât have the answer and Cummins reminds me of a Flat Earther in how insistent he is, believing that he is right. There are many low-carb doctors that are apparently questioning the science of climate change as well, which makes even less sense. It is frustrating for sure!
Once your eyes have been opened its quite hard to close them again?
Iâd suggest reading round a bit more and not only mainstream media.
So Ivor Cummins is an idiot and a quack because he can cite a boatload of evidence that contradicts the COVID19 hysteria. Has anyone yet actually watched the video and paid attention to the data? I thought we are all about science, data and evidence here.
Okay, so I watched the video.
Interesting stuff. Truth? ⌠based on thoughtful science? Dunno.
Thatâs the problem with any subject that requires significant expertise⌠I find myself reliant upon the credibility of those others who (hopefully) are closer to the data and the details and whose only agenda is honorable truth-seeking.
Iâm fairly tolerant of folks being wrong. Weâve been wrong in the past about most things we currently understand correctly. What I fear most are those who are wrong and know it - or donât much care.
Not sure how, as a civilization, we ever get beyond this perennial obstacle as we try to expand our knowledge base. 
By your logic, why should doctors talk about nutrition? After all, there are ânutritionistsâ â those pesky doctors should just stay in their lane!
I havenât heard any low carbers talk about climate, but if theyâre not on board with climate catatrophism, then good for them â theyâre clearly more perceptive and/or knowledgeable than most people!
I agree - heâs really embarrassing himself now.
I think heâs more intent on generating page views than anything else. âViral Issue Crucial UpdateâŚâ And âThe ultimate update on our viral issue, bar noneâŚâ Such silly, exaggerated hyperbole and all thatâs there is really just a re-stating of what Ivorâs said before.
We do need to separate good science and logical evidence from Ivorâs ultracrepidarian fopdoodlery (which, unfortunately, is substantial).
I donât know whether Ivor actually does the work of researching/setting up his presentations, or is he just reading/going over what people have handed him - either physically or via the internet? Regardless, he does delve into outright untruths and deliberate deception.
Ivor actually doesnât say, âItâs over.â He expresses concern that prior to the coming winter we may be, in effect, squandering our chance for âsafe spread.â He also contradicts himself, there, as heâs been constantly harping that we couldnât stop the virus spread anyway, saying that " âThese curves are baked in, essentiallyâ
About the deaths in countries - 8:23 Ivor is saying, "âŚwhy Sweden would have been higher (in mortality) than other countries, particularly the Nordics." Heâs acting like relatively few deaths in 2019 set Sweden up for higher mortality in 2020, and he says the same is true for The Netherlands, Great Britain, and Spain. For Finland and Norway, Ivor says âvery different lookingâ graphs. He says, for Finland and Norway, ânormal enough death rates in the prior years.â
I suspected Ivor was trying to pull a fast one here, so I checked what was going on in the larger context, i.e. where were 2018 and 2019 compared to existing trends, the average mortality of the past 10 years, etc.
I donât know where the supposed information - the charts he showed - from mortality.org is coming from. I can see a good bit of information on deaths there, but only through 2018 for Great Britain, and I donât see anything for deaths in 2019 for any country.
So, Ivor and his cherry-picking. UK deaths had been in an overall uptrend from 2011, and 2018 is a relatively high point, so comparing 2019 with it may not give the best results. To me it looks like one would have to go back to 1999 to find a year with a higher death number.
Not having 2019 figures yet, I looked at macrotrends.net, which gives a UK death rate of 9.382/1000 for 2018, and 9.398 for 2019. A small increase, +0.17%. At this point, it looks like Ivorâs claim that the UK had âa huge troughâ in mortality for 2019 is BS. And in any case, itâs silly to act like the UK would have been somehow âway behindâ on deaths, given what occurred from 2011 onward, and thus extra-liable for a higher death rate from Covid-19 in 2020.
The Netherlands had a heat wave in 2019, and the death rate was 1.1% above that of 2018, and 5.6% above the 10-year average. Ivor says The Netherlands had âfewer than expected deaths,â but this too appears to be false.
âPretty much the same for Spainâ - here we do have a 2.4% decline in mortality from 2018 to 2019, but 2019 is still 3.6% above the 10-year average. It is only Ivorâs cherry-picking that is deceptive.
Sweden did have a decline from 2018 to 2019, 3.8% - the biggest of any country mentioned. It was also 2.1% below the 10-year average.
Finland: 2019 was 1.06% below 2018, while being 3.5% above the 10-year average.
Norway: 2019 was 0.38% below 2018, while being 0.8% below the 10-year average.
âSo this is most likely the biggest factor driving Swedenâs numbers, and most countriesâ numbers, actually, independent of lockdowns and distancing.â â I think this is ridiculous, and that Ivor is being juvenile and silly trying to obfuscate things this way. To begin with, consider the extreme extent to which some countries have limited their deaths.
The entire range of the countries above, for 2019 versus 2018, is +1.1% (for The Netherlands) to -3.8% (for Sweden). Does this really make sense as the âbiggestâ factorâ when it comes to Covid-19 deaths?
Ivorâs analysis is necessarily wrong for the UK and The Netherlands, and I think itâs senseless to assume that the small negative changes in mortality in the rest of the countries from 2018 to 2019 makes that much of a difference. This is yet another case of intentional deception and taking things out of context.
Especially when we consider Sweden and Norway. Thereâs Norway, having less deaths in 2019 than in 2018, as does Sweden - with Sweden admittedly having a greater percentage decline. Both countries for 2019 were below the 10-year average. Ivor tries to make a big thing out of Swedenâs 3.8% decline against Norwayâs 0.38% decline.
I would say to him, âWell okay, Ivor, Sweden did have 3.4% greater decline in mortality than Norway in 2019, but here we are and Sweden also has 1080% greater per-capita deaths from Covid-19 than Norway. With that in mind, do you really think your thesis explains things and somehow âexcusesâ Sweden?â
Iâm not an expert, but I have a fairly recent and up to date education on the subject (during the first 6 months of the pandemic no less). Many of the things that Ivor is claiming as facts you wonât know, you canât know, until after they have happened. Herd immunity for example, you only know that you have reached herd immunity when Râ is zero and remains zero when challenged with a new host. Predictions of herd immunity at 80% seroconversion or 20% are just guesses. After Râ goes to zero in an isolated region then we can say what percentage of a population need antibodies to protect those who canât make antibodies.
Alex Selby a PhD in Mathematics and a bone-fide genius (https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,,389802,00.html), pretty thoroughly fisked Ivors presentation (http://sonorouschocolate.com/covid19/index.php?title=Cummins-2020-09-08). Anything I could add to that would be redundant.
Iâll just say that many of the low carb experts appear to have experienced a relevancy deficit in response to COVID which has resulted in a lot of premature statements of certainty where there can be none yet. It has made me review all the assertions made in the past to confirm if perhaps I had been blindsided by confidence of people who are confident about things that they canât yet know.
What I know is that I reversed my own type 2 diabetes after going ketogenic, but that is useless to make any predictions for any other human, unless I suddenly find a long lost identical twin.
The literature (thanks to Drs Phinney, Volek and Hallberg) shows that we (they and I and you) are not deluding ourselves that it appears to be a viable treatment for type 2 diabetes. And we have significance data to support that result. Everything else may be open to debate.
I agree entirely, Richard. People who are making bold factual claims about this epidemic, using all the tricks that Ancel Keys himself used (cherry picking, confirmation bias and so forth) make me worry about the integrity of many of the people in our community I once thought were straight down the line. A pandemic should not be a plaything with which to make tendentious libertarian points.
Itâs not that there wonât be stuff to learn. Itâs not that officialdom has been perfect or even adequate in response to this epidemic. But to have this cock-sure certainty that you know the answer just because you can torture a graph to make your libertarian point - thatâs depressing.
And the ânormiesâ outside our community are noticing that too many of our gurus are behaving like this, and itâs tainting the more solidly based keto messages. This is a huge tragedy.
Yes. His stuff no longer passed the smell test for me and I couldnât allow our friendship to cloud that. Remember: most of us are not here in KetoLand because we had a political or cultural pull towards it. Indeed, we were almost all initially sceptical, for obvious reasons, and had to be drawn into this world of lipivory kicking and screaming, as we carefully falsified every presumed objection thereto until we were left with nothing more to change but our minds and our diets.
So most of our commitment to keto is a residue of a careful and sceptical distillation. This doesnât mean we now suddenly stop being sceptical. Quite the contrary! Perhaps we could be dragged, kicking and screaming, away from other solid/main-stream narratives, as we were from the standard CICO/lipophobic model. But, just as with our journeys to keto, we must and should kick and scream when enticed on any further journey. If a siren call has a carnival-hucksterism tune about it (however âliltingâ), and is singing straight from Ancel Keysâs crooked playbook, then we rightly stop ourselves and our community from being dashed against the rocks.
I like Ivor and I reckon yâall are being a bit harsh in maligning him. He makes some excellent points in his videos and demonstrates the similar patterns where ever the virus gets a hold.
It is good that he demonstrates the progression of the disease through a human population, that fear inducing rise, the spike and the fall off and the reduced likelihood of 2nd waves. It helps us clearly see that many of the social restrictions and political actions are redundant, despite claims by their instigators that their actions inflicted are what creates the drop in the graph, rather than a standard progression of the disease.
The T-cell immunity hypotheses make sense when recognising the minimal effect the infection has on many in the community and match the initial observations in infected populations.
@FrankoBear Have you read the post that @richard linked to, which deals with Ivorâs âexcellentâ points. If you think Ivor made excellent points because graphs, Iâve got this chap called Ancel Keys you should read - heâll definitely convince you that saturated fat is very dangerous, with similar âexcellent pointsâ and graphs too!
Iâve been saying this for months, but thereâs plenty of pushback on here simply because people âlikeâ Ivor et al, or because it suits their political philosophies. Having been right pushing back against âsettled scienceâ once (on the basis of new, ACTUAL science) doesnât therefore mean youâre right every time you disagree with something called science just because youâre not getting the headlines/adulation you used to get.
Considerable harm being done, indeed.
Ah dear Dr PepperâŚ
Heâs made an ass of himself on twitter more than once.
Mixing in a little truth with lies, illogic and deliberate deception doesnât go too far, however. It makes him dismissible. Some of it is interesting, but he apparently cannot stay away from nonsense when trying to make his points. The video weâre discussing is totally aimed at those with such confirmation bias that they wonât notice Ivorâs BS, to put it bluntly.