It's over - Ivor Cummins discusses the data (Let's stick with COVID) - this title got UNfiddled

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#25

Yet to watch this. Does it align with @richard ‘s link? I prefer the visual input.

Ok there are going to be multiple edits to follow as I collect the information (and apply my biases for the purpose of discussion).

Reading the Alex Selby critique referred to by @richard

See how he makes definite statements about what will happen without a hint of uncertainty. Such (rather unscientific) statements from such a high profile scientists have the potential to be used by Ivor Cumminses the world over and cause carnage (“Who are you to disagree with a Nobel Prize winner?”). Yet when Levitt is proved wrong he just shrugs and says “oops”

Selby goes on to make definite statements without references:

But it’s completely wrong to assume the infection is done when we’re at the bottom of the curve. If distancing is relaxed enough the infection will certainly be back.

So, I read the critique. It’s a good read. Thank you. I was affected by the hypocrisy in the language, but tried to temper that with looking for facts as best I can discern them from my average intelligence. I was also affected by @richard ‘s Appeal to Authority “bone-fide genius”, and that helped highlight Ivor’s similar appeal to Levitt ( the Nobel prize winner). That was enlightening. And I, similarly am appealing to the authority of Richard and Ivor (as it suits my beliefs). It’s like balancing scales to weigh the points in a rocky boat, the sea of investigation is constantly shifting, and during fearful pandemic times, quite turbulent.

I come out of the experience knowing less but knowing more by that. I think that type of learning has a sociological graphed curve along which I have progressed. Dunning-Kruger effect?

Has anyone got a link to a current Israel graph? Now that time has moved on a bit.

Now I will watch the linked video as Selby and @PaulL suggest.

Thanks for holding the boat while I do some swimming in the muddied waters.

Who is Dr. Pepper, Mark? Dr. Pimenta?

Ok, my viewing is incomplete but in the first 10 minutes I can observe that the doctor is not accurately listening to what Ivor is presenting. As examples, He dismisses the curve because of the start date rather than the shape. He appears to be basing an interpretation of immunity on serological antibody results rather than a more complete interpretation as provided by immunology.

I made the comments (above) before finding Ivor’s riposte video (below).

These responses I have are flare points on my existing biases, but this smug junior doctor has yet to produce a critique that is convincing for me. That is, more convincing than being presented in Ivor’s presentation.

At this moment, in this edit, I have yet to be convinced that Ivor is as discredited as the tone of this thread would have us believe.

It’s a tangle that needs unpicking. And as we unpick and untangle time will pass and more information will come to light.

I agree that approaching a viral pandemic with a voice of certitude is fraught and best left to thick-skinned (or dim witted) politicians. But, in my subjective opinion, that is not enough reason to cut down the tall poppy of Ivor Cummins and taint his history and legacy in the low carb keto space. I’m calling for temperance on those aspects.

#26

For the record. Ivor’s response.

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #27

Very pleased to see that I’m far from alone here. The overwhelming response on this board seems to be that some of these so-called “low carb experts” have now decided to excuse themselves from being credible sources. Why any of us were relying on engineers to tell us anything about medicine is rather beyond me.

It is high time that the low carb community stopped welcoming anybody who puts his hand up to speak at conferences. Qualified, serious professionals only should be put on stage. The current situation is now nothing short of embarrassing, and the community needs to take note.

If you still disagree, I have some theories by Ancel Keys to sell you!

#28

I fear it may be past that time. I hope I’m wrong.

Painfully embarrassing.

#29

The intelligent people from outside the medical profession and outside the conventionally nutrition trained practitioners (ref: Belinda and Dr. Gary Fettke’s history of nutrition teaching) are a boon to the health of low carb practitioners. In particular, engineers and physical scientists bring the scientific method and logical problem solving skills to human nutrition, an area where it seems obvious these needed skills were/are lacking.

In the example below Ivor Cummins explains why general practitioner doctors find it difficult to communicate science data based information in the virus pandemic… because it is an integration of data challenge, not just solely a medical treatment problem. I think this explanation is also applicable to human nutrition and chronic diseases treatment.

Are you advocating for censorship Gabe?

And @gabe and @TheOrangePimpernel,

Where does the embarrassment stem from? What are you embarrassed about? Or, are we being embarrassed on behalf of others who know not yet to be embarrassed?

The thing that embarrasses me is the potential character assassination on Ivor, that I gauge as unwarranted. I’m glad this is a closed forum. :flushed:

“Normies” not understanding? Nothing new here. And who cares anyway? Was the mission of the low carb message to become the norm? There is no hugeness in what is not even a tragedy. The solid based keto messages remain unaltered (except on Twitter, where all is dipped in taint). The ‘normies’ will always enjoy their xenophobic driven messenger turkey shoot. We know this as we were ‘normies’ once. And we remain ‘normies’ in other fields. At least the ‘normies’ shoot Ivor in the front.

And what will we say if Ivor turns out to be correct? We will have to silence him then, as there will be no stopping the expansion of his hubris. Call in more snipers.

I have to agree Sheriff Joey. Tolerance is required. We can almost be certain that Ivor will not be shown to be completely right. And neither will his critics. It’s a viral pandemic on social media. The reiteration and updating as time passes will expose the truths. People who are knowingly wrong and don’t much care are a concern and can be viewed as bad. I reckon the truly evil are those that think they are right, but they’re not, and that may be the essence of the discourse here. Is Ivor one of those? (It’s the standard formula for the most evil villains in contemporary storytelling). We will have to wait. Shoot him in a firing squad once he is found to be wrong. Don’t snipe him at his podium presenting what he thinks is right.

This unfortunately rings a little bit true in my ears. I recognise he has had a change in funding as is pursuing his interests self-funded now.

#30

Thanks for diving into it a bit deeper Elmo. I haven’t had enough time to fully appreciate your post.

Might he be looking at the short-term mortality fluctuations (STMF) data for the past 2 decades including weekly deaths during 2020? It’s linked from mortality.org and demonstrates graphically mortality excess and deficits (to the norms) in a list of countries. It looks like the data Ivor was communicating via the original author ‘PLC’ @Humble_Analysis (looks like a Twitter handle). Not sure of PLC’s credibility to be used as a resource.

https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/

https://twitter.com/Humble_Analysis

@OldDoug Doug, I’m not sure if this is the resource but it was linked from the reference and it does take the data up to 2020.

#31

Because the player is misrepresenting the science. In the last interview I watched he cut across and inaccurately represented what an English doctor was saying in the actual interview at which point I gave up any confidence I had that he was capable of interpreting the data as he so constantly credits himself as being.

Very disappointing 'cause I lliked the quality information relevant info he nicely packaged from research on cardiac problems and cholesterol. He however appears to think he is very specially gifted and unfortunately he’s not. His lack of broad referencing of the relevant Covid research (and frankly his ignorance and generalizations) is making him sound and look like a fool.

He is overestimating his own knowledge, which would not matter except many people are trusting what he says, which is now extremely misleading and can cause harm. That’s why it matters and why people like me are critical of him now.

Its not enough to be a nice guy with a mike and some contrarian interviewees.

I iimagine he will be sued shortly by someone who thinks he knows what he is talking about, follows his advice and loses a partner or a friend as a result. This is not minor. It is as bad imo as the diabetes doctors who told me to eat carbs, which were killing me slowly.

If you claim to be an expert, you need to know what you are talking about and regarding Covid, he is wrong, regardless or possibly even because of his fan’s devotion.

(bulkbiker) #32

It isn’t by the way.

#33

The willingness of some to deliberately mislead vulnerable people in furtherance of their own agenda. I make no claims to ‘knowing’ what their agenda might be but I have some theories.

(Peter) #34

People are playing the man because a) Ivor has been partial to that himself over the years, and b) because that’s somewhat the point of this discussion, people who have set themselves up as “keto experts” and are now finding that they have a significant amount of relevance deprivation and are desperately trying to drag the spotlight back to themselves.

(bulkbiker) #35

What nonsense… he is simply presenting the data as he sees it. And he is far from being alone.

I’ve so far yet to see much of what Ivor is saying proved wrong… maybe some of his guests have been a bit OTT with their predictions but that’s on them not on Ivor surely?

(Peter) #36

No, Ivor promoting them and Ivor putting them on Ivor’s podcast and so on has nothing to do with Ivor, excellent point.

(bulkbiker) #37

What they say has zero to do with Ivor… and as for “promoting” them what about the mainstream media and their barrage of doom and gloom Cassandras…

Who unlike Cassandra are in fact listened to and lapped up by the majority.

(Peter) #38

Excellent example of whataboutism.

#39

What are the mortality rates? What are the testing rates? Any data?

#40

“It’s over” as Michael puts in the title of the thread. One would hope it would be the end of the initial fear crisis. We know so much more now we are down the timeline. I am continually amazed at the adaptability and creativity of the human species.

Ivor said the epidemic part of the curve was over by June/July when looking at the graph. He goes on to refer to that common spike as being the epidemic and that as the curve flattened saying it was over for the northern summer months. ‘It’ being the COVID19 pandemic. He goes further to explain that cases and deaths will rise with the seasonality of respiratory disease. And then he says we have to see what happens to the curve for further interpretation. I didn’t get that the COVID19 pandemic is over from that expanded listening. But that may be the inciting supposition? I guess the interpretation of what is being said is in the way one listens. Word arrangements are tricky to grasp. They seem to have a ‘meaning glycocalyx’ like the slime on a slippery fish.

plus

Is this the ‘thorn’ in our community paw?

(bulkbiker) #41

Not especially, just showing both sides of the coin my friend which you seem frightened of for some reason.
If you don’t like Ivor’s work then ignore it?

To be honest it is @richard and @bokkiedog who have gone down a bit in my opinion by joining in on this attempt at character assassination.

(Nick) #42

And then we explain why “as he sees it” is tendentious and cherry-picking. We don’t accept it from Ancel Keys, and we don’t accept it from him. This isn’t “character assassination”. This is precisely a critique of his use of data in a teleological service of an ideological point.

To see quite how precisely his cherry-picking is Keys-esque, please look, for example, at point three in this document:
http://sonorouschocolate.com/covid19/index.php?title=Cummins-2020-09-08&fbclid=IwAR0bkx3ck2OZVMCninPZMUIFPm5dBqPdww5ZaQqJE2HJstYvnBTG7bYujd8

(Richard Morris) #43

I’m OK with that.

The more time and effort I spend on my education, the more I realize how little I know. But the upside is I’m learning how little other experts know too, so it’s becoming harder to fool me, as long as I don’t fool myself.

If you are sure that lockdowns don’t work then you need to explain Vietnam, or Taiwan, or New Zealand, or states of Australia other than Victoria, or Victoria for that matter.

If you think this is a “casedemic”, and cases are decoupled from fatality, then you have to explain why an increase in cases predominately among an age demographic that doesn’t die from this disease should suddenly show a signal in deaths.

The reason we have more cases is likely partly because we’re testing more as can be seen from the total test numbers, but also from more cases as can be seen from the percentage of positive tests - it’s well described. You don’t get 30-40k new cases in the USA every day because of some accounting error, or because you have PCR cycles dialed up to 11 and are finding dead virus. You get it because you let an exponential progression get out of control.

The reason why the relationship between new cases and deaths has changed is because we appear to be getting better at keeping people alive longer. Plus most of the new cases are in people under 40, but that doesn’t mean these infections are harmless, they keep a reservoir out there for this virus to survive long enough to become endemic in humans, not to mention reports of long hauler issues.

You don’t have herd immunity until you have no reproduction … so claims of herd immunity at 20% are just empty claims, just numerology and reading of tea leaves. You’ll only know that you have herd immunity once you have zero reproduction. And there is no state in the USA with zero R₀ (and 4 in Australia).

rt.live

I’m not certain that Ivor is wrong. I am certain that we don’t have the information to make the kinds of claims being made about the progression of this epidemic.

As Anders Tegnall (Swedens chief epidemiologist) said “Ask me if we did the right thing once we reach herd immunity”

(Richard Morris) #44

And don’t expect me to jump into twitter battles over this. I have a full time job just keeping up to date on the research in my field.

If you want to hear from real experts in virology, who have real doubts and can frame what they do and don’t know with precision, and have no interest in claiming to know something they can not … subscribe to https://www.microbe.tv/