How do you say government waste, without saying government waste? Sonnenberg is my choice for the June CD4 primary, why he should be yours. The importance of relevance when reading medical journalism.
How do you say government waste, without saying government waste?
Denver will be paying $100K to study whether or not some other department of government is spending money in a way it shouldn't.
The CBS article below details how Denver is going to pay up to $100K to fund a look into whether the Denver Fire command staff was abusing flex time.
There are more details in the article and the allegations seem pretty serious. Still, $100K? Just to investigate?
I read things like this and think to myself that I'm in the wrong business. I need to move into the kind of work that these folks are doing, the kind of work where you can take two years to find wrongdoing and get the kinds of hourly rates that could add up to $100K in that time.
My God. If there's anything government excels at, it's spending YOUR money.
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/denver-allocates-100k-investigation-denver-fire-department-timekeeping/
Related:
Denver will be shelling out money to youth in the city in an effort to curb violence and crime.
Not quite sure what to think about this one. On the one hand, I agree with the contention that idle hands are the devil's workshop. On the other, does giving money to people encourage those that might turn to mischief or crime to work do much?
When I give extra credit to students, you know what I find? I find those that have A's do the extra credit at a much higher rate than those who could actually benefit from it.
Oh, and I'd also have a lot less of a problem if the money didn't come out of the pockets of hardworking people in Denver.
Nonetheless, despite cuts to help deal with the immigrants flooding the city, despite millions poured into homelessness efforts that haven't done much, let's toss some more money at this and see what sticks.
https://denvergazette.com/news/government/denver-youth-crime-prevention-summer-programs/article_a77e3dec-16da-11ef-ad47-6bc29d4bf07d.html#google_vignette
The CD4 Republican Primary will be coming up soon, June 25, 2024, and I want to share my endorsement for that race.
I have known and been corresponding with Jerry Sonnenberg since I started getting engaged in politics way back in 2020 due to COVID. He was then my state senator and is now my county commissioner after being term limited out.
He's been a supporter of mine, and more importantly to me, he is someone that answers emails and phone calls. That's criterion 1 for me (2 being that we agree on policy which we do). I don't care so much that we agree on everything straight down the line. I do care that when I have ideas or concerns that I get listened to. If you, like me, live in a rural area this is likely something you can relate to especially well.
I can't speak for everyone in the primary, but I would ask you to consider this. How important do you think your concerns are to someone like Boebert? I would wager that insofar as they align with what is good for her, they'll be important.
If not, I would wager your concerns won't matter. What I mean here is that when it comes time for me to choose, I'm going to choose someone that was here before, listened to me before, and thus is likely to listen to me in the future. I don't see that happening with Boebert or with the other candidates who I do not know.
If this matters to you as well, I urge you to follow me and make Sonnenberg your choice in the primary.
The importance of relevance when reading medical journalism.
When you read things, regardless of the source, I want you to be skeptical. Skeptical does not mean that you reject everything outright. Skeptical does mean, that you weigh the claims made by the evidence presented. Big claims need big evidence.
One critically important piece of information to consider in this process is to ask yourself about what I would term the relevance of the evidence; here I mean relevance in the sense of asking how representative the study population is to you.
Humans are different from each other and they are different from animals.
A study about cancer survival that used lower-income females in Amsterdam may lead the researchers to make some big claims about cancer treatment, but I question highly the value of this claim as it pertains to treating the cancer of a 60 year old affluent male in the Midwest.
Likewise a study about whether or not genetically modified organisms, GMO's, in food causing cancer which uses rats with a known propensity to grow tumors regardless of diet or living conditions (see the first link below for more context here) probably should not be relied upon to make sound recommendations on diet.
Now, that's not to say either study has nothing to say right off the bat, but what it means is that neither can provide an answer you could depend on.
Let me walk you through a subtler example from actual news by way of showing what to look for and what to do. The CPR article linked second below make a pretty sizeable claim: that social distancing and vaccines in COVID saved "nearly a million lives".
The first thing you ought to look for when trying to assess this claim would be what it was that led the researchers to make this claim and what evidence they used.
Unfortunately, nowhere in the lazily written, thoughtless article that the reporter farted out do you see any links to the actual research or any sense of how it was done. This is bad science journalism at its finest.
In order to actually find the research, I had to Google the name of the researcher and start poking around. I did find the paper and it's linked third below. Strike two on this came about when I noted this wasn't so much a study in a peer-reviewed article as it was something presented at a conference.
In order to talk relevance, I need to quickly summarize what the researchers actually did. They created a computer model that they claim accurately predicts COVID transmission and mortality. After creating this model, they used actual blood test and mortality data to "fit" their model to the real world. Having done both these things, they then ran a series of scenarios and looked at the health outcomes.
This was the source of the claim that vaccines and social distancing saved nearly a million lives: it's the difference in mortality under various modeling scenarios.
Putting aside legitimate questions about the validity of the model, let's just keep our focus on relevance.
The paper's authors discuss the sources of their data starting on p 6. The source of their blood test data (testing blood to see who had and/or was sick from various variants of COVID) was testing labs and blood donations.
That is, if you donated blood or you went to the doctor's office and had blood drawn for any of a number of reasons, someone somewhere tested your blood to see if you had COVID in the past or currently.
This is where you stop and ask about relevance. Are there patterns, is there a variance across age, race, geographic location, income for people who donate blood? Do you suppose there are people who didn't go to the doctor's office during COVID?**
Yes, there likely are. Neither of these pools draw from random population samples. The author's themselves, to their credit, acknowledge this as you can see in the attached screenshot (with its page number).
Let me repeat: "...no serology data from a sample designed to be representative of the population is available." A lack of randomization of subjects or data is a big red flag.
This doesn't mean rejecting things out of hand. I personally believe that the vaccines saved lives (mostly of those that took them). I am less certain about social distancing.
But the claim of saving a million with these two things is not one I'm ready to be confident in. I need to see a lot more evidence before I'll believe that.
As you read medical journalism, keep in mind the subject of this post. Despite what you see in this terrible CPR article, there are some good examples, examples where they share the "how" of the study.
Whether they do or not, remember that one of the first things you should consider when looking at any sort of medical journalism is how relevant the study subjects were. If they are not random, if they do not match you, then likely the results don't really apply well.
**The answer is yes. There was a substantial uptick in mortality for some causes outside of COVID which is likely the result of people avoiding the doctor's out of fear.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/lab-rats-cancer.htm#:~:text=In%20the%20infamous%20study%20where,conditions%20%5Bsource%3A%20Sohn%5D.
https://www.cpr.org/2024/05/15/cu-boulder-study-says-social-distancing-and-covid-vaccines-saved-nearly-a-million-lives/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v6C7DgNcbWcWbrXz3z_StSdXPvF98_bT/view