DECODED: "Gold Standard Evidence-Based Medicine"
The Great Anti-Vax Rebranding Campaign
Decoded is a new series dedicated to revealing the advertising techniques the anti-vaccine movement has exploited to sell the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the public. The Pandemic Accountability Index is entirely supported by reader subscriptions - take advantage of our limited time offer of 35% off annual subscriptions (about $35 USD) and fortify your thinking against anti-vaccine propaganda today!
If you've been paying attention, you will have noticed multiple government officials insist that their obscene antics are merely a return to "Gold Standard Evidence-Based Medicine." Just what does this mean?
To tell you the truth, this is little more than branding.
In the advertising industry, one of our primary tasks is something called "Branding." Here in America, it's all around you. You're literally drowning in it, especially if you live in a major metropolitan area. This isn't just corporate logos, but everything from general aesthetics to the specific choice of words used in public-facing materials. Our goal as advertising professionals is manipulating the public's feelings towards our employer or client, no matter how dishonest.
The Medical Establishment™ under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., including NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya alongside FDA Director Marty Makary, all have a long and well-documented history of dishonest behavior. (Youtube) Now, they insist they're practicing "Gold Standard Evidence-Based Medicine." Ironic, coming from anti-vaxxers who pluck child deaths at random and assign blame to the COVID-19 vaccine.
The anti-vaccine movement cannot stand on its own with facts, so it relies upon highly manipulative language to drive an irrational, emotional response in the niche audience they've carved out for themselves. Exploiting the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, these creeps have had five years to advance their goals and bring them into the mainstream. Even worse, they suddenly found an incredible amount of money backing their propaganda from wealthy billionaires throwing a hissy fit over public health mitigations. Worst of all, they were boosted by journalists who sold out their obligation to the public and the truth to manufacture Enlightened Centrist™ infotainment, laundering anti-vaccine nonsense into the mainstream.
When attaining your Master’s degree from the School of Hard Knocks, you inevitably learn that there's simply certain individuals that you shouldn't enter into an alliance with. While you may gain in the immediate short-term, your supposed ally's long-term goals will cost you much more in the end. Possibly everything.
The anti-vaccine movement is made up of nothing but these individuals.
Foolishly, they've been handed the reins of The Medical Establishment™ on a silver platter. The results are already catastrophic and the situation rapidly deteriorating. The larger anti-vaccine movement has rebranded under the slogan "Making America Healthy Again," claiming the mantle of something you've heard repeated a lot these past few years: "Gold-Standard Evidence-Based Medicine."
We've written about this before through the lens of games theory and the study of rules design - viral contrarians think disasters like pandemics are a game to be "won," mind you - but "Gold-Standard Evidence-Based Medicine" is nothing more than a dishonest re-branding of tired old anti-vaccine antics. If anything, it's more closely related to sleight-of-hand card hustling. (Internet Archive) A sleight-of-hand used to mislead the public into accepting the premises of the anti-vaccine movement as legitimate with manipulative language. Left unspoken is the implication is that the medical profession is overwhelmingly incompetent & practicing wildly inferior "Feelings-Based Medicine."
FDA Director Marty Makary had been fueling these flames for a while, with a faulty paper claiming "medical error" was the third leading cause of death. This has since been long debunked. After five years of sitting from behind the safety of his laptop, doing nothing but spewing insults on social media, AIER propagandist David Zweig argues in his new book (PAI) that public health should be replaced with business management consultants. These are not serious people.
It's easy promote yourself by tearing down others, especially when you can't produce any meaningful contributions of your own.
In truth, the present state of "Gold-Standard Evidence-Based Medicine" is little more than an attack on entire scientific and medical fields from loudmouthed do-nothings who want to force everyone else to be as apathetic and unaccomplished as them. They share the belief that in Spring 2020, we should have all turned a blind eye and let COVID-19 kill and disable countless more than any one of us could possibly comprehend. Those brave enough to do anything to prevent those bad outcomes are themselves branded as irrational "tyrants," rejecting the "normalcy" of "Team Reality."
These pestilence sycophants preyed upon those with no knowledge of medicine or science prior to 2020, lost in the midst of a global crisis, looking for reassuring answers. Wouldn't it be so reassuring to hear in the Spring of 2020 that COVID-19, this brand-new disease causing so much carnage, was relatively harmless to you and your children? That all of these public health mitigations were wholly unnecessary, and worse, totally ineffective theater? That you had no responsibility whatsoever?
What a reassuring fantasy! As we are collectively trapped within this fictional realm, let us break this "Gold Standard Evidence-Based Medicine" brand down.
Part A: “Gold Standard”
While the term "Evidence-Based Medicine" has existed prior to 2020, the qualifier of "Gold Standard" is a relatively recent addition to the anti-vaccine lexicon. Doesn't this imply the existence of "Silver," "Bronze," or even "Platinum" standards of medicine? How is such a grade even determined, governed by what authority? There is no real answer to these questions, because "Gold Standard" is an empty qualifier meant to elevate one's ideals by implying the inferiority of dissenting opinions.
"Method over knowledge it seems is the motto. And so you end up with respirator studies where the authors didn't bother to trouble themselves with minutia like physics, [because] if you have the right method you always make gold" -Matt Oliver (sameo416 via Bluesky)
The origins go back to a propaganda push in 2023 against the effectiveness of N95 respirators and other PPE: A now-debunked Cochrane "Review" of masks, compiling multiple RCTs into a singular "meta-analysis." The results of this sloppy Cochrane review are ultimately inconclusive, which the authors then dishonestly ran to the media and insisted that this “gold standard” Cochrane review was definitive proof that PPE is ineffective at preventing COVID-19 infection. The Editor-in-Chief of Cochrane, Karla Soares-Weiser, had to issue a correction of their disinformation:
Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.
It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive. Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask-wearing itself reduces people's risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.
The lead authors are two "EBM" academics with zero experience in engineering science and are wildly out of their depth, conflating airborne and droplet transmission of viruses. The COVID-era studies they cherry picked have sample sizes far too small to infer any meaningful result, alongside numerous other flaws, yet were included anyways because they conformed to the conclusion the authors were trying to construct - the opposite of how the scientific method is supposed to work.
"The unspoken belief behind much of this is 'if your knowledge doesn't conform to what we consider 'high quality gold standard' evidence, we will choose to ignore it.' Apart from the petulance, it's an incredibly ignorant assertion." -Matt Oliver (sameo416 via Bluesky)
Is this "gold-standard" behavior? It infers that The Medical Establishment™ under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will do what he has done for decades - start from a conclusion & work backwards to justify their unscientific decisions, no matter how devastating the consequences for the American public.
In truth, "gold-standard" is an empty qualifier in which The Medical Establishment™ will dictate what is and isn't factual science, in line with their regressive crusade against vaccines. This is a political project to seize control over the facts, pinning "Gold" badges on "evidence" that reinforces their opinions, instead of rigorous dedication to scientific inquiry.
The public cannot let themselves be deceived by such dishonesty.
Part B: “Evidence-Based Medicine”
The phrase "Evidence-Based Medicine" (EBM) is incredibly loaded and manipulative on its own. Left unsaid is the suggestion that doctors are practicing "Feelings-Based Medicine," or that public health officials were implementing non-pharmaceutical interventions from the basis of "Emotions-Based Medicine" in 2020. It grants a select few academics incredible sweeping authority over science as a whole with little in the way of checks-and-balances. This is about power, not science or saving lives.
One "Cochrane review of masks" author, Carl Heneghan, is a "Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine" at Oxford. He is also attached to Collateral Global, a dark-money propaganda outlet that spreads misinformation about vaccines and NPIs. If the scientific evidence supported Heneghan's views of letting new viruses burn through an unvaccinated population, why would he need to attach himself to a crooked propaganda outlet? Sadly, Carl’s prioritized his feelings over the facts.
"For any question where RCTs would be unethical, impractical, or too costly, the EBM model *by* definition says we can never have anything better than 'low quality' evidence."
-Dr. David Gorksi via Twitter (gorskon)
Obviously, you would like your doctor to make decisions and give recommendations based on the best evidence available. The structure of EBM is a pyramid, which is ironic considering the history of the Great Pyramids as religious structures to entomb all-powerful pharaohs beyond reproach. While the real world is complicated, the EBM model is simple in its structure: entire bodies of evidence are immediately invalidated by a single systematic review or meta-analysis, no matter flawed the paper or politically motivated the authors are.
The "Cochrane Review of Masks" is a prime example of this. Just listen to the lead author Tom Jefferson in a February 2023 interview:
"...they could have randomized half of the United Kingdom, or half of Italy, to masks and the other half to no masks. But they didn't. Instead, [The WHO] ran around like headless chickens."
This is a completely absurd and unscientific statement, suggesting a wholly unethical RCT: who would volunteer for a study in which they're assigned to the control group and left unprotected against SARS-CoV-2 in Spring 2020? Would this be enforced by the police? It's a wholly unserious demand for a completely impractical RCT that will never happen. This is what qualifies for "Evidence-Based Medicine" thought: making impossible demands of scientists to jump through an absurd series of hoops in order to have their research validated by academics who explore science in the abstract of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
In the eyes of EBM zealots, there is no meaningful rebuttal to their proclamations - only irrational heretics who reject their sacred decrees, branding them "Covidians." Deployed by RFK Jr's Medical Establishment, this is a recipe for disaster that we're already witnessing play out in their war against the COVID-19 vaccines. By forcing vaccine manufacturers to jump through unprecedented and unethical hurdles (Reuters) to release an updated COVID-19 vaccine to the public, this gives the ever-evolving SARS-CoV-2 virus a greater opportunity to kill & disable. In the eyes of RFK Jr. and his ilk, those casualties simply aren't worth preventing or didn't happen.
Rebranding Attacks on Doctors & Scientists
We've spent enough time laying the foundations of our core thesis: "Gold-Standard Evidence Based Medicine" is an empty rebranding of the anti-vaccine movement, granted legitimacy by credentialed academics claiming dominion over all of science, purely from the abstract of a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. This isn't about science, but power over others.
Just listen to Tom Jefferson casually disparage the Swiss Cheese model of layered mitigations to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission from the same Feb. 2023 interview:
"I like Swiss cheese to eat - the model not so much...it's predicated on us knowing exactly how these respiratory viruses transmit, and that I can tell you, we don't know...There's no evidence that many of these things make any difference."
This quote was celebrated by Tracy Beth Høeg, who is now sabotaging vaccines at the Food & Drug Administration under Marty Makary. Problem is, literally every part of it is false. By early 2023, it was widely known for years that SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne, socially transmitted virus exhaled via aerosols by those infected with COVID-19, a vascular multi-system disease. Secondly, there is a growing mountain of evidence (PAI) which shows how various non-pharmaceutical interventions such as respirators and air filtration prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission.
An arrogant old man, hiding under the brand of "Evidence Based Medicine," publicly disparages hard-working scientists from the comfort of his own ignorance. Sitting behind the safety of a keyboard and insulting scientists is the sort of behavior that is celebrated by other “EBM” academics like Vinay Prasad of UCSF.
This is precisely what HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is doing now to sabotage America's health, with Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya and John Hopkins' Marty Makary aiding him in this regressive revival of vaccine-preventable diseases. If we are to resist, we must be brave enough to call out "Gold Standard Evidence-Based Medicine" for precisely what it is: unscientific drivel from the willfully ignorant who seek to disparage actual scientists, by assigning themselves unearned authority over subjects they refuse to learn a damned thing about.
Nobody should fall for this failed re-branding of tired old anti-vaccine tropes.
The Pandemic Accountability Index is entirely supported by reader upgrades and one-time donations. At 35% off for annual subscriptions (~$35 USD) until May 15th, now is the best time to support independent journalism as The Medical Establishment™ ushers in a new Dark Age of vaccine preventable diseases upon American families.