Thursday 11 February 2021

The WHO investigation

into the origins of the Covid19 virus has come up with the conclusions most of us expected. 

It was always going to be the case that there would be no definitive answer as to where the virus originated.  At the same time we could be certain that China would not be held responsible.

China did not want an investigation. They delayed it as long as possible. In that time evidence, if there was any, could be "lost" and other evidence would be degraded. There might be enough around to raise some doubts but there would be nothing definitive. After that you "invite" selected people in and control their movements. That was always the way it was intended to be. 

I know almost nothing about viruses and how they develop, mutate, or get transmitted. I do know something about research in the social sciences and, from talking to scientists, I understand something about the way they conduct research. It seems unlikely that the "investigation" conducted by the World Health Organisation was carried out in accordance with the best research practices. Doubt about that has been widely expressed in scientific circles.  

"It's a nice little whitewash job Cat,"a colleague told me last night. He had phoned me to check a reference in a paper he is writing. He tends to be thorough about such things.

When I was doing the research for my doctorate I kept hitting what seemed like a brick wall. Try as I could I could not get the "right" results - the results my supervisors told me I "should" be getting, the results everyone was expecting. I kept being told there was something wrong with what I was doing. I remember my senior supervisor saying something like, "Look Cat there is a vast body of research out there which tells us that .....  Now, your job is to find out how... "

The problem ended up being quite different. The previous research was not telling us that at all. My "job" was actually something quite different. It was to find out why the children I was working with were responding in the way they were responding. What I discovered was not what was suggested I would discover but something entirely different. I had to provide the evidence for that, not for the previous "research out there which tells us that...."  For a short while Galileo was more popular with the astronomers of his day than I was with the small team of psychologists with whom I was supposed to be working.

And that is what we need with investigations into origins of the virus. I didn't set out to become unpopular. I was just going where the evidence was leading me. If I had been more experienced at doing research I might not have actually done what I did at all. It is entirely likely that I would have continued to build on a body of research which, while it still applies to some situations, does not apply to another. 

I am trying to be open minded about the results of the WHO research but it would be good to have more evidence. 


 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I was at university around 1970, one of the professors was distressed because he could not get the same results when replicating the latest “received truth” psychology experiments (so so the gossip that reached stage one students had it). I think, now, that this should have been used as a teaching tool. Similarly with your experiment - surely it’s not getting the same results that should lead to more research which would either find mistakes and been made, or extend knowledge. If people were happy with triangular wheels (which would have been better than none), we would have gone on using them (until the points wore off?).

I hope you can feel better about the copyright problem. Thanks for permission to use your post. I shall mention it and report back. (Do you think it is because knitting was/is “women’s work” so important things like copyright do not apply to copying patterns?)

LMcC

Anonymous said...

I should have written “...copying patterns for financial benefit”. Oops!

LMcC

jeanfromcornwall said...

May I reply to a point made by LMcC? Knitting is and for a long time was "women's work", but in times long gone, it was a craft in parts of the UK, and only men could learn, and belong, and use it as a livelihood. A man could be thrown out of the guild for revealing secrets. So yes, you are right on that point!