Mirror mirror on the wall who is the worst expert of them all....
In New Zealand it's a tough choice
Sometimes it’s difficult to pick from New Zealand’s pandemic of the underwhelming, which “expert” is the worst. Baker seems to be the most afraid. Hendy seems to have the worst models, although to be fair epidemiological modelling seems to be a competition for who can be the most wrong.
But for me, Siouxsie Wiles takes the top spot. Set aside for a moment the fact that she actually takes pride in being woke although her first name is clearly cultural appropriation….I mean they don’t call the Washington Redskins the Redskins anymore, but a white middle class English women in New Zealand can name herself after a Native American tribe?
The general wrongness, ignorance, lack of humility and good old fashioned hypocrisy of Siouxsie Wiles is astounding.
Here she is complaining to the court about Auckland University not protecting her from people being upset with her because of all the misinformation she has spread in the last 21 months:
First off let me be very clear. As disastrous as Baker, Wiles, Hendy, Jackson and the other “experts” have been for tourism, children, the poor, the national debt, hospital waiting lists, women susceptible to breast cancer or the Black Ferns I in no way condone threats of, or actual physical violence, towards any of them. That way leads to the dark side.
But no one made any of them move into the public realm and if you really are a scientist, then you strongly believe in debate. And you should be prepared to take the punches.
And therein lies the issue. Wiles has been wrong about so many things from the start. Wiles was wrong about washing hands (it’s not spread by fomites and never really looked like it): https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018736608/the-key-weapon-in-the-covid-19-fight-hand-washing
She doesn’t seem to understand that virtually no one catches covid outdoors. Here she tells us we shouldn’t talk to people on the street or our neighbours, much like our Dear Leader Jacinda Ardern (and never mind community or mental health):
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/449441/covid-19-stay-away-from-people-when-you-re-out-of-your-house-warns-siouxsie-wiles
Perhaps Ardern and Wiles hang out together in Singaporean construction sites?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-transmission-cdc-number.html
She is wrong about masks and lockdowns….neither work much, if at all. But I’m not going down that rabbit hole. There is good evidence that lockdowns do very little especially the first one in New Zealand which could not have worked by Wiles’ own logic (more on that later). And all the studies on masks, whether they support their use or not, are low quality and riddled with confounding factors. If they do work (and I don’t think they do) the effect is tiny. You might as well have a pocket full of posies.
Finally for a taste of how poorly she understands the situation, here is her little rant about “freedom day” in the UK. Wiles seems to believe the young should put their lives on hold forever because her mother has a rare blood cancer. Although she seems to believe that the vaccine is as effective as our friends in big Pharma say it is (95% effective against hospitalisation and death was what they were saying at the time) she seemed to think that although it was high summer and all of the vulnerable were double vaccinated that people should still live under restrictions. The young have been hammered by this pandemic. Somehow society decided that their future was worth trading to keep old and sick people alive a few months or a year longer. And Wiles is right onboard:
https://thespinoff.co.nz/science/15-07-2021/siouxsie-wiles-boris-johnsons-dangerous-experiment-puts-everyone-at-risk
In the article she states:
“Boris Johnson and his government are embarking on a dangerous and unethical experiment all while spouting the narrative that it’s time people started taking personal responsibility for their health. From Monday, if people get infected, it’ll be their fault for not being cautious or vigilant enough. It’s a narrative that is grossly offensive given it will disproportionately impact those whose jobs and income put them in harm’s way versus those privileged enough to be cautious.”
Wow. The person who proposes lockdowns the moment someone gets a dodgy PCR test result, because they do nothing to her life except get her on the telly more, is the champion of the poor it turns out. And imagine expecting people might take responsibility for their own health. Outrageous.
And what happened after Freedom day. Around a 30% drop in cases:
In fact things never got as bad as under the restrictions until the Omicold came along.
If anyone can find her retraction or apology or any public sign of humility from her at all, I would love to see it.
Of course, everyone is wrong from time to time. Sure she is wrong a lot but that’s the nature of the world. I’m wrong, you’re wrong, we are all wrong at some stage. I may well be wrong in this piece of writing, time will tell. But that is a cornerstone of science. You can’t say a hypothesis is something. You can only say it is not everything else. And after you have eliminated every possible thing it couldn’t be…..then it must be whatever is left over.
Her being wrong is not the main problem, though it would help if her wrongness didn’t ruin so many lives. Her lack of humility and understanding of society, economics, history or business is not the problem. The real problem with Wiles is her efforts to actively supress debate via personal attacks and dodging any questions that don’t fit her opinion on what is happening.
For her to then get upset that individuals might feel animosity towards her, a person who has at times pushed forward pseudoscience and misinformation to support drastic measures with at best, very questionable science behind them, measures that have cost individuals their jobs, and / or their businesses and meant their kids have missed more than six months of school if the live in Auckland, shows how little she understands the society she has helped force these measures on.
This is not surprising. Wiles has no skin in the game. She can easily work from home. So can her husband who I understand is also an academic. She lives in a nice white middle class neighbourhood and her child will easily be able to keep up with her school on a shiny device with high speed internet. Her business has not been crushed. Her career unaffected, probably even greatly improved by covid. Who had heard of her before this mess? Her child will make up the lost school, and will have other chances.
But will the poor and hungry children living in South Auckland? Or Kaitaia? How many chances aside from public education, does a poor and hungry child have? Does anyone think they will make up the school they have missed? How? I don’t see any plan for it from the government.
We should be very wary of people who tell us to do things that harm us when they have no skin in the game.
She is also part of the pro covid vaccine brigade that are now wanting to push a vaccine with relatively rare but potentially very serious side effects, onto children under the age of 11, children who are at higher risk of drowning (https://www.hqsc.govt.nz/assets/CYMRC/Publications/Drowning-in-those-Under-25-in-New-Zealand.pdf) than dying from the original variant (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717) , which was more dangerous than delta and more still than omicron. She advises parents to definitely expose their children to a small but quantifiable risk in order to avoid a small but quantifiable possible risk. And the government is further forcing parents hands with mandates and social pressure. Are 11-year-olds and younger going to be able to go to movies, or play sport if unvaccinated? My 13-year-old son got vaccinated not because he wanted to or I wanted him to, or because he is at any risk, but because he couldn’t go to a public pool with his friends. That has nothing to do with science.
To what end does she recommend that children should take a definite small risk over a possible small risk? It’s possible they won’t get covid at all, and the longer they don’t the better treatments will be, and if the trends in virulence continue, the milder covid will be when they do get it. The vaccine is the same and the risk associated with it will stay the same, unless they make a better vaccine. And why would Pharma do that when they are still making so much off us pressuring this one on children?
And she wonders why people are angry with her?
Look at vaccination rates in the UK, including high booster rates (note rates are of the entire population not the eligible population so they largely mirror our rates):
And look at the explosion of covid from Omicron:
And then look at hospitalisations:
The vaccine is doing nothing to stop the infection, or spread, boostered or not. It may well be the reason that hospitalisations are low, but it may also be that Omicron is less virulent (which looks to be highly likely) and / or so many people have had covid in the UK that (far superior) natural immunity from infection is having an effect.
But the real crux of her hypocrisy is that she has made personal attacks on scientists, far, far more qualified and credentialed then either her or the other intellectual lightweight “experts” the mainstream media use in this country.
Here https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/20-10-2020/siouxsie-wiles-dont-fall-for-the-covid-contrarians she describes the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) as “unethical, eugenicist crap” and then describes the signatories as “a small number of fringe academics”. By describing them as eugenicist she puts them in the same camp as the Nazis, I suspect quite deliberately. Fair to say, she does not seem interested in entering into a good faith scientific discussion here. Or a fair appraisal of both sides of the debate.
She also makes the claim that the GBD are backed by “slick PR companies and libertarians in positions of power and influence”. She provides no evidence of this. Because it is likely something she made up. Slander is one word for that I believe.
She also throws in the accusation of them using “the big tobacco playbook”. Another attack which she again does nothing to substantiate. Because the crux of all scientific debate is making crap up about your opponent to assassinate their characters.
And it is interesting that she describes the GBD signatories as few in number and fringe. The Great Barrington Declaration is here:
https://gbdeclaration.org/
It has been signed by over 50 000 experts of various fields along with nearly a million everyday people. Including me (I’m an everyday person not an expert). There is at least 1 Nobel Laureate and the lead signatories are well published epidemiologists or public health researchers from some of the most prestigious Universities in the world. At the very least, they deserve to have their argument heard and engaged with on fair terms.
Wiles signed the John Snow memorandum. If you go to the John Snow website https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/john-snow-memo.html you see 6900 scientists have signed. And zero everyday people. Why were everyday people not invited to sign it? Is it because people like Wiles, think people like you and me are dumb? That our signatures don’t matter like hers does? What could us non experts possibly contribute to the conversation? It would seem all that matters is what the experts that she personally approves of think. Sounds more like a cult than science to me.
And 50 000 vs 6900? Also kind of sounds like Siouxsie is in the fringe group, no?
But the numbers don’t matter. And degrees don’t matter. Plenty of smart people don’t have degrees. Anyone with some critique can analyse any data and come up with a conclusion that might be useful. And not being an expert, not being bound by the limits and conventions of the thinking in a certain field, can actually be an advantage. And being able to bring unique perspectives from whatever field you occupy can disrupt things and bring real insight. There is too much obsession with “experts” (who seem to be largely media appointed anyway). How do we get thinking outside of the box when the only people who are allowed to comment are people who live inside the box?
Debate is a critical basis of science. There is no “the Science”. There is a spectrum of ideas, disagreements, evidence, data and theories that after a time amalgamate around a centre that most scientists, mostly agree on, most of the time.
How often have you seen any mention by Wiles, Baker or any of the rest of the fear brigade, of the high-quality data showing that lockdowns do little to flatten curves at colossal cost to society? She also criticizes others for cherry picking, yet I defy anyone to present an article where she has offered an in depth look at the critiques of lockdowns. Or masks. Or any of the other pseudoscience she supports.
Like this one (that includes John Ioannidis as an author who is one of the most cited scientists in the world):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33400268/
or
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7682427/
or
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0257455
How often have you heard anything in the media from our own Simon Thornley (of Covid Plan-B) who has criticised lockdowns from the start? Where is the debate? Or balance? Unfortunately for all of us, nowhere, partly because it is supressed by people like Wiles calling other scientists names, in an attempt to discredit them in the media. This is just dirty tricks and an abuse of her position of trust in the New Zealand public.
She claims to be pro-science. Yet she acts anti-science.
She also says this:
“The signatories of the John Snow Memorandum firmly believe countries can bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control without going down the herd immunity-by-uncontrolled infection route.”
That’s quite interesting as The Great Barrington Declaration talks nowhere about “uncontrolled infection”. She doesn’t seem to have understood the document. Perhaps she never even read it.
But what is really interesting about that statement is the language she uses. Because just in the last couple of weeks, Freedom of Information requests in the US have shown that Frances Collins and Anthony Fauci the same fun lovin guys who funded the gain of function research that likely bought covid to the world and who together, control nearly 50 billion dollars’ worth of research funding from the US government, had email exchanges talking about how they wanted to “take down” the Great Barrington Declaration.
Two of the three main signatories talk about it here:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-collins-and-fauci-attack-on-traditional-public-health_4187173.html?slsuccess=1
Collins and Fauci also described the head signatories as “fringe”. And in the article you can see that the authors of the GBD were confused by the media describing it as a “let it rip” policy as it is not what they meant or what it says, at all.
It sounds eerily like Wiles doesn’t it? Was she taking instructions from Fauci? I doubt he has any idea who she is. But the wording is a long way from “we need our best lockdown science guys to debate these people head on, lets hit them with the data”. Instead it’s about sabotage of debate, by name calling. Fauci and Wiles may not be connected but the playbook is the same. It’s been the same throughout this pandemic. Debate and reason left the room with all the hysteria and fear at the start. And suppression, dirty tricks, pseudoscience and cancel culture have taken the room.
Make no bones, Wiles, Baker, Jackson and the rest of the fear brigade are still in February of 2020. They haven’t moved on, while the data mostly has.
One final point on how anti debate (and science) Wiles is, comes from when I tried to challenge her on these things myself.
Not having much to do with Twitter before (I find it to be a bit of a cesspool to be honest) I waded in just so I could challenge her on lockdowns. This is a paper from The Lancet, about how marvellous the first lockdown in New Zealand was:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30225-5/fulltext
You can read where Siouxsie talks about “the lag” (which is the mystical two-to-three-week time that lockdown takes to have an effect) here:
https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2020/03/30/when-will-we-know-the-lockdown-is-working.html
So, I took the chart from the Lancet paper above (one she has referred to herself) and plotted “the lag” (also quoted by her) onto it. I am generous and use the minimum two-week period she mentioned, not three weeks. The peak in locally acquired cases clearly occurs around late March (I circled the area). This is about the time that level 3 and 4 started:
Look at that chart. Does it look to you that the curve begins to flatten after two weeks?
By Wiles’ own logic, the first lockdown could not have been responsible for “flattening the curve”. The curve had already flattened, virtually when we entered the lockdown. The two-week lag shows no correlation to a peak in cases. None.
It baffles me that no one in the media has ever put this chart to our Dear Leader. She may well have an explanation. It is bizarre no one has asked her for one.
Yet Wiles asserts again and again and again that the lockdown worked. Although it clearly didn’t by her own logic. Yet another 1984 moment in this disaster.
I put this to Wiles on Twitter. Without swear words as angry as this all makes me.
She mocked me with a Judge Judy rolling eye gif.
That’s ok she is a busy person and probably gets asked a lot of things.
Then she said “Tim must think that Swedens response was good”.
I do actually. Sweden currently ranks 44 in the world in deaths per capita.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
It continues to drop down that ranking as time passes. But Sweden always said it was a long game. They look to be right.
Sweden is ahead of most other European countries that used lockdowns, mass masking and school closures. It is even ahead of Austria which is currently in lockdown and has locked down the unvaccinated and only two places worse off than Holland where police are currently using dogs to attack lockdown protestors.
There aren’t any lockdowns or police brutality or protests in Sweden and their schools (up to 15 year olds) and kindergartens never closed. Which is the better outcome? That is probably up to nuanced debate. Not something Wiles likes to deal in. It would seem she was wrong about Sweden as well.
But I digress. I pushed Wiles further on our lockdown and how come the two weeks don’t remotely correlate with the lockdown and in the spirit of science she went into detail to help me understand how I had misunderstood the data, and the two week lag theory and provided me with some excellent references to think on.
Of course she didn’t. She just blocked me:
At least I don’t have to be on Twitter.
Wiles is a mediocre scientist. She hasn’t published or been cited much in the last 5 years. Citations are one of the main currencies of science. According to google scholar, she has been cited 3806 times in her career.
Jayanta Bhattacharya has been cited 12573 times, Sunetra Gupta 19210 and Martin Kulldorff 27141 times. Who are those three people? The three primary signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration. The ones that Wiles described as “fringe scientists” and “eugencists”. You could multiply Wiles’ citations by three and they would still be less than Bhattacharya who is the least cited of the GBD primary authors.
It seems brightly coloured hair gets you on the telly more than smarts.
She is not interested in debate and supresses views she does not agree with using personal attacks, slander or just plain ignoring them. She is in fact, the antithesis of what a good scientist should be; open to criticism, wary of group think, bias and echo chambers. She is part of the new religion of Scientism, where the “truth” comes from a few selected talking heads, or government decree and anything that does not fit “the science” is labelled “conspiracy theory”, or “denialism”, or “right wing”.
We should all stop listening to her.
Awesome read
But, she isn't an immunologist....she is a microbiologist