It's for the public good.

Once again the medical profession has not covered itself in glory, with a news report yesterday that medical studies are being skewed by so-called professional study subjects, people who misrepresent their health conditions or treatment history in order to take part in paid studies:

For researchers, these so-called 'professional study subjects' are much more than a nuisance. Their deception can ruin the chances of an otherwise effective agent reaching the market, potentially dashing the hopes and jeopardizing the health of real patients living with a variety of acute and chronic illnesses.  

Misrepresentation of medical conditions, failing to accurately disclose the medications they are taking, or fabricating a clinical response to an agent in development can also skew skews results — in some cases enough to invalidate outcomes and even halt further research.

Isn't that just swell. Another case where the hard science of medicine looks as hard as a crème brûlée.

I joked about this stuff earlier in the week, but it's pretty serious. It's not like it was ten years ago when the much-beloved Dr. Anthony Fauci said not to bother with masks, as reported by Andy Larsen in the Salt Lake Tribune:

On Feb. 29, the U.S. surgeon general begged people not to buy masks, saying they were “not effective in preventing general public from catching #coronavirus.” On March 8, Dr. Anthony Fauci went on “60 Minutes” and said “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

Andrew Klavan notes that this whole coronavirus thing has gotten politicized, which we all know, and how terribly stupid it is. He says his non-political daughter would just like to know how to protect her family, and he agrees. But somehow in our current climate, nothing is allowed to be apolitical, certainly not a massive health crisis in an election year. And public health officials like the execrable 1,200 who signed the pro-protest letter have done more to set back the cause of public health than every anti-vaxxer on earth put together.

Here in New York, everyone seems to love Governor Sonny Corleone, who has the blood of thousands of old people on his hands for refusing federal hospital help and shoving sick people into nursing homes. 

This is no joke or exaggeration: We have a local nursing home, and during flu season that thing is shut down tight as a fly's rectum to any visitors. But during the huge and deadly Chinese Death Virus plague, Andy stuffed sick people in the same place, like the grandmother of a friend of mine. She had her own apartment, but when she got COVID-19 they sent her to the nursing home, where she died. And who knows how many more died with her, after she brought her share of the virus in. National Review actually got this wrong when the editors wrote:

Most disastrously, Cuomo and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy both ordered nursing homes to take back patients who tested positive for the virus, unleashing catastrophic death tolls in both states’ nursing-home populations.

Evil-Eyes Cuomo didn't just send nursing home patients back to the nursing homes; he sent people who didn't even live at the nursing home to the nursing home. A nursing home that in saner days wouldn't have allowed anyone in during flu season, symptomatic or not.

So at this point I would rather trust the five-year-old in the corner house than any so-called public health official in the country. At least he's a nice kid, and would want to help me. These idiots may have entered the field of public health hoping to help others, but they wind up helping nothing but themselves to the spotlight and the public trough. And politicians are even worse, and even dumber, especially in New York.