Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is an epidemiologist working in chronic disease in Sydney's west, with a particular focus on diabetes. He writes a weekly blog on public health, policy, and science communication-particularly where these things go wrong. He has recently begun a PhD with the University of Wollongong researching the social determinants of diabetes, and is passionate about the social causes of our ill health. ¹⁾

NOTE →> ACSH is a legacy Front Group for big tobacco & toxic chemicals featured in San Francisco Uni's Legacy Tobacco Archive ^{2) 3)}

Contributor Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz Public health, policy, economics, ranting. Email gidmk.healthnerd@gmail.com

Gid is a chronic disease epidemiologist by day, and a chronic disease epidemiologist by night (it's a full time job). He works in the far-off land of Western Sydney, in the even farer-off land of Australia. He has fully embraced his nerdishness, and writes about those irritating little health issues that seem so complex but are actually wonderfully simple. He lives by the phrase; “cats; you either love them or you get out of my house”. Due to his growing social media addiction, you can easily contact him on Twitter or Facebook. ⁴⁾

Gideon is a health nerd who works as an epidemiologist (public health person) working in chronic disease. He writes about how simple health science really is, how we get it so wrong and why being terrified of that New Scary Study is usually a bad idea. If you want to get in contact, he is shamefully addicted to Twitter and would love to hear from you! ⁵⁾

Begun three years ago by Gideon Meyerowitz Katz (aka Gid M-K), the blog, which has some 14,000 followers ⁶⁾

Herd immunity for COVID-19 is still a terrible idea

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz - 1/09/2020 5:39:16 PM Epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz wants to dispel myths about herd immunity and coronavirus without a vaccine.

The basic idea of herd immunity is simple – if enough people are immune to a disease, then even if a person comes into the community carrying the illness, they won’t spread it. The few people who aren’t immune are protected because most of the people they interact with are immune and so they can’t get the disease.

This works really well if you have a vaccination for infections. Measles, for example, used to cause massive outbreaks and kill hundreds of thousands a year, but in most countries cannot spread further than a few kids these days. That’s herd immunity at work, and it’s a wonderful thing to see.

The problem with COVID-19 is that we don’t have a vaccine. To be immune to the disease, you have to get it and then recover, and we know that coronavirus kills a pretty scary proportion of people who get it.

We’ve known this for months. So why are people suddenly saying that herd immunity is just around the corner?

Speculative science There are actually two arguments that have been going around implying that herd immunity is almost here.

The first is pretty simple, and very obviously wrong: that 50% of people are already immune to COVID-19 due to pre-existing T cell reactions that were probably caused by other coronaviruses (the ones that cause the common cold).

This, the idea goes, means that only a few percent need to catch the disease to reach the herd immunity threshold, and so we’re probably already there and there’s nothing more to worry about.

While it’s a popular line, it makes very little sense for a number of reasons. If nothing else, we already know, from superspreading events, that most people can catch COVID-19 if they are exposed and that pre-existing T cells might make COVID-19 less deadly, but it certainly doesn’t make you immune. ⁷⁾

2021 Sep 22. doi: 10.1038/s41591-021-01535-y. Online ahead of print. The lesson of ivermectin: meta-analyses based on summary data alone are inherently unreliable Jack M Lawrence 1 , Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz 2 , James A J Heathers 3 , Nicholas J L Brown 4 , Kyle Sheldrick 5 Affiliations PMID: 34552263 DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01535-y (see Kyle Sheldrock)

Fraudulent ivermectin studies open up new battleground between science and misinformation

Studies suggesting ivermectin is an effective Covid treatment relied on evidence ‘that has substantially evaporated under close scrutiny’, fresh research shows

BBC by Melissa Davey - Fri 24 Sep 2021

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist with the University of Wollongong in New South Wales and a co-author of the Nature Medicine article, says he and his peers scrutinised more than a dozen studies that claim ivermectin is beneficial either as a preventive or treatment for Covid-19.

“Of those studies, we have serious concerns about four that have been made public, and several more which we are still investigating,” he says.

Some of the authors have failed to share data from their research, which Meyerowitz-Katz says “at this point is a very worrying sign”.

“There has only been one retraction so far, but I suspect more are coming,” he says.⁸⁾