Last week, the Cochrane Collaborative was forced to walk back conclusions of a review by that had been spun in the media as proving that “masks don’t work.” Tom Jefferson himself has been problematic about vaccines for a long time, but the rot goes deeper. What is it about the evidence-based medicine paradigm that results in misleading conclusions? https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-cochrane-mask-fiasco-how-the-evidence-based-medicine-paradigm-can-produce-misleading-results/
@gorskon Good write up. As I've argued on my blog, I think the ultimate source of the problem is Nullism - the belief that the scientific method mandates that you have a Null Hypothesis that wins by default, until/unless it is disproven. EBM then ramps up the default thinking to 11. OTOH, if you don't let a hypothesis win by default, but instead carefully weigh all evidence for and against, then there would be no role for an evidence pyramid.
