Coronavirus and Science There is a lot of information circulating about the COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and a lot of misinformation. To tell them apart, you need to understand how science works.
Who can we Call a Credible Expert and Who Not?
Why do scientists change their minds? In other words, how does scientific research work?
“Science is a process in which you keep questioning yourself and which leads to you constantly correcting yourself,” says Ulrich Diurnal, stroke researcher at the Berlin Charita. He also heads the QUEST Center at the Berlin Institute for Health (BIH). Diurnal and his colleagues are responsible for quality management in biomedical research at the BIH. In other words. Coronavirus and Science research about research.
Although the investigative work is only an approximate process, this does not mean that all hypotheses or opinions carry equal weight.
Anecdotes of this kind can initially cause astonishment. For example, Someone recently shared that “a midwife friend saw many miscarriages after getting a coronavirus shot.” The woman is a midwife. She must know!
Midwife or not, such an anecdote or observation can at best be the starting point for further investigation. “You can certainly generate a hypothesis from an anecdote,” says Darnel. “However, this needs to be verified in controlled studies before a causal relationship can be established,” he adds.
Incidentally, a connection between vaccination
and the rate of spontaneous abortions could not be proven, despite more than 8,700 million vaccine doses vaccinated worldwide.
- Many studies with incorrect results were evaluates and withdrawn during the corona pandemic.
- Many studies with incorrect results were evaluate and withdrawn during the corona pandemic.
- She organized skepticism and self-criticism.
So it’s entirely possible that the midwife’s observation was the result of a human mechanism known as confirmation bias. This confirmation bias leads us to believe information confirming what we have already assumed.
Nobody is immune to such a process: “On the other hand, it only helps to be the devil’s advocate,” says social psychologist Roland Imhoff, who researches conspiratorial thinking at the University of Mainz. It’s about consciously taking a position that contradicts one’s own opinion.
Given that science is far more aware than most deniers of the possibility that they are wrong, they will likely investigate the issue of miscarriage further. “Organized skepticism is a norm in science,” explains Ulrich Diurnal, adding: “Knowing that we can be wrong in our results and conclusions, we scientists are fundamentally skeptical. Even to ourselves.”
Every scientific publication must therefore face criticism from the professional world. The scientific community evaluates research results with keenness.
“Organized skepticism also implies that the limits of good studies are revealed at the end,” says Diurnal, for example, and mentions that certain aspects were not taken into account.
Science has its Limits.
It sounds strange, but it’s straightforward. Science doesn’t try to prove that something is true. “It’s much easier to dismiss a hypothesis as false,” says Diurnal. “The assumption that swans white holds until the first black swans sight,” he explains.
If the goal of science were to test a hypothesis, that is, to prove that the assumption is valid, you would have to look at all the swans in the world. It can never rule out that the researcher missed a swan.
German virologist Christian Dorsten
The virologist Christian Dorsten has a good reputation in Germany. He has been researching coronaviruses for a long time.
Not all Experts the Same
Our ability to mimic the experiments and calculations performer in a study is limit. Ultimately, it’s about trust.
Roland Imhoff and his colleagues Pia Lamberts and Olivier Klein tested this trust in experts in a study: people quickly attracted to conspiracy stories trusted a hypothesis, mainly if a scientist supported it. The content of the view was secondary.
In Germany, for example, the virologist Christian Dorsten enjoys great trust because he involve in the discovery of SARS-CoV-1 in 2003 and had been researching Coronavirus and Science ever since. He has also published extensively on SARS-2. Christian Dorsten’s publications must also be critical of this
