FROM J C

Having been proved right times one thousand, I take no joy; I feel only that familiar kind of annoyed satisfaction tinged with parental concern, the way you feel when a small child is told not to play with the fire wand — twice! — and then suddenly flames off his little eyebrows.

I told them so. A wild, uncontrollable tornado of backlash has now been unleashed, and the smug so-called experts are all sitting blithely in its path, like idiots, daydreaming and plucking at daisies, not realizing they’re about to be snatched up, badly shaken, and rudely deposited under somebody’s house in Kansas with their trousers irreverently hauled up in knots around their lying little necks.

Treasonous Archfiend of Pseudoscience and unkempt celebrity grifter Peter Hotez recognizes the danger. Maybe not the full scope of the danger. But Hotez wrote a horrible, self-pitying book last year (that nobody is reading) side-splittingly titled, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning.” Okay, Peter. Whatever.

Hotez’s authorial tour (or more likely his P.R. team) prompted the publication of some truly horrible fake-news propaganda, like this ludicrous headline from the corrupt Canadian Broadcast Company back last September:

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(Wait. A pediatrician? Are you kidding me? My first gobsmacked thought was, who in their right mind would leave their children with Peter Hotez? I’d bet my next three paychecks that disheveled doctor doesn’t see any kiddies as patients at all, that’s just another in a long series of lies. But I digress.)

And, “a scientist’s warning?” Please. Give me a break. That’s all they’ve been doing for the last four years, warning us about a million fake crises that never materialized. If only Peter and his cronies had listened to a lawyer’s warning. From mid-2020 I was telling them as often as I could that, while they could ram their unwanted public health ‘science’ down our throats as pandemic mandates and emergency edicts, eventually there would be a reckoning.

Welp. Their reckoning cruise ship has sailed up to the dock and is now ready for boarding. Time to go.

Hotez was partly right about one thing. There’s an ‘anti-‘ movement afoot, all right, but it’s not anti-science. It’s anti-expert. And since they themselves broadened the definition of “expert” to include just about anyone with a post-graduate degree or university job, the target zone is, as they say, rich.

You will recall, I’m sure, last month’s humiliating self-owns by Harvard President Claudia Gay and Penn State president Liz Magill. One way of thinking about what happened is the diverse academics were mauled by an unforeseeable pro-Israel zeitgeist that popped out of nowhere like a career-killing Jack-in-the-Box. Or, maybe they were exposed as woefully underqualified DEI hires, fuzzy-minded hypocrites, and overpaid flim-flam artists.

But there’s no escaping the fact that, before the pandemic Gay and Magill would have gotten away Scott-free with their arrogant refusals to give straight answers to the questions from dull, non-PhD-having Congresspeople. Instead, they pranced prettily into the propeller blades because credentialed experts have no trust residual to draw on anymore. Nobody likes them. Nobody trusts them. They were wrong about everything.

In other words, everyone is fed up with academic experts who think they are better than everybody else just because the media fawned over their every word during the pandemic. They are now experiencing a rude awakening

I can offer no more recent evidence of the tsunami of reckoning washing away the edifice of fake expertise than yesterday’s Harvard Crimson story headlined, “Top Harvard Medical School Neuroscientist Accused of Research Misconduct.” It’s bad. A Harvard darling, a so-called expert and top medical science research professor, now stands credibly accused of having falsified (Portlanders: that means made up) his data and having plagiarized other people’s images and illustrations, in over 20 of his papers during a twenty-year period. Over once a year on average.

Meet prolific plagiarist “Doctor” Khalid Shah. If that’s his real name:

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The Crimson story suggests the doctor may have taken a few shortcuts, you know, to make sure his papers popped and so that he would get the “right” answer.

Who knows how much the alleged cheating contributed to Shah’s meteoric career? While other academics toiled away, following the rules, not obtaining the astounding pro-pharma results like the not-so-brilliant Dr. Shah did? Real science is a lot harder.

Shah’s deceit was discovered by data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik. Ms. Bik is every woke academician’s worst nightmare. She is a “real” expert with a talent and a passion for sniffing out academic fakesters. Nowadays Elisabeth uses A.I. and reverse image searching to help, but she’s written guides explaining how you too can help expose fraudulent Harvard doctors. According to Liz’s bio, her exposé work has resulted in 1,069 Retractions, 149 Expressions of Concern, and 1,008 Corrections (as of last November).

If you’re a science type, here’s a link to Elisabeth’s blog post on her investigation of Dr. Shah’s ‘work,’ if you can call it that.

For everybody else, according to the Crimson, Bik found 44 different examples of made-up data in Dr. Shah’s papers between 2001 and 2023. But the “most damning” problems were from Shah’s 2022 paper in Nature Communications (it had 32 other authors, but Shah was the lead author). Bik said Shah’s 2022 paper contained figures and images stolen from seven other papers (written by other scientists) plus some images copied straight off the websites of two scientific product vendors.

For instance, one of Shah’s pinched pictures came from an online catalog by R&D Systems, which makes scientific research antibodies. Shah did not give credit to R&D Systems for using its image in his 2022 article. Instead, Dr. Shah claimed the image was from his own work and — get this — he edited the picture’s labels to show a completely different antibody than the original.

Totally fake. Fake, fake, fake fake fake.

“This is a really unusual sort of thing that I cannot imagine how this happens by accident,” drily noted an independent professor who reviewed Bik’s findings for the Crimson.

Harvard again! What is obvious beyond denial is the bigger movement afoot: the anti-expert movement. Ms. Bik’s helpful labors are but one small special forces unit in the army of discontent that Peter Hotez can see coming through his smudgy, pie-shaped eyeglasses. Mark my words. Their downfall will be so complete that before this is over, they’ll be claiming they were set up.