Well, full marks for honesty I guess but aren't you just proving my point? You haven't read his article or engaged with his argument at all, but he must be a c

Well, full marks for honesty I guess but aren't you just proving my point? You haven't read his article or engaged with his argument at all, but he must be a crank because you can't stomach the implications if he was right. A cursory inspection of the first few paragraphs shows that (a) it's about 2021 so definitely not "outside COVID" and (b) it's another example of what I was pointing out: he is looking at government data that looks pretty concerning and reacting to it in a rational way. Your only argument he's not rational is that "vast swathes" of science would be invalidated if he's right, therefore he must be a crank. That's not even an argument, is it? 1. Some of the biggest leaps forward in science have come from invalidation and correction of deeply fundamental science. That's why Einstein is famous. The potential to invalidate pre-existing scientific beliefs is pretty much a pre-condition for a study to be interesting. 2. Vaccine efficacy is a tiny sub-area of the overall scientific enterprise. If everything people believed about vaccines was disproven conclusively tomorrow that'd certainly be far less than 0.1% of all scientific knowledge. 3. Your heuristic is totally unable to correct handle or react to groupthink or bad incentives. The entire field of virology claimed that there was no possible way SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab and anyone who claimed it could was spreading conspiracy theories. Those same scientists were simultaneously writing private emails saying a lab escape was definitely possible and even looked likely. You were the sort of person who was successfully fooled by their conspiracy, and maybe still are. Fundamentally, your attitude here is poisonous to the search for truth that defines science to begin with. If you can't be bothered evaluating their arguments then don't express opinions on them.