[jazzyk]

What to do when you have two very different opinions coming from experts:

- Anthony "I am The Science" Fauci

or

- Dr Malone (mRNA inventor)?

Who to believe?

Difficult to say, but these days, sadly, the first (and prudent) thing to do is to follow the money. While credentials matter, the first thing I check when I read a paper/publication is who funded the work.

[spion]

Doesn't really work. Social media grifting can be really profitable - it brings in audience, clicks, ad money. Even just audience is enough as long as you can come up with something to sell later.

Even if the original paper was an unfunded honest mistake, grifters can find a way to profit from spreading it especially if its novel and sensational.

[tripletao]

All claims I've seen that Malone is "the" inventor of mRNA vaccine technology trace back to Malone himself. He possibly has some real claim to be "an" inventor, among the top dozen or so contributors of early advances that ultimately enabled the present vaccines. It's also possible that the contribution he's claiming as his own was basically his supervisor's idea (Felgner's), and Malone is just the one who did the lab work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

Either way, I'm pretty sure Malone's claims about vaccine safety are dangerously wrong. After literally billions of doses of mRNA vaccines, the adverse effects he's been warning about simply haven't materialized. The rate of those effects isn't zero, and surveillance at mass scale has identified adverse effects that the original trials weren't powered to detect; but for now, the risk/benefit ratio for the vaccines looks highly favorable. Malone's baseless assertions otherwise are causing real harm.

That said, please don't take anything above as a defense of Fauci or of censorship. While I'm pretty sure that Malone is dangerously wrong, this pandemic has repeatedly demonstrated that the mainstream consensus can also be dangerously wrong--so like the Royal Society, I'd rather tolerate false information from the contrarians than risk a false mainstream view that can never get corrected. That doesn't mean contrarians are automatically (or even usually) right, though.

"Follow the money" may sometimes be a useful standard, but I don't see the relevance here. Fauci appears to get his money from the government, where he's the single highest-paid employee but still earns less than countless anonymous tech workers. This seems more to me like a matter of prestige, ego and power for both men.

[berdario]

> I'd rather tolerate false information from the contrarians than risk a false mainstream view that can never get corrected. That doesn't mean contrarians are automatically (or even usually) right, though

I don't. I think it's reckless to tolerate contrarian information (and in fact, it's causing a much higher death toll during this pandemic) in public.

I agree that specialists should still be allowed to discuss contrarian information, via papers, peer review and the overall scientific process.

But should Software Engineers (like most of us here) really be warranted a platform, a listening audience on their ideas about virology?

[imbnwa]

What exactly is the "false mainstream view that can never get corrected"? I'm likely out of the loop to some extent, but WRT, e.g masks, that was retracted and corrected; vaccines prevent transmission/reception, that was retracted and corrected. What else am I missing, or is it simply that people don't like "flip-flopping", which is strange cause there wasn't massive outrage at the way "cigarettes don't give you cancer" was propagated, or Absestos, etc

[skybrian]

No, looking at funding is a terrible shortcut. If you can't study the papers yourself, maybe see what other scientists think of their work? For COVID there is plenty of discussion.

If you can't figure it out, hedging your bets is better than choosing a side.

[Jansen312]

I trust Malone way more. Fauzi has vested interest in continuing COVID measures. Check out his pay (higher than western leaders in the world). Check also his stock holdings. Still Fauzi has way more credibility than the entire WHO which has been a laughing stock for the past 2 years.

[rrrhys]

Why are you intentionally spelling his name wrong? It certainly doesn't add credibility to your argument.