Moon of Alabama - It's time to say goodbye--- in which we debunk a "debunking"

Thirdly, and finally, I would like to add a few words about professionalism, integrity and the ethics of journalism. Journalistic ethics are not really different from the natural decency with which one hopes everyone seeks to comport themselves.

It is unseemly, we can all agree, to attack someone and give them no chance to defend themselves. For example, blocking someone on twitter and continuing to bad-mouth them or their work when they can offer no refutation, is not generally speaking "the done thing". Likewise, it is basic professional practice that, if you intend to refute someone's work, you inform them of this. It would usually be considered right to offer them space to reply.

Likewise selectively quote-mining is always considered bad form.

Claiming that "It makes little sense to review and refute the whole mess", and choosing to "concentrat [sic] on the 6 of the 8 [sic]"Take Home Messages" might seem, at first glance, to be an effort at maintaining brevity. However a more cynical reader might point out that, in doing so, MoA has chosen the only section of the text with no hyperlinked sources.

Throughout the original 5,000 word article there are over 60 linked references, the majority to academic journals and peer-reviewed studies. Bernhard does not refute one of these sources, in fact he doesn't even acknowledge their existence. Instead choosing to attempt to refute 75% of the article's conclusions, whilst ignoring 100% of the arguments and facts upon which those conclusions are based.

Lies by omission are poor form, you could even call them the hallmark of hack journalism.

With all that said, let us turn our attention to the task at hand. I will address each of Bernhard's criticisms in turn, firstly quoting the original article authored by Dr Jeanmonod, then Bernhard's response, and then my thoughts. Dr Jeanmonod has been informed on MoA's attack on his work, and has given his blessing to us to make a response; while we don't speak for him, we hope he can approve.

1. CORONAVIRUSES, COLDS, SARS AND MERS

In the original article for OffG, Dr Jeanmonod wrote:

"1. Corona viruses are one of the viral agents of the common cold, which, just like the flu, invade the whole planet every year. They cause largely widespread, mostly benign, yearly pandemics of respiratory tract infections."

MoA's response fits a familiar pattern - a rather pedantic nitpick, and then rather dishonest conclusion:

MoA: "There are seven distinct corona viruses that infect humans. Four of those can cause the common cold. The infections are generally mild. At times they have more severe consequences like pneumonia. The infection fatality rate for these four corona viruses is estimated to be about 0.1%."

This is broadly speaking true. It also doesn't, in any way, contradict anything Jeanmonod says.

This, however, is a misleading and irrelevant tangent:

MoA: "The three other corona viruses, SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2 are very different beasts. They cause very severe symptoms in a significant numbers of the infected people. The infection fatality rate for SARS was 9% and for MERS it is even 37%."

Equating SARS and MERS with the other four coronaviruses he already mentioned neglects an important difference: The four "common cold" coronaviruses cause around 15% of the world's "colds". That is literally 100s of millions of cases every year. Conversely, there have been only 10,617 officially recognised cases of SARS and MERS combined in over 18 years.

Clearly, Jeanmonod is justified in claiming the vast majority of coronavirus infections as "mostly benign".

SARS and MERS, themselves already the subject of hysterical "global health scares", have fatality rates based on such small samples as to make them meaningless. They are suffering from the same problem the Sars-Cov-2 outbreak was suffering from back in spring - we have only hospital admissions to go on. We have only severe case data.

There have been very, very few seroprevalence studies done on these viruses, thus we have no data for how widespread these viruses are. How many asymptomatic infections for SARS or MERS have there been? We don't know. How many mild cases dismissed as "the flu" or "colds" etc.? We don't know.

However, even if we accept the high fatality for SARS and MERs, that is irrelevant, which Bernhard himself admits in the next sentence"

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