It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
Thomas Sowell
I have written before about Marion Koopmans’ court jester, Maarten Keulemans.
Now I will address Koopmans herself, triggered by her comment that I do not have a Google Scholar list.
Marion Koopmans does.
That is why I will question Marion about her enormous scientific knowledge and skills. About everything that, partly due to her, has happened to our society in the last year and a half. About all the suffering she and her OMT have caused in our society. In all its silliness, ignorance, and arrogance.
Remember, Marion, when you had to call your own microbiology lab to find out that two genes were used for rt-PCR in Erasmus? And that you had to call Marc Bonten to learn that three were being used in the UMC Utrecht? And that it showed that being a virologist you don’t even know your own tools?
And do you remember, Marion, that you were unable to answer the question of how things actually work with terms like sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, the number of false positives and false negatives when using the rt-PCR as a diagnostic? And that you were bamboozled when you were asked what to do if one of the genes on the rt-PCR was positive and the other negative?
Or have you repressed that all of a sudden?
And do you recall that concepts like the positive and negative predictive value, the number of false positives and the number of false negatives depend on the prevalence of a disease? And do you realize that in a population without a ‘gold standard’ – the disease itself – you can’t determine those parameters at all?
And while we’re on the subject: what do you actually know about diagnosing? What do you know about the properties of diagnostic tests and how to determine these? What do you know about the relativity and value of diagnostic testing in a clinical setting, without ever having conducted anything in patient care yourself?
Because, when it comes to clinically diagnosing, I am the authority, and NOT you, dear Marion Koopmans. I’ve been doing that for twenty years, and I’ve read everything I can about it. To be able to diagnose properly, I don’t need a silly Google Scholar ‘list’. What experience and knowledge have you ever acquired in clinical diagnosing, apart from diagnosing signs of aging and morning stiffness in Saint Nicholas’s horse, or detecting a runny nose in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
I am not a scientist, dear Marion. I am a craftsman. I always have been, and I want to stay one. People who ply a craft do not need an H-index. They don’t need Google Scholar either. They do not need ‘citing clubs’ to mutually quote each other’s pseudo-scientific trifle in order to artificially jack up their H-index even more.
Craftsmen perform something useful. They really do. They maintain something. They fix something. They create something. They diagnose something. They treat something. In Belgium, during the two years it took until a new government could be formed, normal life continued as before. Whereas in Palermo, Italy, when the garbage collectors went on strike for a week, the city turned into a huge garbage dump, making normal daily life almost impossible. The rats literally ran through the streets. That’s the difference between a shit job and a bullshit job, dear Marion. If tomorrow, you, and your entire research group are suspended because it turns out that you have been tinkering a little too passionately with the influenza virus and suddenly saw bats fly, nobody will notice. No one at all. Even if you were never allowed to go back into your labs, nobody would be bothered by it. But if the nurses or cleaners from Erasmus quit tomorrow, Ernst Kuipers can close the doors that same day. And he himself will not be missed for a second either.
Job and Bullshit job. I suggest reading David Graeber again.
I really may hope that the bloody elitist left-wing clique, which includes yourself, will have nothing left to eat promptly after bone heads like Jesse Klaver and Rob Jetten have harassed even the last farmer out of our country. I hope that, if you have a spacious villa built as reward for your many lucrative side jobs, you will find a Pole who is all thumbs. Resulting in your front door falling out as when you, drunk with power, accidentally fall against it. Jobs and Bullshit Jobs. Valuable or Worthless.
Science to me is just a tool, usually often even blunt and useless. For years, the classics in the field of neurology have been more helpful to me in solving a patient’s problem, than medical “science.” The statins that Big-Pharma shoved us and our patients down our throats with trickery and deceit, with the consequence that every patient after suffering a heart attack or stroke – up to a very old age and per protocol – will find this unnecessary medication in their pillbox every single morning. Until they die. The alleged efficacy of beta-blockers, entirely invented by a professor of cardiology from the Erasmus Medical Center. Yes, your Erasmus Medical Center. The same Center from which your former head of the virology department, Ab Osterhaus, tried to convince the nation that the swine flu was life-threatening. He failed to do so. But you did succeed.
So, now you have a reputation to protect. And you are doing that really well.
Furthermore, I consider that you, likewise, know very well that your research group produces pseudoscientific gossip for the larger part. Read the paper by John Ioannidis again: “Why Most Research Findings are False”. Since then, the significance of a ‘Science in Crisis’ has only increased. You and your research group are no exception. The university being a place for free and critical thinkers is ancient history. Most of the research being conducted at a university in modern times is null and void. Today’s science consists largely of superfluous gimmicks, carried out by scientists drifted away from society who have nothing better to do than conduct experiments without any social value, as long as they can get funding for them. The scientist as a modern Storyteller, who no longer travels around like in the Middle Ages, but who today spreads his fantastic pseudology at lightning speed through the World Wide Web.
Being a craftsman, I don’t have to write a dissertation and publish yet another booklet that no one reads except the PhD committee members, who generally only read the summary. The others, being colleagues, friends, and family, only read the theses insert, the only part of a dissertation that is (sometimes) worth reading. The number of dissertations in the Netherlands alone is now so large that one can effortlessly build a paper copy of the Chinese wall, with every brick – the dissertation – costing society 70 to 90 thousand euro. Public money that disappears into thin air, and for which people with a shit job must work hard. Note that of more than 99% of these doctorates, the dissertation ends up on a bookshelf to just collect dust, until this little booklet, like all the others, at the end of the career disappears into a box and is thus permanently forgotten.
Paper art thou, dust thou shalt gather, and in the wastepaper bin thou shalt end.
An estimated 750,000 ‘scientific articles’ have now been published about the corona crisis. Most of them are only suitable as paper cement to seal the cracks and seams of the academic Chinese wall. And have you read even a fraction of those articles? Or do you only read the scaling studies from your own pseudoscientific pressure cooker? Do you at all ever read anything other than the abstracts from your own research group, to then just add your name as the final author, without even understanding anything about the article itself? Just to show off an even higher H-index, and having an even longer list on Google Scholar? And maybe to get even more lucrative side jobs offered?
Notice, for example, the article that you had praised by Marc Lipsitch on your request, in order to market your tainted merchandise as ‘important data’? A pre-print, of which the methodology rattled so concussively, that it could be heard as far as Britain? As a result, Claire Craig, pathologist, and data analyst, mercilessly filtered the frills and labeled the article as ‘a terrible paper’. And while we’re at it, this lady is throwing more meaningful information out into the world every day than you have in the entire past year and a half. Moreover, it appears that she does have the necessary knowledge to say something meaningful about this crisis, something that you have shown very little in the past eighteen months.
By referring to Google Scholar as an argument for my lack of knowledge, you try to use the authority argument. Normally a valid argument, provided that the subject you comment on, actually belongs to your expertise. Please check the argumentation doctrine again.
Anyhow, you, Marion, have devoted yourself to the science of the square nanometer, called virology. Therefore, about science and society on the square meter or square kilometer, you know nothing at all.
What do you know about complex social issues? What do you know about the social, economic, and psychological consequences of face masks, lockdowns, and curfews, being a modern cavewoman of a small research office in Erasmus? If you can’t think of the answer yourself, I’ll do it for you: nothing, absolutely nothing. Not that it hinders you in the least to open your big mouth about these subjects too, declaring your opinion as the supreme truth. And you have no idea what an enormous amount of misery, poverty, gloom, anger, and sadness you are responsible for. I may sincerely hope that one day, you will be held accountable for it all.
To top it all off, you claiming to be a ‘scientist’, along with the other members of the OMT, following: Not a single advice from the OMT is substantiated with relevant scientific literature by you. We are left with your pompous nonsense, as you can easily sell it to the – for the greater part, gullible, ignorant, and completely devoid of any knowledge and skills – Members of Parliament, without any opposition. You can simply sell any fairy tale to political leeches like Jan Paternotte and Aukje de Vries, both suffering from the dangerous combination of zero intelligence coupled with boundless arrogance. For those people, finishing primary school was already a world-class achievement.
Everything you release to the world as ‘advice’ is – at best – no more than ‘expert opinion’, dear Marion, and has nothing to do with science. And with an ‘expert opinion’ it is generally still possible to discover on which scientific literature it is based. But when it comes to the advice of the OMT, we must guess on which wisdom given by God himself your advice is predicated. Even Van Dissel’s now famous ‘sphere graph’ lacks any justification, the data are incomplete, and a description of the methodology is missing. And even what can be discovered in terms of methodology, if at all possible, beats the already deafening clatter of your aforementioned trifle. Of course, for convenience, Van Dissel had ‘forgotten’ to split the reported number of infections in the distinct vaccinated and unvaccinated groups into infections within households, and infections outside of these households. How very convenient, since the OMT’s advice needed to result in an introduction of a corona pass.
Even the nitwit that was sent to the hearing by the RIVM to assist the stuttering State Attorney who, at the hearing had to explain to the judge what could actually be seen on the, as evidence presented color scatter plot diagram, during the summary proceedings of Maes et al. against the State, really couldn’t even begin to understand it himself and then managed to submit a black and white version to the judge. This good man hadn’t realized that the color legend of the dot matrix provided the essential information, and not the size of the dots.
That, dear Marion, is the level of the OMT. To burst out laughing if a reason to do so would still exist. Or to break down crying out loud, and believe me, the Dutch people have more than enough to cry out loud. To burst into tears for the stupidity that you and the OMT have spat out on the Dutch people. Because you suffer from a severe form of the halo effect; loosely translated: The illusion that if you have know-how of materials on a square nanometer, you can also say something meaningful about the rest of the world.
Still, even if you observe a concert pianist a hundred times, you don’t become one yourself. And even if you stand a hundred times next to a clinician who comes to a diagnosis, you will never learn it if you never practice it. However, when I see a clinician making the same mistake a hundred times, I start to question his diagnostic abilities and whether he has mastered diagnosing. Consequently, that is exactly why I, being a craftsman, can judge scientific articles without having to write them myself.
In all other respects, the OMT despises all people that are still conducting conscientious, diligent, and well-substantiated science, for instance renowned scientists like John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattachary, Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, with profound disdain. And, as a refreshing surprise, Alina Chan, who you probably know about by now. Lecturing at top institutes like MIT, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, four of the institutes in the top five of the QS World University Rankings 2022. These are people who do have something meaningful to say. Now, let’s have a look at the actual ranking of Erasmus on this list: My goodness, number 179.
Focusing on your second court jester, Pepijn van Erp, the stand-in for Maarten Keulemans, when he, sitting on his Beer-Bike, is heading towards the 5th Class Saturday Amateurs of the Association for Innocent and Contentless Science Journalists (VOIM), I performed a quick search for the Google Scholar list and Pepijn’s H-index.
The first is untraceable, the second 0. A nice symbol for this self-praising sewer rat, who needed eight years for his math studies, and even in that context still has nothing meaningful to say. Apparently, no one wanted to quote his bitter writings to give him too an H-index higher than zero. The sickening dumbass that, in reference to craftsmanship, is also null and void.
Pepijn van Erp, the King of the Attic of the Pseudosceptics. The great captain of the complacent but declining clique called ‘Skepter’, who, what irony, has remained utterly silent for the past year and a half, when completely unscientifically substantiated measures like the mask obligation, the lockdowns and the curfew occurred. As soon as it really involves science, and it asks for really destructive quackery, as committed by an outgoing government along with the OMT, Pepijn drops out and quickly disappears into his attic, back to his miserable existence as a frat boy, blustering in a vacuum.
You apparently need such a complete social misfit to prove yourself right and to give your ‘authority’ more prestige. A scientific hangdog whom you ask for support whenever you must once again enter the lion’s den of the ordinary people. You, being the great ‘scientist’, needing help from a pathetic professional nag, who in his Royal Attic can’t do anything else but nagging and humiliating people who actually do read, do have knowledge and do understand things.
There is no need at all for me to ridicule you as a scientist nor as a person. You very well show the ability to do that yourself.
You should have limited yourself to statements about subjects you understand: Knowledge on the square nanometer. But, in your megalomania, you didn’t do that. You should never have been allowed to escape from your laboratory, any more than your Chinese colleagues should have been allowed to take bats out of the Mojiang caves. You are a profound pole sitting turtle: you don’t belong on the pole called OMT, and God knows who put you there. You should have been kept confined in Erasmus, where you couldn’t do much harm. That would have been a real blessing for the Netherlands, but instead you became a curse for our society, the moment they let you go.
One last warning, dear Marion. Referencing the authors of an article on the halo effect, stating:
“A common response to a halo’s disintegration is expulsion. We expel the person from our midst. In some cases, this is necessary. Some criminal behavior makes further use of his or her good qualities impossible.”
It might be wise to keep that in mind. Because in the quacking advisory mud pool of the OMT, you are perhaps the greatest walking disaster for our society.
And as long as I live, this note addressed to you will remain here. To serve as a witness – for anyone who wants to read it in the future – to the questionable and extremely evil role you played during this period.