Reactions to Polosa Study: The (Gl)ANTZ are coming out of the woodwork

[AgentAnia]

SG posted a comment to Dr. Polosa's study on PLOSone, to which Dr. Farsalinos replied, a PLOSone editor jumped into the fray. The brouhaha here:

PLOS ONE : accelerating the publication of peer-reviewed science

"Velvet Glove Iron Fist" posted a response to the ANTZ reply (http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/)m among which:

I will let the statisticians argue about this technical point, but it is richly ironic to see Glantz dismissing a finding on the basis that it can only be shown with 90 per cent, rather than 95 per cent, confidence. I have written before about the way Glantz defended the Environmental Protection Agency when, in 1993, it dropped the 95 per cent confidence interval and replaced it with a 90 per cent confidence interval for its meta-analysis on secondhand smoke. Without doing this (and various other tricks), the EPA could never have found a correlation between secondhand smoke and lung cancer.

When the EPA was criticised for lowering the burden of proof, Glantz said that quibbles about confidence intervals was "hairsplitting that only professors care about". He also said: "I know that scientifically it's widely used, but there is a strong body of thought that people are too slavishly tied to 95 percent."

And speaking of the (Gl)ANTZ, D[short for Richard but ECF censor doesn't like his name] Puddlecote chimed in on his blog as well (http://dickpuddlecote.blogspot.co.uk/) about the ANTZmanic response to the latest 18% US smoking rate:

Possibly because the quite insane Glantz hates them so much that his view of them is a stunning example of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and shouting very loudly. He wants to see them [ecigs] banned because he claims you can die from passive vaping. He also believes that all the billions of cigarettes that are now not smoked are just a figment of your imagination

I suppose we knew this had to come sometime. The massive uptake of e-cig use - along with the heavy evidence of smokers quitting in droves as a result - were always likely to make a dent in smoker prevalence figures, it was a curiosity to see how an industry which has lived the high life on pharma patronage was going to react to e-cigs doing the job that they have demonstrably failed to do in recent years.

Well now we know. They'll just claim the success as their own. Simples.

Has there ever been a more corrupt movement than the one devoted to full prohibition of tobacco or anything that looks like it? Sinking so low as to applaud themselves for the achievements of a phenomenon they are desperately trying to ban is scandalous, cowardly and shameful.

 

[AgentAnia]

Smokey Joe posted this info on the Legislation Forum. Many good comments there.

See post #15 and following comments. http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/fo...lini-who-twitter-my-response.html#post9948930