Denis Rancourt (French/English)

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Just as a resource if not noted prior (which is often in French or English), is Denis Rancourt, a Canadian PhD of physics who has a good handle on medical molding and jumps in with politics often enough. He has deeply looked at Covid.

From his website:

Bienvenue sur
Sur ce site web, vous pouvez apprendre à me connaître et trouver mes principaux articles et interviews dans le domaine des sciences, des politiques publiques et de la théorie sociale.

J'écris actuellement sur la médecine, COVID-19, la santé individuelle, le changement climatique, la géopolitique, les droits civils, la théorie politique, la sociologie ... et j'ai également écrit plus de 100 articles dans des revues à comité de lecture dans des domaines techniques de la science et de la technologie.

J'ai obtenu des diplômes de BSc, MSc et PhD en physique. J'ai occupé des postes de chercheur post-doctoral dans des institutions prestigieuses en France et aux Pays-Bas, avant d'être professeur de physique et scientifique principal à l'Université d'Ottawa pendant 23 ans.

Je suis un plaideur expérimenté qui se représente lui-même à plusieurs niveaux de tribunaux et dans de nombreux tribunaux administratifs, tant en Ontario qu'au Québec. Je suis chercheur bénévole pour l'Association ontarienne des libertés civiles (ocla.ca) depuis 2014.

J'espère que vous apprécierez ce site Web et mes mises à jour.

Traduit avec www.DeepL.com/Translator (version gratuite)

Welcome
On this website you can learn about me, and find my main articles and interviews in science, public policy and social theory.

I currently write about medicine, COVID-19, individual health, climate change, geopolitics, civil rights, political theory, sociology … and I have also written over 100 peer-reviewed-journal articles in technical areas of science and technology.

I obtained BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in physics. I held post-doctoral research positions at prestigious institutions in France and The Netherlands, before being a physics professor and lead scientist at the University of Ottawa for 23 years.

I am an experienced self-represented litigant at several levels of court and in many administrative tribunals, in both Ontario and Quebec. I have been a volunteer Researcher with the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (ocla.ca) since 2014.

I hope you enjoy this website and my updates.

Here is a French video interview and a discussion paper from April 1st, 2022 that may be of interest.


Here is the lead off of the written discussion:


Résumé : Nous expliquons d’abord comment les mesures - présentées comme des mesures de santé publique « contre le Covid » - appliquées autour de la planète doivent être considérées du point de vue de la géopolitique mondiale. Puis nous passons en revue les caractéristiques historiques récentes de cette géopolitique mondiale.

Summary: We first explain how the measures - presented as public health measures "against Covid" - applied around the world should be public health measures "against Covid" - applied around the world must be considered from the be considered from the perspective of global geopolitics. Then we review the recent historical features of this global geopolitics.

In English, Denis has a good "Critique of the Fisman CMAJ paper"


1651072576522_Numer_Psi_vs_eta_various_prop_unvax_R0_6.jpg

2022-04-27 ::: OCLA Statement on CMAJ Fisman et al. Article Claiming Disproportionate Infection Risk from Unvaccinated Population, and on Negligent Media Reporting​

Denis Rancourt, PhD and Joseph Hickey, PhD

Ontario Civil Liberties Association

OCLA Statement on CMAJ Fisman et al. Article Claiming Disproportionate Infection Risk from Unvaccinated Population, and on Negligent Media Reporting | OCLA

27 April 2022

The recently published article by Fisman et al. “Impact of population mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations on infectious disease dynamics: implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission” (Impact of population mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations on infectious disease dynamics: implications for SARS-CoV-2 transmission) has received disproportionate coverage in the mainstream media, which risks causing societal vilification of people who have refused the medical intervention aggressively promoted by governments and large corporations.

As scientists familiar with epidemiological modelling and actual epidemiology, we have carefully examined the article of Fisman et al. and find its main conclusion (that risk of infection among vaccinated people can be disproportionately attributed to unvaccinated people) does not follow from the model presented.

Fisman et al. concocted a new parameter, never before defined in the scientific literature, which they call “unvaccinated contribution to infection risk, Ψ”. Google Scholar has no other scientific article that defines this parameter.

Fisman et al. define their Ψ parameter as “the fraction of all infections among vaccinated people that derived from contact with unvaccinated people, divided by the fraction of all contacts [involving vaccinated people] that occurred with unvaccinated people”.

Fisman et al. then falsely claim that their Ψ parameter means the following: “Effectively, this represents a normalized index of the degree to which risk in one group may be disproportionately driven by contact with another.”

This incorrect characterization of their own parameter Ψ is the only basis for their main conclusion. It is incorrect for the following reason: the model is blind as to whether the “contacts” in the normalizing denominator of Ψ are infectious or benign, irrespective of vaccination status.

Indeed, by definition in the model, most “contacts” in the model are benign (not involving an infectious person and a susceptible person), whether vaccinated or unvaccinated.

This means that the normalizing denominator of Ψ cannot be assumed to represent “contacts driving infection”, as advanced by Fisman et al.

Fisman et al. are either incompetent or disingenuous.

It is easy to see that Ψ is a nonsense parameter in Fisman et al.’s own results:

  1. Their Figure 2A shows Ψ dropping dramatically with increasing reproduction number. This would mean that unvaccinated people threaten vaccinated people proportionately less when the presumed pathogen is more infectious. The state should not worry about unvaccinated people if the pandemic is sufficiently virulent?
  2. Their Figure 2B shows Ψ approaching large values as the mixing coefficient η approaches 1. This would mean that unvaccinated people are proportionately more of a threat to vaccinated people as the two groups are more and more isolated from each other, up to complete isolation. This is an absurd result.
In fact, the obvious parameter that Fisman et al. could have reported is the numerator of Ψ, which is “the fraction of all infections among vaccinated people that derived from contact with unvaccinated people”.

We plot this “numerator of Ψ”, for parameters used by Fisman et al., versus the mixing coefficient η, and for different population fractions of unvaccinated people, here (see figure above).

We see that there is no indication of disproportionate infections caused by unvaccinated people, and that the “the fraction of all infections among vaccinated people that derived from contact with unvaccinated people” is bound by the relative populations of vaccinated and unvaccinated susceptible individuals for random mixing, and goes more and more quickly to a value of zero as isolation between the two groups increases, as it must.

These are trivial results. The only way to get the simple model to say anything else is to concoct and misinterpret an ad hoc parameter.

We refrain from saying much about how distant the model actually is from reality, except to point out that Fisman et al. did not use the most relevant work of Singanayagam et al. (DEFINE_ME) whose detailed empirical study of transmission with the Delta variant shows the vaccine inefficiency value of 0.2 used by Fisman et al. to be incorrect. Singanayagam et al. find “The secondary attack rate in household contacts exposed to the delta variant was 25% (95% CI 18–33) for fully vaccinated individuals compared with 38% (24–53) in unvaccinated individuals”, which corresponds to a vaccine inefficiency of 25%/38% = 0.66. Fisman et al. did not cite the paper of Singanayagam et al., which was peer-review published 29 October 2021.

Finally, we are obliged to comment on the negligent media frenzy that ensued.

There is no way that a journalist could critically evaluate the subterfuge inherent in the parameter Ψ. Therefore, they should have recognized their limits and sought expert counter opinions before participating in their mobbing of unvaccinated people, especially since the Competing Interests statement has: “David Fisman has served on advisory boards related to influenza and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for Seqirus, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Pasteur Vaccines …”

Likewise, one has to wonder how the competent anonymous reviewers at the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) managed not to question the use and meaning of the unusual parameter Ψ.

Denis Rancourt, PhD

Joseph Hickey, PhD

Here is a video of near same:

 
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