Tag: Gagandeep Kang

A gentle push over the cliff

From ‘Rotavirus vaccine: tortured data analyses raise false safety alarm’, The Hindu, June 22, 2024:

Slamming the recently published paper by Dr. Jacob Puliyel from the International Institute of Health Management Research, New Delhi, on rotavirus vaccine safety, microbiologist Dr. Gagandeep Kang says: “If you do 20 different analyses, one of them will appear significant. This is truly cherry picking data, cherry picking analysis, changing the data around, adjusting the data, not using the whole data in order to find something [that shows the vaccine is not safe].” Dr. Kang was the principal investigator of the rotavirus vaccine trials and the corresponding author of the 2020 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, the data of which was used by Dr. Puliyel for his reanalysis.

This is an important rebuttal. I haven’t seen Puliyel’s study but Bharat Biotech’s conduct during and since the COVID-19 pandemic, especially that of its executive chairman Krishna Ella, plus its attitude towards public scrutiny of its Covaxin vaccine has rendered any criticism of the company or its products very believable, even if such criticism is unwarranted, misguided, or just nonsense.

Puliyel’s study itself is a case in point: a quick search on Twitter reveals many strongly worded tweets, speaking to the availability of a mass of people that wants something to be true, and at the first appearance of even feeble evidence will seize on it. Of course The Hindu article found the evidence to not be feeble so much as contrived. Bharat Biotech isn’t “hiding” anything; Puliyel et al. aren’t “whistleblowers”.

The article doesn’t mention the name of the journal that published Puliyel’s paper: International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine. It could have because journals that don’t keep against bad science out of the medical literature don’t just pollute the literature. By virtue of being journals, and in this case claiming to be peer-reviewed as well, they allow the claims they publish to be amplified by unsuspecting users on social media platforms.

We saw something similar earlier this year in the political sphere when members of the Indian National Congress party and its allies as well as members of civil society cast doubt on electronic voting machines with little evidence, thus only undermining trust in the electoral process.

To be sure, we’ve cried ourselves hoarse about the importance of every reader being sceptical about what appears in scientific journals (even peer-reviewed) as much as news articles, but because it’s a behavioural and cultural change it’s going to take time. Journals need to do their bit, too, yet they won’t because who needs scruples when you can have profits?

The analytical methods Puliyel and his coauthor Brian Hooker reportedly employed in their new study is reminiscent of the work of Brian Wansink, who resigned from Cornell University five years ago this month after it concluded he’d committed scientific misconduct. In 2018, BuzzFeed published a deep-dive by Stephanie M. Lee on how the Wansink scandal was born. It gave the (well-referenced) impression that the scandal was a combination of a student’s relationship with a mentor renowned in her field of work and the mentor’s pursuit of headlines over science done properly. It’s hard to imagine Puliyel and Hooker were facing any kind of coercion, which leaves the headlines.

This isn’t hard to believe considering it’s the second study to have been published recently that took a shot at Bharat Biotech based on shoddy research. It sucks that it’s become so easy to push people over the cliff, and into the ravenous maw of a conspiracy theory, but it sucks more that some people will push others even when they know better.

A question about India’s new science prizes

really deserving candidates

In a meeting chaired by Union home secretary Ajay Bhalla on September 16 and attended by senior members of the various science departments of the national government (DST, DBT, etc.), the Union government eliminated hundreds of awards given to the country’s scientists for achievements on various fronts and fields. Governing a country the size of India is bound to result in bloat, so it wouldn’t be possible to dismiss this move by the government out of hand. However, the three words above make an appearance among Bhalla’s many utterances in the meeting and they are worthy of suspicion.

The Indian government under Narendra Modi has regularly used vague adjectives to accommodate a diversity of possibilities instead of committing to one course of action over another. Perhaps the best known example is its use of the “national security” excuse to refuse answers to questions under the RTI Act, such as what the scientific payloads of the Chandrayaan 2 and 3 missions were or why the FCR Act was amended. Other examples include any assurance made by Prime Minister Modi, such as on the occasion he was forced to repeal the regrettable farm laws.

In December 2019, physicist Brian Skinner uploaded a preprint paper to the arXiV server in which he quantified the effect of a “prestige bias” on the professional trajectories of scientists who are subjected to multiple rounds of evaluation. I’ve had occasion to return to this analysis on multiple occasions because, to me, it arrives at an essential, irreducible truth of the world: that keeping the conditions of entry to some space vague doesn’t just allow for arbitrary decision-making but inevitably causes such decision-making. As Skinner wrote:

For example, two applicants for graduate school may have similar grades and exam scores, but if one candidate comes from a more prestigious university then their application will, in general, be evaluated more highly. This ‘prestige bias’ arises naturally, since metrics like grades and exam scores are imprecise measures of a student’s ability, and thus the evaluator looks for any other information available to help with their decision. Belonging to a prestigious group suggests that the candidate was ranked highly by some other evaluator in the past, and this provides a prior expectation (like a second opinion) that biases the decision in their favor.

Vagueness when the stakes are high can’t be innocent, especially once it has been identified, because the more powerful can and will use the resulting uncertainty to their advantage. Here as well, when Bhalla has determined that a small number of new prizes should replace the plethora of the now-extinct prizes and that they ought to be given to “really deserving candidates”, it brings to mind the “really deserving” corporations that are winning contracts for mines, ports and defence manufacturing, the “really deserving” businessmen whose wealth has increased disproportionately to that of their peers, and the “really deserving” ministries and departments that are receiving an increasing fraction of the Union government’s budgetary allocations.

Granted, drafting and holding a fixed definition of the term ‘deserving’ can only be bad for the people and the government both. But when any doubts or uncertainties about its ambit are likely to be abused by the government – awarding India’s top honour for scientific work to, say, Appa Rao Podile or M. Jagadesh Kumar over Gagandeep Kang or Rakesh Mishra – our options are limited to a meaningless science prize that represents, above all else, the BJP’s successful subversion of another science-related space (after the IITs) for the nationalist project versus a prize that is much more meaningful but whose terms are rigid and unresponsive to the times.