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SUMMARY:Data agnosticism in medical emergencies: a tale from the past - Da
 vid Teira (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia)
DTSTART:20210311T153000Z
DTEND:20210311T170000Z
UID:TALK156424@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Helen Curry
DESCRIPTION:Historians of statistics have mostly focused on the algorithms
  for data analysis in clinical trials. We do not know much yet on the hist
 ory of those data: for instance\, how the data should be formatted to be c
 onsidered credible. Our claim in this paper is that without prior agreemen
 t on what counts as proper data\, not even 100 years of hindsight will clo
 se a controversy on a medical treatment. Our case study will be Jaime Ferr
 án's three submissions to the Prix Bréant\, an award of the French Acade
 my of Sciences to incentivize research on cholera. Ferrán\, a Spanish ind
 ependent physician\, claimed to have discovered a vaccine in 1884. The fol
 lowing year\, he tried it on thousands of patients during the cholera outb
 urst in Valencia. The results of his trial sparked a controversy in Spain 
 and abroad on the vaccine's efficacy\, that continues today. Some historia
 ns consider Ferrán's experiments persuasive enough and accuse the Academy
  of chauvinism for not awarding him the Breant. Our counterfactual questio
 n is: what sort of data would have closed the debate? Drawing on archival 
 records of the award\, we suggest that Ferrán failed to format his data i
 n a way that conformed to the emerging standards for data presentation at 
 the Academy. This led the Bréant jury to remain agnostic about Ferrán's 
 vaccine efficacy. As the controversy on Ferrán's vaccine shows\, this epi
 stemic agnosticism is rarely appreciated. Furthermore\, with an unfolding 
 emergency\, it is often considered morally indefensible. Yet\, our lack of
  agreement on Ferrán suggests that\, without a prior agreement on what co
 unts as proper data\, no amount of moralizing will bring about a consensus
  on experimental outcomes.
LOCATION:Zoom
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