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COVID-19: The Pandemic that Killed Debate
Related: CCP Virus, ethics in medicine, gears of the machine, health, SARS-CoV-2 aka COVID-19 aka Coronavirus
Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it — Lloyd Chambers. That applies to climate science, COVID-19, and Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Repudiating rational debate on science is as ANTI-science as it gets, yet this attitude has become the new norm in not just the social programming networks (“news”) but it is being used to harass, intimidate and silence those in science and medicine who dare to disagree.
RE: The Doctor Is In: Scott Atlas And The Efficacy Of Lockdowns, Social Distancing, And Closings.
RE: Martin Kulldorff, professor, Harvard Medical School: Letter to the editor: Scott Atlas and lockdowns
RE: COVID-19: Great Barrington Declaration by Medical Professionals and Epidemiologists
RE: The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation
RE: Time to Steepen the Curve and Accelerate Infection of Low-Risk People
RE: AIER: “The Pandemic that Killed Debate”
Emphasis added.
AIER: “The Pandemic that Killed Debate”
October 6, 2020
Carl Sagan famously said, “the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” This wisdom has been sadly forsaken during the COVID19 pandemic, when one powerful narrative has taken not only the public, but the scientific community, by storm...
Even as evidence proving that lockdowns do not stop the virus rolls in by the truckload, the scientists who argue for a different approach are marginalized, censored, affixed with disparaging labels, and ostracized. Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was accused of “leading Sweden to catastrophe” and of “experimenting” on the Swedish people. Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt’s careful studies and models were labeled “lethal nonsense” as he weathered attacks left, right and center. John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most productive scientists, found his studies smeared and ignored. Sunetra Gupta, one of the world’s foremost epidemiologists at The University of Oxford, found that expressing her wide-ranging infectious disease knowledge suddenly made her “unethical and dangerous.”
The latest smear target is neuroradiologist and health policy expert Dr. Scott Atlas, formerly of Stanford. A longtime lockdown dissenter, his principal and latest offense seems to be agreeing to serve on The White House’s coronavirus task force...
...[WIND: read the Kulldorff letter and reply in the article]
...Professor Kulldorff received no reply to this offer, so The Soho Forum — a highly respected debate platform — took up the case, personally inviting the scientists to participate in an online, one-on-one debate via Zoom, taking the negative on this resolution:
To minimize mortality and optimize public health, the U.S. should implement a targeted coronavirus strategy that better protects the old and other high-risk groups, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives.
This offer was emailed to Dr. Philip Pizzo, the chief signatory of Stanford’s letter in opposition to Atlas, who replied simply: “Thank you for the invitation. We have conveyed what we have to say in our letter and do not have additional comments to offer.” From both a public policy and scientific standpoint, this blanket refusal to engage in discourse is concerning. When someone can level an accusation of dishonesty at a public figure, refuse to debate the substance with the accused, and suffer no consequences for this behavior, this stifles the free expression of opinions and ideas...
The alternative — some narrative-maker decides the information that will be provided, withholds contradictory relevant information, and forbids the defense from speaking at all— is fascism. It is tyrrany. It is certainly not American.
...
WIND: real science has been decaying for many years now. As an avid reader about science my entire life, I have watched an increasing intellectual corruption in publications like Scientific American and similar places—obvious confirmation bias and cognitive commitments having no scientific basis are readily found in the prose. Offhand statements lacking any proof is seen in far too many articles—this is persuasion @AMAZON technique and I read it all the time. Opposing viewpoints are simply not published. The “press” then amplifies this ten-fold, taking care to never discuss the other side.
Non-replicable studies: confirmation bias, selection bias, financial corruption, non-public data, falsifying data, excluding key factors (intentionally or through lack of imagination)—these all have led to a crisis in science.
Test-tube thinking: particularly in medicine, the failure to realize that the human body is a complex synergistic ecosystem with myriad feedback mechanisms and wildly varying “software” (genetics and epigenetics and biome), not a test-tube where single variables can be studied.
Financial corruption: look no further than the sordid history of the chimeric cholesterol hypothesis and the history of statins—see my see my recommended reading list.
Vast peer pressure: the very topic discussed above. And for example in climate science, where only a fool could expect to question the consensus and expect to secure grants or make a living. It has become an echo chamber with little or no discussion of the known and fully feasible solution for the Golden Age (eg Gen 4 Nuclear Power). Climate science is now so structurally corrupt that it is best seen as a religious movement—apropos the term “denier” as in “denier of the faith”. The issue is not about whether and how much the Earth is warming, it is about whether it can even be discussed without repercussion. So it’s a religion, not a science.
Collapse of independent medical opinions: very few doctors remain free to prescribe or treat as they see fit, or even to speak freely about some medical topics—employer pressure (fire at will), mandatory treatment protocols (many of which have little basis in science and are all about Big Pharma profits), insurance companies that enforce conformity and suppress practice out of the consensus, an total failure to improve health instead modern allopathic medicine focuses almost entirely on bandaids that suppress symptoms. Diabetes, obesity, heart disease and numerous other modern maladies have only gotten worse, and this is no accident but a fact of medical ignorance masquerading as science, for manu decades.
The hysteria about COVID-19 has turned a crisis into a total nuclear meltdown. The whole thing is as anti-scientific as I have seen in my lifetime.
