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The Chronicle of Higher Education published a thoughtful essay this week titled, “We Need Scientific Dissidents Now More Than Ever.” The sub-headline added, “The early artificial consensus around Covid’s origins is a wake-up call.”

We seem to be living in two worlds. Also this week, USA Today published a scathing diatribe against pandemic-era covid and jab misinformation on social media, headlined “Among those spreading medical misinformation during the pandemic: 52 doctors.”

So which is it? Do we need scientific dissidents now more than ever? Or do we need to put a cap in those 52 heterodox doctors?

USA Today’s article was reporting on a new “study” posted on the JAMA Open Network, titled “Communication of COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media by Physicians in the US.” They defined misinformation as anything varying from CDC pandemic-era guidance.

Because slavish, unthinking adherence to vacillating, politically-driven government propaganda is just what we want in a healthcare system.

The researchers, if you can call them that, “found” that a core group of 52 doctors were responsible for “most” of the non-CDC-approved misinformation. The major themes they identified included: (1) disputing jab safety and effectiveness, (2) promoting “medical treatments” without “scientific evidence” or FDA approval (i.e., ivermectin), (3) disputing that masks can prevent catching covid, and (4) an “catchall” category including things like “unsubstantiated claims virus origin, government lies, and other conspiracy theories.”

In their conclusion, the study’s authors recommended considering taking legal and professional action against these devilish misinformation superspreaders, to teach them a lesson and make sure only government-approved scientific information gets to the public. Legal and professional action against the doctors is, of course, already well underway, mooting their big point.

May they find themselves on the other side of the censorship microscope at some point. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

In contrast, the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education seemed to be making the exact opposite point. It began by telling the shameful story of heroic Vienna medical resident Ignaz Semmelweis, who in 1846 famously ran a test in the charitable childcare clinic where he worked, by asking doctors to wash their hands before working with patients. Patient deaths immediately fell by 90 percent.

In other words, Semmelweis was the guy who figured out hand washing. It was a big deal.

For that remarkable discovery, Mr. Semmelweis was made a doctor, promoted to the Academy of Sciences, and awarded the 1847 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Haha, just kidding! Actually, Semmelweis was ridiculed by the doctors, fired from his Vienna hospital, made a pariah and professionally unemployable, and driven out of Vienna entirely, persona non grata. He died broke in Hungary, in a psychiatric hospital, after suffering a severe beating by asylum guards.

I’m not sure if it would have been any comfort to him, but Mr. Semmelweis’ experience minted a term, the “Semmelweis reflex.” The article quoted intellectual and author Timothy Leary’s definition: the Semmelweis reflex is “mob behavior found among primates and larval hominids on undeveloped planets, in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished.”

USA Today’s researchers seem to be quite familiar with the Semmelweis reflex, just not in a good way.

The article continued by describing the revolting story of how during the 1960’s and 70’s, the scientific community identified fat — and not sugar, the real culprit — as the cause of plummeting American cardiac health. Since it turns out that it was a sugar lobbying group that single-handedly pulled off the coup, establishing incorrect scientific consensus as dogma for decades, harming who knows how many Americans, the Chronicle’s article observed:

Sometimes, a scientific consensus is established because vested interests have diligently and purposefully transformed a situation of profound uncertainty into one in which there appears to be overwhelming evidence for what becomes the consensus view. When a scientific consensus emerges via this accelerated process, the role of the scientific dissident is not, like Semmelweis, to carry out revolutionary science. The dissident’s role is to provide a check against epistemically detrimental and artificial consensus formation. Nevertheless, the challenges faced are similar. Never has this accelerated process unfolded with such success, and such fury, as in the case of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In its final paragraph, the Chronicle’s article landed on a vastly important point, a point the USA Today study researchers should be strongly encouraged to ponder. Here’s how the Chronicle put it:

The world isn’t simple, what the evidence shows isn’t always clear, and things are not always as they seem. So we owe the Semmelweisses of the world a debt of gratitude — for their diligence and their courage. This doesn’t mean we should believe every heterodox thinker that comes along. But it means we should strongly resist the urge to punish them, to censor them, to call them racist, and to evaluate their claims by, in Stewart’s words, “litmus-testing each other for our political allegiances.”

In other words, heterodox thinkers are an essential and necessary part of the scientific process. They serve as a check on consensus thinking, forcing the consensus to justify and prove their preferred hypothesis and not just sit around in an echo chamber of contented mutual agreement. Heterodox scientists also check government overreach — and how much better off would we have been, had there been more than only 52 such thinkers during the pandemic?

In other words, instead of running pseudo-scientific studies and USA Today articles condemning them, we should be thanking those 52 heterodox doctors.

Finally, the two groups of scholars — The Chronicle’s editors and the study researchers — evidence the battle lines between the establishment (CDC is gospel) brownshirts and the anti-establishment (heterodox thinking is good) counter-revolutionaries.

‘By virtue of not having acquired a certain set of letters after my name, there are certain areas of the world that are closed off to me. And I must therefore be obedient, not just to the scientists themselves, but to the power structure which they inform.’ ...

Once, the culture of Western Civilisation had at its core a form of wisdom that was transcendent of specialisation and capable of sifting and synthesising between the diagnostics and prescriptions of multiple disciplines. Now, more than three centuries after the dawning of the Enlightenment, we find ourselves at the mercy of a multiplicity of myopic specialisms, each of which may command the power and authority of the state in mandating its findings and pronouncements. ...

‘One of the things that is quite staggering about this culture is that there is a shadowing of knowledge. All knowledge is veiled, because it is the prerogative and the property of particular experts, and they alone have the entitlement to explain it. It really is a going back to the darkest days. The churches were once accused of obscurantism in relation to science. Well, this is a similar situation — far worse, I would say — because it’s happening at a far more basic level, so that people no longer consider themselves qualified to speak about anything in relation to certain areas and those areas are expanding exponentially all the time, as they’re being colonised by these new experts.

Before we start, let’s check in on the evolution of the mandatory pro-vaccine statement required for a study to survive peer-review. Spoiler: it’s getting watered down. Here’s how this peer-reviewed study phrased the obligatory endorsement:

The SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccines have been found to be safe in international studies involving hundreds of thousands of individuals (1–4), although very rare cases of adverse events have been subsequently reported.

One imagines with relish the twenty-one authors debating the precise wording of that sentence at great length. And, haha! First, they completely dropped the word “effective.” Sayonara! And even the word “safe” has been diluted; rather than just saying jabs are safe, as if it were common knowledge, these authors merely noted that “international studies” found the jabs to be safe.

In other words, they said it was safe. Don’t blame us.

All of these papers are held up, waved frenetically in our faces by hersterics and rulers who chant “Research shows we must trust The Science!”

End it. Formal publishing is not just useless, it’s downright harmful. And there is no need of it.

Science began with highly intelligent men writing letters to each other, and showing the copies around. A fine practice.

It kept the noise to a minimum. Formal publishing is now almost entirely noise. There are more than 8 million papers published a year now, a number going up and up and up. Nobody reads them. Why should they? They are almost all useless. Nearly all exist because, and only because, academics must publish or perish. Must.

If we eliminated formal publications, much of this persiflage would dry up, and our best and brightest would be able to concentrate on their own work, and not be harassed with “peer review” requests.

The only people who have respect for peer review are those who have never experienced it. As I always say, there is no surer enforcer of banal tepid watery content than peer review. Nothing better ensconces error and mandates Consensus. I cannot say it better than Alan Savory, who recognized peer review is academia and not science.

Nothing better ensconces error

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Alyssia Finley titled, “How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science.”

You don’t say.

The piece begins describing how last month, to his great credit, respected climate scientist and director of Berkeley’s Breakthrough Institute, Patrick Brown, publicly admitted that he’d censored one of his own studies to remove facts tending to disprove the current climate theory, so as to improve his odds of getting published.

Specifically, in an essay for the Free Press, Brown confessed that he’d left out “key aspects other than climate change” from his paper about the cause of California’s wildfires, because the omitted details would “dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.”

Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, lied and denied that the journal has any preferred narrative. But she also didn’t invite Brown to add back the omitted data, either.

Next the op-ed cited a September 11th, 2023 paper published in the JAMA Network titled “Peer Review and Scientific Publication at a Crossroads.” The researchers described a burgeoning crisis in peer review, explaining that the ‘academic papers game’ is getting infested with all kinds of cheating, and wrote:

Many stakeholders try to profit from or influence the scientific literature in ways that do not necessarily serve science or enhance its benefits to society. The number of science journal titles and articles is steadily increasing; many millions of scientists coauthor scientific papers, and perverse reward systems do not help improve the quality of this burgeoning corpus.
In addition, deceptive, rogue actors, such as predatory and pirate publishers, fake reviewers, and paper mills continue to threaten the integrity of peer review and scientific publication.
Even outright fraud may be becoming more common—or may simply be recognized and reported more frequently than before.

This op-ed isn’t the first criticism of the so-called “peer review” process, which some top scientists have long argued has become hopelessly compromised, and captured by pharma interests. The biggest problem, and threat to all our well being, a problem which became painfully obvious during the pandemic, is that government actors dangle grant money in front of unethical whitecoats to obtain fake studies supporting the officials’ preferred policy narratives. Even worse, they all conspire to prevent inconveniently-contradictory papers from ever being published in the first place.

But that’s Science! So shut up! What do you know? I bet you don’t even have a white lab coat.

"Kayfabe," a concept from professional wrestling where staged events are presented as real, offers a lens to understand how societal systems, from economics to politics, have similarly evolved to blend reality with orchestrated deception, challenging our ability to discern truth. ...

"You spat directly in my face and told me not only that it was raining but that I was a crazy person for thinking that you spat directly in my face." ...
"You cannot trust Harvard or Nature... the CDC or the NIH." ...
"You've got people running around who are calling themselves scholars who publish in scholarly journals and sit in scholarly seats, and you can tell what they're saying is completely wrong." ...

“Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated.”

It’s amazing that someone can have this level of insight in 2011 yet miss the biggest Kayfabe show when it turned up on his doorstep. I guess he was in good company with the likes of Chomsky and Klein to name just two. I’m grateful he now sounds more like a sane person again. ...

If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".

Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior. Such unwelcome sportsmanship which "breaks Kayfabe" is called "shooting" to distinguish it from the expected scripted deception called "working".

Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts. ...

Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated. Wrestling's system of lies has recently become so intricate that wrestlers have occasionally found themselves engaging in real life adultery following exactly behind the introduction of a fictitious adulterous plot twist in a Kayfabe back-story. Eventually, even Kayfabe itself became a victim of its own success as it grew to a level of deceit that could not be maintained when the wrestling world collided with outside regulators exercising oversight over major sporting events.

At the point Kayfabe was forced to own up to the fact that professional wrestling contained no sport whatsoever, it did more than avoid being regulated and taxed into oblivion. Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

Doctors Censored And Gagged From Truth Telling

How essential post-approval pharmacovigilance was undermined by our government

“There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice, and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action.” - Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) gag order 9 March 2021.

This reckless gag order has since been rescinded (called “superseded”) but it is too late.

Alison says: “This censorship is a threat to public health as it interrupts the drug safety reporting system”. This is undeniably true.

“Doctors were silenced as of 9 March 2021 with a gag order issued by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) and the Medical Boards. All medical professionals were threatened with disciplinary action if they raised concerns about the products. A website was set up to snitch on any who did.” ...

In addition, it is now widely known that governments used security agencies in concert with social media companies to track down and silence health professionals who dared to tell the truth of their experiences. This action deliberately undermined the traditional system of voluntary post-approval pharmacovigilance which has been fundamental in identifying safety issues for approved drugs and has led to the proper withdrawal of more than 100 dangerous drugs on safety grounds worldwide in the last couple decades alone. Thalidomide was a prime example in the 1960s. Without voluntary post-approval reporting of the horrendous effects of thalidomide, many more lives would have been lost and many more serious disabilities would have occurred. It is incomprehensible that governments actively sought to undermine the long established post-approval pharmacovigilance system which is fundamental in order to keep us safe. There is no valid excuse for this dereliction of duty. Shame on them all.

In the name of fostering diversity, hiring at STEM departments is increasingly done on the basis of identity, it being far more important to showcase Women of Colour Doing Science than to actually do science. The result of course is that the junior faculties of most science departments are now filled with half-smart ideologues more skilled at telling the diversity committee what it wants to hear (and of course, very skilled at being themselves diverse) than they are at long division. But then, since most research is fake, it doesn’t matter very much how skilled the researchers are at faking it. ...

Some think that the universities can be saved. There are valiant efforts to do so: to force hiring committees to stop requiring ‘diversity statements’ in faculty job applications; to force universities to adopt codes guaranteeing academic freedom and respect for freedom of speech; to force the resignations of professors caught in the most egregious academic fraud; even to close the most obviously polluted departments, gender studies being an egregious example.

This is noble, but a bit like trying to defibrillate a man who has just been shot in the chest. It isn’t so much a medical intervention as one of the stages of grief.

For centuries, “truth” was delegated to the ruling institutions of the time, and hence truth was simply the narrative which conformed to their interests. Then, during the enlightenment period a new idea emerged—that truth could be determined empirically through experimentation and data.

This in turn gave birth to the scientific revolution, and while not perfect (as vested interests would still try to make their “narrative” be truth irrespective of what the scientific data showed), scientific inquiry began shaping the direction of Western Culture, and in a rocky fashion gradually moved society forward, giving us many of the benefits we take for granted today.

Sadly however, the tendency of ruling interests to want to monopolize the truth never went away and we’ve watched a curious phenomenon emerge where science, riding on the social credit earned by the success of its revolutionary discoveries, has gradually transformed into something not that different from a state religion. Given that science was originally meant to be a way to move beyond truth being monopolized by the dogmatic institutions which ran society, it is quite tragic that science has become one as well.

As a result, science has more and more become the practice of “trusting scientific experts” and not being allowed to question their interpretations of the data—or even see it. This is very different from what science was originally intended to be—the collective endeavor of scientists around the world to put forth ideas and have the ones that stand up to scrutiny become the generally accepted standard. ...

Epstein was a moron and was ultimately disposable. Whether or not he’s still alive, as some believe, he’s all done as an international man of mystery and security-state blackmail procurer. But we can reasonably wonder: was science co-opted by the security state in 2005 using grotesque blackmail schemes? Did the spooks shift their other tech assets toward bio-sciences? Like Bill Gates? Is Bill now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CIA and working on vaccines and genetically modified mosquitos for the intelligence community?

I heard Epstein was not very smart, and not terribly good with people.