Before the Covid pandemic spread across the world, I considered myself to have a pretty sceptical attitude toward public authority. Too many times, I had seen reputable institutions collapse under the weight of their own corruption. Too many times, I had seen politicians chase after popular causes only to reverse course when the winds of public opinion shifted. Too many times, I had seen high-level actors in churches, financial institutions, media, or political parties fail as stewards of vitally important public goods.
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It was not that I believed all public authorities, all of the time, were corrupt or incompetent. But I had seen enough incompetence and corruption in high places in my lifetime to understand the truth of the adage, “power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Authority is necessary to solve coordination problems, and to hold bad actors accountable. But insofar as it involves handing power to some actors over others, it generates opportunities for arrogant, inept, and self-serving actors to lord it over others. And the best of us can succumb to the temptation to use positions of power to enrich ourselves or indulge our egotistical fantasies at the expense of others.
A Shocking Global Experiment
So it should not have come as a complete surprise to me when public authorities in medicine, science, and government, not just in one country, but across much of the globe, abandoned principles of impartiality, caution, evidence-based inquiry, and constitutionalism, to impose the most dangerous and large-scale social and medical experiment in human history. But it did take me by surprise, for two reasons.
First of all, in spite of my entrenched scepticism about human power and authority, I assumed that the division of political power, and the institutional and philosophical diversity built into the international system would make it extremely unlikely for all or nearly all governments and medical and scientific establishments across the West to lead citizens en masse over a cliff in lockstep.
Secondly, I discovered, retrospectively, that I had unconsciously carved out a few exceptions to my rule against placing a high level of trust in powerful actors. I had little difficulty imagining ministers of government abusing their posts for personal gain, or accepting a bribe. But I was generally disposed to believe that in matters of public health, where matters of life and death were at stake, there would be a convergence of goodwill and competence.
Faith in Science and Medicine Shattered
In spite of my reluctance to trust public figures without putting them to the test, I was nevertheless inclined to believe that doctors, scientists, and peer-reviewed authors in scientific journals would tell the truth and show intellectual integrity and rigour during a public health crisis. I - perhaps naively - tended to assume that scientists would hold each other accountable for their assertions, and would be led by the very practice of science to be fundamentally truthful about a matter as important as the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.
But my naive pre-2020 faith in science, doctors, and public health officials would soon be in shreds. I would soon be confronted with the cold, hard truth that science and medicine are no less vulnerable than other spheres of life to being co-opted by ideologues and corporations, and are not the infallible benefactors of humanity that they are frequently represented as. The truth is, there is no such thing as “Science” and “Medicine.” There are only human scientists and medics, who are just as corruptible as the rest of us.
A Personal Wake-Up Call
One of my personal wake-up calls was late in 2021, when I was invited by a friend to give an informal talk to a group of professionals on the topic of expert knowledge.
The topic of vaccines came up, and I suggested that people’s resistance to the Covid vaccines could be explained by the fact that they had a worse safety profile than other vaccines on the market, judging by the spike in adverse event reports. I also pointed out that people who had already had Covid had already developed an immune response, and therefore had little reason to submit to a novel vaccine. The response by at least two of the doctors present encapsulated, for me, all that had gone wrong with the medical profession - or at least leading voices within it.
One of the doctors in the room basically told me to keep my mouth shut, lest I might corrupt young people or dissuade them from taking a life-saving vaccine. He offered no scientific counter-arguments to any of my claims, and I later discovered that he was neither an epidemiologist nor a vaccinologist, just a medic who could not stand hearing a dissenting scientific opinion from a person without a scientific degree.
Another doctor announced in a grave and authoritative voice that the Covid vaccines were perfectly safe, “according to a vaccine expert friend” of his. It was very surprising to me that a trained medical professional, who professed an interest in science, would express such unreserved confidence in the long-term safety of vaccines that had been in existence for barely two years, and in circulation in the general population for around a year.
Delinquent Gatekeepers
This incident was a microcosm of what I observed throughout the pandemic: medical professionals and scientists treating dissenting views with contempt, ignoring inconvenient data, assuming “the Science” was unanimous and indisputable on complex matters, and expressing opinions on unsettled questions with a confidence that you would expect from an ideologue but not from a genuine scientist.
Of course, this was not an indictment of the entire medical and scientific profession. I have known doctors and scientists, both personally and on social media, who are extremely open-minded and truthful, and understand and embrace the practice of evidence-based inquiry, even when it points against the conventional beliefs of their profession. I have seen individual doctors and scientists speak out against the gatekeepers of their profession on sensitive matters like vaccines, lockdowns, and school closures, putting their own prestige and professional future in jeopardy.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that many of the most powerful gatekeepers of the scientific and medical establishment were, at best, delinquent in their duty to care for the public interest, at worst prepared to actively persecute and villify dissenting colleagues for challenging the official Covid narrative. The fact remains that regulatory authorities that should have known better, such as the USA’s Centre for Disease Control, were pushing the Covid vaccines hard, even for young people at negligible risk from Covid-19, in the absence of convincing long-term safety data. Many people died or suffered serious and debilitating vaccine injuries needlessly because of the overly hasty and sloppy approach of regulatory authorities to the vaccine rollout.
The same could be said for lockdowns, that high-level scientists defended enthusiastically with almost no regard to their insidious collateral harms. The few brave doctors and scientists who spoke out against controversial pandemic measures, such as Dr Jay Bhattachary of Standford University and Dr Martin Kulldorff, formerly of Harvard University, were shunned and dismissed as “fringe epidemiologists” instead of being engaged with respectfully by their colleagues.
False and Unsupported Assurances
High-level scientists and public health officials gave confident assurances to the public of numerous things that were either false or only supported by weak or mixed evidence:
(1) We were assured by the head of the USA Centre for Disease Control, Rochelle Walensky, among many others, that the Covid vaccines were “safe and effective.” Indeed, the CDC continues on its webpage to say that “Covid vaccines are safe and effective.” This was a completely naive guess early in the pandemic, since it was unsupported by long-term safety data. It is now either a lie or a proof of scientific incompetence, given that it is now well established that the mRNA vaccines are associated with an alarming level of heart inflammation, especially among young men. It was criminally reckless to give the public confident, unqualified safety assurances in the absence of long-term safety data, and it is extremely disturbing, and frankly scandalous, that an organisation as influential as the CDC continues to recommend these vaccines indiscriminately, even for children, given what we now know about Covid vaccine injuries.
(2) We were assured in a rather blasé manner by numerous governments and public health officials, as well as the CEO of Pfizer, that the Covid vaccines would prevent or substantially reduce transmission, even though they were never properly tested for their ability to prevent transmission, as a Pfizer representative has admitted before the EU Parliament. The whole messaging coming out of Western governments was, “go get vaccinated to protect your granny.” That was essentially a piece of shallow public relations or wishful thinking, as we later discovered, since reliable protection against transmission, it turns out, lasted for a number of months at best.
(3) Dr Anthony Fauci, one of the most influential public health “gurus” alive today, did a complete flip-flop on the question of mask efficacy, announcing out of the blue in early 2020 that masks were an important tool of disease control for the general public, in spite of having given confident assurances to the contrary just a few months earlier. Many other public health authorities followed suit, and designed public campaigns that claimed masks saved lives, a claim that could only be supported by cherry-picking some mask studies and ignoring others.
(4) Public health authorities recommended draconian lockdowns that inflicted untold damages to economies, healthcare systems, and the mental and physical health of citizens, in spite of the fact that almost no pandemic protocols actually contemplated such severe interventions. These recommendations failed conspicuously to consider the collateral harms of such a massive and dangerous social experiment. That was criminally negligent and it is hard to explain that so many governments innocently made such a colossal and costly mistake, repeatedly, over the course of 2020-21.
I could go on, and talk about the misuse of PCR tests, the hasty implementation of vaccine passes for vaccines that were not properly tested for either safety or efficacy against transmission, the refusal of public health authorities to permit the experimental use of repurposed drugs with excellent safety profiles, the persistence of school closures in spite of accumulating evidence that schools were not major hotspots for Covid transmission, and the inexplicable decision by public health authorities in places like the United States to approve the Covid vaccines for emergency use in children, a cohort at minimal risk from Covid-19, needlessly endangering children’s health.
So the next time I hear the words “public health” and “authority” in the same sentence, I will be doing a lot of background checks and independent research to make sure I am not being sold out to the pharmaceutical industry, or being manipulated into complying with irrational and inhumane rules invented by virtue-signalling politicians and second-rate scientists.
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Great article. As the expression goes, normally, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts- as you eluded to regarding institutions of science and medicine. They used to hold each other accountable. But alas, like a giant bag of what was once good apples, a few spots of rot affected the whole lot, turning everything into a heap of slimy smelly sewage.
We are not naive to have once trusted, for the most part, these institutions. But if there are still people who haven’t become aware of the insidious nature of the deceit and corruption, it’s time to take a closer look.
2020 two major events. Loss of
trust with CDC, health care “experts” and the msm media became one side biased propaganda outlets.