Science has long been regarded as a
stronghold of logic and reason. Scientists don’t draw conclusions based
on emotions, feelings or sheer faith. It’s all about building a body of
reproducible evidence. Well, that’s what it used to be, but as
technocracy and transhumanism have risen to the fore, it has brought
with it its own form of science — “scientism” — which is basically the
religion of science. Sheldon Richman with The Libertarian Institute
writes:1
“The popular slogan today is ‘Believe in science.’
It’s often used as a weapon against people who reject not science in
principle but rather one or another prominent scientific proposition,
whether it be about the COVID-19 vaccine, climate change ... to mention a
few ...
The clearest problem with the admonition to ‘believe
in science’ is that ... well-credentialed scientists — that is, bona
fide experts — are found on both (or all) sides of a given empirical
question ... Moreover, no one, not even scientists, are immune from
group-think and confirmation bias ...
Apparently, under the believers’ model of science,
truth comes down from a secular Mount Sinai (Mount Science?) thanks to a
set of anointed scientists, and those declarations are not to be
questioned. The dissenters can be ignored because they are outside the
elect. How did the elect achieve its exalted station? Often, but not
always, it was through the political process ...
But that’s not science; it’s religion, or at least
it’s the stereotype of religion that the ‘science believers’ oppose in
the name of enlightenment. What it yields is dogma and, in effect,
accusations of heresy. In real science, no elect and no Mount Science
exists.
Real science is a
rough-and-tumble process of hypothesizing, public testing, attempted
replication, theory formation, dissent and rebuttal, refutation
(perhaps), revision (perhaps), and confirmation (perhaps). It’s an
unending process, as it obviously must be ...
The institutional power to declare matters settled by
consensus opens the door to all kinds of mischief that violate the
spirit of science and potentially harm the public financially and
otherwise.”
Technocracy News also added a comment2 to Richman’s article, noting that “Scientism is at the root of both technocracy and transhumanism, indicating that the revolution waged against the world is religious in nature.”
Whether the war against humanity is truly underpinned by religion or
not is open for debate and interpretation. But what is clear is that
something has shifted science away from its conventional foundation into
something that very much resembles religious faith. In other words,
it’s a belief even in the absence of evidence, or in the face of
contrary evidence, and this is a very serious problem.
Scientific Gatekeeping as a Priesthood
In “Against Scientific Gatekeeping,”3
published in the May 2022 issue of Reason magazine, Dr. Jeffrey Singer
argues that “science should be a profession, not a priesthood.” Indeed,
yet that’s basically what it has become. Singer starts out by reviewing
the early discovery of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment against
COVID-19, and the subsequent demonization of anyone who supported its
off-label use.
He then goes on to discuss the scientific priesthood’s intolerance to
new ideas while, simultaneously, “search engines and the digitization
of scientific literature have forever eroded their authority as
gatekeepers of knowledge.” He writes:4
“Most people prefer experts, of course, especially
when it comes to health care ... But a problem arises when some of those
experts exert outsized influence over the opinions of other experts and
thereby establish an orthodoxy enforced by a priesthood. If anyone,
expert or otherwise, questions the orthodoxy, they commit heresy. The
result is groupthink, which undermines the scientific process.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided many examples. Most
medical scientists, for instance, uncritically accepted the
epidemiological pronouncements of government-affiliated physicians who
were not epidemiologists. At the same time, they dismissed
epidemiologists as ‘fringe’ when those specialists dared to question the
conventional wisdom ...
The deference to government-endorsed positions is
probably related to funding ... President Dwight Eisenhower ... warned
that ‘we should be alert to the ... danger that public policy could
itself become captive of a scientific technological elite.’ Today we
face both problems ...
It is easy to understand why the scientific
priesthood views the democratization of health care opinions as a threat
to its authority and influence. In response, medical experts typically
wave the flag of credentialism: If you don't have an M.D. or another
relevant advanced degree, they suggest, you should shut up and do as
you're told.
But credentials are not always proof of competence,
and relying on them can lead to the automatic rejection of valuable
insights ... Scott Atlas, a former chief of neuroradiology at Stanford
Medical School, has published and critically reviewed hundreds of
medical research papers. He is a member of the Nominating Committee for
the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.
Yet when Atlas commented on COVID-19 issues, the
priesthood and its journalistic entourage derided him because he is ‘not
an infectious disease expert’ — as if a 30-year career in academic
medicine does not provide enough background to understand and analyze
public health data. Why? Because this physician had the temerity to
contradict the public health establishment.”
The Need to Reassess Dogmatic Thinking
Singer reviews several other examples of bonafide experts who got
thrown under the proverbial bus by the medical priesthood during the
years of COVID, and highlights instances where we can now, rather
conclusively, prove that public health officials made bad calls.
Several studies have concluded that lockdowns had no beneficial
impact on infection rates and COVID deaths, for example, while
disproportionally harming the young and the poor. Yet no one has
publicly admitted this strategy was an unwise one that should be
permanently abandoned and never repeated.
Many studies have also demonstrated that natural immunity is better
than the COVID jab, yet no changes have been made to the official
recommendation to inject everyone, whether COVID recovered or not.
“Just as public health officials must abandon a ‘zero
COVID’ strategy and accept that the virus will be endemic, the science
priesthood must adapt to a world where specialized knowledge has been
democratized,” Singer writes.5
“For scientific knowledge to advance, scientists must
reach a rapprochement with the uncredentialed. They must not dismiss
lay hypotheses or observations out of hand. They must fight against the
understandable desire to avoid any hypothesis that might upset the
health bureaucrats who control billions of research grant dollars.
It is always useful to challenge and reassess
long-held premises and dogmas. People outside of a field might provide
valuable perspectives that can be missed by those within it.”
Effort to Muzzle Doctors Continues
The way things look right now, the gatekeepers to the scientific
priesthood don’t seem to have any intention to open its doors to
outsiders and independent thinkers.
If anything, they’re trying to massively increase their control over
the information we’re allowed to see and share, even to the point of
proposing the creation of private medical certifying boards to police
physicians’ sharing of medical opinions online and elsewhere. In a May
31, 2022, Substack article, independent medical journalist Paul Thacker
writes:6
“This of course, is laughable. We have plenty of
evidence that medical boards are incapable of regulating physician
behavior simply by looking at the history of drug scandals in America,
none of which could have occurred without the complicity of corrupt
doctors — few if any of whom were later sanctioned by their own
profession.
Anyone notice a medical board going after Duke
University’s Dr. Ralph Snyderman for aiding the Sacklers’ opioid scheme
and helping spread disinformation that these highly addictive drugs are
NOT ... highly addictive?
Of course not. Snyderman built up Duke University
into the 3rd most prestigious medical school in the States. Despite
spreading disinformation about opioids that killed tens of thousands of
Americans, he's obviously a great doctor ...
Oddly enough, one of the most prolific tweeters on
COVID-19 vaccines is Baylor University’s Dr. Peter Hotez. And while
Hotez has spread disinformation about vaccines — in one example, stating
that vaccines mandates were never going to happen and were just a dog
whistle by anti-vaccine groups — don’t expect any state medical board to
come after him.
The reality is that, during the pandemic, the medical
profession has become cheerleaders for vaccines, not skeptics. So when a
couple MDs write an essay in the NEJM saying we need to confront
COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, you automatically know they don’t mean
someone like Hotez who has tweeted vaccine misinformation, but who has
also religiously promoted COVID-19 vaccines.”
Thacker goes on to detail the history of Dr. Edward Michna, who has
spent a large portion of his career promoting and defending the use of
opioids for several different drug companies. He’s also conducted
several pain trials involving opioids, and despite having received many
tens of thousands of dollars from opioid makers, he didn’t disclose
those competing interests.
“In coming months, documents will be released,
further explaining what the opioid manufacturers did. But nothing …
NOTHING will happen to Dr. Edward Michna for defending these companies,” Thacker writes.7 “That’s
why nobody should believe ... the idea that doctors can regulate
doctors. Doctors have had forever to do this, and they continually
fail.”
Without Free Discourse, Science Dies
It seems the moral of all these stories is that without free
discourse, science cannot flourish and falsehoods become harder to weed
out. Free speech is a requirement for any well-functioning system,
whether we’re talking about politics, medicine, science or anything
else.
The idea that a group of people, no matter how well-intended, can be
the sole arbiters of “truth” is irrational on its face, because who
among us can claim to know all there is to know? Individual biases
always creep in, and the greater the influence of such a group, the more
ingrained and dogmatic those biases will become, until the system is
corrupted to the core.
One could argue that dogmatic faith in nonexistent scientific
consensuses is the reason for why we are where we are today. Gatekeepers
to the scientific priesthood have already allowed science to be
corrupted to the point its barely recognizable. The answer, then, is not
more of the same, but less. We need less censorship and more
open-minded sharing of viewpoints, opinions and interpretations.
And when it comes to creating medical boards to police medical
“misinformation” shared by doctors, we already know how that would work
out. While Thacker doesn’t mention this, many doctors have been targeted
by various professional boards, including state medical boards, for
publicly opposing COVID measures such as mask and COVID shot mandates. I
discussed this in “Medical Boards Hunting Down Doctors Over Mask Mandates.”
Transforming the Health Care System
In his book, “Curable: How an Unlikely Group of Radical Innovators Is
Trying to Transform Our Health Care System,” Travis Christofferson
addresses questions such as: “What has happened to American health
care?” and “What are the foundational disruptions or corruptions in the
system?”
His book, in some ways, is based on the theory promoted in Michael
Lewis’ book and subsequent film, “Moneyball.” It describes how you can
use statistics to massively improve a flawed system.
“Moneyball” showed how, within a simple game of baseball, you can
have massive inefficiencies, and by taking away the human biases and
just applying statistics to find what is undervalued, you can massively
boost the performance of a team.
When I interviewed Christofferson
about his book, he offered several examples of how statistics and
removal of human biases can be used in the same way to improve
inefficiencies within the medical system. For example, the diabetic drug
metformin has “massive repositories of data” suggesting it can be
useful against a plethora of chronic diseases, including cancer, and
it’s extremely affordable.
The reason it’s rarely prescribed for any of these other indications
is because there’s a financial motivation to capitalize on more
expensive treatments, even if they don’t work well. By focusing on
undervalued treatments and low-cost prevention, health care costs could
be driven way down, while simultaneously improving patient outcomes.
Another example comes from Geisinger Health in Pennsylvania. By
introducing a Fresh Food Farmacy for Type 2 diabetics, Geisinger Health
was able to reduce its per-year outlays and cost for Type 2 diabetics by
a whopping 80%. Patients with prediabetes or Type 2 diabetes are given a
prescription for fresh, whole foods, and allowed two free meals a day
from the Farmacy, along with intensive care and educational support.
A third example is Intermountain Health. In addition to paying its
doctors a fixed salary plus bonuses based on patients’ health outcomes,
they also assess differences between treatments to see which works best.
For example, patients are always given antibiotics before surgery,
but it’s never been established when the optimal time to administer the
drugs is. Intermountain compared medical records, finding the optimal
time was two hours before surgery, which cut their surgical infection
rate by more than half.
Bias Corrupts and Corruption Is Inherently Destructive
These are all examples of how we can effectively and efficiently move
medicine forward. By silencing debate and discussion, and by ignoring
data and statistics, which has become the norm in this COVID era, the
conventional health care system is headed for collapse.
This seems particularly true when you consider hospitals have, over
the past two years, completely shredded patients’ trust by mistreating
and outright killing COVID-19 patients with the most dangerous
treatments available. Rather than collaborating with peers, most doctors
have blindly followed financially-driven and politically biased
protocols handed down from the reigning “priesthood,” and the results
have been nothing short of disastrous.
Speaking of disastrous, California has introduced a bill8
that will strip doctors of their medical licenses if they express
medical views that the state does not agree with, basically reducing
medicine to a state-sanctioned one-size-fits-all endeavor. Absolutely
nothing good can come of such a plan. I discussed this in “Bill Seeks to Muzzle Doctors Who Tell the Truth About COVID.”
This bill, AB-2098, was passed by House vote (53 to 20), May 26, 2022, and is currently in the Senate.9
If this law is passed in California, we will probably begin to see
similar or identical bills introduced in other states as well.
If your trust in doctors has already waned, implementation of such a
law is sure to carpet bomb whatever trust is left into oblivion, because
all you’ll be able to get, no matter who you go to, is the
state-sponsored opinion. What happens then? How do we care for our
health if our doctors are legally prevented from giving us their best
advice? This is such a radical departure from sanity and sound practice
that it’s hard to even imagine what medicine will look like at that
point.
The answer, I believe, will be for good, caring medical professionals
to start building parallel health care systems, such as those detailed
in Christofferson’s book, “Curable.” We may also have to take on greater
responsibility for finding solutions to our own health problems. “Take
control of your health” has been my motto and tagline since I started
this website, but it’s more important now than ever.
In years past, one of the greatest risks a patient faced was a doctor
lacking nutritional know-how. In the future, the greatest risk could be
doctors outright lying to you, even to the point of sending you to a
more or less certain death, just to stay in practice. I hope it won’t
come to that. But prevent it, we must resist and oppose these kinds of
treacherous plots wherever and whenever they crop up.