Has science become a threat to human health? After it was co-opted by Governments to impose interventions of highly questionable efficacy and immense harm during the pandemic, that’s the shocking possibility considered by leading epidemiologist Professor John P. A. Ioannidis and colleagues in a new article in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. Here’s an excerpt.
During the pandemic crisis of 2020-2023, it is likely that the successes of biomedical science were more than offset by its failures. These failures continue to undermine once-powerful ideals and hopes for science’s role in societal betterment. Here, we dissect the underpinnings of these failures and argue that restoring such ideals first requires systemic reform of science itself.
The considerable successes of medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic pertained to speed, for example, real-time information sharing, record-time development of vaccines and unprecedented rapidity in getting results from some large randomised trials of interventions, solidly documenting or refuting claims of effectiveness. On this basis, the visible role of science and scientists in the pandemic response seems worth celebrating. Basic research, translational research and evidence-based research tools all had some bright days during the crisis.
But success was accompanied by major failures. Some of these failures reflected efforts by influential scientists and their political allies to demonise dissenting scientific views and evidence. From the earliest days of the pandemic, despite weak, absent or contradictory evidence, leading national decision-makers, facing the urgent need for action, assured the public that they were adopting COVID-19 policies by ‘following the science’. A new scientific elite of media-savvy experts from fields like virology and modelling (with or without relevant credentials) gained visibility and influence in political circles. The narrow, reductionist disciplinary and sometimes partisan perspectives of these scientists and ‘influencers’ helped justify the COVID-19 policies that allocated sacrifice, privation and suffering across all walks of society and hundreds of millions of lives.
The consequences for education, healthcare, small businesses, social life and democratic politics itself were often disastrous. Consequences were most acutely felt by vulnerable populations, from factory workers to school children, the old and the poor. Radically different responses to the disease from nation to nation — from draconian lockdowns across all sectors, to relatively permissive and flexible pandemic regimes — made obvious to all that the value of scientific evidence was to support what was politically desirable and possible in different contexts. Rather than politics following the science, science was enlisted to follow the politics.
Supposedly science-based responses to COVID-19 in turn built upon and amplified deeper contradictions at the intersections of science and public health. Some affluent nations with generously funded science, such as the United States and United Kingdom, had been experiencing slow-downs and even reversals of gains in life expectancy that predate COVID-19. These trends, unthinkable 25 years ago, both reflect and exacerbate pre-existing and entrenched health inequities. For example, life expectancy for men in London’s affluent neighbourhoods is 18 years longer than for those in poor areas. Such disparities have multiple causes, but the political economy of medical science is a critical part of the story. Investments in health sciences focus overwhelmingly on reductionist, molecular-genetic approaches to cures, which can generate status for scientists and profits for companies, but have minimal benefits for population health and may even widen inequalities. Medical science delivered to society through market mechanisms continually inflates healthcare costs, another driver of inequities. Additional tensions at the science-health interface include misuse of direct products of science itself, such as opioids, and iatrogenic disorders. Indeed, during the lockdown, iatrogenic disease may have acquired new, unprecedented dimensions. Yet study and communication of these disorders during Covid was too often demonised by high-level decision-makers and their scientific advisors, which in turn clouded our ability to openly debate the balance of impacts of the massive public health interventions imposed across large segments of the society.
Now add the uncertain but plausible possibility that COVID-19 was itself the product of biomedical science, and an apparently outrageous consequence becomes inescapable: science itself may have become a threat to overall population health.
Is the record-time development of vaccines really something to celebrate if those vaccines are not properly tested, of dubious efficacy and safety and forced wholesale on healthy populations? Sounds like yet another source of the iatrogenic harms from science to me.
Worth reading in full.
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Deleted
Yep, that’s how I feel about this milquetoast article.
So the speed of developing non vaccines and marketing and forcing them into populations by the billions wasn’t a cause for alarm but a source of “considerable success”?!
I had a lot of respect for Ionides at the start of the pandemic for correcting the ludicrous IFR stats and using the Ocean Princess as a perfect statistical experiment to show the relative harmlessness of C19, but he is one of those keeping the Overton window tightly an erroneously bound where it comes to Genetic experiments on the masses.
Bravo for Will pointing this out.
People, including fellow academics and certain doctors such as Dr Malhotra, talk about him with such admiration but I’m sure I remember seeing one of his presentations and he was pro-mask. I’d be interested in what his stance is now, but I really think such a seemingly mental, non-scientific position ( if I haven’t misremembered that fact anyway ) is totally at odds with his reputation for being such an extensively published, cited and data-driven scientist.
How come you’ve got 4 likes for ”deleted”?? LOL
It’s five now Mogs. Obviously some of my fans will uptick whenever I post which is very kind and generous
Actually what I deleted was the link to the killing of race horses because it was misplaced.
Make it 6 as I’ve just made like a sheep/shown my support! LOL
You are a star. Thank you.
[My emphasis]
I wonder if that is a dig at Prof Neil Ferguson with his DPhil in theoretical physics?
A potentially obvious answer to your last question is ‘No’. What it demonstrates (in an unfortunate manner) that short cutting established safety standards with respect to the development of new products of that kind was a bad idea. It may be that the long term negative effect of the policies that have been pursued is even worse than the original problem, but time will tell.
An excellent article about the danger of following & trusting The Science by Dr Rima Laibow – another fervent defender of truth, humanity & love. She really is a truly lovely person too (another member of MD4CE – is why I feel so privileged to be a member. I get to rub digital shoulders with some amazing brilliant folk who are also incredibly humble)
https://www.globalresearch.ca/vaccinate-vacate-planet/5822089
Ever since Pasteur – just kill the pathogen – sadly triumphed over Bechamp- treat the body, not the disease – was hailed by snake oil salesmen, medicine was corrupted.
That said, Vaccines have saved Millions of Lives.
Fact.
So there.
Sorry. I forgot the Lol.
Irony gets forgotten even here.
St Jenner the ultimate quack with his poisons. Business model was to inject regardless of result. St Jenner was not a doctor, never practiced, knew little about the human body. He did see a thriving market and easy fear porn – ‘if you don’t stabbinate your child, he/she/it will die of smallpox, so be a good parent….’
Has TheScience™ Become a Threat to Human Health?
Answer: No. Because TheScience™ has always been a threat to human health.
Well speaking of science, can somebody please watch this 2min clip of John Cullen showing Steve Kirsch how 4000 people were dying per week in the U.S from flu Jan – March 2020, then ‘Covid’ showed up and it increased and see what you think. If you’ve seen his other vids he shows how flu mysteriously ”disappeared” from over 100 countries at the same time, because hoax/re-brand. Maybe Will would like to take a look at his data also;
https://twitter.com/I_Am_JohnCullen/status/1667922760683913216?cxt=HHwWgIDU9b2606UuAAAA
Interesting images, especially seeing how flu spread across the US first quarter of 2020, then the world rebranded it as ‘Covid’ I guess. And just to add to that, what seems plain as day in hindsight and with all the evidence we now have, what was killing people from May onwards ( when a normal flu season ends at the latest ) and the cause of the deaths most countries were seeing was the entire Covid response. From lockdowns to denial of health care and myopic focus on Covid, death protocols for the elderly etc etc. Probably why Sweden fared the best.
https://twitter.com/I_Am_JohnCullen/status/1665917210249031680
Just to end on a hat-trick, a series of excellent mini-clips of Denis Rancourt presenting his findings on the scamdemic;
”And finally, Dr. Rancourt’s conclusions:
1) If govt’s had done nothing – no excess mortality. There was no pandemic, that caused excess mortality.
2) The measures that governments applied, caused excess mortality.
3) The vaccination campaign definitely caused excess mortality.”
https://twitter.com/USMortality/status/1667406717930577920
https://www.technocracy.news/great-reset-dutch-government-to-buy-farms-as-thousands-face-shut-down/
An update on the Dutch farms. This has nothing to do with science.
genuine science remains sound.
genuine science is empirical – ie observation and experiment, with much argument allowed about methodology and inference.
unfortunately science has become confused by statistical massage of findings, by computer modelling, and by poorly controlled biotechnologies.
Science is not a problem. “The Science” TM is
“Science” is a threat to NO ONE. ————-“Official Science” though is a serious problem that causes massive damage to people and economy’s. The symbiotic relationship between government and science is a lethal cocktail.
Science has always Threatened Human Health
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Elms Field
near play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Has Science Become a Threat to Human Health?
“Infertility Virus” to Sterilize Stray Cats: New Gene Therapy Approach Could Work on Humans, Too
I am not of a scientific mind but I have previously posted on here that I believe sterilisation is a feature that will become more and more obvious in the years to come. It would appear that the means to achieve this has been found.
This line caught my attention: because it is leftist axiomatic BS
‘Medical science delivered to society through market mechanisms continually inflates healthcare costs, another driver of inequities’
not true …. sometimes markets are the best way to deflate costs