When authorities in Britain and the U.S. took the unprecedented step of locking down the country in the spring of 2020, they assured us they were “following the science”. This was despite the fact that neither country’s pandemic preparedness plan made any mention of ‘lockdown’.
Indeed, the U.K.’s own plan clearly stated: “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.” While several countries did manage to temporarily halt the spread of Covid, this was never a realistic option for Britain – much less a desirable one.
Indeed, the pre-2020 ‘science’ provided little if any justification for lockdown. A 2006 paper by four leading scientists described “large-scale quarantine” as something that “should be eliminated from serious consideration”. And a 2019 WHO report classified “quarantine of exposed individuals” as “not recommended under any circumstances”.
What were authorities doing when they locked down the country? “Following the Chinese Communist Party” would be a more accurate description.
Referring to China’s lockdown in January of 2020, Anthony Fauci stated, “that’s something that I don’t think we could possibly do in the United States, I can’t imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles”. Mere months later, Fauci took part in a campaign to discredit scientists critical of lockdown.
In March of 2020, Sir Chris Whitty stressed the need to “minimise economic disruption”, while his counterpart, Sir Patrick Valence, talked about building up “herd immunity”. Both men subsequently backed the Government’s lockdown strategy, even though it was the exact opposite of the strategy they’d initially outlined.
Given all the above, you might expect the public to have become somewhat less trusting of the scientific community. So far, there’s no evidence of this in Britain. According to a survey carried out in June of 2021, over 30% of people trust scientists more than at the start of the pandemic, compared to under 10% who trust them less.
Americans, on the other hand, have become less trusting – at least since 2021. Here’s a chart showing the percentage who have “a great deal” of confidence in the scientific community, broken down by party identity. (The chart was brought to my attention by Twitter user ‘The Missing Data Depot’. It’s based on data from the General Social Survey.)
From 2021 to 2022, the percentage saying “a great deal” fell by 12 points among Democrats and 10 points among Republicans. However, it had previously increased among Democrats, so they’re back to where they were before the pandemic. Republicans, by contrast, have become consistently less confident over the last two waves of the survey.
(Note: these figures are not directly comparable with those I quoted above for the U.K. The British figures are for June of 2021, and the question was phrased differently.)
The trend among Democrats may simply represent a ‘return to baseline’ following a period of elevated confidence during the pandemic. The trend among Republicans reflects a dramatic and sustained loss of confidence. Between 1973 and 2018, the percentage of Republicans with “a great deal” of confidence never went below 35%. It has since plummeted to 22%.
And is it any wonder? Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to oppose lockdowns and mandates – in part due to basic differences in values (more emphasis on freedom, less on safety). Yet thanks to groupthink, deplatforming and biased media coverage, it seemed that the ‘scientific community’ was united against them.
This impression was reinforced when 1,000 “public health experts” signed a letter defending “anti-racism” protests in the middle of the pandemic on the grounds that “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue”.
Whatever else may be true, it can’t be healthy for one side in a democracy to have lost so much confidence in the scientific community. Winning back that confidence would require health authorities to admit to their mistakes – but I don’t see that on the horizon. Polarisation is here to stay.
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Norman Fenton’s freedom of information request summarises how much we needed to ‘halt the spread of Covid’..
Most people had no clue about Rona IFR or real hospitalisation risks. A society of Retards.
What that shows us is that the Government and MSM propaganda campaign did an excellent job of gaslighting the public.
And remember that it broke out quite soon after the Dec 2019 General Election campaign. It worked well for them then, so it looked as if they just tried it on again.
There was another one even more shocking out over the weekend from Scotland:
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/one-of-scotlands-largest-hospitals-reports-single-digit-covid-deaths-over-three-years
Have an agenda and wheel scientists out to give scientific authority to it. If all goes well you take all the credit, and if it doesn’t then you get off Scot Free by just blaming the scientists. ———-Scientists have mortgages to pay and families to feed just like the rest of us. If government want to pay them vast sums to look for purple horses then you can hardly blame them for accepting that easy money, but what we end up with isn’t “Science”.————– It is “Official Science”
And not just the scientific community.
KT McFarlane provides here the most concise explanation of the FBI and CIA part in the 2016 and 2020 Election steals.
As always, UK media says ‘ nothing to see here, move on’.
In a Chinese copy, Sunak/Hunt and their globalist gang did the same to Liz Truss.
Pay attention folks.
https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1660381696066461696
We need an investigation into the polling companies now. I simply don’t believe them.
One of the most acclaimed recently claimed Charles’s popularity rating had risen from 30% to over 60% before the Coronation. From years of looking at polls it’s absolutely clear just how much of society remains fixed in its view, and how far opinion varies (not very much). That there was a 30% pro Charles swing was nonsense on stilts. Garbage. Pure propaganda. Others can disagree, but too my mind that is all the proof I need these companies polls can be co-opted or bought and paid for.
I don’t know any details regarding the Charles thing you mention, but I wonder if that was a “survey” rather than a formally conducted opinion poll. I think the polling companies put quite a lot of effort into making opinion polls conducted before elections accurate by surveying a representative sample, but some of the YouGov stuff I have seen referred to came from surveys I was involved in (as a YouGov registered user) which I am pretty sure are just based on who could be be bothered to respond.
I don’t believe the UK poll cited in the article that the average idiot trusts ‘the $cience’ more now than pre-scamdemic. Simply untrue in my daily life and dealings. Trust has plummeted here for all institutions including the saintly National Death Service. Fake polls notwithstanding.
Exactly. You have to be very careful about rejecting sources of evidence, but I have now seen simply too many polls that are clearly nonsense to believe them without question. Of course people polled can be lead to an answer with leading questions. There is a famous “yes minister” episode where Humphrey demonstrates this very well indeed.
Reputable pollsters are supposed to exercise care to avoid doing the leading question approach. However in my limited experience with them, they have developed all sorts of subtle ways to claim objectivity while tilting the scales. I think, a bit like big Pharma trials, they have learned a sophisticated set of techniques for getting the preferred answer. In my experience (from some years back) they would outright reject any direct request to tilt the scales, but they nevertheless did, I think, subtly tailor the questions and samples to make the client happy. I now suspect that for certain clients where there is a closer relationship, this has tipped over into outright corruption or “rent-a-result” (the Charles popularity poll being a case in point – which to my mind is undoubtedly bull).
Yes the survey sample wasn’t representative. In the survey, 94% said they were either COVID-vaccinated or intended to be. Also things have changed a lot since the summer of 2021, we’ve had several cycles of boosters so a lot more people now know people who have had life-altering injuries.
“Republicans’ Confidence in the Scientific Community Plummets”They might be a community, but they are definitely not scientific and it’s been this way for some decades.
“We live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television-words, books, and so on-are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.”
Richard Feynman (1966)
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
Carl Sagan
“Whatever else may be true, it can’t be healthy for one side in a democracy to have lost so much confidence in the scientific community.”
Given the current state of the “scientific” community, I think it’s extremely necessary for the public to have no confidence in them. Shame both sides in these “democracies” have not done so. It’s not healthy for scientists to lie for profit, but the only way that will stop happening is if people stop believing them and their funding dries up.
One explanation:
https://vdare.com/articles/it-s-official-again-leftists-particularly-leftist-women-are-nuts
We have a situation where, for a generation, access to grant funding is only available for those “scientists” prepared to nod to “Glowbull Warming” (and similar political nostrums), or preferably to enthusiastically promote them.
The coal mining industry was destroyed primarily because the energy produced from coal was way too cheap and part of the excuse used, was that control of the NUM had been captured by Scargill and a bunch of Marxists from roughly 1974 to 1985.
Now control of academia and “The Settled Science” has long been siezed by venal, ‘activist’ Marxists and others wanting to destroy the West.
I await with interest our ” Conservative” Government even admitting that there might be a problem there, never mind pushing back.