From coronavirus to climate change, scientific discussion has been stifled by the ‘settled science’ trope. As a long-term analyst and careful critic of medical papers it annoys me. In 2000 I began a column in the journal of the British Society for Rheumatology (conveniently titled Rheumatology) trawling the journals for interesting, unusual or bizarre pieces of research, which I would dissect for my readers. Five years as a columnist honed my critical eye.
One cornerstone of medical research is the null hypothesis. You set up an idea and try to find something that knocks it down. A parallel concept is that of the Black Swan, where a plan is derailed by an unexpected event. In each case a single observation or fact which disposes of the hypothesis is sufficient for its abandonment. Bill Stott encapsulated this in a brilliant cartoon in Punch some years ago.
Various doctors have described how one of their teachers would tell them that, after five years, half the things they had been taught would be shown to be wrong, and the problem was that you didn’t know which half. But it underpins the argument that medicine – and by extension science – is not a static subject and is always subject to change. There are endless examples of how scientific consensus has been disrupted by a contrary observation which pulls the whole house down. Some are well-known, some less so. Here are a few. As you will see there are different mechanisms and causes.
Settled science said the Sun went round the Earth until Galileo and Copernicus made observations that proved it did not. Both were lone voices and suffered for their beliefs. Settled science said that cholera and puerperal sepsis were considered miasmic conditions until John Snow conducted a controlled trial proving the former was water-borne and Ignac Semmelweis conducted a similar one for the latter. Snow’s work took some time to become accepted, while Semmelweis’ work took longer, no doubt in part because of the way he presented it and attacked his disbelieving colleagues.
Before 1921, settled science did not know the cause of diabetes. Then Banting and Best discovered insulin, though Paulescu in Romania was the first. So settled science then began to understand that insulin lack caused diabetes. But then it became apparent that there were distinct types of diabetes and that insulin lack was not the only cause; insulin resistance could occur. Then it was found that insulin lack might be caused by an autoimmune reaction destroying the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Then the hormones glucagon and later leptin were discovered. Diabetes was no longer due to failure to produce insulin alone, and diabetes became as confused as it had been at the beginning of the 20th Century. No settled science here.
Some infections of unknown cause were found to be due to viruses – but it was not until it was possible to see these microbes that cause and effect could be adduced. Similarly, the understanding of inflammatory processes and the realisation that white blood cells held a key role in disease transformed rheumatology management, but, just as with diabetes, the exploration of the inflammatory response changed the science. It was not just white cells; these now were subdivided into T-cells, B-cells and macrophages, and then the T-cells got further divided into T-helper cells, T-suppressor cells and T-null cells, and then the inflammatory chemical cascade ran amok with the discovery of all sorts of interferons and interleukins, the number of which latter is unclear (search Google using “how many interleukins are there” and you will find varying estimates from 30 to over 60). I have sat through many lectures describing the inflammatory cascade and the slides become more complex by the week. In these examples, advances in science – here immunology, biochemistry and microscopy – were key to unravelling mysteries and taking down hypotheses.
In the 1970s some research pointed to the possibility that rheumatoid arthritis was triggered by infection with the infectious mononucleosis virus. This hypothesis was confirmed in a couple of laboratories, only to be knocked flat by the discovery that the original results were due to contamination. So, one may argue that the revelation of faulty research led to a change in understanding (or belief). Belief also caused patients with back pain to be put to bed, often in hospital and in spinal traction. After all, who could argue with the concept that such pain should be treated with rest? I didn’t; sometimes I had four or five back pain patients in my ward. We had always done it, we were taught to do it and so we went on doing it. It was settled science. But in fact no-one had done any research to compare bedrest against ambulant treatment and when they did – if ever there was a medical U-turn, that was it.
Settled science relies nowadays on clinical trials. But have these been properly conducted? In other words, is the conclusion justified? Was the sample size sufficient to prove the case? Was randomisation properly done? Have the correct statistical tests been used? Have confounders been accounted for? Have all the data been properly analysed? Were there any conflicts of interest that could have influenced the publication of results? Have the conclusions been fairly presented? Have the data been open to outside inspection? Statistical teaching in medicine is patchy and I certainly would not profess to be a statistics expert, but others are and I can rely on them.
There were numerous trials of anti-inflammatory drugs in the 1970s which had too small sample sizes, and several which concluded that drug A was similar in efficacy to drug B, although re-analysis merely proved that the trial had failed to show a difference, which is not the same. Many trials used the wrong statistical tests and were improperly randomised or excluded specific groups. Patient selection for trials? Benoxaprofen (Opren) was deemed safe but had never been tested in older people who, it transpired, metabolised it differently and in whom it was far from safe. Similarly a preparation of oral gold (for rheumatoid arthritis; injectable gold was the mainstay of therapy in the 1970s) had pharmacokinetic data showing two patterns of drug clearance judged by its half-life in the body, but the sample size was small. Only one patient showed the second pattern of delayed clearance – but this was 15% of the sample, yet the analysis ignored it. Extrapolate to a population and you can see the problem; as it turned out, the population did show such a dichotomy and the delayed clearers had a higher incidence of side-effects due to drug accumulation. Some trials excluded dropouts from analysis and thus failed to assess properly why subjects failed to complete the trial. Conflicts of interest? Some trials were and are conducted by drug companies or by researchers receiving large grants from them, and negative results are often concealed. Positive results are great, but when looking at the risk-benefit analysis it is important to compare like with like. Thus, if a statin trial shows a 50% reduction in cardiac risk, what is that a 50% reduction of? If the absolute risk is 5% then a 50% reduction drops the risk to 2.5%, which is not huge. Often the risk is presented in absolute terms and compared with the benefit in relative terms, which is scientifically dishonest. And all too often the raw data from such trials are not offered up for independent analysis, with the feeble excuse that it is commercially confidential. All of these unsettle settled science.
The explosion of genomics has led to the unravelling of numerous medical mysteries, in particular in hereditable disorders and inborn errors of metabolism. Fifty years ago this would have been unthinkable, but science progresses, we find out more things – and we find things that undermine current opinion, as Einstein did with gravity and new space telescopes have done with quasars, black holes and other studies of the universe. If we did not find those things and realise that science can change, we would still, perhaps, think the Earth was at the centre of the Universe.
In today’s context we have the twin issues of SARS-CoV-2 and climate change. In the first case we have been led to believe that settled science proves that lockdowns and masks work and that the virus was of natural origin. In each case unpicking of the data, some of it concealed for whatever reason, undermines all three conclusions. We were bamboozled into believing that settled science showed that there would be an explosion of deaths, failing to see that the conclusion was not based on facts but on prophecy. We were told that settled science proved that vaccines were safe and effective, but when doubters asked for the evidence, this was largely absent, and our belief that settled science had proved the safety of m-RNA vaccines was destroyed by analysis proving significant DNA contamination. There is a hypothetical risk to this, but that risk remains unquantified if indeed it exists at all, but it is unsettling to think there might be a significant risk. Would it not be safer to do some long-term studies before exposing a global population?
The debate on climate change has also relied on models, and settled science activists have brushed aside the GIGO axiom – garbage in, garbage out. They have also failed to quantify the relative contributions of fossil fuel burning, volcanic eruptions, solar storms and sunspot activity, changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, deforestation and water diversion and failed to understand the effect of urbanisation. In plunging headlong into the promotion of so-called renewable energy they have also fallen into another common trap – that of proclaiming the benefits while failing to analyse what could possibly go wrong. If, as I was told this week, five of 50 luxury cars of the same marque had to be returned to the saleroom for replacement of their batteries after less than two years, what are the costs both to purchaser and manufacturer? If spontaneous combustion risk causes insurance premiums for such vehicles to become unaffordable, what is the future, let alone the likelihood that demands on electricity supply will become unmanageable, so the cost of recharging goes up and also becomes unaffordable? And this set of risks excludes any analysis of whether the climate is really changing as dramatically as the prophets foretell, which factual evidence seems to contradict.
When sceptics raise all or any of these contradictions they are disparaged as vaccine deniers, climate change deniers and dangerous fanatics. If there is doubt, then say so. There is nothing wrong with saying you don’t know. While there are undoubtedly some proponents of wacky conspiracies lurking in the undergrowth, the huge majority of sceptics have merely analysed the data in a scientific way and unravelled the settled science consensus. And then the settled scientists themselves become deniers because they are too rigid to change their minds despite the revelation of incontrovertible facts.
These few examples lead to the inescapable conclusion that there is no such thing as ‘Settled Science’. Such science may be informed by dogma, belief, poor research, inadequate information and even fraud. New investigative techniques, re-analysis of past work, repeats of trials in the light of new knowledge all confirm that science may change. ‘Settled Science’ is an oxymoron. Let’s leave it behind.
Dr. Andrew Bamji is a retired Consultant Rheumatologist and author of Mad Medicine: Myths, Maxims and Mayhem in the National Health Service.
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Explains a lot. This is institutional child abuse. People have been arrested for less…
Savile was knighted and was sought after for marriage advice. His client’s brother frequented on Massad funded sex islands in the Caribbean and in New York.
By jove, I’m spotting a pattern…
“in which she lauded teenagers for their stoical refusal to “bellyache” and “moan” about mask requirements“
Absolutely, we should all look down on those who “bellyache” and “moan” about dictats that they really ought to just put up with in good, obedient spirit.
What does it actually cost someone to sit at the back of the bus, or wear a symbolic badge? Nothing much. People should obviously just obey orders from authority.
Just wear the damn mask/buckle up the damn seatbelt/take the damn injection….
Excellent nanny state stuff from the Guardian, as usual.
The Left regards even their own children primarily as being ‘machines’, as we learnt from Justice Sotomayor a few days ago.
I would love to see this poll question of a cross-section of a nation’s population:
Did you personally know any person under the age of 40 who has died from COVID in the past two years?
This poll question will never be asked, but if it was, and people answered honestly, probably 90 percent would answer “no.”
So the vast majority of the world’s population did not know any person under the median age who died from COVID.
What does this tell us?
Would this have been the case in 1918-1919 of the Spanish Flu?
I doubt it very seriously. Most people would have known several people under 40 who died of the Spanish Flu. In fact, I just read that the average age of a victim of the Spanish Flu was 28. The average age of a victim of COVID in most Western nations is 80 or older.
If you asked did you personally know anyone under the age of 21 who died from COVID, probably 99 percent of world inhabitants would answer “No.”
Why did we turn the world upside down when hardly anyone knows any person middle age or younger who has died from this “dreaded” disease?
Typical modern lefty. Loved the lockdowns. Her kids were no doubt all baking banana bread in between playing out in their nice garden while the poor were going round the twist in their tiny inner city flats. Easy to say kids are resilient when they have a piss easy middle class upbringing.
After working in a modern lefty environment for 8 years ( UK university) after spending 25 years working as a CNC machinist in a factory I found the modern lefty to be just awful. They say they are all for supporting those worse of than themselves but they will turn at the drop of a hat
Bounce Back Better.
It has to be laid bare, the sacrifice of the innocents. Only in such stark relief can we be forced to confront this malign influence. And of course there are even more serious interventions – the ministrations of Mr Spike. His name will not be in the shadows for much longer.Intelligent teenagers aren’t any different from adults this information has spread.
Zoe Williams lauds those who just got on the Train east to their new Jewish home outside Germany.
Bounce back from that one if you can.
eh?
Good old Zoe Williams. In a 2011 article on the London Riots she attached the sobriquet ‘Rat Lady’ to a poor shop keeper who had the temerity to refer to the yobs who ransacked her baby-wear shop as ‘feral youths’. Another example of her callous disregard for the suffering of individuals. Since then I always think of Zoe Williams as ‘that Rat Lady’.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/uk-riots-vigilantism-big-society
She’s and many of her ilk, are deluded if they think kids are going to just “bounce back”! Just shows how bloody blinkered and accepting of the narrative they are. Well, in my experience children ARE showing a degree of maturity when many of them come up to us at events to ask questions, because they now know they’re being manipulated and lied to!
I would have thought the skateboarding mum was referring to her sons ability to carry on after a nasty fall, not his psychological ability to survive pointless mandates.
The youngsters who do work their way through the horror they have been forced to endure and understand what is happening and what is coming will be far from the future compliant slaves TPTB desire.
I don’t really understand what happened to the Scottish. Maybe it’s Celtic enrapture to a great leader. But if that’s your fucking masot then you really do live in an age of diminished expectations.Snap out of it.
I have just come back from two days in Scotland, principally Edinburgh, the compliance was utterly depressing.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/11/the-people-who-brutalized-children-to-grab-emergency-powers-are-not-experts-theyre-evil/
Critically assess what’s said by an authority figure or a person wearing a uniform? Mustn’t have that!
And to go off only slightly on a tangent, I thought this opinion poll from France about reaction to Emmanuel Macron saying he wanted to drag “vaccine” resisters “in the shit” was interesting.
60% thought he was “wrong” or “very wrong”; 40% thought he was “right” or “very right”. (There are no “don’t knows” or “won’t says” in these or the following figures.)
Among the vaccinated, the figures were 56% and 44%.
It’s only when you get to those who have been “boosted” that the majority are favourable: 49%-51%.
Among those who describe themselves as supporters of a political party or grouping, the only section favourable to Macron’s statement are those who sympathise with “Ensemble Citoyens”, his own alliance.
BUT…
when asked whether they were in favour of putting restrictions on the “unvaccinated” to encourage them to get “vaccinated”, 60% were in favour.
Clearly there is an element of “It’s not what Macron does; it’s the way that he does it“.
The question is…can such an incumbent win an election?
Macron news
1) Daily Mail: “Brigitte Macron ‘received anonymous phone call saying her husband was with a gay lover’, French documentary claims”
They’re saying that whoever did it used the resources of an intelligence agency.
2) The Times are having a laugh. Macron is apparently in a “pole position”:
“Macron has pole position — but that’s no guarantee of French election success”
Soon the identity of the other man present when the “pole” was engaged will be revealed.
Guess what – Macron may not even run for re-election.
And I thought Macron wanted to shit in their general direction…
Well, let’s have a picture of Zoe Williams of The Guardian!
“When my father died, he left a stack of oral morphine by his bed, and my brothers, sisters and I all took it to see if we would get high. We didn’t. “Maybe it only works if you’re actually in pain,” I said. My sister replied: “I am in pain! My dad just died.” And we all laughed for a really long time.”
Zoe Williams
Below: Zoe in her trendy cannabis outfit.
Don’t have nightmares.
The correct quotation – my emphasis.
When my father died, he left a stack of oral morphine by his bed, and my brothers, sisters and I all took it to see if we would get high. We didn’t. “Maybe it only works if you’re actually in pain,” I said. My sister replied: “I am in pain! My dad just died.” And we all laughed for a really long time, so maybe we were a little high.
I don’t know if you have ever lost someone close to you but semi-hysterical irrational laughter is quite a common response even if you are not high.
What’s known as “a bit of a sinner.”
Williams’s willful blindness to the fact that those between the ages of 11 and 19 are actual individual people, with names…. and faces… and thoughts and feelings and achievements… of their own.
…….
Williams replays a conceit of the Left, which likes to render concrete realities into abstractions, to be designated by big concepts, arranged by big theories and administered by big policies, with little compassion for actual individuals.
It looks like generalisations are a bad thing when applied to teenagers but OK when applied to the left. Actually of course you can’t really make any useful statement about a group of people without some kind of generalisation.
Williams writes for the guardian – that’s all you need to know.
Welcome to the tyrannical ‘vaccine’ culture, organised by AI, and loved by The Guardian cult. Being human, and a rebellious teenager, is so 20th century…
I run the debating society at my school. This afternoon I had to endure the pathetic spectacle of a group of highly motived and enthusiastic 16 year olds debating their motion wearing crisis props on their faces, struggling to hear each other’s muffled points, and occasionally pulling them away from their mouth so they could breathe properly; they had had them on constantly for seven hours.
Zoe Williams
The wearing of these scientifically ridiculous and dehumanising props has been internalised by children across the world who now think that following orders, no matter how nonsensical, is the right thing to do.
So yes. Zoe Williams is asking us to look the other way while children are abused, demeaned, poisoned and brainwashed ready to join her sterile fuckwitted dystopian cuckoo land where facts don’t matter as long as everyone is appeasing their new corporate gods and brain dead communitarianism.
Excellent work CG.
I’m pretty sure that kid couldn’t remember who she was, or give a shit. You reap what you sow.
They get in everywhere if you let them and poison everything. I remember in 1983 this force was chasing me and I spent my teen years and twenties fighting the fucker. You can call him Wendigo or whatever but this is a spiritual force and you should just fight it regardless. My first experience in England was being held down on a bed and being injected with something and I struggles but they got it in anyway.
There really is no point replying to Guardian articles; it just indicates more respect than they deserve. Leave the sewer of the world’s press where it belongs (alongside Bozo and the fake Conservatives) – in the gutter.
Patronizing is the typical attitude of these people towards everyone, not just towards so-called teenagers.
It’s a different world for me. That parents would suggest it and children would adhere to it. I remember my teachers in Belfast and some of them loaded their canes with lead Which was fine. You fucked up and you paid for it. If there is any meaningful political struggle in the decades to come it will be the struggle against centralisation.
Children bounce back, it’s true.
But that doesn’t make it okay to beat them up for no reason.
It’s a joke a population of bloated baby boomers thinking that they control the minds of the young. It isn’t like that at all just wait and see. You can call them fucked up kids but they see more clearly than anyone.
Reasons not to cover faces
A random 10 minute search on Google will throw up a dozen reasons why covering faces is not progress. It seems that eye contact and communication by facial expression go to the very heart of what it is to be human. Therefore anything that prevents that for no good reason should be avoided. I would go further and say that for very good common sense reasons the following are not encouraged in most civilised but particularly British society. It just not the way we have done things, at least in the old normal. Basically in our very open culture there is an expectation that people can see each other’s faces.
* Wearing a motor cycle helmet in a bank, or petrol station – threatening
* Carrying on a conversation while wearing sunglasses – just plain rude
* Wearing a mask when entering someone’s house – a good indicator until very recently and maybe still that you are a burglar,
* Wearing a scarf over your face when going on a protest march – sure sign of extremist group membership and that you are up to no good
* And more recently, wearing a surgical mask which provides no protection from virus transmission.
For all of these reasons I believe that facial covering of any kind should be banned unless there is a good reason for it. I certainly will not engage with anyone whose face I cannot see if they are wearing a full face helmet, sunglasses, or a face mask. It is offensive and not British. To be be able to see someone’s face while interacting with them is part of what it is to be human being and stretches back into the mists of our evolutionary and social development. To cover faces deliberately and for no good reason denies that fundamental humanity. I was in a hospital not long ago. Masks were mandatory and I didn’t want to get into any confrontations so I complied. I was wearing a baseball cap with the peak pulled down, as it was raining outside. I caught a glimpse of myself in a darkened internal office window. I looked very threatening, and certainly unrecognisable. Mask wearing is not progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGXlTth6rro
My anxiety over the last couple years reminded me of something. That is how I felt through my childhood. In both cases it was due to a lack of control over my life.
Children don’t have a lot of control over their lives and that alone is stressful. They’re the worst affected by this entirely political covid nonsense which reduces their control much more.
MSM is trying to make fun of people wanting to protect themselves with cheap and proven drugs. Ivermectin has been FDA approved for human use since 1996. It also beats Pfizer’s new wonder drug hands down, and costs next to nothing. Ivermectin doesn’t make tons of money. So they know the Covid shot is on its final gasp, so they take it add something different to it, rebrand under another name and charge 20 times what they would for ivermectin. I cannot wrap my head around this nonsense. When I explain this to my relatives they label me as crazy and ask me if I know better than science. I don’t make up these information out of my ass. All this information is true and proven. For some people it is near impossible for them to wake up. They are comfortable in their clown world life. If you want to get Ivermectin you can visit https://ivmpharmacy.com
While in general, the assertion that children are resilient may arguably be true, and that adversity can “toughen them up”, the nature of what is being required of them here is depriving them of the tools needed for developing resilience. And pretty much deliberately so, viz. the Bob Moran cartoon – “Mummy, I’m frightened . . . That’s the spirit!”
Zoe Williams!!
What on earth do people expect?
Dr Murphy mentions examples of fit and healthy athletes collapsing.
To this I would add that in the last couple of months I’ve read about 3 premiership football matches being delayed due to “a medical emergency in the crowd”. I don’t read a huge number of match reports, but prior to last Autumn I can’t recall ever having read about a match being delayed for this reason.
Are more football fans having medical emergencies than a year ago? If so what possible explanation could there be other than covid vaccines?