What The Covid Panic Did To Science

This was the speech I delivered on Saturday, 2 November 2025, at the True Grit Summit, held in Fort Smith, Arkansas. If and when the video becomes available, I’ll post it here.

SWEET LIES

We expect, and often welcome, politicians to lie. We like it, or rather don’t exactly hate it, when they lie for our side. We excel at turning deaf ears to monstrosities—when they’re in our favor.

Our love and acceptance of political lying is why it was no surprise to anybody that when then President Biden lied and said that if you take the covid vaccine you couldn’t get sick and couldn’t pass the bug on, nobody held it against him. He continued on in office like he didn’t remember what had happened.

A small joke, but on us, really, because we, too, went on like it had never happened.

It was an obvious lie, too, a whopper. No vaccine in the new mRNA line had shown, in any set of data, a perfect record. What vaccine does? They don’t in the lab, when pharmaceuticals do a lovely job controlling their own data, nor in the public, when the drugs are released into the wild. Long and wide experience was more than sufficient evidence to say any claim the new jabs were perfect must be in error or untruthful. Every competent scientist and doctor knew that. Yet how many of them spoke out against the lie? Not too many.

Yet Biden, and many other politicians, said the shots were perfect. We might excuse this not as prevaricating, but as incompetence, which is another characteristic not unexpected in politicians, especially in democracies, where the populace is continually bewitched, bothered, bewildered and bombarded by propaganda meant to nudge them into voting the right way. The people the addled public end up electing are thus not always our best.

But what are we to make of Anthony Fauci?

Maybe Fauci was a mere government spokesman, acting as a politician and not a scientist, and his statements should be treated as such. Even though at one point he, in his own estimation, and that of the many agencies who showered him with awards, became Science Incarnate. This miraculous event–for there is no other way to describe it—was not exactly unexpected in a society as scidolatrous as ours. Preposterous scientism is one way science was damaged.

SCIENCE WOUNDED

That brings us to our subject. What did the panic do to science? It hasn’t hurt politics, which lumbers on wreaking havoc and causing mass disappointment, much as before. Science took a hit, though, because of the irresistible urge to leverage the historical prestige of science for political ends.

Let’s recall some examples, without attempting to adjudicate here any complex scientific claims. We’ll stick with what’s easy.

Rochelle Walensky was head of the CDC during the panic. She made certain she was in front of many cameras in early 2021 to say “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick. It’s not just in the clinical trials, it’s in the real-world data”. By May she was changing her story, saying “Data have demonstrated even if you were to get infected during post-vaccination, you can’t give it to anyone else.”

Perhaps you recall that Walensky is a physician, a medical doctor. Which means we have two choices. She was either grossly negligent, which is to say, monstrously incompetent. Or she was lying.

She had to have seen Pfizer’s original report on their efforts, in which it was clear their drug was not perfect. And she had to have known about the voluminous data that came afterward, none of which gave any credence, at all, to the idea of perfect protection. Yet she said, by implication, there was perfect projection.

Maybe she was telling a noble lie, some of you will be thinking. A lie told for the good of the ears of those hearing it. She may have judged that the lie was better than the truth at getting arms inside rest area vaccination stations, tables set next to boxes of urinal cakes. Any leakage of truth would be seized by “vaccine deniers”, she might have thought, and used to spread their propaganda that—the vaccine was imperfect?

Better to promise perfection and make people well by frightening them into taking the shot. She may have reasoned that ordinary people cannot be trusted to make complex medical life-or-death decisions on their own. “These deplorables don’t know how to deal with the uncertainties of a pandemic, that only I can handle,” doctor Walensky might have said to herself.

Maybe, just maybe. In any case, that she was lying was perfectly clear. Because of “breakthrough infections”. Prior to the covid panic, this phrase was not unknown in medicine, and describes just what it says: infections “breaking out” in the vaccinated. Where infections were hoped not to be, but were because, of course, vaccinations are imperfect. Which all doctors used to know. Or still do but are shy about admitting. These new vaccines were particularly imperfect.

Walensky in an email with colleagues mentions discussing these breakthrough diagnoses with Fauci and Francis Collins, another grandee of science and the then Director of the NIH. Walensky wondered what to do about “breakthroughs”. If she wondered about what to do with them, she knew they existed. And if she knew they existed, she was lying when she said the vaxxed were perfectly protected.

It’s worse still because evidence had already been mounting, though it was then too early to tell for sure, that the vaccinated were perhaps more likely to be diagnosed with covid. It was, and still is, difficult to know the extent of this.

First because those who rushed to get their “Fauci Ouchies” were the ones more likely to obsessively test themselves, even after their jabs. While those who refused to be bullied, tested usually themselves only when required to.

Second because of the asinine headlong mad rush to have everybody vaccinated before they had been officially tested. If you don’t first document whether a person had covid antibodies, you don’t know whether to ascribe the creation of those antibodies to the vaccine or prior infection.

Many must have had those antibodies because of prior infection before vaccination. Recall the virus was spreading fast, often because infections were scarcely noticeable. That is the way airborne diseases travel: fast. You will remember the hersteria (there is no misspelling: think herstory instead of history) of “asymptomatic transmission”, even as the propaganda was warning that once people got sick, it was going to be at least devastating, if not deadly. This was the first disease in herstory that authorities required you to fret over, even though for most, it caused little or no perceptible harm.

I recall one report of an anxious doctor complaining that some patients didn’t take their illnesses seriously enough — for the doctor — because the symptoms were not unlike seasonal allergies; which is to say, not particularly bothersome. By September of 2021 the CDC, in a rare moment of sobriety, estimated that a large chunk of the population were infected and never knew it.

Propaganda, ordinarily at fever pitch, reached disgraceful, unconscionable levels in the panic, and in the name of Science. We were treated to horrifying images of doctors and nurses in spacesuits lumbering around patients strapped to gurneys, hooked to a plethora of frightening-looking machines. Pictures of trucks were shown which were ready to take the flood of bodies that was coming—any day now! Rumors of mass graves. Science assured you that you were next. Unless you obeyed.

And isn’t is remarkable that the countries that did best, as rated by death rates, were those that did not panic in the name of Science? The USA was worst among all large countries (and near the top of all countries) in officially attributed covid deaths. Nobody beat America in levels of panic. Except perhaps for other English-speaking countries like the UK, New Zealand and Australia. Extensions of the American Empire? Can you recall the opprobrium heaped upon Sweden for refusing to performatively run around in circles shrieking? At one point propagandists had daily pieces gleefully predicting absolute doom for that country. Sweden did fine.

Our second clue something had gone awry in Science was this: that we were told to freak out in its name.

Earlier when I said “before people were tested”, I meant officially, where values were checked and recorded. Not the howling rush to secure home test kits so that many could obsessively check themselves every time somebody coughed within earshot. These tests were rarely or never put into medical records, so that their timing and results could be cross referenced against when initial vaccinations happened.

It’s true many were forced to undergo more rigorous testing as conditions of employment, or to travel, and things like this. But even these highly — overly? — sensitive PCR tests didn’t usually find their way into medical records. In major cities, like New York where I lived at the time, new store fronts opened up promising quick results for PCR tests. Were these all legit? Who knows.

The point remains. All the work, to this date, showing the vax worked in preventing death or serious illness cannot be trusted on its face. The stats will show the vax did better than it did because of the lack of knowledge of prior infection.

We can, with some justice, attribute this mistake to idiot panic. Except there had to be malice or incompetence, too. Because many scientists claimed, in what I believe is a first for science, that the various drugs on offer conferred better protection than prior infection!

How did they claim to make this strange claim? Models. We’ll speak about model mania more in a minute, but let’s go over the CDC’s model in their paper  “Laboratory-Confirmed COVID-19 Among Adults Hospitalized with COVID-19–Like Illness with Infection-Induced or mRNA Vaccine-Induced SARS-CoV-2 Immunity — Nine States, January–September 2021.” 

They looked at hospitalizations for “COVID-19–like illness”, which may or may not have been caused by covid, for 18+ year olds, given prior disease or prior vax, coming 90–179 days before hospitalization. The outcome was a positive covid test. After being in hospital for covid-like illness.

Right away an obvious flaw presents itself. If prior disease alone conferred superior immunity, as is sensible, then we would not see many who were previously infected in hospital. We’d only see the real sickies, the folks most susceptible to illness or hypochondriacs. The comparison group therefore is wrong.

What makes it worse was the other group was vaxxed but “with no previous documented SARS-CoV-2 infection.” Documented, you understand.

It wasn’t that this was a lousy study, because lousy studies are the norm in science. It’s that there was plenty of other evidence indicating the opposite, that prior infection was superior at conferring future immunity or preventing severe illness. The Brownstone Institute had already published a list of about 150 papers arguing for prior immunity’s benefits. It’s true many of these were probably lousy, too. But they were not even considered by the CDC.

They accepted their obviously rotten study as The Science. Why? Could this have been another noble lie? Or a worse kind of lie? Or have we met genuine incompetence?

The flood of lying and exaggeration done in the name of Science was, shocking, to non-cynics anyway. It was useful in controlling behavior. And Experts and rulers got away with it in the beginning, though it worked against them in the end, because they figured exaggerations and lies would always be a good strategy to compel behavior.

As time passed it became clearer and clearer to most that the sky would not fall, that the lies were lies, and the claims passed off as certainties were far, far less than sure. By the end of the panic, headlines which began “Experts say” became a joke. Science as a whole took a body blow.

Some of you will be thinking, “But we had to panic! This was bad!” No, we did not. The Asian flu pandemic of 1957 to 1958 killed upwards of 4 million people. But in ’57 the world’s population was about half what it is now. The number of deaths officially ascribed to covid stands tonight around 7 million. This means the Asian flu’s death rate was the same or higher than covid. The same was true of the Hong Kong flu pandemic a decade later, in terms of deaths and total population.

Almost nobody remembers these pandemics now. Because there was no panic. No official requirement to panic.

We did learn one thing. Whenever we see or hear the definite article put in front of science, as in The Science, grab onto your wallet.

As an aside, these body counts are on the low side. Don’t forget: the bugs responsible for the Oriental flus are still with us, as is covid. All will be with us forevermore. The body counts will only ever rise. Which means their mere presence is no excuse to foist more The Science upon us.

Not everybody panicked. By January 2020 I was already spitting mad over the reprehensible antics of Experts. I wrote my first of hundreds of articles on the subject then. By March of that year two colleagues and I, Jay Richards and Doug Axe, started writing a book in an attempt to restore at least some calm. It came out in October of 2020. The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic Into a Catastrophe. Don’t buy the book. It’s now a historical oddity. And it didn’t do any good. The only people who heeded its message were those who already understood it.

SCIENTIFIC BANDITRY

Everybody will have their own most hated moment of the panic. For me it was masks. I should have been madder about the lunacy surrounding the vax, because of the many who were fired or barred from travel or school for refusing to take it, vaccine passports, not to mention vaccine injury, the cases of myocarditis dismissed as “minor” (remember J&J?), and on and on, one horror story after another.

But masks had me viscerally angry. Not because we had known for a century of their uselessness. But because they were used to spread fear and terror, that they turned ordinary men into blobs of gelatinous goo. The worst thing that happened was when I was walking, maskless, down the road, and a young man, thin and otherwise healthy looking, was coming toward me. He was wearing googles, a mask, and hat, but not, amazingly, gloves. As I was passing him, he stopped and turned his face to a wall and pinched his nose.

I wanted to punch it.

How could we have let them do this to us!

A common lie people told themselves was “My mask is for your protection”. But nobody ever believed their own mask worked, as my young man proved, unless others were also flying colors of submission. It was the same for the vax. People rushed like electrically jolted lemmings to get the vax, egged on by Experts. They believed in its powers implicitly—but only up to a point. Tell the vaxxed that they were in the presence of an unvaxxed person and suddenly their own vax gave up its powers! They recoiled like a vampire seeing a crucifix.

They were even right to do so, because Experts and rulers struck again. They said that the vaccinated were getting infected because evil people refused the vax or the mask. It was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Or the maskless.

Here we had Experts and rulers saying the vax offered perfect protection and that the vax failed when an unvaccinated or maskless person hove into view. Both opinions were The Science that had to be followed. Why was this obvious contradiction never noticed?

A full century ago, after the Spanish Flu, the first mask studies were done. Science magazine on 30 May 1919, in “The Lesson Of The Pandemic”: “It is not desirable to make the general wearing of masks compulsory.”

My favorite was the time in which surgeons at a large British hospital tracked infections in surgical patients. “Is a mask necessary in the operating theatre?” by Orr in the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. I quote the entire abstract: “No masks were worn in one operating theatre for 6 months. There was no increase in the incidence of wound infection.”

By a remarkable coincidence, a meta-analysis of masks, and even masks plus handwashing, was published in early 2020, not for the coronadoom but for flu. This was “Nonpharmaceutical Measures for Pandemic Influenza in Nonhealthcare Settings—Personal Protective and Environmental Measures” by Xiao and others. Which, if you enjoy black humor, was published on the CDC’s website.

It showed that masks, and even handwashing, did nothing to prevent the spread of flu, a respiratory disease. But this study, and many others like it, was dismissed — mirabile dictu — because it wasn’t done for covid!

All this proves that, as I like to say, the only lesson learned from history is that no lessons are learned from history.

Most relevant to Covid was the “Danish study”. This was the March 2021 paper “Effectiveness of Adding a Mask Recommendation to Other Public Health Measures to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Danish Mask Wearers” in the Annals of Internal Medicine by Bundgaard and others.

Some 6,000 Danes were split into two groups, one without masks and one with masks. Not just masks but the “best” masks, and with training in their use. Such as if you touch it, change it. If it becomes moist, change it. And so on. The results were no difference in infection rates in the two groups. This study was roundly — ignored.

There were many others. They weren’t hard to find. The CDC could have done what academics call a “literature search”. But they didn’t. All previous work was dismissed or ignored by rulers and Experts because that was Science done before covid. Science had to be done de novo, for we were living in a “new normal”. For Science and for everything.

All evidence which showed masks to be useless was discarded, because the pre-decided conclusion was masks worked. Any evidence toward this view, no matter how awful, and there was really rotten papers, was kept and trumpeted.

The thing about modern Science is that you can find an academic willing to “prove” just about anything you like. Taking the place of studies that looked looked at actual outcomes, like the Danish paper, were crude and laughable proxy “studies”. Harvard provided one, the CDC had several. Instead of looking at whether people got sick or died, they’d look at rates of change of reported infections across counties and correlated these with mask mandate dates! Farcical. This is evidence that cannot be taken seriously, but was. Because it fit the Narrative.

The Narrative has a powerful effect among Experts. Maybe you recall Fauci went on 60 Minutes early in the panic and told the truth. It happens. He laughingly and derisively and correctly dismissed masks. Then he got word of the Narrative. He dropped the truth and began saying wear not one mask, but two. He didn’t bother wearing one himself when he thought the cameras were off, though.

At the end of the panic, after mask mandates had ended, the well known Cochrane Review came out with their careful study in which they said there was no certainty to be had about mask wearing. Yet even they didn’t carefully look at pre-panic mask studies. Put those earlier studies in and the case is more than clear.

What happened with the Cochrane study? Ignored.

When science was dominated by a small cadre of men, it was combative. Success was done not just in discovering or proposing something new, but in pounding a beloved theory into dust. Science was a form of intellectual combat. It worked.

But now things are more, well, collaborative and nice. It’s seen as a victory when people get along. Better to accept a little error than cause bad feelings. This is why evidence which is contradictory to a useful theory can, and even must, be ignored. There were some scientists who tried the old pugilism during the panic, but this did not work out for them, especially in they were in medicine. Many were reprimanded.

Contradictory evidence for beliefs in science is not so much rejected as unpersoned. All right-thinking people pretend not to see what they know they should not. And, except for some fringe Realists, nobody cares. This topic deserves a talk all to itself, so let’s collapse it to this: unless science returns to it open and adversarial mode, it dies the slow death of mediocrity.

GAIN OF LETHALITY

I never tire reminding people of the video that sent the world into a tizzy. It showed a man on a Wuhan street, teetering, then collapsing. Dead, presumably. Many saw that and descended into gibbering madness. We’re all going to die! was one of the soberer responses.

How come no one remembers what happens next in the video? Men in spacesuits arrived moments after and scrape the body up. Now I ask you: how many times have you seen men in spacesuits strolling down the street waiting for people to collapse? How in the unholy Hell did those men know to be there just as the man was dying, and how did they know to be suited up? And who just happened to be filming the spectacle?

Two things are now plain. The video was obvious propaganda. But to what end? To unnerve the world. It worked. But why did they want to do this?

Because, of course, China already knew that the virus had escaped.

It was during the panic the rest of the world learned the euphemism “gain of function”, by which scientists mean gain-of-lethality. The ostensible idea is to create super destructive organisms, which can be studied, to answer questions like “How destructive is this engineered monster?” And, scientists say, so that they can build cures for their engineered vectors-of-death, just in case Nature decides to recreate this deadly bug herself.

Yet there is no evidence Nature would do so.

A bug created as a plaything for scientists got out and killed an awful lot of people. Should scientists be allowed to continue gain-of-lethality experiments? What happens when a worse one escapes? And aren’t scientists also working in bio-weapons using the same arguments as justification? Has everybody forgotten that accidents happen?

I’m asking bad questions. Nobody is going to stop scientists, because it’s clear rulers want this work. Science will continue on these paths and we will pay the price, eventually.

Since it is unmanly to cry over what cannot be changed, let’s change tack. It is now a “conspiracy theory” to give evidence in favor of an engineered covid bug. Those who do so are “science deniers”, or worse. And the reason is simple. Governments are not going to admit, ever, having a hand in killing so many people. And I shouldn’t say “governments”, because while that metaphor has uses, what we really mean are individuals “with names and addresses”.

The best we’re going to get out of any revelation is a slight extra helping of circumspection from those in charge. Nothing more.

UGLY MODELS

All models (which includes AI) only say what they are told to say. This is, or should be, no more than a banal truth. After all, how could a programmed model say anything else but what it was told (coded) to say? Yet when it comes to Science models, that truth is forgotten.

Let’s recall the most infamous model of the panic. In early 2020, Neil Ferguson’s group at the Imperial College of London issued a model which terrified the world. More than two million dead in the USA! Half a million dead in the UK! But we could be saved if only we locked down, closed schools, and social distanced.

It was an idiotic model, one of a series of foolish and wildly inaccurate models issued by Ferguson over the years. His lamentable track record in predicting the End Of The World should have had people laughing in his face as he predicted it yet again in 2020.

People didn’t see the new model as ridiculous, though, because for one it was put in terms of numbers of dead per capita, and the figures looked scary. But a simple calculation, had anybody bothered to make it, showed the model predicted 14,000 deaths per day at the peak in the UK, and 56,000 deaths per day in the USA.

Asinine. Childish. Goofy. Criminal. A model that was saying what it was told to say. And not one Expert or ruler asked Ferguson why he told the model to say what it did.

Because they wanted to believe the model. A model that led to the Lockdown That Dare Not Be Called A Lockdown. Anymore. Remember “Two weeks to flatten the curve”? People are now saying it never happened. There was no lockdown. Non-essential citizens — useless eaters, really — being told to cower at home? Conspiracy theory!

Another model was social distancing. We detail this in Price of Panic, but simply it was a high school girl’s science project, which her scientist father helped with. They coded a model to say, more or less, “If you stand six feet apart, you won’t die.” But it was seen as confirmatory that the model “predicted” that if you stand six feet apart, you won’t die! That six feet become dogma. Remember those comical stickers showing where to stand?

Our church only allowed people to sit every other pew because of this newfound dogma. Yet as many who wanted to sit shoulder to shoulder could. The virus could only travel backwards and forwards, you see. Which was also the theory at ATMs and grocery store checkouts, which all had Science Shields blocking a wee fraction of the air between customer and clerk.

Models were responsible for the fanatical faith in masks, too. Besides the ones we met, there were others which put masks on dummies and then tracked air movements in closed rooms. Useless, because that’s not how people live. But these models convinced—a very willing audience.

They were done on computers, you see. And who can question a computer? In science today, it’s models and more models. It’s models calling to models. It’s models all the way down.

Until science gets back in the business of verifying models before trusting them, it will wander off into dark alleys and be lost. I wrote a whole book on this, if you have an interest (and some math), called Uncertainty.

YOU HAVE BEEN MISINFORMED

Not only did Science choose to incarnate in the frail, corrupting body of an ancient bureaucrat, governments, local and national, announced that they were singular sole sources of scientific certainty.

Whichever the case, the crushing censorship of Science during the panic was predicted by the theory of Official Mis- and Disinformation. It is a matter of logic that if you have identified a falsity, then the contrary of that falsity is necessarily a truth. Thus any agency that boasts of a list of Official Misinformation must also, at least implicitly, have a list of Official Truths.

The conclusion, then, is that any government which defines Official Mis- or Disinformation must necessarily have a Ministry of Truth, even if it goes by another name, or is spread throughout its system. Naturally, an Official Truth can be a falsity, or a lie, or an uncertainty passed off as a certainty. There is only the weakest correlation between Official Misinformation and Official Truths with actual falsities and actual truths.

Governments hated that non-credentialed non-Experts criticized their decisions more than they hated the effects of the disease. Governments cracked down harder on dissent than at any other time. By using their own powers, but also enlisting the enthusiastic cooperation of propagandists (some people call them “journalists”), academics, tech barons, and other associated Experts.

When I say ‘Expert’, I do not only mean a person with expertise in some subject. I mean a person with credentialed expertise whose views publicly align with rulers. Fauci was an Expert. Walensky was an Expert. But so were a host of academics willing to back whatever Official Truths rulers wanted. Remember when Experts spoke against ivermectin as “horse paste”? Some places even banned, for a time, its prescription. Whether that drug worked, or to what extent it stemmed the degree of infection are interesting questions, the very kinds of questions Science used to be good at answering. But for a time it was adjudged verboten, and only because rulers and Experts saw the drug’s use as questioning their authority.

Social media platforms, like Google, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and others all banned certain discussions, especially about the vax. Or they put Official Truth warning disclaimers next to content. YouTube still does this for “climate change”, incidentally.

This is odd because, though there might have been the occasional exception, the people staffing these firms were ignorant of medicine and Science in general. Tech executives could not judge the material they were censoring. They censored because rulers asked them to. Some of them, like YouTube, went well beyond their orders, and with gusto whacked accounts which they thought would displease rulers.

This is because the executives at these places see themselves in the Expert or managerial class. The form of this class and its behaviors was well described and predicted by men like James Burnham and Sam Francis. When one person in this class hears “The debate is over”, they all hear it, and the thing, whatever it is, becomes unquestionable. Think about how one day “pregnant men” was a risible idiocy, but by the next day it was an indisputable Official Truth. No one in this class dares to be seen or heard disagreeing with anyone else in the class.

Since science is now an official part of the bureaucracy, it fits in this scheme with the rest. This is why we hear talk of “The Consensus”, for any number of fields. Once a view or theory becomes “The Consensus” it cannot be questioned. Lest one become a “denier”.

There is no escaping this part of bad science. Not in the current culture. This is why for the best science we must look outside official channels. Watch private, not public, companies, small single-focus institutes and lone individuals. These will soon be the only places the best science is found.

TATTERDEMALION REPUTATION

We can see that science did not go wrong in any one way in the covid panic, but in many ways. None of them were new ways, though.

The mendacity of rulers is ancient; the hubris of Experts is expected, as is turning blind eyes to unwanted evidence. Then there’s the collectivization due to managerialism, a form of governance which I call the Expertocracy. The urge to crush and silence opposition is permanent. The reliance on models, forgetting models have to be verified independently by those who do not have an interest in their outcome is somewhat newer, becoming routine after science become Nice. All that and more are neither new nor unique problems.

What is interesting is that they all came together at once. What’s remarkable is that this panic was a global phenomenon. A first of its kind, outside war. I claim this can be blamed on Science itself.

Everybody knows how science works. After taking the same courses and taking the same training all over the world, people think up ideas about the way the world works, sometimes they even test them. The ideas find their way into print, and so become the starting points for others to amplify. Science is universal. A scientist in Bonn or Beijing isn’t writing of German or Chinese science, but of science tout court.

This universality is ordinarily a benefit. It becomes a curse when the science is flawed or just plain wrong. Because science is a global activity, errors are harder to get out of once they are entered into, by the principles of inertia alone.

It was the further, and grievously neglected duty, of scientists to warn against scientism. Every time a ruler demanded “Follow the Science!” scientists should have stood and insisted, “Science cannot tell you what to do!” Science does not know right from wrong, moral from immoral, prudent from imprudent. Scidolatry overcame other religions, and inflated the already swollen egos of scientists.

The things that were done in the name of science should have shocked scientists badly. They should have spoken up, or at least admitted when their preferences intersected, or overruled, the uncertainties in their work. Most did not. Experts especially were guilty of the sin of scientism.

It was in the name of Science we heard the call “If it saves just one life!” Which is madness, not science. It was science that gave us the Cult of Safety First! It is impossible to put safety first. Every act of life, including doing nothing at all, carries some risk. All risks are not the same. Science cannot judge between risks. There was very little honesty in this from scientists.

We heard insane pleas to vax kids, when they were at almost no risk of major injury or death from covid. But any risk at all was deemed intolerable. Remember zero covid? I lost my voice shouting it was many times more likely for kids to die in car crashes than of covid, so that if we were serious about Safety First! we’d ban kids in cars.

Scientists lending their prestige to lies, especially about the vaccine, encouraged wild reactionary flights into fancy, like how some said the vax had programmed nano particles in it up to no good. This was the entirely predictable reaction to the “Safe and effective!” propaganda and the dishonesty of scientists in conveying vaccine injury risk. Too many opted to say there no risk. A lie. So it could not possibly be any surprise in reaction many said the vax was the riskiest thing ever.

Scientists are not wholly to blame for the panic, but they share a large portion of that blame. The reputation of Science, especially in medicine, is in tatters, or at least the long goodwill scientists built over decades of careful work has been lost, and deservedly so.

It will take a long time to rebuild that trust. On the other hand, it may be to everyone’s benefit that it doesn’t.

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