When Politics and Science MIX, Science Loses - Granite Grok

When Politics and Science MIX, Science Loses

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The headline comes from a repeating mantra in this excellent piece shared on Ace of Spades from a board-certified physician and US Veteran. They are or should be an old saw, proverb, maxim, or adage. When politics and _______ mix, _______ loses. Science could be no different.

Dr. CAT, from the AoSHQ piece, notes that from the moment COVID went wild in Italy,

 

Physicians and scientists were collaborating globally using Facebook and Twitter to speed the spread of new information and ideas around the world within minutes. Major scientific journals expedited the release and publication of COVID related articles and made them free to access. It was amazing. This was going to be a global triumph. But then politics joined the fray. And when politics and science mix, science loses. What the government scientists spoke was the truth, everything else was labelled misinformation and banned.

 

Please read the whole thing when you have time, though I’ll be revisiting it a few more times here.

Next up, we have the words of Dr. Robert Malone, the core inventor of the mRNA vaccine (years ago) though he’s fallen out of favor with the people who approve the narratives.

In another long piece that you should read when you have time, he talks about the efficacy, issues, and politics of this event and the response. Not just the initial response but the response to what happened after vaccination moved forward.

 

Mr. Jekielek: So you’re not trying, “So hard to undermine the use of this vaccine technology.”

Dr. Malone: No. My concern here, as I said in our prior interview, is that there’s been a series of actions taken, policies taken, regulatory actions taken, that are at odds with how I’ve been trained with the norms as I’ve always understood them. The regulatory norms, the scientific norms—these things have been waived. For a lot of people, it doesn’t make sense.

 

The process, the act of science, had the rug pulled out from under it by the politics of so-called scientists cum bureaucrats pandering to politicians and their (increasingly despotic) whims. My words, not his, but how do you explain the complete abandonment of medical principle and scientific consideration.

For a virus that more than 99% of people will survive, mostly with few or no symptoms.

We return to Dr. CAT for more on that.

 

For centuries the scientific method invited questions, invited curiosity. Stupid questions and fringe ideas overturned scientific dogma throughout history. It is how we advance science. We question results, question truth, keep experimenting. But when politics and science mix, science loses. Fringe ideas such as a heliocentric solar system get Copernicus and Galileo thrown out of the church. Offering an alternative treatment to COVID, or questioning the effectiveness of masks gets you banned from Facebook and YouTube.

 

When the wonder-cure vaccine began to fail after just 6-months, if it was ever truly effective (given the timing of increased sunshine and summer heat), the narrative makers blamed the unvaccinated for the new spike in cases. To do anything else would be to admit fallibility, error, perhaps even incompetence leading to the shortening political “lives” a far more important statistic to those sorts of people than actual lives.

Back to Dr. Malone: “That social contract was, “Despite what you may have heard about the risks of some of these products and the fact that we admittedly did rush them, we’re protecting your health. If you take these products, you will be safe.” That’s the social contract. “Despite all these other concerns, you will be safe, and you won’t have to retake them. You’ll be protected.” People believed they had a shield if they bought in and did this.”

 

At first the position was that this was only occurring in the unvaccinated cohort. Then that became increasingly untenable and it became clear that it was occurring in the vaccinated cohort. The same became true with the UK data set, which is stronger than the American monitoring system. They do a lot more sequence analysis.

So now we had this paradox that those that had been vaccinated, while the data still suggested that they’re largely protected from disease and death and more protected than the unvaccinated from disease and death, they’re no longer protected from infection. It became clear within the data, and through multiple sources, that the levels of virus replication in the individuals, even who had been vaccinated previously, was the same or higher as the levels of virus replication in those that had been un-vaccinated. And also that those that had been vaccinated and had breakthrough infections, which is what we’re talking about, were also shedding virus and able to spread virus.

So that raised the prospect that they were kind of the new super spreaders, because they would have less apparent disease and yet still be shedding high levels of virus.

I’m running long, and you should read both but two more quotes to leave you with, and then you are free to pursue either or both—first, Dr. Malone regarding any vaccine booster.

 

Vaccine responses are not linear. More is not better. There are many cases where if you dose more or dose more frequently or move beyond a prime and a boost, you can actually quench the immune response. You can move into “high zone tolerance.” You can move into a situation where your immune responses drop.

 

The Politics is pushing the policy and not necessarily to any good end but perhaps the fattened pockets of those making them.

And lastly, Dr. CAT.

 

The family of coronaviruses is fairly common. It along with rhinovirus, adenovirus and enterovirus typically cause symptoms of the common cold. A vaccine which can tackle some or all of these viruses would be a windfall for any pharmaceutical company. Cure for the common cold. But the cure does not exist.

 

That remains true even now, but politics has taken over medical science, and it won’t let it out of the narrative cage it has constructed. One into which it has also stuffed entire populations and nations of people.

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