Sunday, June 21, 2020

What If I Trust Science, But Don't Trust Big Government Science!

If you pay any attention at all to the drivel coming from the leftist media (the vast majority of media) you'll have heard the idea that anyone who questions anything from authority is a "science denier."  That's an awful term, crafted to create a subconscious link to holocaust deniers.

This has been rumbling in my mind a lot, but credit (blame?) PJ Media author Stacey Lennox for bringing it into focus today with her piece, "What If I Trust Science and Don't Trust Dr. Fauci?"  Her emphasis is on Dr. Fauci and the Kung Flu crisis, but it's broader than that.  Let me go with a few of her points for a while.

To begin with, she quotes Dr. Fauci himself from a US Department of Health and Human services podcast saying:
“One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are — for reasons that sometimes are … inconceivable and not understandable, they just don’t believe science, and they don’t believe authority,”
The problem is that this week, the same Dr. Fauci admitted that he lied to Americans about the effectiveness of masks. They decided to tell us masks didn’t work rather than tells us they were effective in preventing the spread, but please refrain from buying them until we have an adequate supply for healthcare workers.  Personally, I believe if they had simply said, "if you buy up all the masks and healthcare workers don't have them, we'll have to abandon hospitals because workers are required by law to wear them" that people would have been understanding and bought up fewer masks.

It's a lot easier to trust people who don't have a documented history of lying to you.  Could that be part of it Dr. Fauci?

Another topic that doesn't make sense and leaves me with Looney Tunes-style question marks in the air over my head is why is an old, well-known drug that was showing promise against the disease so politically divided?  The easy answer is that a couple of conservative commentators started talking about success with Hydroxychloroquine and then the president started talking it up.  Suddenly, liberal commentators couldn't acknowledge they might be right.  Dr. Fauci joined the liberal pundits against the drug.  Ms. Lennox (a Registered Nurse) says:
The debate over this generic drug that has been in use for decades is one of the most puzzling and ridiculous things about the entire pandemic. The medicine was politicized and became controversial. After researching it myself and listening to practicing physicians who were using it, I expected Dr. Fauci to step up and clarify why there was a reason to believe it may work in conjunction with the mineral zinc. He never did.

I found this odd since the drug’s older cousin, chloroquine had been demonstrated to inhibit the SARS virus, which has a 90% overlap with COVID-19. The NIH did this study in 2005, where Dr. Fauci is a director.
We report, however, that chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells. These inhibitory effects are observed when the cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage.
Any doctor that was recommending the treatment recommended it be given with zinc. The properties of zinc on RNA viruses, which COVID-19 is, are also well known. Again a study from the NIH in 2010 shows that with a companion ionophore, or drug that allows more zinc to enter the cell, the mineral interferes with the replication of the virus. Both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are zinc ionophores.
When people see contradictory messages, they try to understand why one group of doctors currently treating patients with these combinations and reporting excellent success gets no press or negative press, while another group of doctors saying it's poisonous and will kill people gets all the media attention.  As result, people try to think of reasons and decades of experience with government at all levels brings thoughts of corruption to mind.  I really doubt that I'm the only guy who has heard people saying Dr. Fauci and the Anointed Health Experts must be in the pocket of Big Pharma.  After all, they argue, why use a very old, cheap, generic drug when there are newer, more expensive drugs, like Remdesivir that can be sold?   Why should they allow drugs that cost a couple of bucks per dose when there are drugs that cost a hundred or hundreds of bucks per dose? 

Again, it's easier to distrust people who have lied to you before.

Stacey Lennox's article contains more good information related to the virus crisis, but if you take the same thoughts and expand them to wherever government big Science! is involved, you get similar answers.  The easy one to cite is climate change.  The trillions of dollars at stake have attracted the grifters that humongous sums of money always attract and every claim has to be carefully examined. 

Another example is the USDA Dietary Guidelines.  The science behind the USDA recommendations is atrociously terrible - the King of Junk Food Science is an example of the kinds of stuff they're based on.  Part of that is because it's both ferociously hard and expensive to do the kind of experiments that can give the answers people want.  While, saying, "it's too hard" is a hell of a poor thing to say, it's better that they're honest about how tenuous their data is.  The committees drafting the 2020 Guidelines have been meeting this year and they've been more (apparently) corrupt than ever, prompting federal Whistle Blowers to come forward and report bad behavior on the part of the subcommittees involved. Full disclosure: I've donated to the Nutrition Coalition and think that their work is good.

It would be better for the USDA guidelines to be shut down and the government to get out of the business of telling people what to eat, but right now that would require many laws or regulations to be revoked because the dietary guidelines influence military meals, school lunch (and breakfast) programs, hospitals, nursing homes and all sorts of institutional programs that feed people.  

Real science is a rigorous process for learning.  It's never preaching from a standpoint of "I'm all-knowing" and it's never "settled" except in the rare cases of physical law and one way you can be sure it's settled is that nobody is doing research into a field.  Nobody disputes that gravity exists; there might be research into fine details of the subject, but the fact that gravity exists is settled.

In the case of a new disease, nobody can be expected to know enough about it when it first appears.  It was quickly apparent that the doctors on front lines treating patients knew far more about it than the Experts.  Consequently, if people don't flock in admiration to the Anointed Experts, it's not that people have "an anti-science bias," it's that they know they've been lied to before or that their life's experiences tells them something funny is going on.  You see, Dr. Fauci, it's not "anti-science bias" to question things.  Questioning things is the essence of science.  Just accepting things the scientists say is the essence of religion. 


Dr. Fauci and Vice President Pence, April 19 Covid-19 press conference.  (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)



11 comments:

  1. COVID-19, the Chinese Plague, would seem from all accounts be responsible for the flu and the the common cold's elimination. Nobody gets the flu or a cold anymore.

    The medication scandal, the whole plague restriction game - all of it - is filthy. I'm not a plague denier, but the approach today, given all we know, should be "if you're at risk, stay home" everyone else, live your lives.

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  2. The Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Feminists, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims are like football teams. Their only differences are the identification tokens like colors and mascots. Otherwise, they're playing the same political game of war, occupation and lies for the same prizes of loot and power.

    Long ago the Catholics imprisoned Galileo for disproving their evidence-free fiction story of Anthropomorphic Global Warming, excuse me I meant Geocentrism. People obeyed the Pope because they thought his church had the best understanding of the workings of the universe, and therefore their policy pronouncements might, underneath the obvious corruption, have some reasonable alignment with physical fact. Nope.

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  3. Health boards go through the metrics of passing/failing on the points someone identified, in these days of "X new cases!" for what phase to allow. If what they are trying to say is positive test results, not sick or admitted to hospital, the News is lying to you. The one metric that matters? Covid Patient beds occupied at your hospital. Our local number? Zero. Zero for many days in spite of "223 new cases yesterday".
    The idea of quarantine for 14 days with a positive test is wonderful touchy feely. Except it's BS too, unless you are locked away with 14 days of provisions. Because the rest of the house is still coming and going. So the 14 days begins anew each day.
    My favorite is the store sign. "Our Employees are wearing masks. You will not be allowed into the store IF YOU are wearing a mask." That is the safest for that business, (until they get an employee who gets sick from whatever because they are wearing a mask).
    I'm waiting for the future stories of people who develop conditions from using too much hand sanitizer. Your skin, as the largest organ, was not designed to be endlessly exposed to chemicals.
    Years ago, the animal nutritionists presented 2 "balanced" diets for the cows. One was normal stuff cows should eat. The other was used oil, an old leather shoe (for fiber!), bunch of other things that escape me now. On paper, the nasty one was "better".
    Jerry

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  4. A lot of science is problematic. Because they need to publish, they don't need to be right. “Einstein, We Have a Problem” – The problem with so much science today is it isn’t true

    The number of studies that cannot be duplicated is amazing.

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  5. Whaddya mean, SIG? I certainly dispute that gravity exists!
    I'm holding on tight just to comment without floating away.

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  6. @ Anonymous at June 21, 2020 at 10:50 PM

    Please at least try to learn true history. It's not hard.

    Galileo was under house arrest for insulting the Pope (his good friend and personal patron), in book form. Not for science. The church accepted the science, and was a primary sponsor.

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    1. That's right. Galileo apparently loved arguing, not reconciliation, and insults were a "feature". It should be well-known that he had zero evidence to contribute to the controversy of geocentrism vs heliocentrism. His strengths were elsewhere. (Long story short, a contemporary named Kepler did use data to argue sucessfully for elliptical planetary orbits.)

      "The Sleepwalkers", by Arthur Koestler, is a great book on this period of history. He wrote fiction as well (Darkness at Noon), and was a dedicated anticommunist.

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  7. My problems with Fauci begin with his coverup of Robert Gallo's theft of Luc Montagnier's HIV samples. His lies about the Ebola epidemic was another.

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  8. Hide the decline. Retractionwatch.

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  9. " they just don’t believe science, and they don’t believe authority,"

    Aaaargh! Holy !@$#!ing shit, someone dares to call himself a scientist and says this? The inscription on the doors to the Royal Society said "take no one's word for it", After Gallileo, after Kepler and Copernicus, after our entire history, these Lilliputian savages dare to talk about authority?!

    MadRocketSci

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  10. Fauci can be both right, and a jackass; they are not mutually incompatible.

    People don't believe science, as is demonstrable about 5000 times in five minutes on any trip to the store currently.

    Where Fauci gets it wrong is thinking he's an authority, rather than a multi-decade serving government shill assclown. I haven't checked, but if it's not his official title, it oughta be.

    People had the straight scoop on masks, and choloroquine and hydrochloroquine, yet they threw the baby out with the bathwater, on all points of the political spectrum, because 90% of people are anti-scientific jackhole Gilligans with more in common with aboriginal cargo cults than with children of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

    Public education and modern journalism FTW.

    Common sense, isn't.

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