https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/when-science-is-not-science/
We’ll be a long time recovering from the evidence-free ‘science’ pushed on the public during Covid.
Just 22 percent of all adults and 41 percent of those 65 and older — the most vulnerable group — have received the updated 2023–24 Covid-19 vaccine. The numbers are nearly identical to those of the previous updated (bivalent) Covid-19 booster — 21 percent of adults and 43 percent of people 65 and older. But both updates showed a marked drop-off from the original two-shot vaccine series that 79 percent of adults and 94 percent of the elderly received. Senior FDA officials Doctors Peter Marks and Robert Califf argue that despite the proven benefits of Covid-19 vaccines, we have reached a “tipping point” where this new vaccine hesitancy will result in thousands of preventable deaths.
But low vaccine uptake is not, as Marks and Califf suggest, a result of misinformation, at least not misinformation in the way they mean it. Rather, it is the product of science, specifically public-health science, as practiced during the pandemic, that was evidence-free, politically and personally motivated, dismissive of other points view, and that ended up undermining public trust.
As time has gone by, it has become clear that public-health pandemic science, as personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci — who famously declared, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” — was far removed from the scientific method of unbiased observation and experimentation to ascertain truth about natural processes.
Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently admitted in congressional testimony that the guidelines he championed to keep people six feet apart were not based on scientific data. “They sort of just appeared,” he said. Testimony from the former director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, confirmed Fauci’s assessment that the six-foot distancing recommendation was not evidence based.
In August 2021, Fauci advocated vaccine mandates for schoolchildren under twelve, well after it was clear that this age group had almost no risk of severe Covid-19 disease or mortality. Months later he defended generalized vaccine mandates, claiming they would protect people from becoming infected and passing the virus on to others. But he admitted in a scientific journal article he co-authored that there had always been good scientific reasons to believe that vaccines against the respiratory virus that causes Covid-19, SARS-CoV-2, would provide “decidedly suboptimal” protection against infection that would, at best, last a few months. He made the transmission claims and mandate recommendations anyway, despite data showing that the effectiveness of the vaccines was declining with each new viral variant.
