I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.
I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on natural vs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.
Academia
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Academic freedom at Stanford is clearly dying. It cannot survive if the administration fails to create an environment where good-faith discussions can occur outside of a framework of ideological rigidity and the false certainties that ideologues—and governments—wish to impose on us. Stanford missed the opportunity to sponsor COVID policy forums and it deplatformed dissenting voices. Several prominent faculty exploited this environment, engaging in actions that directly violated basic academic norms.
The goal of all professors is to get tenure, and right now, tenure continues to be awarded based in part on how many peer-reviewed publications they have. Tenure committees treat these publications as evidence that the professor is able to conduct mature research.
Sadly, however, many academic articles today are merely exercises in what one professor I knew called “creative plagiarism” — rearrangements of previous research with a new thesis appended on to them.
https://intellectualtakeout.org/2023/01/academic-writing-nobody-reads/
Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia, argue these authors
The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220316191824/https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o702
Most academics since January 2020 have lined up obediently behind even the most improbable self-deceptions of the covid leaders. Chillingly, they’ve acted out a rough reprise of the performance of their professional forebears in 1930s Germany, when a large fraction of German scientists supported the irrationality of the Nazis.
At the start of the current madness in many Western countries, thousands of academics signed petitions (like this one) that effectively begged their democratically elected governments and their supporting bureaucracies to transform themselves into cadres of despotic thugs.
Through what means was this to be achieved? By using the machinery of state itself to force unproven social and medical experiments onto entire populations, and in so doing running roughshod over constitutional liberties and internationally recognised human rights.
Bizarrely, academics applauded as covid leaders around the world ignored the accumulated public health knowledge of decades and even tampered with the well-researched blueprints that had been prepared for just such an event. Most academics fell hopelessly in love with the illusion that expert-led totalitarianism was the answer to this new threat, and that preservation of freedoms had no meaningful benefit. They were, in short, smitten by the lure of fascism.
https://brownstone.org/articles/why-academia-is-drawn-to-fascism/
Dr. Peter McCullough has been the world’s most prominent and vocal advocate for early outpatient treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) infection in order to prevent hospitalization and death. On May 19, 2021, I interviewed him about his efforts as a treating physician and researcher. From his unique vantage point, he has observed and documented a profoundly disturbing policy response to the pandemic—a policy response that may prove to be the greatest malpractice and malfeasance in the history of medicine and public health.”
Link to interview audio format released by Julian Charles of The Mind Renewed podcast.
Backup mirror:
My 30 years of working in academic environments, as both a scientist and a clinical academic, tell me this: a scientist’s career objective is to big up his subject, which increases his personal likelihood of gaining grants, influence and promotion. Scientists focus on narrow topics, often almost to the exclusion of everything else. Perspective is rarely a strong point. The more their subject is in the public eye, preferably centre stage, the better it is from a career point of view. Any crisis is, I’m afraid, a career opportunity for some. Unbiased, agenda-free, selfless public service is not, I believe, a key feature of academic life, nor is there any real reason to expect it to be.
The management of the Covid ‘crisis’ – a crisis substantially caused by the very management itself – has all the hallmarks of government being advised by a group of experts in the limelight, in thrall to groupthink, and with far too cosy a consensus to do effective science.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/09/25/the-making-of-britains-covid-catastrophe/