I still believe in science. What I don’t believe in is pseudoscience, bogus science, fake science, agenda driven science or simply lies dressed up in scientific apparel. In short I believe in the truth and true science is one way, not the only way, of getting to the truth. But what happens when scientific research depends on funding as it almost always does? What happens if a financial backer or even a government has a particular expectation and if the scientific researcher is dependent on the philantrophic grace and favour of his funder to progress his career?
Is there not the potential for a major clash of interest that those with the funds will almost always win out to the detriment of good science?
These conflicts of interest seldom enter the public domain due to the joint vested interest between researcher and funder. However in September of last year climate scientist Dr Patrick Brown blew the whistle but astonishingly on his own work. Dr Brown was investigating the origins of wild fires in California and concluded that one cause was arson. He submitted his article to the prestigious academic peer reviewed journal Nature and it was rejected.
He altered his conclusions stating that the cause of the wildfires was climate change and his work was published without the most basic of checks and balances. At this point, after publication he went public.
He could have done what everybody else does, basked in academic glory and ignored his conscience. To his credit he chose not to. Nature has survived although its reputation is damaged and I am sure that Dr Brown’s career is over although he probably doesn’t know that yet.
Honest people can be poor at negotiating the greasy slope but he will find out. I did and so did a small number of Irish doctors who questioned the science behind the PCR test that was used to diagnose Covid. This test was described as the ‘gold standard’ in diagnosing Covid and everything from government policy to lockdowns depended on this test as it provided the numbers of new cases. If you were PCR positive you had Covid even though you may have had no clinical signs and if you entered hospital with a broken leg and were PCR positive you were registered as a Covid case.
But the PCR test depended on putting a sample through cycles of amplification that would magnify the slightest evidence of contact with covid. The higher the amplifications the more certainty of a positive test. If an amplification cycle is 35 or over the positive rate of actual cases is 3% meaning that the false positive rate is 97%. In Ireland our amplification rates were 35 or over.
This suited a government agenda of locking down society because it was WHO policy to do so and for that to happen an exponential rise in cases were required and that could only happen if the PCR tests came up positive because amplification cycles were increased away beyond what was needed to identity genuine cases. This is the misuse and manipulation of science. The result is a bogus science that is agenda and ideologically driven and fails to get to the truth.
The misuse of the PCR test which was the instrument that drove government policy still has ramifications to this day with late and delayed cancer diagnoses, mental health issues and the grotesqueries of people dying alone in nursing homes. Science, bad science or deliberately falsified pseudoscience, you decide.
Never again must science be taken at face value, never again must science be blindly trusted, never again must people acquiesce to the opinions of those who would claim to be expert. Examine the science, research the science and then and only then accept the science.
