By Helen Raleigh
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people have been told to “follow the science.” Yet for a year and a half, they’ve heard contradicting messages from self-appointed prophets of “the science” like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
We learned that politicians who claimed their decisions were science-driven often ignored scientific findings that didn’t fit certain political narratives. We discovered that scientists are fallible human beings, and some would let personal interests and political views cloud their judgment.
Is science itself one of the victims of the COVID-19 pandemic? I asked Dr. Scott Atlas at the 13th annual Freedom Conference hosted by the Steamboat Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization. Formerly a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center, Atlas is now a senior fellow in health policy at the Hoover Institution.
Atlas has been under constant attacks by the left and the corporate media since he served as a special adviser to former President Trump and a member of the White House coronavirus task force from August to November 2020. The New York Times and the Washington Post ran hit pieces on Atlas, questioning his qualifications despite his distinguished career and scholarship.
Google-owned YouTube also removed a 50-minute video of Atlas’s interview with the Hoover Institute. Twitter took down his tweet that questioned the effectiveness of masks.
‘Science’ Destroyed Its Own Credibility
Atlas has refused to be silenced. He has a lot to say about how the scientific field and Americans’ trust in it have been tremendously harmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Science has been not just a victim,” he told me, “but actively participated in the self-destruction of its credibility.”
To prove his point, Atlas referred to the now infamous letter published in Lancet, which denounced the lab-leak theory as a “conspiracy” that created “fear, rumors, and prejudice.” Facebook “fact-checkers” used the letter to censor discussion of the lab-leak theory for more than a year.
It then surfaced in The Daily Mail that Peter Daszak, president of Eco Health Alliance, orchestrated a group of scientists to write the letter without disclosing the EHA’s close financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Now many scientists accept that the WIV lab-leak theory is just as probable as the natural origin theory.
Atlas also faulted leading scientific publications such as Nature and Lancet for playing “important roles in enabling, encouraging, and enforcing the false narrative.” In June, journalist Ian Birrell cited one source who estimated the publisher of Nature had sponsorship agreements worth millions of dollars from Chinese institutions.
“Science is not supposed to be about intimidating, countering interpretation of data, or abusing, or censoring data,” Atlas said. “Science is not supposed to have a view. Science is only about data and the scientific process. There is never supposed to be ‘an accepted view’ of science.”
Stop Censoring the Scientific Process
Politicians and pundits also lost people’s trust by advocating regulations that were not based in fact. “The phrase ‘follow the science’ should never be uttered again by people who do not know actual data. They must stop,” Atlas said. “They have no credibility whatsoever when they get up and say, ‘follow the science.’ It’s clear many of them don’t know the science, don’t understand the science, and they are not using the science to make the recommendations.”
How can science and scientists recover from this trust deficit? “It depends on only one thing — the visibility of the scientific process, which by definition is about the visibility of the data,” Atlas said. “There should be no censorship of views and interpretation of different data. Do not intimidate or issue harsh condemnations of people just because you disagree with them. Let the truth prevail by the data.”
He has received hundreds of emails from other scientists who have encouraged him to remain outspoken while afraid to speak up themselves. “The saving of science really depend[s] on scientists to come forward and to be unafraid to say that the objectivity of science and [the] scientific process itself has been contaminated and impeded,” he continued. “When more scientists come forward, there hopefully will be a reversal of that [trust deficit]. There is no such thing as science without the evidence being visible and debates being current. Science doesn’t exist in any other way.”
How can we do a better job of fighting back the next time our ruling class tries to send us into crisis mode? We have to recognize what the data revealed about this current pandemic, Atlas said, citing several recent studies (including one by Eran Bendavid and other scientists of Stanford University) showing that lockdowns didn’t work to keep COVID-19 from spreading while imposing their own severe additional costs.
Never Let Lockdowns Destroy Lives Again
Lockdowns destroyed people, Atlas said, by “shutting down medical care, stopping people from seeking emergency medical care, increasing drug abuse, increasing death by suicide, more psychological damage, particularly among the younger generation. Hundreds and thousands of child abuse cases went unreported. Teenagers’ self-harm cases have tripled.”
Atlas also noted the increase of other deaths like tuberculosis, caused by the world’s focus on COVID-19. The World Health Organization warned in 2020 of up to an additional 400,000 deaths from tuberculosis because of the diversion of resources to COVID-19. “Mortality data showing that anywhere from a third or half of the deaths during the pandemic were not due to COVID-19,” Atlas said. “They were extra deaths due to the lockdowns.”
Democrats simply want to obey, as long as the orders are coming from Democrats. They don’t care about what masks actually do, good or bad; they simply want to be the first to line up to obey any arbitrary directive issued by Democrats and insist everyone else blindly follow suit; if for no other reason that to make them look less stupid.
It’s been proven definitively that regions where masks are mandated fare no better than regions where masks were optional. People submit to this pointless mandate (and numerous others) like lemmings trying to be the first to the edge of the cliff.
Some actual real COVID-19 related biology.
https://m.twitch.tv/gigaohmbiological/home
COVID-19 has killed 642,000 Americans since January 2020.
Correction;
Me fauci and biden have killed 642,000 Americans since January 2020.
There, fixed it for you
Your sock puppet is showing again.
They have now recorded 13,627 deaths, 2,826,646 injuries, and 1,429 fetal deaths from pregnant women who took a COVID shot.
Around 869.7 of every 100,000 Americans die each year. That works out to 8,697 per million. 169.6 million have been vaccinated. Do the arithmetic. A significant number people would “die after vaccination” if the injection were nothing but sterile distilled water. The same is true of other reported adverse events.
“Deaths following vaccination” doesn’t mean “deaths due to vaccination”. Also, the VAERS is a passive reporting system—a compilation of reports made by individuals or relatives, not a controlled system of reports from medical sources. They’re collecting anecdotal reports to look for patterns of adverse events that could warrant closer controlled examination.
The article misrepresents what the data actually means.
https://vaers.hhs.gov/about.html
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Why hasn’t idiot Biden made the virus go away?
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