The Censorship of Science

It is a sad day when you have to sit down and write a Post about corruption in science. In my naive and idealistic way I thought science was about enlightenment, debate, the fair competition of ideas and promotion of understanding and that the ‘Scientific Method’ was widely accepted as the gold standard for exploring nature with precision and verifying truth.

Evidently I am wrong.

This Post is all about the need to establish an Academy for Science and Freedom, which is exactly what has happened at Hillsdale College in Washington DC in the USA. The reasons this has become necessary have become evident in the response of the Governments and Scientific Establishments (the Institutions, Universities and funding distributors) to the Public Health Emergency posed by the Covid – 19 Pandemic. Science has been grossly abused and perverted, it has been politicised, the free exchange of ideas has actively been shut down and any ‘opposition’ throttled by methods such as withdrawal of funding, vilification of individuals and protection of self interest. All of which have precedence over ‘the greater good’. All in all quite an inditement!

The new Academy’s mission is to educate American people (and hopefully a wider audience!) about the free exchange of ideas for the Public Good and a proper relationship between freedom and science in the pursuit of truth. The Covid-19 Pandemic has exposed many grave problems within the scientific community and between it and the Scientific Establishment.

In particular some scientists whose research and data interpretations differ from the ‘officially desired narrative’ have been silenced, censored and slandered, in a word ‘cancelled’. This is being done by the Scientific Establishment, the very bodies that should be respecting and protecting the integrity of science and scientists – that used to be their prime purpose. They are now using Social media as a weapon to discredit individuals who are blocking their paths. Similar tactics to those used by the ‘Humanities’ warriors.

The main speaker is Martin Kulldorff, a world expert in his field of using statistical information to guide Public Health Policy during epidemics. He is an academic, softly spoken, not a firebrand. He is also a victim of telling the ‘inconvenient truth’ that the USA authorities were grossly mishandling the Covid-19 epidemic in the USA. He was therefore made to suffer for this by vilification, isolation, defunding and a host of other actions we would normally associate with life in an Autocracy !

In his talk he points out that Science is broken, hence the need for a new Academy to establish its proper functioning again in the longer term. It is also about censorship in science using his own story as an example, as he points out other scientists have had much worse treatment. So far the villains of the piece have all got away without as much as a scratch.

It started 2 years ago – the Wuhan Covid-19 virus escape became known along with its rapid spread to Italy. Martin was very concerned that it had spread so far so rapidly but was heartened to discover that the severity of its effects were very age related, only slight symptoms in younger people and severe symptoms and risk of death in the elderly and those with weakened immune systems.
This was known in April 2020.

Up until that time the World Health Organisation’s advice had been:
– protect vulnerable groups as soon as they are identified
– do NOT lockdown populations, due to huge social damage
– do NOT close schools unless children would be harmed by infection

Martin noticed that all the accumulated wisdom about managing Public Health during infections was being ignored – worse than that it was being actively contradicted. The more he tried to use his position to spread the fact that well established science was being abused or simply ignored the more isolated he became.
In the meantime other Scientists had also been vilified, particularly the the 3 scientists behind the Barrington Declaration – this amounted to character assassination organised by the Scientific Establishment with the tacit agreement of Government.

Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD
A professor of medicine and economics at Stanford University

Martin Kulldorff, PhD
A professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital who develops epidemiological and statistical models to detect infectious disease outbreaks

Sunetra Gupta, PhD
A professor of theoretical epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University

Here is the email, provided by Hillsdale College as a slide, from the Director of the National Institute for Health Francis Collins to
Dr Fauchi. You don’t even have to read between the lines!

As a result of the deliberate preference by the establishment for mass vaccination, lockdowns, school closures, reliance on mass testing and tracing etc it is arguable that there were at least a million excess deaths world wide (out of about 6 million total in April 2022). Quite some achievement for a group of officials knowingly usurping their function and authority. Even today in the UK we have the absurd situation where children are being offered the vaccine when the harms of its side effects (just published by Pfizer) outweigh the beneficial effects of naturally acquired immunity for that age group, i.e. having the infection to gain natural immunity.

It is shameful that the Universities, except some in Scandinavia, put their short term funding issues above their duty to academic freedom and scientific integrity, the free exchange of ideas and the wellbeing of their staff and students.
Cash has been king for them.

Here is the Hillsdale College Talk by Martin Kulldorff.
I really hope you find time to watch it carefully, just to know what a dire state Science is in and how the Scientific Establishment works to keep things just as they are, i.e. their jobs are safe, yours aren’t.

As always, I encourage you to draw your own conclusions and act accordingly. For my part I believe the best way to beat bullies is to stand up to them, expose what they are doing and, if possible, their motives. We all have a duty to shine a light on such wrongdoing whenever and wherever we find it.

As George Orwell said …
“If liberty means anything at all,
it means the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear“