Nov 21, 2023·edited Nov 21, 2023Liked by Rebecca Culshaw Smith
People are naturally curious, so science in one form or another will certainly continue. But whether mainstream scientific institutions will be able to divorce themselves from politics, greed and big Pharma, and rebuild trust remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath either.
In early March 2020 I noticed how numbers of covid cases were reported for certain locations without giving a denominator, i.e., the size of the overall population, which tended to raise unnecessary alarm. And then in mid-March a friend sent me a link to an interview in German (which I speak) with Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, and that opened the floodgates for me to investigating the whole pay-op, along with several other truth-seeking friends. Dr. David Katz also had a very good op-ed in the NYT (believe it or not!) in late March 2020, noting the wrong-headedness of general lockdowns. Lots of excellent dissident doctors and scientists kept speaking up, which I welcomed!
Been Rethinking AIDS since early 1987. Been sharing these Flaws In The Coronavirus Pandemic Theory compiled by David Crowe since March/June 2020. http://saveelsobrante.net/CoronavirusPanic.pdf
Well I can tell you it's sparked something rather unintended I think, that many people are waking up to virology as a whole as being junk science. And there's significantly more hesitancy about vaccination now. i was skeptical from the very beginning. Something didn't sit right with me, that suddenly governments everywhere just knew that people were going to get sick with this new virus. I was in Utah, and was watching case counts on Utah's reporting website and there was very little going on. Yet people were lined up at Walmart buying toilet paper like it had just been invented.
And then the predictions from I think it was the University of Washington continually putting out new pandemic models claiming to show what was going to happen, only to have them need constant updates. But it only took me a short time to find that the Imperial College of London and Neil Furgeson's previous prediction models were total crap, and the amount of damage those predictions caused that significant economic harm. It wasn't hard to find this stuff either, and governments were freaking out over this.
It certainly seemed that some people were getting sick from something, that everyone seemed to know it was this one single new virus seemed odd to me. And shutting down every except Walmart and a couple of other big businesses like grocery stores where everyone would congregate seemed illogical to me. Fortunately in Utah things opened up pretty quickly compared to some states, and Utah didn't seem to suffer any worse than any other place because of that. When gyms opened back up (I'm a long time gym goer), we actually had to schedule a time to go to the gym, so they could keep only a certain number of people there at a time. That pretty quickly fell apart and pretty soon gyms were back to normal and people weren't dying in the streets like we were told was going to happen because of a supposed lack of ventilators.
I think my skepticism of authority, given my religious upbringing in a very authoritarian environment, paid off. I stayed away from the vax and am supremely grateful for this.
I’m in Texas and we opened up super fast too. (Not fast enough, although my husband is a massive introvert and still says, mostly jokingly, that he sometimes misses lockdown.) I’d forgotten about the gyms- I’m a big gym goer as well and I’d totally forgotten how I had to schedule a time to swim laps or lift weights. Fun times. 🙄
And I know you know this, but about models - they can’t tell you anything you haven’t already assumed. If a model tells you social distancing works, it’s because you input that into the model assuming it would work. The utility (limited though it is) of models is to tell you the magnitude of an effect. They cannot be used to infer causation.
So odd thing happened today. A friend texted me this:
"ou can get 4 more free Covid Tests.. The government is giving away more free Covid tests. They ended the program but now they have all these tests already paid for that are going to go bad so they are giving them away again.
It doesn’t hurt to have a couple just in case. Barbi and I got it this summer. She gave it to me. 🙁 Probably picked it up at work." And a link to the site.
I didn't get into with him, didn't feel like a fight, he's all in with the covid narrative. I just kind ignored it. But honestly, I wanted to ask, if I get sick I'm probably staying home anyway, so what does getting the test DO for me? Ugh.
I think the testing craze is a North American thing. One of my sisters lives in France, and she thought she had Covid at one point and didn’t bother testing. She told me that they don’t really test at home in Europe. Anecdotal, but interesting nonetheless.
Fauci was brought up Jesuit and presumably from that comes many things, including his hatred of gays, his manipulative attitude to nefarious dogma, and his Saviour syndrome. Forget science, the guy makes more sense if viewed as a religious zealot.
My first reaction was “They are doing it again!” I encountered an alternative AIDS activist group in Portland, Oregon in the mid to late 1980s and was convinced that HIV/AIDS was a complete fraud. When I heard of the new coronavirus epidemic early in 2020 and that Anthony Fauci was leading the policy I immediately thought it was another case of a complete fraud. Here’s a link to the book that convinced me that HIV/AIDS was a complete fraud.
To answer your question, I knew from the beginning that the Covid threat (e.g. putative mortality rate) was exaggerated, because I already knew about the hiv/aids hoax as well as the scare-mongering of SARS-1 and H5N1 of recent decades. As the "pandemic" proceeded, contradictions were everywhere, none of which were explained or even addressed, such as Fauci testifying to Congress that masks don't work to stop infection/transmission of a respiratory virus, then a couple months later reversing himself -- same non sequitur for lockdowns & 'social distancing,' which would not stop a mild cold virus. Also, it made no sense to tell people with covid to stay home/avoid treatment, plus recommending Remdesivir (!) and denying that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine treatments should be used.
Finally, the idea of waiting a year for an untested vaccine to treat a rapidly mutating RNA virus was absurd and an obvious money-making scheme -- indemnifying drug companies against lawsuits/damages and exempting government officials from mandates certainly fueled my skepticism.
As for the question of how to rebuild trust in 'the science' -- to me, it's not science (at least, legitimate, non-self serving or non-profiteering research) that's untrustworthy, it's the propaganda and merchandising of medical technology that's the problem. It's trust in corrupted, corporately controlled government that seems problematic to me.
I don't know how to repair science's damaged reputation in practical terms, but in general we need a separation of Lab and State, of science and market. We'll also need to completely reform the mainstream media somehow, whose commercial interests have totally corrupted and discredited them, in my opinion.
People are naturally curious, so science in one form or another will certainly continue. But whether mainstream scientific institutions will be able to divorce themselves from politics, greed and big Pharma, and rebuild trust remains to be seen. I'm not holding my breath either.
In early March 2020 I noticed how numbers of covid cases were reported for certain locations without giving a denominator, i.e., the size of the overall population, which tended to raise unnecessary alarm. And then in mid-March a friend sent me a link to an interview in German (which I speak) with Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, and that opened the floodgates for me to investigating the whole pay-op, along with several other truth-seeking friends. Dr. David Katz also had a very good op-ed in the NYT (believe it or not!) in late March 2020, noting the wrong-headedness of general lockdowns. Lots of excellent dissident doctors and scientists kept speaking up, which I welcomed!
Wodarg was one of the first people I saw that was publicly skeptical. He may even have been the first.
Been Rethinking AIDS since early 1987. Been sharing these Flaws In The Coronavirus Pandemic Theory compiled by David Crowe since March/June 2020. http://saveelsobrante.net/CoronavirusPanic.pdf
Flaws In The Coronavirus Pandemic Theory http://saveelsobrante.net/CoronavirusPanic.pdf
Well I can tell you it's sparked something rather unintended I think, that many people are waking up to virology as a whole as being junk science. And there's significantly more hesitancy about vaccination now. i was skeptical from the very beginning. Something didn't sit right with me, that suddenly governments everywhere just knew that people were going to get sick with this new virus. I was in Utah, and was watching case counts on Utah's reporting website and there was very little going on. Yet people were lined up at Walmart buying toilet paper like it had just been invented.
And then the predictions from I think it was the University of Washington continually putting out new pandemic models claiming to show what was going to happen, only to have them need constant updates. But it only took me a short time to find that the Imperial College of London and Neil Furgeson's previous prediction models were total crap, and the amount of damage those predictions caused that significant economic harm. It wasn't hard to find this stuff either, and governments were freaking out over this.
It certainly seemed that some people were getting sick from something, that everyone seemed to know it was this one single new virus seemed odd to me. And shutting down every except Walmart and a couple of other big businesses like grocery stores where everyone would congregate seemed illogical to me. Fortunately in Utah things opened up pretty quickly compared to some states, and Utah didn't seem to suffer any worse than any other place because of that. When gyms opened back up (I'm a long time gym goer), we actually had to schedule a time to go to the gym, so they could keep only a certain number of people there at a time. That pretty quickly fell apart and pretty soon gyms were back to normal and people weren't dying in the streets like we were told was going to happen because of a supposed lack of ventilators.
I think my skepticism of authority, given my religious upbringing in a very authoritarian environment, paid off. I stayed away from the vax and am supremely grateful for this.
I’m in Texas and we opened up super fast too. (Not fast enough, although my husband is a massive introvert and still says, mostly jokingly, that he sometimes misses lockdown.) I’d forgotten about the gyms- I’m a big gym goer as well and I’d totally forgotten how I had to schedule a time to swim laps or lift weights. Fun times. 🙄
And I know you know this, but about models - they can’t tell you anything you haven’t already assumed. If a model tells you social distancing works, it’s because you input that into the model assuming it would work. The utility (limited though it is) of models is to tell you the magnitude of an effect. They cannot be used to infer causation.
So odd thing happened today. A friend texted me this:
"ou can get 4 more free Covid Tests.. The government is giving away more free Covid tests. They ended the program but now they have all these tests already paid for that are going to go bad so they are giving them away again.
It doesn’t hurt to have a couple just in case. Barbi and I got it this summer. She gave it to me. 🙁 Probably picked it up at work." And a link to the site.
I didn't get into with him, didn't feel like a fight, he's all in with the covid narrative. I just kind ignored it. But honestly, I wanted to ask, if I get sick I'm probably staying home anyway, so what does getting the test DO for me? Ugh.
I think the testing craze is a North American thing. One of my sisters lives in France, and she thought she had Covid at one point and didn’t bother testing. She told me that they don’t really test at home in Europe. Anecdotal, but interesting nonetheless.
Fauci was brought up Jesuit and presumably from that comes many things, including his hatred of gays, his manipulative attitude to nefarious dogma, and his Saviour syndrome. Forget science, the guy makes more sense if viewed as a religious zealot.
It is giving cult (as the kids would say).
My first reaction was “They are doing it again!” I encountered an alternative AIDS activist group in Portland, Oregon in the mid to late 1980s and was convinced that HIV/AIDS was a complete fraud. When I heard of the new coronavirus epidemic early in 2020 and that Anthony Fauci was leading the policy I immediately thought it was another case of a complete fraud. Here’s a link to the book that convinced me that HIV/AIDS was a complete fraud.
https://amzn.asia/d/8qFMOZD
Excellent information, thank you.
To answer your question, I knew from the beginning that the Covid threat (e.g. putative mortality rate) was exaggerated, because I already knew about the hiv/aids hoax as well as the scare-mongering of SARS-1 and H5N1 of recent decades. As the "pandemic" proceeded, contradictions were everywhere, none of which were explained or even addressed, such as Fauci testifying to Congress that masks don't work to stop infection/transmission of a respiratory virus, then a couple months later reversing himself -- same non sequitur for lockdowns & 'social distancing,' which would not stop a mild cold virus. Also, it made no sense to tell people with covid to stay home/avoid treatment, plus recommending Remdesivir (!) and denying that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine treatments should be used.
Finally, the idea of waiting a year for an untested vaccine to treat a rapidly mutating RNA virus was absurd and an obvious money-making scheme -- indemnifying drug companies against lawsuits/damages and exempting government officials from mandates certainly fueled my skepticism.
As for the question of how to rebuild trust in 'the science' -- to me, it's not science (at least, legitimate, non-self serving or non-profiteering research) that's untrustworthy, it's the propaganda and merchandising of medical technology that's the problem. It's trust in corrupted, corporately controlled government that seems problematic to me.
I don't know how to repair science's damaged reputation in practical terms, but in general we need a separation of Lab and State, of science and market. We'll also need to completely reform the mainstream media somehow, whose commercial interests have totally corrupted and discredited them, in my opinion.