For most of our lives, we trusted that scientific authorities speak with the truths they know from evidence. This has grown over the centuries with gradual discoveries. These discoveries are incorporated into the knowledge set and put into practice in medicine, health, chemistry, physics, or any other field.
These discoveries are storied and beloved. We tell the stories because they flatter us into thinking that humanity—meaning us!—is always improving.
So we have a list of heroes who made us better: Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein, Edison, and on it goes, upwards unto the light. The belief in the progress of science is central to the historiography of the West, and to the very idea of the Enlightenment. What a tribute to the power of the mind and to our capacity as people to advance.
This is how it stood in public health. We have learned so much since the bad old days when the local water pump spewed out cholera into the whole community and certainly since rats crawled all over the grain and spread the black death. Now we clean things and deploy high-minded techniques to guarantee the health of the community rather than panic and pump people full of snake oil or attach leeches to people and bleed them.
Aren’t we wonderful!
Then 2020 happened. Suddenly the entire game plan on pandemics completely flipped. All known wisdom was tossed out. The elites blabbed to the world that they just have no idea how it spreads even though it was clearly a coronavirus. They didn’t know the latency period even though that has been known for many decades. They didn’t know any therapeutics even though Nobel Prizes have been given for them and there were a dozen off-patent drugs available.
Then they started making up insane things. The virus could be on your grocery bags! It is floating around in rooms without people! You have to wash and sanitize your hands 17 times a day! You need to install all kinds of air filter systems immediately! Put up Plexiglas everywhere! Better yet, just stay put. Sit on your sofa and be as still as possible. Don’t move a muscle, then you might not get sick.
Finally, they said they had a magic potion that would fix the problem. It’s a new thing, a gene therapy that comes wrapped in little capsules that we inject into your skin. It’s been tested as 95 percent effective, and you know that’s true because it is a number with a percent. There are no side effects even though there was no way they could know that regardless.
What in the world was going on? Essentially, all old science was tossed out and new science replaced it except that the replacement was not science. It was some kind of method for social control. And with it came all kinds of other things. Get rid of your gas car and drive this golf cart! Stop eating meat and eat bugs! Don’t go to church! Don’t sing! Strap this cloth around your face and walk around keeping others safe!
We had a sense that all of this was bonkers. I had read articles from 2006 that had debunked every single one of these ridiculous methods of disease control. What in the world happened? Even two authors of that original paper by D.A. Henderson were on board with the new kabuki dance. There was certainly some change in the matrix.
What I had not known until yesterday is that the science on all these topics was even more robust than I knew.
There is a world-famous journal called The Cochrane Review which was founded to keep track of the most robust science particularly as it applied to medicine and public health issues. They were exclusively evidence-based, choosing only randomized controlled trials, considered the gold standard of evidence, and tracking all the studies with meta-analysis.
Back in 2006, some major scientists—led by Tom Jefferson of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Oxford University—started to examine the role of physical interventions in slowing or mitigating disease spread. In particular, they wanted to know whether physical barriers like masks, or respirators, or hand sanitizer works to stop the spread. Their first meta-analysis was published in 2006.
What did it conclude? It said there is no evidence that any of these practices have any effect. This was not a controversial conclusion. It was the widely accepted wisdom after a century of scientific experience and study of respiratory disease. It was the known science. It was orthodoxy. It was variously disputed but only by crazies and cranks who had no real public-health knowledge. And they hardly mattered since they had no power or influence.
This was the evidence. This was the science. This was accepted profession-wide. It was not controversial. It was the prevailing knowledge and wisdom. The Cochrane Review was the most respected outlet in the world to find out what the science was. Everyone knew that. And the science very clearly said that all these ideas were unproven. Which is to say: all this stuff was stupid.
Then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the science was trashed. Nearly the whole of the scientific establishment, plus the media, plus all governments in the world except Sweden and a few other outposts, embraced the same bogus myths that stood wholly refuted in the existing literature that was publicly available to the entire world but now completely ignored.
This was “the science” we were given during lockdowns and for two years following. In fact, it is still around. The CDC site still has this nonsense up there. But it gets worse. The Cochrane Review ITSELF started publishing what the editor was calling “Rapid Response” articles that directly contradicted the settled science found in the exact same journal! It was completely amazing. And scandalous. And still is.
So what the heck happened?
We are still trying to figure that out. The answer lies in some combination of power, money, and public panic. Exactly which of the three predominates here is open to debate. But there simply is no question that we have been subject to a “great reset” that deployed science in an effort to change life functioning on the whole planet earth. This really happened to us.
And it is still happening. We are being surveilled and censored. We are being bullied and browbeat. We are goaded, taxed, nudged, and forced into accepting that which we do not want, whether it is EVs or CBDCs or mRNA. These efforts started with the rejection of science in favor of myth and the myths are still governing the world.
Whatever else we can say about these astonishing developments, this much we can pronounce. We were wrong to trust the authorities. We were wrong to put faith in leaders. We were wrong to look to the universities, the media, and journals, and the experts generally. They failed us. They lied to us.
What does this say about the usual historiography of science and the idea of progress? It’s not good. It will be a generation or two or longer for people to regain their trust. And rightly so.
