Even when the facts don’t fit, we must follow the science
Beware of forsaking scientific evidence for blind faith
LOCKDOWN, and its associated restrictions, seems to be turning into a religion. A compulsory, state-controlled religion to which we must all bend the knee.
It’s disturbing to see how many people have voluntarily signed up to the Church of Lockdown Zealotry, even without the need of coercion, though there’s been plenty of that.
This army of eager recruits stands ever-ready to defend the most destructive, illogical, disproportionate measures, on the grounds that they “save lives”.
The idea that these extreme measures might actually cost many more lives — through undiagnosed cancer, heart attacks, suicide — and ruin countless others, especially those of the poorest and most vulnerable, does not appear to occur to them.
Once you become a member of the church, you don’t have to justify your actions, or provide quantifiable evidence for them.
It’s enough that you believe. You’re saved.
Any blasphemer who dares to question the official creed is dismissed as a loony Covid denier, or a Donald Trump fanatic, or as a callous granny-killer.
Dissenting scientists are routinely described as ‘outliers’, technically a neutral term, but we all know that it’s code for ‘dangerous heretics who must be silenced’.
And any evidence that does not tally with the absolutes of the lockdown creed is either smeared or ignored.
I find the latter approach even more sinister than straightforward censorship — such as Facebook’s recent attempt to discredit an article about the gold-standard Danish trial of facemasks, which indicated that wearing a mask didn’t make much difference to rates of community infection.
At least such attempted censorship can be called out and challenged.
But to ignore inconvenient evidence is an even more powerful weapon of suppression, simply because most people don’t get to hear about it. It doesn’t even get to the stage of being openly and widely attacked. It’s effectively shadow-banned.
This is only possible, of course, when large sections of the media fail to cover it in any meaningful depth.
Broadcast media, in particular, has clearly been spooked by guidelines from Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, warning them about including “potentially harmful material in their programming”.
Effectively this means that anything that challenges any aspect of the officially-sanctioned lockdown creed is treated with extreme caution and scepticism, if not ignored completely.
Take the example of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests. These are the tests routinely used to diagnose cases of coronavirus in their millions around the world.
There are many problems associated with the PCR test, such as its propensity to contamination.
To be fair, a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary recently highlighted the issue of cross-contamination at the Randox laboratory, here in Northern Ireland, which processes tens of thousands of Covid tests per day. (Randox denied the accusation of “serious failings”, and said that some of the claims in the film were inaccurate).
But such challenges to the broadcasting consensus are rare.
Instead we are expected to treat the test and the cases it discovers as an article of faith.
Yet many of these “cases” are not real cases at all. PCR tests can detect non-infectious shattered fragments of the virus many weeks after an active infection, as the US Center for Disease Control has admitted. It can also detect live virus, but in quantities too tiny to be infectious.
Why is it important that we talk about this?
Because the whole kit and caboodle of the second wave — the dismantling of people’s lives, and the inevitable destitution which will follow — is dependent on the accuracy of this flawed test.
Recently, the high court in Portugal determined that the PCR test is not a sufficiently reliable means to determine how infectious people are, and it is thus unlawful to quarantine people based solely on a positive test.
Another legal challenge, this time in Germany, is now under way.
How did I come by this information? Not through mainstream media channels, that’s for sure.
It’s through the work of Dr Mike Yeadon. He spent over 30 years leading research into new medicines, and was Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy and Respiratory with Pfizer until 2011.
You might think, therefore, that Dr Yeadon has a well-informed and valuable perspective, worth listening to.
But no. He’s deemed to be an “outlier”, and so is routinely both censored and ignored.
This blatant brushing aside of facts that do not fit reminds me of the way that creationists ignore evolution, insisting — in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary — that the earth was created 6,000 years ago.
Creationists believe that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, who should be regarded as “missionary lizards” for the gospel.
If vital evidence is ignored, discredited or suppressed, you’re not dealing in science any more.
You’re dealing in blind faith. And that’s no way to protect public health.