Not science: Just guesses
Perhaps the number one problem that both the public and government policy-makers have faced is making decisions regarding Covid-19 based on “The science.”
Science has been perverted, particularly in the past 20 years, by two factors. The first is that models used to predict that future that failed were “adjusted” or that certain data was added or deleted to make the model “accurate.” The second is that we now look to a “consensus of experts.” Both were a direct result of the science surrounding the idea that the Earth was warming, and that recent human activity was the cause.
We will not argue the validity of the “Climate Change” scenarios except to say that when the argument is that “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree,” that is not science.
A fully developed heliocentric model—that the Earth moves around the sun—was presented by Aristarchus of Samos in the 3rd century BC. But the scientific consensus said that idea was false, even after Nicolaus Copernicus formulated a model that placed the sun at the center of the universe in the 1500s.
In past centuries, the greatest killer of women—one in six died—was fever following childbirth. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen said the fevers were curable infections. The consensus said no. It took 125 years for the “consensus” to agree.
The pandemic has been a nightmare for us all. But how much more for the men and women in government and also the private sector like business owners and operators that have actually had to make decisions?
Of course, government officials must be accountable and should always be transparent. They have an obligation to explain why they acted the way they did. But it is extremely easy to criticize behind the safety of a newspaper column or a social-media post. For most of these “experts,” the biggest life-changing decision they ever made was answering the question, “Would you like one or two scoops of rice?” And absolutely none of them have ever had to make potentially life-or-death decisions affecting millions of people.
The pandemic has also been a nightmare because the situation, as well as the virus, has been changing month-to-month, and sometimes even day-to-day. For example, “Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization now recommend cloth masks for the general public, but earlier in the pandemic, both organizations recommended just the opposite.”
Trying to get reliable information from the genuine health care/epidemic experts on the trajectory of the disease is also exceedingly difficult. One local group wrote in April 2020, “A mathematical model is just a model and is at best an approximation of reality.” But then it goes on filling pages with projections. At that time (April 2020) they said “Ncr—pandemic is close to being contained.” However, they should not be faulted any more than the government should be faulted for the actions it took based on these scientific projections.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation was founded in July 2007 with hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. On September 4, 2020, it wrote that the best-case scenario for the Philippines was 58,030 deaths by January 1, 2021. Worst case was 117,721 and the actual figure was 8,316.
However, the projected deaths by then under all scenarios were a range of 7,552 to 137,358. That is not science. That is a guess, probably reached by a consensus of 97 percent of the people that wrote the report.