Seeing Truth In The Current Age Of Information Overload
A recurring theme in human society is how often groups hold diametrically opposed viewpoints, yet both are absolutely certain they are entirely correct, and the other is completely wrong
In each instance, this means that at least half of the people involved are wrong and incapable of seeing evidence repeatedly presented to them.
For example, recently, ACIP (the panel that advises the CDC on the vaccine schedule) decided to reevaluate the newborn hepatitis B vaccination because:
•Decades of evidence suggest it causes significant harm (e.g., it targets myelin1), yet no formal studies have ever assessed if the harm exists — despite continual requests for them.
•The public justification for newborn mass vaccination is that it serves as a safety net for the roughly one in a million instances where a hepatitis B positive mother is not tested for hepatitis B, infects her child during childbirth, and the partial protection the vaccine provides will prevent the child from going on to develop a lifelong hepatitis B infection. Yet, there is no evidence that thirty years of this policy has reduced hepatitis B.
ACIP hence proposed making newborn vaccination optional for mothers who tested negative for hepatitis B. However, due to the religious fervor around the vaccine, this met widespread resistance, and at the meeting, medical representatives showed they were incapable of conceiving that the vaccine could cause harm because their entire focus was anchored to preventing the (one in a million) case of newborn hepatitis transmission.
Likewise, once ACIP’s completely sane recommendation to stop vaccinating newborns of hepatitis B negative mothers was enacted, it was treated as an existential catastrophe by both the medical profession and the media and the ACIP chair was fired by his Texas hospital.2
While much could be said about this, I wanted to highlight that:
•A key theme in Robert Mendelsohn’s 1979 book Confessions of a Medical Heretic3 was that anyone who challenged medical dogmas was expelled and treated as a heretic (e.g., doctors who tried to save COVID patients from Fauci’s remdesivir protocols were fired and had their licenses targeted).
•Doctors (at least prior to COVID) typically only spoke out against the medical profession at the very ends of their careers to avoid being canceled.
•The largest victims of this cancel culture are patients, as the doctors being excommunicated are typically those patients would most want to see at their most desperate moments — which is a key part of why trust in physicians and hospitals decreased from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024.4
See more here substack.com