Science and Covid-19 Policies
The elaboration of scientific theories is a slow process. It requires familiarizing oneself with a broad range of literature, not just what appears to be directly relevant. The collection of convincing empirical data demands yet more time.
This data needs to be extensive and varied so as not to serve biased ends. Observation must be reproducible and severally reproduced. Even to know what to look for, what experiment to perform, takes time. Falsifying a thesis also requires care and time as the validity of counter-arguments needs ensuring.
In contrast, scientism, or the creed into which science has been trans-formed into, evolves rapidly. For its pronouncements are not founded on proper data, nor always on reason and common sense. To rely on science to remedy the damage created by the excesses enabled by scientism is therefore unrealistic.
While scientism is only limited by immediate impossibilities, the limitations of science are extensive. Scientific knowledge is in a constant state of unfolding. It is the exact opposite of dogma. Science is by definition the only approach to knowledge with in-built doubt about its own statements, in other words an approach acknowledging that its theories are open to modification, even to complete repudiation, that they are ephemeral and in a constant process of revision, but of a revision that must itself conform with the data available. In a nutshell, to cite Dmitri Mendeleev, “science knows no final truth.”1
Any reason for concern should always make us reconsider and again amend or even abandon. We may be guided by the quest for truth, but must never forget that science is not about truth, or if it is we can never know whether that is the case. What our ever deepening scientific under-standing does is guide us away from untruths. Scientific knowledge, despite being the least fanciful form of knowledge, is at best uncertain.
In other words, science by its very nature suggests prudence. It cannot serve as an alibi for policies. Any evidenced doubt about a theory should make us pause regarding its applications until such time when it is better ascertained.
This evidently applies to the current issues related to the official covid narrative. For a proper scientific assessment, time is needed.
Whether or not there has in effect been a pandemic with a high mortality rate and with a high number of severe cases can only be correctly answered after some number of months or even years. To begin with overall mortality has to be compared with other years.
This should include comparisons over different time periods: an entire year comprising the winter season, only the winter season, the post-measure months, in particular the lockdown months. The answers may vary country to country or even regionally. Every year probably witnesses some increase of deaths in some part of the world due to specific local conditions.
In the event no significant excess is found then it would raise severe questions about the policies implemented, although it would not dismiss the thesis of the emergence of some new disease. This question will take longer to unravel.
In the event a significant excess is found, then the latter question takes on greater importance, but it cannot be immediately attributed to a new disease. All that can be concluded is that some disease(s), some physical and psychological factors, are more prevalent.
Because death certificates in all countries mention covid even where it is not the cause, a mere quantitative study of the numbers of deaths attributed to it is unlikely to be all that helpful to find the reasons of any excess. It could be due to already known diseases, it could also be due mostly or fully to non-medical causes.
For instance, the measures implemented have certainly resulted in un-precedented negligence and inhumane treatment of the elderly in care homes. Being totally cut off from family and friends, from the flow of life, from any physical contact, surrounded by staff in special gear that dehumanizes both them and the inmates, is sufficient reason to further weaken an already fragile segment of the population.
At least in the wealthier nations, the staff is largely from poorer ones. How many opted to return to their countries before borders closed? To what extent did it leave the homes understaffed? If the excess corresponds to excess deaths in care homes then the question as to whether it is not purely due to fear and folly generating policies.
If the excess is greater than that in care homes, then consequences on the health of populations due exclusively to the measures should be investigated. If the measures do not provide an explanation, then certainly other causes have to be investigated. One is to pursue the viral contagion thesis. Although so far no virus appears to have been identified, it does not mean that none will at a later date. The other is to pursue the Claude Bernard theory: since, according to it, “the constancy of the internal environment (milieu intérieur) is the condition of free, independent life”,2 rather than the consequence of life, disease consists in the disturbance of this constancy, and any disturbance of such a complex process may have multiple interrelated causes.
In both scenarios, the following stage would be to find out whether the prevalent causes are manmade or natural. If manmade, is it something introduced into our environment in recent decades, or the combined effect of too many polluting factors, which increasing numbers of people are beginning to react to?
For instance, it is only over the years that it has become impossible to escape manmade electromagnetic radiations. Key dissimilarities with natural ones have recently been found to be the cause of the latter’s adverse impact on human and other living organisms.3 4 5 Or is it some more deliberate use of bioweapons, notably patented coronaviruses?
Another path worth investigating is the vaccine one if excess deaths in care homes represent at the very least a non-negligible proportion of any excess. Indeed, the elderly in care are likely to have been systematically vac-cinated against the flu. The role of the flu or possibly other vaccines cannot be dismissed given there is some evidence that the “Spanish flu pandemic” may have originated from a massive vaccination campaign, especially in the armies among which the pandemic is held to have originated.
Given that the occurrence of a pandemic cannot be known at the outset, the main argument to justify unprecedented measures has been the precautionary principle. However does it and did it at any moment justify these measures, or on the contrary does it imply that they should never have been enforced and should be immediately lifted?
The theories heralded to justify the policies appear to be ungrounded on sufficient empirical grounds. As will be explained in a separate article, the existence of a contagious viral pandemic has not yet been ascertained.
Hence, from the beginning, estimations of the basic reproduction number, a concept supposed to indicate the contagiousness of a disease and founded on the assumption of a “totally susceptible population”, have made little sense if there is no contagion, especially by a germ attacking all and sundry.
Therefore fears of overwhelmed hospitals used to justify the measures, especially lockdowns and quarantines of travelers, were and remain unfounded. Regarding mortality, in China, covid-19 was a minor cause of death ranked below 49th even at the height of the crisis, many 100s of times less than lung diseases causing breathing difficulties.6
Given the millions who are supposed to have left Wuhan on the eve of the lockdown, and given that most of China did not impose any lockdown, the very idea of a pandemic seems even more questionable.
Quarantining sick people is an age-old practice. Quarantining the healthy under the suspicion they might be infectious, apart from being akin to imprisoning everyone because all are potential criminals, is however unprecedented and clearly useless. Indeed, were there harmful viruses pervading the environ-ment, then they certainly would be as prevalent indoors as outdoors.
Hence even more than useless, confinement ensures a larger number of severe cases and deaths. In case a veritable contagious pandemic is suspected, the survival instinct tells us to flee from danger zones. This is what happened during the plagues that decimated Europe in the Middle Ages, when the upper classes left London and Paris. As a preventive measure against the introduction of the epidemic from abroad, or at least its worsening, it certainly is now futile since cases do not imply contagiousness.
Everywhere the mortality rate said to be from covid remains negligible. So does the hospitalization numbers, in other words the number of severely infected patients. If the number of cases is rising it is simply because there is more testing.
Moreover, deaths had remained in most European countries lower than usual until the imposition of confinement, and hence given that the thesis of a pandemic in China was from evidenced, quarantining travelers has throughout been unjustified. It is also nonsensical: in case of a viral pandemic, viruses are unlikely to recognize borders.
As for social distancing, the milder form of lockdowns, it does not even bear arguing against. The idea originates from a 2006 paper7 for a school project of a fourteen year old girl, which in effect argues for a full lockdown, based not on empirical data, but on a highly reductive computer simulation.
It was co-authored by her father, who holds no degrees in medicine, epidemiology, nor in immunology. It is evident that instinctively one avoids physical contact with someone showing signs of apparent infection, what-ever be the infection, but the absence of any evidence of the effectiveness of this measure is reflected in the distances varying according to country. Should these distances not take into account the incessantly changing wind speed and direction, humidity levels, and other local characteristics of the environment?
Washing hands or more thoroughly bathing and changing clothes certainly aid to stop the spread of diseases after a visit to the sick or to places likely to harbour a high level of infection. However done too frequently, especially with anti-bacterial products, kills the very bacteria without whose protection our species would certainly never have emerged and would rapidly disappear. Moreover, this is likely to contribute to the emergence of resistant bacteria, which is already an increasingly severe issue.
What about masks? Controversies such as whether or not masks lower the amount of oxygen inhaled and heighten the intake of CO2 will take time to fully resolve. Haphazard experiments by this or that person do not constitute evidence. Only systematic, controlled experiments over large numbers in varying conditions do. And this demands time. The supposed virus is held to measure about 120 nm in diameter.
Many viruses are larger. Bacteria certainly are. Therefore, masks retain most of the rejections the wearer exhales. Consequently, he is in effect incessantly inhaling a variety of microbes concentrated within a confined space in proximity to the nasal cavity, which the immune system is in the first place trying to rid the body of.
This process is likely to be more harmful than inhaling microbes disseminated loosely in the ambient air. Hence wearing masks regularly for long is much more harmful than not wearing them. The argument advanced against this conclusion is that surgical teams sometimes do so for prolonged operations.
To conclude that indeed time is no contraindication a systematic study should be conducted over a sufficiently long period. A first step is to find out the frequency of prolonged operations performed by a medical practitioner. The capacity of doing so is in itself a sign of good health, which may not be the case of a large part of the population. Also operating rooms have special features. They maintain a positive air pressure, higher than outside.
This is also the case of many commercial centres, but it certainly is not of most indoor places. Hence, the conditions, notably humidity levels outside and also largely indoors are often higher. This certainly affects both the usefulness and the dangers of masks. Hence once again, the longer and the more frequently masks are used, the greater the risks; only within limited settings and for short periods, for instance when visiting the sick could they be recommended.
In short, for various reasons, the wearer, whom other mask-wearers are trying to protect, is with time more likely to fall severely ill. There is here also a logical flaw: if masks are self-protective, then why enforce it? Anyone who wishes to wear a mask, should be free to wear one.
The uselessness of all these measures is clearly shown by notably the example of the American State of South Dakota. It has so far not imposed any measures, neither lockdowns, quarantines for travelers, nor masks or social distancing, yet so far only 167 deaths, namely 0.018% of its total population are attributed to the supposed covid.
As for the tests and the rush for vaccines, are they not nonsensical? In the absence of any proper scientific assessment of the cause(s) of a pandemic, what are they supposed to be about?
There is also increasing scientific evidence that the measures are in effect extremely harmful, both physically and psychologically.
In other words, in name of precaution, all measures should be immediately lifted until the situation is better assessed, and all research on vaccines halted. In particular, all attempts to change human behaviour that have characterized our species since its emergence, and have made it possible for us to survive this far, should be immediately stopped. This common sense has been telling us from the beginning. And common sense keeps telling us that the mischief created is long term, and can only worsen the longer they are in place. Waiting for science to corroborate this before intervening may be too late. Out of the fear of the natural unpredictability enmeshed in the fabric of life, populations have permitted the introduction of an artificial factor of unpredictability of an unprecedented magnitude beyond estimation.
Notes
- Quoted in Vucinich, Alexander. 1967. “Mendeleev’s Views on Science and Society”. Isis 58(3): 342.
- Bernard, Claude. [1865] 1949. An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. Translated by Henry Copley Greene. United States: Henry Schuman. p. viii.
- Panagopoulos, Dimitris J and Johansson, Olle and Carlo, George L. 2015. “Polarization: a key difference between man-made and natural electromagnetic fields, in regard to biological activity”. Scientific reports 5(14914).
- Panagopoulos, Dimitris J. 2018. “Man-Made Electromagnetic Radiation Is Not Quantized”. In: Horizons in World Physics Editor: Albert Reimer. Nova Science: chapter 1, 1–58.
- Panagopoulos, Dimitris J and Margaritis, Lukas H. 2010. “The identification of an in-tensity ‘window’ on the bioeffects of mobile telephony radiation”. International Journal of Radiation Biology 86(5): 358–366.
- Fenz, Katharina and Kharas Homi. “A mortality perspective on COVID-19: Time, location, and age”. The Brookings Institute.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/03/23/a-mortality-perspective-on-covid-19-time-location-and-age/.
- Glass, Robert J., Glass Laura M., Beyeler, Walter E. et al. “Targeted Social Distancing Designs for Pandemic Influenza”. EID Journal 12(11).
About the author: Dr Urmie Ray read mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where she obtained her B.A. (M.A.), Mmath, and PhD. After 23 years as an academic, several articles and a book in the field of algebra, she resigned her professorship in France – the country of her childhood – to dedicate herself to her lifelong interests in current issues, notably those related to science. Her second non-mathematical book “On Science: Concepts, Cultures, and Limits” (Routledge, Dec. 2020) in particular examines why and how science has been increasingly transformed into its exact opposite, a dogma which claims to speak in its name.
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