Trust the science we are told. Really?
On November 13th 2020, the respected British Medical Journal published a scathing attack on the government’s handling of the virus situation, and in particular, the way they appear to be deliberately suppressing medical science to pursue an agenda which, rather than helping protect the British public, seems designed to do just the opposite.
It is not a long article, so I reproduce it in its entirety here. [1]
Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.
Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.
The UK’s pandemic response provides at least four examples of suppression of science or scientists. First, the membership, research, and deliberations of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) were initially secret until a press leak forced transparency. The leak revealed inappropriate involvement of government advisers in SAGE, while exposing under-representation from public health, clinical care, women, and ethnic minorities. Indeed, the government was also recently ordered to release a 2016 report on deficiencies in pandemic preparedness, Operation Cygnus, following a verdict from the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Next, a Public Health England report on covid-19 and inequalities. The report’s publication was delayed by England’s Department of Health; a section on ethnic minorities was initially withheld and then, following a public outcry, was published as part of a follow-up report. Authors from Public Health England were instructed not to talk to the media. Third, on 15 October, the editor of the Lancet complained that an author of a research paper, a UK government scientist, was blocked by the government from speaking to media because of a “difficult political landscape.”
Now, a new example concerns the controversy over point-of-care antibody testing for covid-19. The prime minister’s Operation Moonshot depends on immediate and wide availability of accurate rapid diagnostic tests. It also depends on the questionable logic of mass screening—currently being trialled in Liverpool with a suboptimal PCR test.
The incident relates to research published this week by The BMJ, which finds that the government procured an antibody test that in real world tests falls well short of performance claims made by its manufacturers. Researchers from Public Health England and collaborating institutions sensibly pushed to publish their study findings before the government committed to buying a million of these tests but were blocked by the health department and the prime minister’s office. Why was it important to procure this product without due scrutiny? Prior publication of research on a preprint server or a government website is compatible with The BMJ’s publication policy. As if to prove a point, Public Health England then unsuccessfully attempted to block The BMJ’s press release about the research paper.
Politicians often claim to follow the science, but that is a misleading oversimplification. Science is rarely absolute. It rarely applies to every setting or every population. It doesn’t make sense to slavishly follow science or evidence. A better approach is for politicians, the publicly appointed decision makers, to be informed and guided by science when they decide policy for their public. But even that approach retains public and professional trust only if science is available for scrutiny and free of political interference, and if the system is transparent and not compromised by conflicts of interest.
Suppression of science and scientists is not new or a peculiarly British phenomenon. In the US, President Trump’s government manipulated the Food and Drug Administration to hastily approve unproved drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir. Globally, people, policies, and procurement are being corrupted by political and commercial agendas.
The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines. Government appointees are able to ignore or cherry pick science—another form of misuse—and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates.
How might science be safeguarded in these exceptional times? The first step is full disclosure of competing interests from government, politicians, scientific advisers, and appointees, such as the heads of test and trace, diagnostic test procurement, and vaccine delivery. The next step is full transparency about decision making systems, processes, and knowing who is accountable for what.
Once transparency and accountability are established as norms, individuals employed by government should ideally only work in areas unrelated to their competing interests. Expertise is possible without competing interests. If such a strict rule becomes impractical, minimum good practice is that people with competing interests must not be involved in decisions on products and policies in which they have a financial interest.
Governments and industry must also stop announcing critical science policy by press release. Such ill judged moves leave science, the media, and stock markets vulnerable to manipulation. Clear, open, and advance publication of the scientific basis for policy, procurements, and wonder drugs is a fundamental requirement.
The stakes are high for politicians, scientific advisers, and government appointees. Their careers and bank balances may hinge on the decisions that they make. But they have a higher responsibility and duty to the public. Science is a public good. It doesn’t need to be followed blindly, but it does need to be fairly considered. Importantly, suppressing science, whether by delaying publication, cherry picking favourable research, or gagging scientists, is a danger to public health, causing deaths by exposing people to unsafe or ineffective interventions and preventing them from benefiting from better ones. When entangled with commercial decisions it is also maladministration of taxpayers’ money.
Politicisation of science was enthusiastically deployed by some of history’s worst autocrats and dictators, and it is now regrettably commonplace in democracies. The medical-political complex tends towards suppression of science to aggrandise and enrich those in power. And, as the powerful become more successful, richer, and further intoxicated with power, the inconvenient truths of science are suppressed. When good science is suppressed, people die.
Emphasis added in all paragraphs.
It can be seen here: www.bmj.com
I have seen nothing in the mainstream media about this startling revelation, but that is to be expected, since most of the media is complicit, or guilty by association, of assisting governments in suppressing this kind of information, in much the same way as they do for real unbiased climate science.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4425?fbclid=IwAR0batIMHBMODPSOGPrJh9z879z8NIPkZwuhDdF0GQB8vEq-WlZ_AVO5rNA
About the author: Andy Rowlands is a British Principia Scientific International researcher, writer and editor who co-edited the new climate science book, ‘The Sky Dragon Slayers: Victory Lap‘
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Dean Michael Jackson
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“On November 13th 2020, the respected British Medical Journal published a scathing attack on the government’s handling of the virus situation, and in particular, the way they appear to be deliberately suppressing medical science to pursue an agenda…”
And the agenda is the “abolition of religion”, and the destruction of those civilizations “whose spiritual aroma is religion”,[1] as the following shockingly illustrates…
“Trust but VERIFY” – President Ronald Reagan’s watch phrase when dealing with the USSR…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As6y5eI01XE
(1) The West conspired to not VERIFY the ‘collapse’ of the USSR, even though the survival of the West depended on verification should the ‘collapse’ be a ruse, which proves (1) there was no ‘collapse’ of the USSR, because if there had been a ‘collapse’ the West would have immediately VERIFIED the ‘collapse’; and (2) the West’s institutions were co-opted by Marxists, explaining the West’s enabling of the fake ‘collapse’ of the USSR…quod erat demonstrandum.
(2) Throughout the 1980s the West conspired to regurgitate Soviet Bloc under counting of communist party membership numbers in order to facilitate the canard of imploding Soviet Bloc political establishments, explaining the West’s enabling of the fake ‘collapse’ of the USSR…quod erat demonstrandum.
(3) Before any religious sectarian strife in Yugoslavia (1991 – 2001) first there would have been massive reprisals against the reviled Communists who implemented draconian discriminatory policies to wipe out religion in Yugoslavia. LCY anti-religious discriminatory policies were so effective that within fifty years those who were without a religion increased by an astronomical 3,100%! The fact that no reprisals took place against LCY members proves that the ‘religious strife’ and ‘breakup’ of Yugoslavia was manufactured and controlled by the Communists.
(4) The World War I Allies never did immediately send a naval expedition to Petrograd to easily topple Lenin & Bolshevik’s November 7, 1917 coup, thereby promptly returning Russia to the war, Russia’s involvement in the war being a critical variable for the Allies’ victory strategy against the Central Powers, proving (a) that the Allies knew they were going to win the war; (b) that the war was set up to (i) weaken the West’s influence in the world; (ii) weaken the West’s people’s confidence in their institutions and what those institutions stood for; and (c) one objective of the war was to settle into power the first above board Marxist state, with more to follow. In fact, there already was an anti-Marxist force in Russia at the time that if ordered would have conquered all of Bolshevik Russia during this period when the Bolsheviks were very weak. The unit was the 60,000 strong Czechoslovak Legion (soon to be 100,000 strong) but instead of sending the legion 700 miles north to Petrograd, the Allies sent it on a 6,000 mile odyssey across Russia to Vladivostok for evacuation to Europe(!), once again proving the Allies knew they were going to win the war…that the war was a Marxist operation.[2]
(5) “On the initiative of the KGB, an army of Soviet vigilantes five million strong, the so-called ‘druzhiny’, was recruited from among the Komsomol activists. Their units were led by retired Chekists. They have been patrolling and policing the streets of all the Soviet cities. Their primary task has been to prepare the Soviet people to ‘behave’ during the forthcoming ‘liberalisation’.” – KGB defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, ‘The Perestroika Deception‘, March 1989, pp. 14-15.
(6) Leningrad Oblast (Province) is still named Leningrad Oblast! Engels City is still named Engels City! Engels Air Force Base is still named Engels Air Force Base! Russian military personnel still refer to each other as “Comrade”! Kaliningrad Oblast is still named Kaliningrad Oblast! The State Emblem of the Soviet Union is atop the Duma building, and illuminated at night for clear viewing! Soviet Red Stars are still attached to the bows of Russian naval ships! The Hammer & Sickle logo is still on Aeroflot commercial aircraft! Not one statue to Lenin has been destroyed in Russia, where out of the 3,000 still standing throughout Russia, only a handful have been carefully taken down (in locations where tourists frequent) and hidden away in parks and museums, the remainder of these monstrosities to Russian nationalism/Russian Orthodox Church rubbing historical salt into still open wounds of Russian nationalists! The Russian ‘electorate’ are only ‘electing’ for president Soviet era communist party member Quislings, who persecuted the 85% of the religious population held captive by the Communist Party during the ‘Soviet era’!
At my blog, read the articles…
‘House of Cards: The Collapse of the ‘Collapse’ of the USSR’
‘Playing Hide And Seek In Yugoslavia’
Then read the article, ‘The Marxist Co-Option Of History And The Use Of The Scissors Strategy To Manipulate History Towards The Goal Of Marxist Liberation’
Solution
The West will form new political parties where candidates are vetted for Marxist ideology/blackmail, the use of the polygraph to be an important tool for such vetting. Then the West can finally liberate the globe of vanguard Communism.
My blog…
https://djdnotice.blogspot.com/2018/09/d-notice-articles-article-55-7418.html
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Dean Michael Jackson
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[1] Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx (1843)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Critique_of_Hegels_Philosophy_of_Right.pdf
“The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.”
…and…
“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”
…and…
“It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world.”
Now you know what Marxists are referring to when they utter the phrase, “The Struggle”…
“The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.”
[2] Even more telling is neutral Denmark’s laying mines off its coastal waters in international waterways in August, 1914 [thereby violating the 1857 treaty opening the Danish Straits to all shipping, where, “No ship of any kind may, under any pretext whatsoever, be subjected to detention or obstruction at the passage of the Sound or the Belts”] at the prompting of Germany (Germany too lays mines in the Danish Straits) and Great Britain does nothing! Not a word from the Allies (and the usual deafening silence from the Marxist co-opted press), in fact, even though access to the Baltic Sea is critical for the Allies to roll up Germany quickly by (a) closing the Baltic Sea to all German surface/subsurface vessels; (b) denying German access to trade with Sweden; (c) bringing the Royal Navy and the Imperial Russian Navy together; (d) forcing Germany to relocate critically needed infantry divisions and heavy armaments away from the Western Front for the new Baltic Front; (e) allowing British and Russian troop landings across the Baltic coasts, preventing German forces from moving eastwards towards Russia; thereby (f) knocking Germany out of the war before one shot
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tom0mason
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Wow, Dean Michael Jackson,
What a suprise?!
You seem to have written something like I’ve read before. I wonder where I’ve read it?
Oh, that’s right it’s all over this site and I’ve seen it only 10 or 12 times before but it feels like much, much, more. I note that you have the same video link and your blog site links again, funny I still do not feel any inclination to visiting either link as I think I know what will be there. From the ravings you continually put here at Principia-Scientific I believe I know what tedium you have to say and it does not seem to be either very interesting or rational.
If Dean Michael Jackson, you have something less tedious to say I’m sure you may get a nicer response, till then please try to control yourself.
As Oscar Wilde said --
<em>"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.
People are either charming or tedious." <em>
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Andy Rowlands
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Well said Tom!!
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Andy Rowlands
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Here you go again. STOP!!
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Barry
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Thanks for the article can you get dean blocked please
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Andy Rowlands
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I’m working on that 🙂
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