Academia and the new dark age: Part 3
Stupid paper #2: Spanish researchers discover the bleeding obvious, while failing to ask themselves some important questions
In last week's post, I introduced you to a paper titled 'Resistance to COVID-19 vaccination and the social contract: evidence from Italy', in which two highly educated US academics struggled to understand why a small proportion of Italians resisted the enormous economic and social pressure exerted by their government, to try to make them accept an experimental COVID-19 transfection agent. I compared this paper to the six reasons why Steve Patterson believes we have ended up in a dark age and found that it checked every box.
This week, I'm turning my attention to a study published online ahead of print, in late April 2023, in the journal Vaccine: X. What's with the weird title of this journal - is this the X-Files of medical publishing? Sadly, the answer is not nearly that exciting. According to the journal's Aims and Scope section:
"Vaccine: X is the open access companion journal of Vaccine and has the same aims and scope. The journal offers authors who want to publish in a gold open access journal the opportunity to make their work immediately and permanently accessible.
Vaccine: X publishes high quality science across all disciplines relevant to the field of vaccinology - all original article submissions across basic and clinical research, vaccine manufacturing, history, public policy, behavioral science and ethics, social sciences, safety, and many other related areas are welcomed."
Oooh, a "gold open access journal" that "publishes high quality science"! Has that raised your expectations of this study? Before we dig into it though, let's take a few minutes to reflect on the role that the development of the scientific method played in ending the last dark age.
As I wrote in The death of science? Part 1, the formulation of a testable hypothesis and the design of experiments to vigorously test this hypothesis against reality (in essence, to try to prove the hypothesis wrong) is at the very heart of the scientific method. If there's no testable hypothesis, then, say the purists, it ain't science. As Allen and Hoekstra wrote in their 1992 book, Toward a Unified Ecology,
"An ungenerous view would say that anything which puts ‘science’ in its title is not science at all: social science, political science, library science, domestic science, and so on. All these 'sciences' deal with messy systems where controlled experiment is often impossible."
From Any Field That Had the Word “Science” in Its Name Was Guaranteed Thereby Not To Be a Science
And if there's no sincere attempt to prove the hypothesis wrong, then it ain't science. In his 1974 commencement address at CalTech, the late, great physicist Richard Feynman compared much modern (supposedly) scientific output to a cargo cult:
"In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."
That missing element, Feynman went on to explain, is the attitude of the scientists themselves toward their work:
"It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards."
This is why Feynman was so dismissive of the field of studies known as the social sciences:
"Because of the success of science, there is a kind of a pseudo-science. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science. They follow the forms. You gather data, you do so and so and so forth, but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything. They haven’t got anywhere – yet. Maybe someday they will, but it’s not very well developed.
But what happens is, at an even more mundane level, we get experts on everything that sound like they are sort of scientific, expert. They are not scientists... I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking your experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something.
And therefore, I see how they get their information. And I can’t believe that they know when they haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know and that they are intimidating people by it. I think so. I don’t know the world very well but that’s what I think."
Feynman's criticisms of the so-called social sciences have been echoed (and amplified) by some very establishment sources. Heck, even Robert J. Pitchell, himself a social scientist, wrote in The Washington Post that "social scientists cannot be 'real' scientists in the same sense as physical scientists" because human free will prevents social science from making any meaningful predictions. Furthermore, Pitchell stressed,
"Human beings also have values and goals that give meaning to their lives and influence their behavior. Social scientists are simply unable to cope with goals and values in any scientifically predictable way. Nor can they use scientific method to determine which goals or values are better or worse. These are crucial elements in the social science universe."
Writing in 1987, Pitchell urged the director of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to "to get out of the business of sponsoring and funding all social science research that has as its goal policy advice to governmental agencies and the public at large". Needless to say, his advice was not heeded either by the NAS or any other agency. And that's why we have an unending torrent of 'social science' papers (including the ones I discuss in last week's and this week's post), appearing in journals that pride themselves on being bastions of 'real science': These papers emanate largely from government grants that fund 'social scientists' to produce sciencey-sounding articles that support the policy platforms that governments (or, more to the point, the permanent bureaucracy that actually runs modern states) have already decided to implement.
And with that very lengthy preamble, let's get to this week's stupid paper.
The paper, titled 'Predictive factors of hesitancy to vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 virus in young adults in Spain: Results from the PSY-COVID study', was written by researchers seeking to understand why some young Spaniards were reluctant to get all jabbed up with their government-approved transfection agent. It was based on analysis of a questionnaire administered to 2120 Spanish residents aged 18-39, between 15 and 30 June 2021 - just after the Spanish government had approved the injection of people aged between 12 and 39 years.
Note that there was no hypothesis stated; the survey was basically a fishing expedition in which all sorts of socioeconomic, psychological, cognitive and attitudinal factors were assessed to see if they had any bearing on participants' intention to take a COVID shot, which the authors were at pains to state was absolutely necessary "to contain the COVID-19 pandemic" (more on that later).
Out of 67 items in the questionnaire, 35 were found to be statistically associated with the intention to accept a transfection agent, although the effect sizes (strength of the relationship between the items and 'vaccination' intention) was small to medium. The researchers further sifted through these to identify three questions that, taken together, accurately identified 86 per cent of young adults who were reluctant or hesitant to get jabbed:
"Is it necessary to administer the vaccine to the population?" People who strongly disagreed were, unsurprisingly, the most likely to state that they did not intend to take it themselves.
"What degree of trust have scientists and health professionals deserved during the coronavirus crisis?" Again, unsurprisingly, those with a low opinion of the trustworthiness of 'the experts' were the most likely to signal that they did not intend to get jabbed themselves.
"Do you think SARS-CoV-2 is a virus created for socioeconomic purposes?" Those who strongly agreed with this (in the authors' words) "conspiracy belief" were the least likely to state an intention to take the experimental transfection agent.
Before I dig deeper into this paper, let's pause for a moment to reflect on whether big gobs of taxpayers' money...
... should have been spent on this exercise. I would have thought it painfully obvious that people who didn't believe that an entire population needed to be subjected to an experimental new medical technology in order to combat a virus which was acknowledged by the World Health Organisation, in late 2020, to be about as deadly as a bad flu, and who had lost trust in 'experts' who promoted non-evidence-based interventions like lockdowns and compulsory wearing of facial decorations, wouldn't be first in line to take the experimental jab. And while the "conspiracy belief" question was poorly formulated (perhaps it made more sense in the original Spanish and Catalan), it did at least point in the direction that some inquiring minds might have looked, while seeking an explanation for the unreasonable actions of their governments and (so-called) public servants.
But what was the purpose of conducting this survey? Was it driven by the sheer intellectual curiosity of genuine scientists? Let's look at the study's conclusion:
"This study has made it possible to delineate in detail the profile of people with high doubts or rejection of vaccination."
Oh, I see. So the government funded a study to "profile" people who weren't keen to get the jibby-jab. Well, that's reassuring, isn't it? Why might they want to do that? I'm sure they have very benign motives. The authors of the study do, too (and these motives have absolutely nothing to do with who pays their salaries). Here's what they have to say about how important it is that everyone take their government-approved transfection agent:
"Widespread population vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a matter of great interest to public health as it is the main pharmacological measure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Hesitancy/reluctance to vaccination has become a main barrier to containing the pandemic."
Now, if I were being far more generous than I'm inclined to be at this point, I might cut them some slack for still clinging to the idea that the transfection agents could contribute to herd immunity, when they launched their survey in June 2021. Of course, those who were actually paying attention to the clinical trials of these agents knew back in October 2020 that they weren't even being tested to see if they stopped viral transmission, which is the only way they could "contain the pandemic". But hey, maybe these researchers were too busy social sciencing to read the British Medical Journal back then. And all the 'experts' were still telling the world that the transfection agents really, truly, honestly did stop viral transmission:
Pfizer was also aggressively marketing their transfection agent as stopping viral spread. And you know how trustworthy they are.
However, as I noted in last week's post, it was already widely admitted by August 2021 - a full eighteen months before this paper was published online - that the COVID transfection agents did not prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2, and did not prevent transmission. To repeat Columbia University epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman's comments to the BMJ,
"In some sense, vaccination is now about personal protection—protecting oneself against severe disease. Herd immunity is not relevant as we are seeing plenty of evidence of repeat and breakthrough infections."
Covid-19: Delta infections threaten herd immunity vaccine strategy
And yet, in a paper published in April 2023, the Spanish authors assert that
"Given the characteristics of the virus and the vaccines administered, it is necessary that between 80 and 90% of the population be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity."
Oh, is that so? Well, by the end of 2021, 80 per cent of Spaniards were 'fully vaccinated' according to the then-current definition (remember when two shots was all you needed to be fully vaxxed?), while another 3.8 per cent were 'partially vaccinated'...
... and yet COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing:
By the end of 2022, Spain had got pretty damn close to 90 per cent 'vaccination'...
... and had finally wrestled its new case rate down to four times as high as that of Romania, a country which managed to jab less than 30 per cent of its population. So yeah, how's that "containing the pandemic" thing working out for you guys over there in Spain?
Now, the process of getting a study published in a scientific journal is quite lengthy. The study results need to be analysed, written up for publication, submitted to a journal, accepted for peer review, corrected as per peer reviewers' comments, and formatted for publication. But even allowing for the usual delay between submitting their paper and Vaccine: X publishing it, it is beyond comprehension that the authors of the study had not become aware that the rationale for conducting their survey - namely, that near-universal uptake of the experimental transfection agents would "contain the COVID-19 pandemic" - had collapsed.
And that invites the question, what function do papers like this one truly serve? Because they sure as heck don't advance scientific understanding.
The answer to that question lies not in the body of the paper (the Method section, which describes how the survey was designed, administered and analysed), but in the Introduction. This section of a paper is supposed to explain what the researchers were investigating, what is known and unknown about this topic, and why it matters. Here are some of the key passages from the introduction to this paper, with my commentary on them.
"Vaccination has historically greatly reduced the effect of infectious diseases and is generally safer and more effective than curative drugs [[1], [2]]."
I have discussed at length the complete falsehood that vaccines were largely responsible for eradicating the scourge of infectious disease, in a previous post, COVID-19 and philanthrocapitalism’s War on Public Health: Part 2 – Technological solutions to public health problems. I'd encourage you to read (or re-read) that post, but here's the money quote:
"The McKinlays calculated that at most, 3.5% of the total decline in deaths from influenza, pneumonia, diphtheria, whooping cough, and poliomyelitis [which were the major causes of death from infectious disease] between 1900 and 1977 in the US could be ascribed to medical measures (including both treatments and vaccines) introduced for those diseases."
The obvious retort to the argument that vaccines are "generally safer and more effective than curative drugs" is that we only apply curative drugs to people who are actually sick, whereas vaccines are administered to people who are currently healthy (in the sense of not having the disease of concern, at least). Therefore a vaccine should be proven to be orders of magnitude safer than curative drugs, and not just in short-term safety studies but across the entire lifespan. Such large-scale longitudinal vaxed-vs-unvaxed studies have never been done, despite the ease of performing them in an era of centralised databases and electronic health records; the few small-scale vaxed-vs-unvaxed studies that have been done indicate that unvaccinated children are healthier than their vaccinated peers.
"The benefits of vaccination transcend the prevention of infection, morbidity and mortality of people, because it also contributes to the reduction of the costs for the public health system and promotes the disappearance of new resistant strains [3]."
Again, vaccination has never been shown to reduce health care costs across the lifespan because large-scale longitudinal vaxed-vs-unvaxed studies have never been done. The cost of treating a child for measles (less than a dollar's worth of vitamin A reduces the risk of death from measles by 87 per cent for children under two years old) is considerably less than the cost of treating children for the chronic conditions such as allergies, asthma, gastrointestinal disorders and developmental delays that have been found by the studies referenced above to be more common in vaccinated children.
"In turn, vaccination provides social benefits, such as indirect protection to people that cannot be vaccinated (due to age, chronic diseases, etc.), while also combating the socioeconomic inequity of access to health compared to other types of pharmacological treatments [[3], [4]]."
I dealt with the first false claim in this sentence at length in last week's post. Suffice it to say that a 'vaccine' that does not prevent viral transmission does not confer "indirect protection" to anyone. And since one of the poorest states in India, Uttar Pradesh, managed to supply an early COVID treatment pack to millions of its citizens (containing cheap nutritional supplements and off-patent drugs), I don't buy the "health equity" argument for taxpayer-funded vaccines that return massive profits to pharmaceutical companies.
"The World Health Organization (WHO) [5], stated that one of the biggest risks to preventing the spread of disease is hesitation over vaccination. This phenomenon underlies a set of negative beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors regarding vaccination. Previous studies indicate that resistance to vaccination is sustained despite its proven success against common and serious diseases [3]."
I discussed the WHO's hand-wringing over 'vaccine hesitancy' in a previous article, Backlash: How the vaccine pushers turned true believers into vaccine sceptics – Part 1. Suffice it to say that the leading proponent within WHO of this 'vaccine hesitancy is an existential threat to humanity' schtick is an anthrolopogist by the name of Heidi Larson, who has no academic credentials in immunology, vaccinology, virology, evidence-based medicine or health econometrics. But, you know, whatevs.
"The development and mass administration of vaccines is seen as crucial to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as well as to achieve herd immunity and curb the emergence of new variants of the virus. Given the characteristics of the virus and the vaccines administered, it is necessary that between 80 and 90 % of the population be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity [[6], [7]]."
I've already discussed the abject failure of the COVID transfection agents to "stop the spread" and "achieve herd immunity", which was blind-Freddy-level obvious a year and half before this paper was published. As for the notion that "mass administration of vaccines" could "curb the emergence of new variants of the virus", there was already compelling evidence in August 2021, when I wrote Why Australia’s COVID-19 exit plan can’t succeed – Part 2, that the 'leaky' transfection agents were actually driving the emergence of new viral variants by fixating the immune response on the spike protein of the extinct Wuhan variant of SARS-CoV-2.
"The lack of precedent for an international health emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic contributes to the fact that information strategies on the virus and the implementation of the protection and prevention measures have not followed a pre-established action plan [8]."
This is one of the most outrageous and insidious lies of the entire scamdemic. The fact is that every country that is a signatory to the WHO's International Health Regulations had a pandemic preparedness plan based on decades of experience in handling mass illness caused by respiratory viruses. Australia's was updated in August 2019, just months before the first reported case of COVID-19. And yet, by remarkable coincidence, almost every country abruptly and inexplicably threw its evidence-based plan out the window in March 2020 and began implementing completely non-evidence-based protocols such as border closures, mass confinement and mass testing of asymptomatic people, asinine physical distancing rules and mandated wearing of facial decorations.
"At a time when new variants of SARS-CoV-2 are continuously emerging, the need to achieve a global level of immunity is highlighted, and it is critical for global public health to identify resistant population groups as well as the main barriers associated with hesitance/reluctance to vaccination."
Here's we where get to the pointy end. These 'social scientists' who evince no comprehension of the scientific method, let alone the established facts about human immunity, vaccines, SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, believe so fervently that vaccines are the saviours of humanity that they deputise themselves to become agents of "global public health" (whatever that is) to hunt down the resisters. Hmmm, what does this remind me of? Ah, that's it - the Spanish Inquisition. Bet you weren't expecting that.
But, all jokes aside, the attitude toward vaccines expressed in the vast majority of papers published on the subject (by both social scientists and those who would consider themselves to be 'real' scientists) has all the hallmarks of a religious cult. Vaccines are the saviour of humanity; all must declare faith in them and receive them as a sacrament; anyone who questions the need for them, or their potency as agents of salvation, is a heretic who must be identified by researcher-inquisitors; and these unbelievers must either recant their heresy and demonstrate proof of conversion through acceptance of the sacrament, or face punishment. Excommunication from society, financial penalties and denial of medical care were just three of the punishments deemed appropriate by the priests and acolytes of the vaccine religion in the COVID era.
The refusal of the authors of papers such as this one to even contemplate evidence that contradicts their supposition is utterly antithetical to the scientific method. Richard Feynman would be rolling in his grave. Steve Patterson can chalk up another piece of evidence for his dark age hypothesis.
Glad to be among the rank heretics!
Forget science, all must bow and kiss the ring of vaxism, amen. Thanks again for another great post Robyn!