“I have better reason to trust authorities over skeptics” argumentum ad auctoritatem (appeal to authority) is a well known logical fallacy, and unwise in an era of orthodoxies enforced by brutal institutional financial menaces. Far better to adhere to nullius in verba (on the word of no one), the motto of the Royal Society, or as Deming said “In god we trust, all others must bring data”
Followed closely; the pandemic years have provided numerous clear examples of very old problems like bureaucratic reluctance to change direction even when strongly indicated—such as holding on to vaccine mandates for young in era of very low risk covid strains, the malign impacts of regulatory/institutional capture by rich corporates (eg pharma cutting-short vaccine trials without doing long term follow-up, and buying support from media and regulators to prevent dissent or contrary evidence and opinions seeing light) and high ranking individuals conspiring to corrupt scientific process (published mendacious statements dismissing Wuhan lab leak theories for political reasons) all of course abetted by Big Tech censorship. All these and a hyper partisan media and academic landscape that constantly threaten heretics and heterodox thinkers with financial destruction has broken the truth-finding and sense-making mechanisms of our world. Institutions do not deserve trust when dissenters are punished, that is the hallmark of religion not science.
Current concerns about vaccine harms seem to have a lot of signal in data; most clearly in excess death figures for New Zealand where covid, flu and RSV deaths were near zero due to effective zero-covid lock-downs from 2020 till end of 2021, and yet in 2021 excess deaths jumped by about 400 per million above the 2020 baseline in the 6 months after the vaccine programs started in Q1 2021 prior to covid becoming widespread in December 2021. The temporal correlation pointing to covid vaccination as the cause of these excess deaths is powerful in the absence of other reasonable explanations. And with a natural experimental ‘control’ population test of 5 million and 2000 extra deaths it is not a small number to be dismissed.
Hopefully the argument will be resolved scientifically over next few years, but it will be politically very difficult battle given large number of powerful people and corporations with reputations and fortunes on the line.
“I have better reason to trust authorities over skeptics” argumentum ad auctoritatem (appeal to authority) is a well known logical fallacy, and unwise in an era of orthodoxies enforced by brutal institutional financial menaces. Far better to adhere to nullius in verba (on the word of no one), the motto of the Royal Society, or as Deming said “In god we trust, all others must bring data”
Followed closely; the pandemic years have provided numerous clear examples of very old problems like bureaucratic reluctance to change direction even when strongly indicated—such as holding on to vaccine mandates for young in era of very low risk covid strains, the malign impacts of regulatory/institutional capture by rich corporates (eg pharma cutting-short vaccine trials without doing long term follow-up, and buying support from media and regulators to prevent dissent or contrary evidence and opinions seeing light) and high ranking individuals conspiring to corrupt scientific process (published mendacious statements dismissing Wuhan lab leak theories for political reasons) all of course abetted by Big Tech censorship. All these and a hyper partisan media and academic landscape that constantly threaten heretics and heterodox thinkers with financial destruction has broken the truth-finding and sense-making mechanisms of our world. Institutions do not deserve trust when dissenters are punished, that is the hallmark of religion not science.
Current concerns about vaccine harms seem to have a lot of signal in data; most clearly in excess death figures for New Zealand where covid, flu and RSV deaths were near zero due to effective zero-covid lock-downs from 2020 till end of 2021, and yet in 2021 excess deaths jumped by about 400 per million above the 2020 baseline in the 6 months after the vaccine programs started in Q1 2021 prior to covid becoming widespread in December 2021. The temporal correlation pointing to covid vaccination as the cause of these excess deaths is powerful in the absence of other reasonable explanations. And with a natural experimental ‘control’ population test of 5 million and 2000 extra deaths it is not a small number to be dismissed.
Hopefully the argument will be resolved scientifically over next few years, but it will be politically very difficult battle given large number of powerful people and corporations with reputations and fortunes on the line.