The Failure of Science is Worse Than You Think

This article originally appeared on The Epoch Times and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Jeffrey A. Tucker

For most of our lives, we trusted that scientific authorities speak with the truths they know from evidence. This has grown over the centuries with gradual discoveries. These discoveries are incorporated into the knowledge set and put into practice in medicine, health, chemistry, physics, or any other field.

These discoveries are storied and beloved. We tell the stories because they flatter us into thinking that humanity—meaning us!—is always improving.

So we have a list of heroes who made us better: Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein, Edison, and on it goes, upwards unto the light. The belief in the progress of science is central to the historiography of the West, and to the very idea of the Enlightenment. What a tribute to the power of the mind and to our capacity as people to advance.

This is how it stood in public health. We have learned so much since the bad old days when the local water pump spewed out cholera into the whole community and certainly since rats crawled all over the grain and spread the black death. Now we clean things and deploy high-minded techniques to guarantee the health of the community rather than panic and pump people full of snake oil or attach leeches to people and bleed them.

Aren’t we wonderful!

Then 2020 happened. Suddenly the entire game plan on pandemics completely flipped. All known wisdom was tossed out. The elites blabbed to the world that they just have no idea how it spreads even though it was clearly a coronavirus. They didn’t know the latency period even though that has been known for many decades. They didn’t know any therapeutics even though Nobel Prizes have been given for them and there were a dozen off-patent drugs available.

Then they started making up insane things. The virus could be on your grocery bags! It is floating around in rooms without people! You have to wash and sanitize your hands 17 times a day! You need to install all kinds of air filter systems immediately! Put up Plexiglas everywhere! Better yet, just stay put. Sit on your sofa and be as still as possible. Don’t move a muscle, then you might not get sick.

Finally, they said they had a magic potion that would fix the problem. It’s a new thing, a gene therapy that comes wrapped in little capsules that we inject into your skin. It’s been tested as 95 percent effective, and you know that’s true because it is a number with a percent. There are no side effects even though there was no way they could know that regardless.

What in the world was going on? Essentially, all old science was tossed out and new science replaced it except that the replacement was not science. It was some kind of method for social control. And with it came all kinds of other things. Get rid of your gas car and drive this golf cart! Stop eating meat and eat bugs! Don’t go to church! Don’t sing! Strap this cloth around your face and walk around keeping others safe!

We had a sense that all of this was bonkers. I had read articles from 2006 that had debunked every single one of these ridiculous methods of disease control. What in the world happened? Even two authors of that original paper by D.A. Henderson were on board with the new kabuki dance. There was certainly some change in the matrix.

What I had not known until yesterday is that the science on all these topics was even more robust than I knew.

Read the full story at The Epoch Times.