Media members often exhort us to "follow the science," but they display a lack of understanding of what science is. Science is a process of ongoing inquiry based on making an observation, asking a question, forming a hypothesis that answers the question, making a prediction based on that hypothesis, doing an experiment to test the hypothesis, analyzing the results, and then determining if the hypothesis is correct.
A process that skips any of the above steps is not science.
It is a sad reality that most of the public discourse about COVID-19 is devoid of legitimate science. In a December 22, 2021 opinion piece titled How Fauci and Collins Shut Down Debate, The Wall Street Journal describes how Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins subverted the practice of legitimate science:
In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge American to "follow the science." In private, the two sainted public health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That's the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, Oxford's Sunetra Gupta and Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called "focused protection" of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration--if they were able to learn about it...
That didn't please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday [December 19], sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020 to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"The proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists...seems to be getting a lot of attention--and even a co-signature from Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises," Dr. Collins wrote. "Is it underway?"
Dr. Collins' email is a betrayal of the scientific process and of the public's trust in him. He did not care about observation, hypothesis, and the search for truth; he cared only that thousands of scientists who had followed the scientific method disagreed with his preferred narrative. Dr. Collins thus ordered his lapdog Dr. Fauci to go into attack mode, and Dr. Fauci wagged his proverbial tail in approval before working with his media lackeys to attempt to discredit scientists practicing science.
Dr. Fauci responded to criticism of his attack mode efforts by declaring that any criticism of him is "criticizing science, because I represent science." What a disgusting and dangerous statement for a public health official to make! No one person can "represent science," because science is a method of objective inquiry, and not the proclamations of an appointed official who has long overstayed his welcome and his usefulness.
A cult of personality has formed around Dr. Fauci such that he really believes that his unfounded opinions are science, and he has convinced many people to believe that delusion. One person is not and can never be science. Dr. Fauci has repeatedly revealed himself to be a public relations spokesperson with an agenda, not a scientist practicing science. As The Wall Street Journal concluded, "Rather than try to manipulate public opinion, the job of health officials is to offer their best scientific advice. They shouldn't act like politicians or censors, and when they do, they squander the public's trust."
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