What Did I Miss?

This was a question I asked myself so many times in 2020. What am I missing?

You see, my natural inclination is to trust scientists. I was one for many years - doing the pointy-head thing of figuring out new stuff out and publishing it. I know the kind of ‘background’ work that goes into some of this stuff and the hours and hours of thinking and questioning and checking that everything is right¹.

I also used to participate in online physics forums where amateur ‘scientists’ would regularly try to tell us how relativity was wrong, or quantum mechanics was wrong. Whilst some of these folk did sometimes spot some interesting apparent ‘paradox’, they were invariably wrong. Chasing down the error could be time-consuming in rare cases, but most of the time it was fairly obvious where the misunderstanding had occurred.

These forum posters, questioning the official ‘narrative’ (on things like relativity and QM), represent the people in the cartoon above.

Then along came covid and I found myself on the other side. I was now one of those doubters, those who thought there was something wrong with the official narrative. So I agonized and agonized about what it was I was getting wrong, what I was missing.

This wasn’t an immediate thing. For example, early on I saw a paper in Nature² from guys at Imperial about how they’d proved the virus’ zoonotic origins. I didn’t read the paper, but took its ‘result’ at face value, trusting in the expertise of the scientists involved. It was, after all, a field I knew very little about.

I was firmly in the “vaccines are a medical miracle” camp at that time, too.

I even thought, initially, that a short lockdown made sense. If there was this highly contagious virus going round that was putting people in hospital then it was a good idea to try to slow the spread so that hospitals did not become overwhelmed. Or so I thought.

The initial data I’d seen (Italy, Diamond Princess) did not lead me to suppose we were facing anything other than something very much closer to “serious flu” levels of mortality affecting primarily the elderly, but if people were still getting ill enough to overwhelm hospitals then some slowing measure could be necessary.

And then the cracks started to appear.

In the UK we were initially told not to panic and then someone pressed the panic button and our politicians started blathering on about Building Back Better all over the place. I already knew this was flu-level, not Ebola-level, and I was wondering what the heck was so damned serious that we needed to think about re-structuring our entire approach to public health and society, that we had to accept some “New Normal”.

Don’t get me wrong. I was concerned about the disease and its consequences, but no more than I would be during an outbreak of a pretty bad flu.

Did the politicians have access to information we didn’t? Were things really this bad, but they were just trying not to panic us too much? What thing was I missing here?

And then the cracks came thick and fast, and widened into canyons.

It was clear from the UK data and the data from Sweden that lockdowns, as practiced in the UK, had absolutely no impact on the ‘natural’ disease dynamics. This was easy to confirm by looking at the 2nd derivative (the ‘acceleration’) of the UK’ mortality curve which indicated that the disease dynamics had already fundamentally altered before lockdown.

If I could do that (very simple numerical) calculation, what were the scientists who were advising the government doing?

But still, I thought, I must be missing something. What was it?

What we were being told wasn’t matching even the pretty piss-poor data that we were seeing on things like OWD (Our World in Data).

And then came the testing. Oh my.

I began to wonder whether I’d being doing ‘science’ wrong all my life. How could any self-respecting scientist advocate (or sit there quietly like a lemon) for the absolute fustercluck of defining a ‘covid’ death as anyone who died within 28 days of a positive test for covid?

I accept that in a (supposedly) confusing and developing situation the data we collect might not be quite as good as we would like, but deliberately building in a wild inaccuracy from the outset?

How on earth was anyone supposed to know what was really going on?

Panic? Build Back Better? New Normal? Ineffectiveness of lockdown? Mostly pointless testing? The deliberate mangling of the data?³

I think this is when I started to become attracted to tin foil, because it was getting harder and harder to explain this appalling conglomeration of scientific ineptitude in any ‘natural’ way.

And then came the masks. And there’s no polite way to say it but - Holy Shit.

The idiocy with masks can, perhaps, be best summed up with a picture. Here’s yours truly enjoying a vape with a mask.

All of a sudden, the “world’s top scientists and doctors”, as the cartoon above says, reversed their position on the effectiveness of masks.

Masks became the new sliced bread of the pandemic world. If you didn’t wear one people did that tut-tut thing, that shake of the head, or even got quite aggressive, because they “knew” that masks worked because the ‘scientists’ and the politicians and the papers and the TV told them they did.

But you see the problem here? Let’s suppose they were actually right to reverse their position on masks (which they weren’t). That means that for many years before covid the world’s “top scientists and doctors” had been wrong.

Not just a little bit wrong, but a whole spectacular 180° wrong.

Same with the various Pandemic Preparedness Plans which all advised against the kind of things we did during covid. They, apparently, got these wrong too.

If the ‘official’ narrative was correct then it begins to make the “world’s top scientists and doctors” look decidedly crap, doesn’t it? They were getting shit wrong all over the place before covid. Thank God covid came along to put them right, eh?

But these folk, who routinely got things spectacularly wrong⁴ before covid, were the very same folk we were supposed to be following during covid.

And then we had things like the FDA, an organisation allegedly staffed by experts, Tweeting this

Ivermectin, irrespective of whether it is useful to treat covid or not, has been used to improve the health of millions of human beings. It is remarkably safe (it is said to be safer than aspirin). And yet here’s the FDA doing its very best to imply it is a veterinary medicine (which it also is) and not fit for humans. Whilst this is not ‘misinformation’ in a technical sense - it was certainly grossly misleading of the FDA to post this.

Why did they do this?

I think we know the answer to that, but let’s keep accusations of being a “conspiracy theorist” out of the way for a moment.

Notice how unprofessional and propaganda-laden this Tweet is. This is not the kind of announcement one expects from a professional body.

The whole covid saga is littered with this kind of stuff. Our eyes were opened somewhat and the experts in our eyes, rightly, turned into Experts™ operating as mouthpieces for whatever deranged thing governments had cooked up for this month’s new ‘intervention’ to combat covid.

It’s not that we spotted anything the scientists had ‘missed’ - it’s that we could remember that only a couple of years previously they had been saying the very opposite.

But science changes, right? Yeah it sometimes does - but not like this. There was no new evidence to suggest that all previous thinking on masks and pandemic preparedness had been wrong. And that’s the bit that’s missing. The change in scientific ‘knowledge’ was not driven by any new evidence that came to light, but by policy.

There is much more to comment on. For example, the obvious way in which an illusion of consensus was created when, in fact, there was quite a bit⁵ of dissention amongst scientists about the interventions and the interpretation of the data. In my neck of the woods (I was working at a university outside of the UK at the time but I was, naturally, very interested in what was going on back home) it was made very clear to us that we weren’t to contradict the official version of things.

And what about all those Expert™ attacks on natural immunity?

But scientists are, perhaps, the worst when it comes to trusting other scientists. We tend to look at the pronouncements from designated experts outside of our own fields and assume they know what they’re talking about. It’s not a conscious ‘closing of ranks’, but a genuine belief in expertise.

The whole covid debacle is a classic example of what goes (very) wrong when you give governments and their buddies the power to stifle anything deemed to be ‘misinformation’. You get stupid shit like masks. You get stupid shit like mass testing. You get stupid (and evil) shit like mandated vaccination.

Scientists are not god-like creatures, despite how they may view themselves, and we’re as prone to propaganda as anyone else. We’re also (more) prone to accepting the words of experts. But if we’re not seeing the whole spectrum of expert views then we’ll come to a very twisted and biased belief.

Scientists, because of their bias towards accepting expertise, can be the most gullible amongst us. You can get the majority of the “world’s top scientists and doctors” on board by not letting them even see alternative expert opinion.

The censorship wasn’t just aimed at the general population but at scientists. They needed there to be not too many scientists speaking up to burst the growing bubble of bonkers that was developing around covid (and the ‘vaccines’).

If we let current governments get their way, if we allow them to control what is and isn’t deemed to be ‘misinformation’, even if that control is exercised through ‘independent’ university ‘misinformation experts’, then we’re going to miss an awful lot of stuff.

The answer to the question “what did I miss?” might become - pretty much everything - in the near future if governments get their way.

1. Even with this, errors do still occur. They tend not to be of the ‘trivial’ variety, though.

2. Don’t quote me on this. It could have been another journal, but it was Imperial, I’m sure of that

3. There was even talk of ‘vaccine passports’ well before any vaccine had been developed and very early on in the unfolding covid ‘crisis’. This all began to stink to high heaven.

4. If we are to give any credence to the ‘official’ narrative - which we shouldn’t

5. Much more than we were allowed to know about