There have been worse plagues than COVID, but none has ever done so much damage to the world’s scientific institutions. In the pre-COVID era, the public health establishment had been gradually falling under the sway of progressives pushing their agenda, but it retained enough integrity to heed serious scientists—the ones who crunched data from past pandemics and randomized clinical trials. Those epidemiologists concluded that lockdown measures would do little or no good against a virus while inflicting enormous social harm.
But then, suddenly, all that peer-reviewed evidence and advice was discarded. Public health leaders adopted radical untested strategies without even pretending to do a cost-benefit analysis or explain why the pre-2020 plans were no longer valid. Lockdowns and mask mandates became “the science,” and those who questioned this “consensus” were declared “outside the mainstream.”
Scientific journals became reluctant to publish contrary opinions and evidence even as COVID data confirmed the wisdom of the pre-2020 advice. When three of the world’s leading experts—from Oxford, Harvard and Stanford—independently published a critique of lockdowns called the Great Barrington Declaration, they were vilified by activist scientists, denounced by officials like Anthony Fauci, and censored on social-media platforms.
No comments:
Post a Comment