The Deadly Rise of Scientism

Story at a Glance:
 •The scientific process is one of the greatest tools humanity has created to separate fact from fiction.  Because of the remarkable societal advancements science has created, our society in turn has placed a deep trust science.
 •This trust has incentivized bad actors to usurp the scientific process so that they can claim whatever “truth” benefits their interests is the truth.
 •This coup has been accomplished by transforming science (the open debate of all existing data) into scientism (a religion where you are expected to unquestionably trust the pronouncements of the anointed “scientific experts”).
 •Peter Hotez and Anthony Fauci have played a pivotal roles in enshrining scientism throughout our society.  In this article, we will review just how they did that, the profound consequences of their actions and exactly what happens once no one can debate the science.

One of the greatest challenges each society faces is deciding what constitutes “truth.” Whoever holds that power wields enormous influence and steers the direction of the society for better or for worse.
 For centuries, “truth” was delegated to the ruling institutions of the time, and hence truth was simply the narrative which conformed to their interests. Then, during the enlightenment period a new idea emerged—that truth could be determined empirically through experimentation and data.
 This in turn gave birth to the scientific revolution, and while not perfect (as vested interests would still try to make their “narrative” be truth irrespective of what the scientific data showed), scientific inquiry began shaping the direction of Western Culture, and in a rocky fashion gradually moved society forward, giving us many of the benefits we take for granted today.
 Sadly however, the tendency of ruling interests to want to monopolize the truth never went away and we’ve watched a curious phenomenon emerge where science, riding on the social credit earned by the success of its revolutionary discoveries, has gradually transformed into something not that different from a state religion. Given that science was originally meant to be a way to move beyond truth being monopolized by the dogmatic institutions which ran society, it is quite tragic that science has become one as well.
 As a result, science has more and more become the practice of “trusting scientific experts” and not being allowed to question their interpretations of the data—or even see it. This is very different from what science was originally intended to be—the collective endeavor of scientists around the world to put forth ideas and have the ones that stand up to scrutiny become the generally accepted standard.
 In turn, we continually see “experts” put forth ideas which are clearly wrong and hurt a great number of people but help the corporate sponsor who paid the expert off. In the past, this behavior would be called out, but since those same corporate sponsors also own the media, these “experts” are shielded from scrutiny, and science has simply become every public voice echoing the expert’s pronouncements.
 This was best illustrated by Fauci’s infamous defense against a Congressional inquiry for his complicity in creating COVID-19, the disastrous policies he had inflicted upon America throughout the pandemic, and the fact he continually lied about his conduct—frequently doing so in an audacious manner that self-evident to anyone who looked at the publicly available footage of Fauci.
 To defend himself, Fauci argued he was “the science,” so criticizing anything he had done was unacceptable as it equated to an attack on science itself.

 It’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science . That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever."
 Note: another important thing to consider about Fauci’s interview was him using the term “antiscience” to attack and dismiss his critics (which will be further discussed below).
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 Superficial Rhetoric
 One of the saddest discoveries genuine intellectuals make once they enter academia (which is supposed to be their “home”) is that much of the “prestigious knowledge” their institutions produce is actually just simple or nonsensical concepts cloaked in elaborate rhetoric [language] that makes their points appear to be something much more impressive.
 For example, the “postmodernist” discourse is pervasive throughout academia and frequently the standard you are expected to measure up to. Yet, in 1996, a programmer from Monash University realized that if he used an existing engine designed to generate random text from recursive grammars , he could generate postmodern essays which appeared to be authentic.
 In essence, this meant that complete nonsense (as the text was random) could be passed off as authoritative and credible simply because it matched the expected appearance of this hard to understand writing. Likewise, in 1996, a deliberately non-sensical paper (which proposed that gravity was a social construct) written in the post-modernist style was accepted for publication by a well-known academic journal —after which its authors admitted what they had done in order to illustrate that the academic process was promoting the publication of non-sensical ideas that conformed to the existing narrative.
 Note: the postmodern generator’s products can be viewed here (a new one will be generated each time you click the link). Later, another generator was made that attempted to replicate the linguistic structures used throughout the new age field (e.g., to sell products) and I lost count of how many people I knew who thought the essays were authentic (and often remarked how touched they were by “my” writing). In turn , I feel much of what we are now witnessing with ChatGPT’s automatically generated text is just a more sophisticated version of those engines, as once you look beyond the surface, there’s a surprising lack of meaning to its essays.
 While these examples seem a bit absurd, they are in fact highly applicable to the current state of political discourse.

For example, in many fields, impressive sounding rhetoric is used to describe relatively simple concepts (e.g., in medicine, many diagnoses are simply the symptoms said back in Latin), which results in an aura of prestige and inaccessibility being imparted to those within the field when they are observed by the general public.
 Note: this is analogous to how “experts” always claims the public is not qualified to assess the data even when what the data shows is clear and unambiguous.

Likewise, public relations discovered years ago that one of the most effective ways to control the public was by using focus groups to identify short phrases (e.g., “safe and effective”) that effectively emotionally manipulated the audience and then spamming that phrase on every single news network (which is possible due to the fact that six companies own almost all of the media in the United States ). This brief montage provides one of the clearest illustrations I have seen of this widespread practice:

 Note: this is also analogous to how politicians, officials and CEOs typically evade whatever question is asked to them and instead continually repeat the scripted phrases their PR firm crafted for them.
 Clear Rhetoric
 Decades ago, a professor at an Ivy League University (at a time when those appointments were held to a higher standard) shared an anecdote I’ve never forgotten:
 If you actually understand a subject, you should be able to explain it to a truck driver. Most academics don’t fully understand their subject, so they cloak it in fancy rhetoric no one without their training can understand.
 In turn, I’ve tried to replicate that wisdom in the writing here, and I know from the feedback I receive that for the most part (excluding the particularly complex medical topics) I’ve succeeded in concisely conveying the concepts covered here in a manner that makes them possible to be understood by those without specialized medical training.

This I would argue is both a testament to the “non-experts” ability to understand the core scientific issues of our era once they are presented clearly, and how harmful it is to the public discourse that so many topics are cloaked behind an impenetrable rhetorical shield which creates the illusion only the experts are fit to discuss them.
 Censoring Debate
 When I was much younger, I participated in a variety of debate activities. From that, I gained an appreciation for the fact it is relatively easy to argue almost any viewpoint (especially once you invoke the nonsensical postmodernist constructs) and that if you had a relatively clear presence of mind, you could normally cut through whatever rhetoric [language] the other party was using to obfuscate their point and illustrate the actual absurdity of it.
 However, at the same time, I was struck by the fact most debaters did not do that and would instead try to “win” by invoking their own set of nonsensical academic constructs and that in many cases within the weird world of academia, it seemed to be an unspoken rule that you did not directly call out the hogwash for what it was.
 In turn, when I watched “debates” happen in the public sphere, as the years have gone by, the “experts” who debate each other became less and less willing to cut to the heart of the matter and instead danced around the point by using a myriad of sculpted language which sounded good but didn’t expose anything of importance.
 Conversely however, “non-experts” whose social status was not dependent upon conforming to these unspoken rules held no such hesitation, and thus would rapidly expose the absurdity of whatever point was being expressed.
 To illustrate, I recently completed a series about previous vaccine disasters and the media’s willingness to openly discuss them (whereas now in contrast, even though the COVID-19 vaccine has been significantly more devastating than any of those previous disastrous vaccines , there has been complete censorship of the topic on almost every single network).
 In that series , I presented a variety of news clips from that era where journalists directly questioned the vaccine promoters, and in each instance, it became very clear to everyone watching it that something was amiss and the “experts” were lying (e.g., consider watching the NBC and 60 Minutes news segments shared in this article ).
 Likewise, at that time, parties who were skeptical of vaccination were allowed to engage experts who would come on in support of vaccines. Consider for example the debate on one of the most popular talkshows in America between these two doctors (one in support of vaccination and one critical of it) in front of a live audience, and how clearly the audience sided with the doctor who effectively critiqued the vaccination pusher:

 Note: while I do not have the entire video of this debate, I do have the transcript of it (which can be read here ). From reading it, it becomes remarkably clear that the doctor advocating for vaccination had an indefensible position, that the pro-vaccine camp lied with impunity, and everyone in the audience could see through it once the other side was allowed to point out his lies.
 One of the things I find the most noteworthy about each of these clips was that the news anchors and talk show hosts were not hostile towards vaccines—rather they tried to present things in a fair manner and allow both sides to be heard. However, since the facts so clearly argued against the existing vaccination program, it became very clear to the audiences that something was amiss, and each of these programs significantly decreased the public’s willingness to vaccinate even though the “experts” told them to.
 Given that each televised debate caused the public to lose confidence in the vaccines, there were essentially three options for the pro-vaccine camp:

•Pivot to a more reasonable position (e.g., spacing vaccines out, not mandating them, supporting those with vaccine injuries or taking the most unjustified vaccines off the market).

•Have individuals who were good at debating defend the vaccine (as most of the “experts” weren’t).

•Refuse to ever debate again.
 As you might suspect, they chose the third option (e.g., I’ve read numerous scientific publications specifically saying it is not appropriate to debate vaccine skeptics publicly) , but simultaneously as much as possible tried to pretend they were still publicly defending that position.
 This was accomplished through having a complicit media which created safe spaces for the “experts” where they could repeat their nonsensical script without being challenged (e.g., no one should question what I am saying because “I represent science”).
 Note: I suspect due to more and more corporate advertising dollars flowing in, particularly after Clinton legalized direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising in 1997 (a predatory practice that is illegal in most of the world), which allowed the pharmaceutical industry to become the largest television advertiser and hence financially blackmail the networks into giving them favorable coverage.
 Peter Hotez
 Over the last decade, Peter Hotez has worked to position himself as the public face of the pro-vaccine movement, something I believe was ultimately done so he could secure over 100 million dollars in funding to develop dubious vaccines that (except for a recent COVID one) never went anywhere.
 Note: Hotez’s grift is something frequently seen throughout academia , although it exceedingly rare for the grifters to be anywhere near as successful as Hotez.
 A key part of Hotez’s grift has been to brand himself as the public face of science ( he even wrote a 2018 paper about becoming a national vaccine spokesman ) so that he’ll constantly be brought on television to defend the narrative (e.g., by attacking anyone who questions it) and secure funding for his grifts “research”.
 What’s fascinating about Hotez is the profound lack of self awareness he demonstrates in his public presentations (i.e. to put it generously, he’s always a mess) and the degree to which he says clearly false statements or continually contradicts his past statements (e.g., from existing footage its possible to make videos of Hotez debating himself).
 Yet despite this, Hotez always gets called to speak in front of the media as an “expert” where he is showered with adoration by each news host and never asked a single critical question which might expose how full of it he was.
 Note: I hold no guilt in attacking Hotez because every person I know who directly knows him has nothing positive to say about his character.
 Conversely, Hotez is notorious for hiding from his critics, never placing himself in a public venue where he can be questioned and only responding to criticisms once he is in a safe space where he can say whatever he wants to say without being challenged.
 Note: Hotez also notorious for immediately blocking anyone who criticizes him (even if they don’t even comment on his Tweets), which in turn requires you to use an external service like Nitter to be able to view Hotez’s deluge of self-congratulatory postings .
 Recently, a Texas citizen was able to break Hotez’s embargo by (non-confrontationally) sneaking in a question to him immediately after Hotez received a glowing introduction by the Rabbi:
 I’m sorry but I have to interrupt.  Dr. Hotez, I know about the children who have died from the Pfizer vaccine and it’s your job to not deny that.  It’s not a hate crime to question science, you understand that.  I will leave now.
 She was immediately ejected from the synagogue and shortly after banned for life from both her synagogue but also the neighboring cemetery (where her family members were buried) with the explicit threat of law enforcement being called if she violated the ban.
 Remarkably, while Hotez refuses to so much as speak to his critics, he loves to throw very nasty allegations at people who challenge the narrative. Typically, he does this with impunity, but this summer, something remarkable happened after he attacked Rogan:

 Shortly after, Bill Ackman jumped in, offering to contribute an additional $150,000.00 to get Hotez to debate RFK Jr. Realizing this was a golden opportunity to red-pill a lot of people (which it ultimately was), we made some calls, and in less than two days, the pot was over 2.62 million dollars .
 The story quickly made national headlines as it illustrated:

•Hotez was so afraid of exposing himself to criticism, no amount of money could change that.

•Even though Hotez constantly talks in the media about his moral superiority because of his devotion to charitable endeavors (e.g., his vaccines which went nowhere), when he had an actual opportunity to do something that could help people in need, he wasn’t willing to.

 In turn, rather than respond to the debate challenge, the next day, Hotez had a friendly MSNBC host introduce him by regurgitating pharmaceutical talking points, who then gave Hotez almost two minutes to share his talking points, after which the host praised Hotez and doubled down on everything Hotez had said.
 Note: I think this three minute segment is an excellent example of the nauseating propaganda you see throughout the pharmaceutical owned networks now. I learned of it after Hotez shared the segment on his Twitter.

 Since that time, Hotez has made a number of remarkable statements about those events. For instance, really think through what’s being said by Hotez this recent interview :
 Clayton: You famously declined to debate Robert F Kennedy Jr. on Joe Rogan's show. Was that an easy decision for you?
 Hotez : Yeah, that was never in the cards. I've known Bobby Kennedy for a number of years and I've had a number of conversations with him over the years. They didn't get anywhere. He's just too dug in, doesn't want to listen to the science. So I knew it wouldn't be productive, but I also thought it could harm the field because it would give people the wrong message about how science works.
 I mean, science is not something that's achieved through public debate. Science is achieved through writing scientific papers by serious scientists that submit articles for peer review, and then they get modified or rejected and grants that get modified, rejected, or you present in front of scientific conferences in front of your peers for critical feedback. And it's a very successful approach.
 You don't debate science like you'd debate enlightenment, philosophy or politics.
 Note: the largest problem with this argument is that our scientific system is suffering a systemic failure of erroneous (e.g., fraudulent) research flooding the scientific literature, a sustained inability to develop paradigm shifting ideas that improve society, and a complete inability to reject erroneous scientific dogmas (e.g., consider what happened throughout COVID-19). All of this is a direct consequence of debate not being allowed into science, and as a result, we spend more and more to simply re-validate the existing scientific narratives.
 Weaponizing Language
 Years ago, I heard a theory be proposed which argued that the general populace has a great deal of difficulty comprehending concepts which required putting multiple premises together (in other words the complex and nuanced topics) and instead required ideas to be presented to them as “simplistic truths” (e.g., emotionally charged soundbites).
 In turn, you will notice that almost all forms of modern propaganda seek to associate a word with everything its promoters need (e.g., that they are good while their political opponents are bad), after which that word is plastered everywhere it is needed.
 For example, after 9/11, Bush was able to successfully label anyone who disagreed with the horrendous policies he pushed for “unpatriotic.” For example, on September 20, 2001 , he stated the following in an address to a joint session of Congress:
 Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
 Note: this line was met with applause by our legislators.

Before long, f ew were willing to criticize any of Bush’s horrendous policies as they were afraid of being “unpatriotic.” Similarly, throughout Trump’s presidency, the media was able to successfully label anyone who supported him as a “Nazi” and this (nonsensical) label became so powerful it both silenced many of his supporters and drummed up a widespread hatred towards him which made many feel it was justified to use any means necessary to stop Trump or his supporters.
 Note: there are many other examples of labels losing any bearing with reality as a result of them being weaponized against a group’s political opponents (e.g., consider what has happened with the word “racist”).
 One of the most important things to understand about this tactic is that it requires the other side to be unable to challenge the absurdity of the label (e.g., how on earth does me not wanting to squander the national budget through bombing thousands of innocent civilians in the Middle East make me “unpatriotic?”). For this reason, the media will always give the individuals weaponizing the current label a supportive forum to repeat it over and over so that the masses will unthinkingly associate it with the sponsor’s agenda.
 Note: during Trump’s 2016 campaign, the American media in coordination attempted to make their sculpted term “fake news” be applied to any independent voice which criticized the existing narrative. Once the campaign had gained a sufficient degree of momentum (hence making it harder to stop), Trump suddenly started using his megaphone to associate it over and over with CNN rather than the independent media (e.g., “the fake news is the enemy of the people”). This resulted in the campaign backfiring and it decreasing rather than increasing public trust in the mainstream media, making it one of the only examples I know of where someone was able to undermine a major linguistic weaponization campaign (as Trump did not did not need to be compliant to be given an audience on the mass media and hence was in a unique position to speak out).
 Antiscience
 Taking a cue from the propagandists, Peter Hotez also searched for a label to silence all of his critics. He (possibly with the help of a PR firm) settled on “antiscience,” and as he only presents himself to sympathetic audiences who won’t question him, was able to keep upping the ante with it, before long claiming “antiscience” represented an existential danger to our Democracy, was the greatest killing force in the world, and hence called for governments around the world to be weaponized against anyone promoting “antiscience.”
 For a while we ignored these antics because of how ridiculous they were, but eventually realized after this WHO sponsored tweet that it had gone too far (this is the type of thing that leads to dark places) and something needed to be done about it:
 @PeterHotez , Professor and Dean @BCM_TropMed , on the devastating impact of #misinformation and disinformation. ","username":"WHO","name":"World Health Organization (WHO)","profile_image_url":"","date":"Wed Dec 14 11:40:29 +0000 2022","photos":[{"img_url":"https://substackcdn.com/image/upload/w_1028,c_limit,q_auto:best/l_twitter_play_button_rvaygk,w_88/e5gewippmar3zbz79g98","link_url":"https://t.co/ZluiMGJ2gX","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":1636,"like_count":2814,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":"https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1602989231999172608/pu/vid/720x720/9N45GqdkKjOxs1UH.mp4?tag=12","video_preview_media_key":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">
 Note: beyond this being full of factual inaccuracies, there is no possible way Hotez could have made this on his own (which suggests it was instead made by a pharmaceutically funded PR firm).

Since the media had strategically shielded Hotez from having anyone call out his lies, I realized the only option to nip this in the bud would be to do something which blew Hotez’s credibility with the public. I then had a flash of inspiration, recalling something I’d seen a few years before and sent this clip to Pierre Kory. By the grace of God, it went viral (I believe it has been seen over 10 million times now) and completely knocked the wind of Hotez’s sails.

 Note: this comical exchange represents one of the few times Hotez has been in front of an audience who did not unconditionally support everything he said, which again illustrates why it is so critical for vaccine advocates to never expose themselves to even the lightest form of public debate.

About six months later, after hearing yet another antiscience tirade from Hotez, another thought occurred to me—how is he actually defining antiscience? After looking for a while, I couldn’t find an answer.
 This prompted me to write a thoughtful article about the meaning of “antiscience” and Hotez’s habitual tendency to fling nasty accusations at anyone who disagreed with him and then claim to be a victim the moment anyone called out this behavior. Robert Malone kindly agreed to publish the article on June 14, and by some odd coincidence, three days later, Peter Hotez decided to pick a fight with Joe Rogan.
 What is “Antiscience?”
 In that article , I attempted to define antiscience. Since I could not find a definition from Hotez, I went with Wikipedia’s which stated:
 Antiscience is a set of attitudes that involve a rejection of science and the scientific method . People holding antiscientific views do not accept science as an objective method that can generate universal knowledge. Antiscience commonly manifests through rejection of scientific ideas such as climate change and evolution . It also includes pseudoscience , methods that claim to be scientific but reject the scientific method. Antiscience leads to belief in conspiracy theories and alternative medicine .
 Note: since I wrote the original article, an extra sentence was added which stated “lack of trust in science has been linked to the promotion of political extremism and distrust in medical treatments,” which as you might imagine, referenced Hotez’s work (which asserts but doesn’t actually demonstrate that link).

 Fortunately, Wikipedia was willing to acknowledge the inherent issues with this label:
 Elyse Amend and Darin Barney [in 2015] argue that while antiscience can be a descriptive label, it is often used as a rhetorical one, being effectively used to discredit ones' political opponents and thus charges of antiscience are not necessarily warranted.
 Note: one of the central themes I found throughout researching the lengthy philosophical debate on “antiscience” was that there were huge political implications over exactly where a society chose to draw the line as to what constituted “antiscience.”
 I thus patiently waited for Peter Hotez’s book “ The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science ” to come out as I hoped it would at last explicitly define his nebulous slander (especially given that the June 14th article had effectively publicly challenged him to do so). Let’s look at what Hotez said:
 Anti-science has historical roots that go back more than one hundred years, to when Joseph Stalin first understood its value to an authoritarian regime like Communist Russia. Discrediting science and attacking scientists is a central theme for autocrats seeking to hold power and acquire geopolitical dominance. This is a deeply troubling and profoundly sad American tragedy but one that must be unveiled in order to prevent further loss of life and to restore science as an essential component of the American fabric.
 Anti-science” is a broader term that includes efforts to undermine the mainstream views of vaccinology as well as research conclusions in other areas, such as climate science and global warming. In biomedicine, anti-science targets multiple fields, including evolutionary biology, stem cell biology, gene editing and gene therapy, vaccinology, and virology. A prominent example features unfounded claims about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Disinformation and conspiracy theories represent major tactics of groups and individuals committed to anti-science agendas. They undermine confidence in mainstream scientific thought and practices but also in the scientists themselves. Anti-science leaders and groups employ threats and bullying tactics against prominent US scientists. Increasingly and especially in the United States, anti-science has become an important but dangerous political movement. It increasingly attracts those who harbor extremist views. In 2021, I defined it as follows:
 “Anti-science is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. It targets prominent scientists and attempts to discredit them.”
 In other words, it meant exactly what it appeared to from his usage—"anyone who disagrees with me or the narrative is bad."

 Note: a more detailed review of the lies within Hotez’s book and the sinister agenda he is promoting can be found here .
 I thus believe that were Hotez to ever publicly debate someone who was not on his side, the moment he started spewing antiscience slanders to support his position, he would immediately be called asked to explain exactly what he meant (which would thus torpedo his argument).
 Debating the Orthodoxy
 Because of how effectively the media vanquished the idea “experts” should be called upon to defend their positions, the public gradually stopped demanding they be afforded the same public forums we saw throughout the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s when concerns were raised about vaccination.
 This changed when Steve Kirsch , a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist realized it was essential to reinstate that standard and began to relentlessly pursue getting that debate. Once every party he contacted predictable refused to defend their actions (e.g., FDA and CDC officials ignoring innumerable COVID vaccine safety signals ) Kirsch pivoted to a new strategy—offer them increasing sums of money to debate him and then widely publicize their continued unwillingness to debate.
 Since money talks, Kirsch’s offers made it clear to much of the public the excuses they gave (e.g., “it’s not worth their time to debate misinformation”) were a bunch of hot air and their actual reason for refusing to engage in a debate was because it represented an existential risk to them. In short, Kirsch at last found a way to undo the climate the media had worked for decades to create where members of the orthodoxy could spout their lies and nonsense with impunity, and in turn, more and more articles have begun to appear which attempt to justify why it is not appropriate for “science” to engage in a debate with an unorthodox viewpoint.

 Note: things did not always used to be this way. Not too long ago , doctors at hospitals would frequently debate medical controversies and conflicting policies their hospitals were considering for adoption.
 Data for Me but not for Ye
 One of the depressing trends we’ve watched occur for the last few decades has been for the following collective social beliefs to be established.

Step 1—There are lots of problems with our world. Better science and better data is the solution to those issues.
 Step 2—Data is our salvation, we must do everything we can to collect it, and our society’s decisions should be based around it.
 Step 3—Data actually is too complicated for anyone except the experts to analyze.
 Step 4—Those who collect data (e.g., private corporations or the government) should have the right to keep the data private regardless of how much the interpretations of that data influences our lives. Justifications for this include “the need to protect privacy,” “the need to protect the financial investment a private company made in obtaining that ‘proprietary’ data” and the need to ensure the data is analyzed by “experts” who can understand the data.

Step 5—Any data collected from a non-approved source should be disregarded if it conflicts with the existing narrative.
 Amazingly, this strategy has worked. Nonetheless, many attempts were made to oppose it.
 For example, many people don’t know this, but the reason the vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) exists was because in 1986, it was well known within the vaccine safety community that it was impossible for parents to report severe vaccine injuries (as doctors, vaccine manufactures and the government refused to document those). That in turn made it possible to argue there was “no data” those injuries occurred, and hence dismiss parents whenever they shared the injury their child had experienced.
 To solve this problem, the activists forced a provision into the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act which stipulated that a database the public could directly report vaccine injuries to needed to exist, and that the data in it must be made available to the public. Once this database was created, enough of the public learned of it for reports to start trickling into it, and vaccine safety advocates were at last able to identify a variety of specific injuries that were linked to various vaccines.
 Conversely, as VAERS broke their monopoly on vaccine injury data, the entire medical establishment did all that they could to undermine VAERS (e.g., by not ever telling doctors it existed, by not staffing it with enough personel to could process the reports it received and by claiming the data from VAERS was junk only a moron would try to infer anything from). Because of this, until COVID, relatively few people were aware of VAERS existence or its utility (which led to approximately only 1% of vaccine injuries being reported to it).
 For example, listen to this response Peter Hotez gave to a surprise question he received at what he believed was a “safe” venue (and hence answered it):

 Succinctly, Hotez states that if someone were to raise concerns about the data in VAERS to a doctor, they should be reminded that much better monitoring systems exist and that we should “trust” those ones, rather than any of the “junk” that comes out of VAERS. Simultaneously, he neglects to mention that the public is never given access to those databases—rather they are told to trust what experts deduce from them, which not surprisingly always points towards vaccines being “safe and effective.”

 Note: during COVID, through a lengthy FOIA request, we were eventually able to gain access to one of the “more reliable” databases Hotez referenced. That database showed the COVID vaccines were extremely dangerous and that the “expert” report which had previously been made to the public about that database was deceitfully crafted in a manner which concealed those red flags. Likewise, in 2014, a CDC whistleblower revealed that after the CDC conducted a study to disprove the link between vaccines and autism, once the data showed the opposite (that vaccines caused autism) the CDC reworked the study to cover that link up and (illegally) disposed of the original raw data which showed that link.
 Since it has become so difficult to access critical vaccine safety data, throughout COVID, we’ve instead been forced to rely upon lawsuits and whistleblowers to obtain it or to utilize public databases which indirectly show the societal impacts of the vaccines.

If you take a step back, this is completely absurd, especially given that millions of people had their core civil liberties taken away by vaccination mandates which were predicated on flawed interpretations of data we were expected to “trust” but never allowed to verify.
 Nonetheless, given how widespread the harm from the vaccines was, more and more of that data was leaked. Recently, this culminated with a New Zealand whistleblower forfeiting his career and risking his personal freedom (presently he faces a 7 year prison sentence) to leak (anonymized) record level data. This data provided a compelling case the COVID vaccine was harming people, and to my knowledge represents the first time record level data for a vaccine became available to the public.
 Note: record level data is the “gold-standard” of data that allows one to clearly determine if there is or is not a correlation between an intervention (e.g., a vaccine) and a change in the human body (e.g., death).
 When I learned about this imminent release, my first thought was “I wonder how the vaccine zealots will respond to this.” In turn, my best guess was that they’d reuse the existing playbook (ridicule it, refuse to debate it, and insist it was the wrong data source to use for determining causation). This in turn ended up being exactly what happened.
 For example, when David Gorski (a well-known ardent defender of the prevailing narrative who actively disparages Kirsch but steadfastly refuses to debate him) learned of the data, he chose to “address” it by publishing a piece on his blog . Since Gorski consistently follows the Hotez playbook, the content of that article should be easy enough to guess; he made a variety of child-like attacks against Kirsch and the NZ whistleblower (e.g., they aren’t “experts” qualified to evaluate the data) and simultaneously insisted that the data was not sufficient for anything to determined from it.
 What I found remarkable about Gorski’s piece was that it repeatedly implied a very simple question. If this dataset in Gorski’s eyes was not sufficient to assess the harm of the vaccines (as it only included 40% of the vaccine records rather than all of them, hence raising the possibility there was some element of bias in the sample and likewise did not contain an unvaccinated control group for the vaccine death rate to be compared to), who bears the burden of responsibility for this?
 Gorski and Hotez (and many others) have asserted the burden of responsibility is on individual presenting the (incomplete) data and stating it suggests a red flag is present since more data is needed to be certain this indeed in the case. However, the far more reasonable argument would be: if the available data shows a red flag is there, the parties possessing the complete data set (e.g., New Zealand’s government) have an obligation to provide that data to the public, and doing anything else is a tacit admission the complete dataset would prove the existence of that red flag.
 In short, were any of these defenders of the orthodoxy to debate a skeptical audience in public, one of the first rebuttals to their arguments would be “that’s nice, but if you feel that the existing data isn’t good enough to assess if the COVID vaccines are unsafe, why aren’t you advocating for releasing the raw data which would settle this question?”
 However, since the corporate owned media has granted them their own perpetual safe spaces, simple questions like this never can be raised.
 Antiscience or Scientism?
 The term “antiscience” has had a great deal of trouble “sticking” in the public’s mind both because it’s an awkward term and because it represents a fictional concept most people don’t really relate to (as only members of the scientific orthodoxy tend to be upset by the society refusing to blindly follow their pronouncements). Conversely however, another much more well-known term exists, which I would argue is due to it being a real concept many have direct experience with.
 “ Scientism ” is a way of describing science being transformed into a religious institution which cannot be questioned and must be viewed as the sole arbiter of truth (e.g., if you saw seven different healthy people die shortly after a vaccine, because that association has not been proven in science’s peer-reviewed literature, your observation is false and hence must be discounted).

 Note: the above picture was put up by protesters in DC two years ago .
 Since science is supposed to be a self-correcting institution which depends upon bad hypotheses being thrown out, the rise of scientism represents a profound tragedy for our society as it disables that critical corrective mechanism. Once science is transformed into scientism, entrenched scientific dogmas persist indefinitely while new ideas which challenge them are never permitted to see the light of day.
 In turn, countless observers have noticed it has become far rarer for paradigm shifting ideas (e.g., the discovery of DNA) to emerge. Consider for instance what was discovered by  this 2023 study  published by  Nature :

 In short, we are spending far more on science for far far less.

 Note: this is an unfortunate scenario which often is seen in an industry which receives large financial subsidies, as those subsidies incentivize the industry to focus on retaining those subsidies rather than creating economically competitive innovations (e.g., many believe the government giving unconditional student loans to everyone made higher education much more expensive but simultaneously much poorer in quality). In the case of research, since the typical scientist’s career depends upon grants or industry employment, they cannot afford to publish anything which challenges the narrative as doing so blacklists them from those funding sources.
 The Deadly Rise of Scientism
 While Hotez (and Fauci) claim the greatest danger we’ve seen in the last 4 years has been the rise of “antiscience” (a lack of blind trust in our scientific institutions) I believe the actual issue has been the rapid proliferation of scientism throughout our society.
 For instance, believing in the “magic” of science has become a common advertising theme the society has been conditioned to worship. To illustrate, consider one of the key marketing slogan’s Pfizer used to sell their vaccine (e.g., see this commercial ):

 Yet, at the same time they said this, as whistleblowers revealed, Pfizer was knowingly conducting fraudulent clinical trials which in contrast to the widely parroted “safe and effective” line, had actually found the opposite but concealed it. In turn, once the vaccines hit the market, we saw the same wave of injuries and vaccine failures that had actually been detected in the trials. In short, “trusting the science” meant denying that was happening and not questioning the integrity Pfizer’s trial.

 Note: this is similar to how Pfizer claimed their vaccine prevented COVID-19 transmission even though it was well known that had never been evaluated in the COVID vaccine trials . Since this was a contentious issue (as it had been used to justify forcing people who didn’t want to vaccinate to vaccinate so others would “be protected”), a member of parliament eventually asked Pfizer why they did this, at which point, their spokesperson justified this lie by saying “we had to move at the speed of science.” Likewise, it was later discovered that the pivotal study used to justify that the unvaccinated represented a danger to society was junk science and paid for by Pfizer .
 Throughout COVID-19, many honest academics and researchers observed that, much like after 9/11, a climate suddenly was created where it was simply not acceptable to question the prevailing narrative (e.g., see this article ). As a result, many patently absurd ideas were put forward such as:

•The COVID-19 virus did not emerge from a lab, even though the lab where COVID-19 broke out had already published numerous papers on creating unnatural viruses that were very similar to COVID-19.
 Note: it was later revealed that Fauci (who, like Hotez, funded the research which synthetically created these deadly viruses) had bribed “experts” to publish a paper nonsensically declaring the COVID-19 virus was actually natural (when in reality, those experts believed it had been leaked from a lab ).
 •An epidemiologist who was known for making outlandish (and consistently false) predictions about the death rate from a new infectious disease absurdly claiming that COVID-19 would infect almost everyone and kill 0.9% of those infected .
 Note: it was later shown that the IFR was between 0.034% to 0.05% for those under 70.
 •Claiming that this 0.9% fatality rate meant millions would die unless draconian (and experimental) lockdown measures were implemented ( that were and still continue to be immensely devastating to the working class ).
 Note: it was later shown that the epidemiologist massively overestimated the risk of death (e.g., in many cases he predicted thousands of times more deaths than what actually came to pass).

• Claiming there was no treatment for the virus, which in turn was used to justify the necessity of a variety of harsh public health interventions.

•Claiming the vaccines were very safe, 95% effective, necessary to mandate as they prevented the spread of COVID and would soon end the pandemic.
 It goes without saying that had a scientific debate been permitted within the mass media for any of these points, they would have not have stood up to scrutiny. However, because scientism became the state religion, the few who dared to challenge faced persecution not that different from what heretics experienced in theocracies of the past, and before long, the scientific establishment’s lies became entrenched dogmas the entire world was forced to suffer through (e.g., millions died).
 Conclusion
 Modern propaganda began to emerge at the time of the first World War. As it came into being, a fierce debate emerged over if it was acceptable to use it, as propaganda offered the promise of ensuring the proper functioning of an increasingly technologically complex society but simultaneously was antithetical to Democracy as it took away the ability of the populace to decide their governance.
 Eventually, the propagandists won out as it was believed Hitler (a master propagandist) could not be stopped unless equally effective propaganda was used by the Allies.
 Since that time, propaganda has gradually proliferated in our society, with much of it revolving around the idea we should “trust” whoever the currently anointed experts are. Governance in turn has become that expert class deciding what we should do and then commissioning a propaganda company public relations firm to ensure the public complies with their policy.
 Because of how effective this model is, I had largely given up on much of the Democratic process or many of the core issues I cared about ever improving.
 However, two major changes have upended the paradigm we’ve been stuck with for decades.
 The first was the creation of the internet and (due to its profitability) it becoming inseparably intertwined with every aspect of our lives. Because of this, an uncontrollable medium now exists which can allow compelling information to be freely distributed throughout society.
 The second was the unchecked greed of the ruling class (the propagandist form of government made it possible for them to keep taking more and more, so they did). This is important because while propaganda can make people believe truly remarkable things, once it diverges too far from reality (e.g., getting COVID repeatedly despite being vaccinated with a “95% effective” vaccine was a huge red-pill for many).
 Because of this, there is no longer a clear way to ensure the continued control of the masses, and as a result, those who have been in power for decades are now facing an existential threat to their power base.
 Note: all the above is discussed in more detail within this excellent article .
 If we want to reclaim our Democracy, it is critical we allow open and honest debate to occur. As the last few years have shown, we cannot have the “expert’s” narrative be shielded from all scrutiny, and as the internet has shown, the monopoly they used to hold over the truth is rapidly fading away. Conversely, I believe if the experts wish to regain the credibility they have lost, they must earn it by publicly defending the merits of their positions, and I believe as time moves forward, the expert class will see realize this too.
 Lastly, I want to thank each of you for your support of my work here and on Substack over the last year (you make much of it possible). The world is shifting quite rapidly (e.g., people are moving from the mass media to the independent media in droves) and I am quite hopeful 2024 will mark the point when our voice grows loud enough that we can begin to correct the terrible course of scientific apparatus has taken.
 Postscript : Peter Hotez “responded” to this article after it went viral. Because of this, I wrote a followup to this piece which illustrated the most objectionable content in Hotez’s and showed how it is part of a much more nefarious PR campaign to prevent all dissent from the narrative being censored (e.g., when the WHO tried to push the next “emergency” vaccine on us). The followup article can be read here .
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Summary: We All Suffer Once You Can No Longer Debate "The Science"


Debate: Was Covid-19 A Pandemic Caused By A Novel Pathogen Or Was It Created Solely By Harmful Policies and Fear Propaganda?

In the spirit and intent of fostering respectful scientific debate, a group of colleagues has asked some of us front-line clinicians to reply to a post written by Martin Neil, Jonathan Engler, and Jessica Hockett titled “ 'Spikeopathy' does not explain the 'novel' symptoms associated with COVID-19. ”
 Obviously, if you are interested in following the debate, the points raised and the points countered, it is mandatory you read the post above before proceeding with the below.
 If you didn’t or don’t want to read it, I will instead summarize their main argument and findings. In no particular order, besides the post above, in the What’s App exchanges, these points were made by various members who have taken the position that “no novel pathogen existed.”

 NICK HUDSON:
 To summarize:
 1. In Covid itself, there was no medical emergency of any sort.
 2. Policy measures created a medical and social emergency of many dimensions—a mass casualty event at its most acute around the declaration of the (fake) pandemic.
 3. The vaccines created a medical emergency of uncertain quantum and duration.
 4. The drive towards digital IDs and CBDCs constitutes a political emergency.
 5. Sustenance of the viral bio-weapon myth, inter alia, provides cover and justification for 4.
 6. A not inconsiderable number of high-ranking policymakers were sighted on all of the above from the start, knowing that there was no material risk in Covid and considerable risk in the vaccines.

 MIKE YEADON:
 (in a reply to my descriptions of the clinical syndrome):
 I’m sure you’re describing what you saw, but there’s a problem.
 The epidemiological evidence doesn’t square with there being a highly transmissible & above average mortality.
 Perhaps you dispute what Denis Rancourt & colleagues have published?
 There was no hint of increased illness or death (as measured by all cause mortality) in USA (state big state) until after WHO called a pandemic.
 (It is on this basis that I’ve been saying there’s been no pandemic).
 How could this be if there was a highly contagious & above average lethality pathogen?
 Separately, I’ve looked & looked and I’m unable to find in the literature good evidence of contagion in influenza like illnesses broadly. Patients with acute respiratory illnesses that are classified as Influenza-like illnesses (ILI) were unable to cause healthy people brought into contact with them to acquire symptoms of ILI. There were several experiments attempted & they were unsuccessful.
 Do you know of literature that demonstrates symptomatic contagion of diseases of this kind?
 The PCR-based diagnostic tests are not meaningful. How did you differentially diagnose “covid19” from other ILIs?

 SEAN FLANAGAN:
 As per my previous above👆, to me as the non-medic, non-scientist, ordinary Joe here, my net net short summary take away from our debate, discussion and various discussion on and our Twitter Spaces:
 all the data in 2019, Diamond Princess 🛳 Jan 2020, and 2020 BEFORE Lockdowns & NPIs in March, and ACM numbers and no Excess Deaths, points to No ‘Pandemic’ (of Oct 2019 & prior WHO definition?) and ‘Cases’ declining in March 2020 before Lockdown & NPIs.

 The 2020 ACM and Excess Deaths data and numbers pre mid Dec 2020 commencement of mRNA injection roll out, point to No ‘Pandemic’

 “There was something (or somethings) different in circulation which we had not seen before, but was totally manageable if treated properly” - words/quote to this effect on one of our Spaces by @Lynn Fynn and some Frontline Drs have said they saw some different ‘stuff’ earlier in 2019.

 As previously mentioned here above 👆 and on our Twitter Space, various Frontline Drs around the world (including those here) were going about their normal business of “Treat What You See” with existing medications and therapeutics and sharing information, and IF the WHO, Gvt’s, Public Health, MSM, Big Tech et al had NEVER mentioned or declared ‘Pandemic’ or any of the data and fear porn They instigated….. then the whole world would have just carried on as normal and Frontline Drs globally would have swapped notes as to what was working (like our side did) and just carried on going about their day to day “Treat What You See”, and, with no interference and left alone to do what they do, aside from a bad and ‘strange’ or ‘different’ flu season, all would have been fine. This points to no ‘Pandemic’.

 Prof John Ioannidis IFR%s are consistent with the above.

 Is this a fair and accurate short summary that we can all sign ✍ up to….?

 This more recent one by NICK HUDSON lends supporting data for their hypothesis that propaganda and harmful policies was the cause of the pandemic:
 “Read this whole thread. The perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing. Don’t miss the section on how autonomic responses can create flu-like symptoms.”
 Nick is referring to this Twitter thread by Champagne Joshi , i.e. @JoshWalkos
 A 2006 DHS document about the possibility of a “Mass Psychogenic Illness” they define as: “A phenomenon in which social trauma or anxiety combines with a suspicious event to produce psychosomatic symptoms, such as nausea, difficulty breathing, and paralysis. If many individuals come to believe that the psychosomatic outbreak is connected to the cause of the trauma or anxiety, these symptoms can spread rapidly throughout a population.” Particular focus is given to a CBR Event (chemical, biological, radiological). “particularly those involving chemical, biological, or radiological (CBR) weapons. The number of those suffering psychogenic illness could far exceed the number of actual casualties in a CBR event.” Some implications stated in the document: “The observed symptoms of many mass psychogenic illness events are similar to several non-specific symptoms of possible chemical and biological weapons—including chemical agents, inhalational anthrax, and avian influenza.” “Recent cases of mass psychogenic illness display a transferal of the symptoms onto contemporary anxieties.”

 Next, they submitted this 9 minute lecture by Prof. Denis Rancourt who states the following conclusions based on his extensive analysis of “all cause mortality.”
 there was a peak of deaths early on in certain hot spots that was directly due to how people were treated in hospitals and care homes

 There was no pandemic, instead there was intense propaganda

 There was no particularly virulent pathogen

 There was nothing that was spreading that was causing death, “mortality didn’t cross borders, there were areas without any increase in all cause mortality right next to “hot spots” where there was.

 In more than half the countries studied, there was no increase in ACM until the vaccines were rolled out

 Nick Hudson and Mike Yeadon agree with the above and they ask:
 Let anyone who takes a different view please either:
 1. Refute Rancourt’s basic analytical methods, findings and conclusions or
 2. Offer an interpretation of events that squares the circle of a pandemic of a contagious & somewhat lethal pathogen, notwithstanding Rancourt’s findings.

 FRONT LINE CLINICIAN “REBUTTAL”
 I will state at the outset that I/we will be unable to fully “square the circle” in providing an explanation for all the anomolous events and data described.
 However, as a clinician, the only point I wish to and believe I am able to counter is the assertion that “there was no novel pathogen.”
 We maintain that there was a novel pathogen which caused a novel syndrome and that it was initially particularly deadly in many areas (Lombardy, NYC, Seattle, Detroit, New Orleans and others), and not just to the old, at least in my clinical experience.
 However, what I cannot explain is why certain hot spots became medical disaster zones while other areas or countries, apparently not far away geographically did not exhibit such manifestations. I believe this latter question comes after we decide whether there was a novel pathogen. Then we can try to answer why this novel pathogen affected certain areas and places disproportionately.
 One aspect of the “no new pathogen” camp’s argument is based on the existence of antibodies to SarsCoV2 found in numerous places in 2018 and 2019 before the Wuhan outbreak. Thus they conclude that the disease had been around, but the catastrophic impacts only occurred after the WHO declaration, media fear mongering and the illogical and harmful lockdown and mask and social distancing policies.
 We counter with the fact that whatever was causing antibodies to be made in certain places in 2018 or 2019 did not have the pathogenicity of the “new variant” which seemingly escaped or was leaked out of Wuhan. I have one data point which might support the “emergence of a new deadly strain” of SARS-CoV2 from Wuhan:
 In this WSJ article from August 2020, they describe a CDC “early warning system” for pandemics which was based on “listening” for key words across the global internet. In the article, they describe a post which was flagged by the CDC early warning system from a Wuhan Health Ministry website on Dec. 31, 2019 which had this recommendation: “Avoid closed public places and crowded places with poor air circulation.”
 Know that to me, this is the first evidence that a pathogen was circulating in Wuhan with novel characteristics, i.e. the ability to transmit through the air. That is the only reason why a health ministry website would tell the public suddenly that they “should avoid closed public places and crowded places with poor air circulation.” I maintain that the Chinese knew immediately this thing was airborne. The article then goes on to casually state that the website post was taken down within hours. But it spooked the CDC. And it spooks me to learn of it. I believe this was the first warning that something big and bad had just been leaked or escaped and spelled trouble due to its high transmission properties. That is why they said to avoid poorly ventilated places. Know this was months before the WHO declared a pandemic.
 And that by the time the WHO declared a pandemic and then ACM started to rise should be understood as that - a real pandemic of a newly highly transmissible respiratory pathogen had erupted. And thus, the ACM increases were not secondary to WHO declaration of the Pandemic, fear mongering, and lockdowns, but instead reflected the reality that a rapidly spreading viral illness syndrome was affecting a lot of people. Yes, the timing of the rise in ACM started only after the WHO pandemic declaration which is troubling to contemplate. However, as little as I want to give the WHO credit for any decision they have made, the declaration appeared to be supported by the clinical reality on the ground - lots of people getting sick with a minority getting really sick (a minority of a suddenly very large number of infected people such that this “minority” overwhelmed numerous urban areas in terms of hospital capacity). I know this did not happen everywhere, I personally do not have the knowledge or expertise to explain the transmission patterns globally, but my best guess is something nefarious contributed to the anomolous spread, something as preposterous as deliberate widespread release in certain targeted cities and areas.
 Anyway, beyond the evidence above that a novel pathogen with significant airborne transmissibility likely emerged from Wuhan in December 2020, is the fact that Fauci et al immediately embarked on a massive cover-up of their bioweapons research being implicated (if not obvious, “gain of function” research is bioweapons research). Why did they go to such lengths to cover up the origin of a pathogen “that didn’t exist?”
 OK, back to the “novel pathogen” argument. I will relate some of the key points that I believe the non-clinicians overlook and why I maintain this was a novel and severe disease:
 Outside of a biopsy of tissue or culture of a pathogen, there is no uniquely diagnostic criteria for any disease , certainly no single radiographic finding, symptom, or lab abnormality. All such findings are always, by definition, non-specific as they can be found in a number of diseases (the organs of the human body have a narrow range of symptoms they can express when sick, thus many different illnesses share symptoms and lab abnormalities. Learning how to discern among overlapping symptoms, findings, and blood tests and radiographic abnormalities is literally the core skill of a medical doctor and why training is so long and why we need to see so many thousands of patients in order to acquire sufficient diagnostic capability). If you doctor long enough, you find that discerning amongst diseases is not as difficult as when you start out.

 Further, what must be recognized is that Covid-19 is not just a few viral symptoms, but rather presents as a “syndrome” with a wide but predictable constellation of findings, and although a number of the abnormalities are non-specific, when they present in clusters or simultaneously, then you can differentiate Covid as a unique and/or novel syndrome by comparing to how pre-existing infectious or viral disease syndromes present.

 Also know that in medicine, since it is rare for any single test, symptom, of physical exam finding to be diagnostic of a single disease, what physicians do as a core skill is to amass all the presenting data including “history of present illness” (triggers, timeline, context, contributing factors, medical history, travel), physical exam findings, lab and radiographic abnormalities etc) and then generate a “differential diagnosis,” ranking the likelihood that the patients presentation is one disease or another, something like, “these findings strongly support Covid-19 given bilateral ground glass opacities on CT, typical viral symptoms, illness beginning after a holiday party where a number of others also subsequently fell ill, the elevations in D-dimer, CRP, ESR, low lymphocytes, significant hypoxia without an accompanying increased work of breathing, and abrupt improvement in oxygenation after administration of ivermectin.” For example. Further, I would also then write “bacterial pneumonia is less favored given bilateral findings vs. unilateral, lack of consolidation on CT, dry cough unproductive of phlegm, lack of elevated neutrophil count, lack of pleurisy, obvious contagiousness as per history etc). Know that in the above examples, I chose a relatively “clean” set of findings which allows one to rule in or rule out a diagnosis. Certainly there were times where the totality of findings may be less discriminating as to cause, but in general, hospital phase Covid presented very similarly.

 The strongest point that I can make is that, even if not ALL features below were present in the hospitalized patient, generally most of them were present, and I had never seen a syndrome with such reproducibility of this constellation of symptoms and findings, thus leading to what I felt was a high specificity of diagnosis. Making a diagnosis of Covid in the hospitalized patient was not difficult. In an outpatient whereby all you have is generally mild clinical symptoms to differentiate patients by, I completely agree that in many cases Covid would be hard to confidently differentiate from other respiratory viruses. But as the illness progressed and became severe, it had a unique set of findings on presentation and a unique trajectory once in hospital. Also know that Paul Marik was reprimanded for saving a mans life because he treated the man with a large combination of therapies which made up our COVId MATH+ protocol. Why was he “reprimanded?”. Because the man had had numerous negative tests for Covid, but Paul treated him for Covid based on his “clinical” diagnosis of the syndrome which was pretty classic. Nothing else fit better than the diagnosis of COVId, despite the negative PCR test. So Paul treated him and he survived but this did not stop his actions from appearing as a complaint in his personnel file.

 Again, the “specificity” was a cluster of findings, not any individual one! When 8 out of the ten findings are present, you have a diagnosis. When 6 out of the 10, you still have a confident diagnosis. And then, just to add to the complexity, there are also, like with any disease we study and treat, “atypical” presentations, like my oldest and best friend who simply got nauseous, started projectile vomiting, went to hospital and was eventually diagnosed with adult onset multi-system inflammatory syndrome related to Covid (note he was Covid positive on admission). But know that he never had a preceding upper respiratory symptom however all the other findings were consistent with the new rarer syndrome of MISC-A.. So, atypical presentation, but his eventual A-MISC syndrome has criteria for diagnosis and he met all of them. I have also seen, on few occasions, other presentations that were atypical, i.e. more GI predominant than respiratory but the response to treatment was the same.

 The unique “collection” of findings in the initial hospital presentation were as follows:
 A viral phase preceding the pulmonary phase, the latter of which befell a minority of those with the initial viral syndrome, and typically becoming severe enough to need hospital for hypoxia/shortness of breath approximately 7-10 days after first symptoms. The reproducible timing of the “pulmonary phase” as I call it, was novel. We published a paper describing the timeline and characteristics of the phases in late December 2020 here .

 Often presenting with “happy hypoxia” which is a clinical (i.e. observational) diagnosis not a defined mathematical one. In my career diagnosing and treating causes of acute respiratory failure/hypoxia, most patients with severe hypoxia evidence visibly obvious increased work of breathing with use of respiratory muscles, upright posture in bed, “tracheal tugging”, diaphoresis, abdominal respirations, confusion etc. An elevated respiratory rate is not what I use to define or differentiate happy hypoxia. In Covid, I kept seeing patients with moderate to severe hypoxia but without all the signs above of an elevated work of breathing. I saw so many patients whose oxygen levels and work of breathing were so obviously discordant and to me as a respiratory failure expert, I found this novel. And not only to me - early on, a number of us clinicians had debates among us as to why this was happening and it was my recall that I had only seen that kind of presentation in patients with the disease called “organizing pneumonia” or OP. Know that OP is not an infectious condition, although it can be caused or associated with infections, but its most common causes are either idiopathic or drug-induced.

 There was a pervasive “bilateral organizing pneumonia” on CT scan (OP is an uncommon finding in general and “organizing” patterns are quite differentiating amongst diseases, especially if you solely compare films on presentation to hospital, not later on the wards or ICU’s as disease progress or secondary complications develop. I compare apples with apples ( films on presentation) and not apples with oranges (film on presentation vs. film after ventilation).

 To give you an example of what really happens in Covid disease, look at this progression – note the presenting and two subsequent films are classic “OP” but then, over time, you can see consolidations, nodules, traction bronchiectasis, fibrosis, and DAD/ARDS. But the presenting film in the top left was classic and reproducible:
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 Patients often presenting with high ferritin levels indicating severe activation of macrophages (also uncommon, but can be seen with other viruses, however, the consistency of this elevation was unique).

 Patients often presented with high D-dimers, CRP, ESR (markers of inflammation and clotting). Again, these are all non-specific findings, but when appearing together, over and over, helped define this novel “syndrome”

 Often presenting with high LDH and quite low lymphocytes ( this latter finding was relatively unique and highly reproducibly found in the first wave).

 In the first wave especially, lots of hypo- and hyper- natremia in the ICU which perplexed the nephrologists I worked with.

 Often presented with complete anosmia or ageusia (loss of smell and taste) which would then persist for weeks to months beyond the illness (this latter “persistence” I had never heard of before, typically anosmia and ageusia are transient while ill with a virus and then they return once recovered). I was in an Uber yesterday with a driver who told me he hasn’t been able to smell in 3 years since he had “Covid.”

 Often rapid progression to fibrosis on CT scans - this was novel to me, I had never seen such rapidly fibrosing lung findings on CT scans in ICU patients (again, not unique as there is a rare, rapidly fibrosing lung disease called AIP (acute interstitial pneumonia) but it is very rare and does not present in the context of the syndrome above.

 High rates of ME/CFS (myalgic encephalitis/chronic fatigue syndrome a.k.a Long Covid) compared to what has been described with other viruses as per this Mayo Clinic paper . Long Vax is actually more common than Long Covid and those patients are on average, sicker than Long Covid patients. Both diseases share the spike protein as the common pathogen, further supporting spikeopathy as “a thing.” Further, aside from the novelty of spike protein disease is the unfathomable complexity, this 40 page, 250 reference paper starts to scratch the surface of the innumerable now well described unique pathophysiologic mechanisms triggered by the spike protein. Spikeopathy is literally in the title of the paper.

 High transmissibility with clear evidence of aerosol spread - I have never seen a disease which spread so rapidly and widely, with numerous super-spreader events, well described in the media and the CDC. Know that none of the other common respiratory viruses we see (flu, RSV, rhino, regular corona) transmit by aerosols to a significant extent (all are thought to be capable in certain discrete circumstances, but this thing was “suddenly” and pervasively airborne). I wrote on Op-Ed on aerosol spread in April 2020, first accepted by NY Times in May, then dropped, then published in USA today in July of 2020 which detailed numerous instances supporting the reality of aerosol spread. The contagiousness within families and after group events despite social distancing and masks were consistent and reproducible (even my own household saw such spreads, multiple times). The best explanation for the mis-understanding and under-emphasizing of the reality of predominance of aerosol spread can be found in the Chapter “Belief #1” in the book by Clare Craig called “ Expired .”

 An unusually high number of pneumothoraces and pneumomediastinum on presentation to hospital (holes in lung developed, causing air to leak out either around the lung (pneumothorax) or in the center of the chest (pneumomediastinum). Outside of someone with a chronic lung disease this is extremely rare to occur spontaneously in patients with a pre-morbid healthy lungs. When it occurs spontaneously, it typically only occurs in thin, tall young men and women and occurs idiopathically - but we were seeing a lot of them - again, very rare for a viral infection to produce a pneumothorax in native, healthy lung. However, although I saw this numerous times, it was still relatively rare amongst the total population of patients, but was far more frequent than in any other acute illness i have encountered.

 Lots of deep venous thromboses and pulmonary emboli on admission or soon after admission, i.e very high rates of macro and micro clotting (microclotting, like turbo cancer are new medical terms by the way, only introduced since Covid (reversing the micro-clotting/aggregation of red blood cells is one way in which ivermectin works and has been associated with rapid improvements in oxygenation, two novel insights since Covid). Also, I have never had a case of a 29 y.o healthy male who died in the Emergency room from overwhelming right heart failure from a massive PE about 5 days into his symptoms. Nasty nasty nasty. Nor have I seen dialysis circuits where you could see the clots in the tubing as a regular occurrence (saw this in the 2nd Covid patient I encountered). Nor had I heard of such reproducible difficulty with drawing bloods or blood then clotting in the collection tubes. Again, I wrote a paper about the incidence of hypercoagulability with near zero fibrinolysis in ICU patients and I started writing that after my 4th patient. Again, this pattern can sometimes be seen in other critical illness, but it was so reproducible/identical between patients (in the first wave).

 In terms of how deadly it was, this also gets complicated because the disease changed over the past few years, and despite the seemingly low Infection Fatality Rate, it is the opinion of my colleague A Midwestern Doctor that it is impossible to calculate the true IFR for influenza so a direct comparison between the two is not possible.
 One other troublingly unique aspect was that in the first wave in NY, doctors and nurses were dying on the front lines. One of the first to die was an absolute giant of my specialty, he died in Seattle right after their first influx of patients. I have NEVER lost a colleague to the same disease we were treating.. ever. And I knew of at least 3 who died in the first wave of Covid. And that’s just me.

 The trajectory of illness in the hospital and ICU, for me as an pulmonologist and ICU specialist was also novel in that patients with hypoxia and CT scan changes would require high fractions of oxygen initially, could breathe without distress, but then over days to a week, the lung changes would advance/worsen, distress would develop, non-invasive or invasive ventilation would then be required, and once on a vent, would require weeks before recovery or death (yes there was a minority who died fairly quickly). However, the “prolonged stability” of these patients was unique to me in that, in critical illness, once you have an advanced organ failure like heart or lung failure, the typical trajectory is patients “declare themselves” in the first 4 days of ICU, meaning they start to evince a slow or rapid deterioration or a slow or rapid improvement. But you see changes daily. However, in Covid patients, day after day very little would “budge”, either good or bad. Weird I tell you.

 Again, the main thrust of my argument is that there was a constellation of symptoms and findings that presented in a novel and unique combination, it was not any one single finding that gave it its uniqueness, as there are very few “ pathognomonic ” findings in medicine, as in, very rare to have an abnormality that is present or specific to one disease, but this does not mean we cannot differentiate clinically amongst presenting illnesses.
 That process is literally the core of what I do as a physician, I am first a “diagnostician” and true expertise in medicine is driven by very high level abilities to discern among patterns, i.e. pattern recognition, and the “pattern” of presentation of Covid was unique and easily discernable and distinct from other viral syndromes to a seasoned clinician. Yes, all ILI will have some combination of a cough, fever, head ache, sore throat, chest congestion etc… and yes, those alone are not easily differentiable, but when you bring in the timing of symptom development, context of symptom development (predictably timed after household or social exposure where others were or became ill), a combination of their initial radiographic abnormalities, lab abnormalities, initial dry lung (relatively rare in acute respiratory failure outside of asthma or COPD exacerbations), progression/trajectory of illness with progressive hypoxia and then progressing radiographically from just GGO’s to other more severe injury patterns like consolidations, response or lack of response to certain therapies, you become very familiar with what was a unique and novel syndrome.
 Although I believe I addressed the main conclusions of Neil et al’s post reviewing the published literature on Covid-19, if it is helpful, and at the risk of sounding redundant, let me specifically address some of their main points in that article:
 Radiologic findings cannot reliably differentiate between Covid-19, influenza like illnesses, and bacterial pneumonia.
 My response: agree and disagree as above but this is NOT the only thing we used, although using radiography was super helpful in discriminating, and yes, I can say this despite the papers showing relatively equal incidences of various radiographic abnormalities overall - you are overlooking timing and stage of disease where radiography is a much better differentiator than those papers suggest).. Also, if you accept this statement on face value, it essentially would mean that radiography cannot be relied upon to differentiate among infectious illnesses. Ask any doctor and they will tell you that radiography is one of the best diagnostic tools (never perfect, but hugely impactful).

 Symptoms, clinical observations (Happy Hypoxia), and laboratory findings cannot differentiate between the above illnesses either
 I simply and respectfully disagree - experts have pattern recognition which easily allows for this, and pattern recognition might be better explained as “intuition”, it is almost an unconscious process when it occurs but I have been successfully relying on my pattern recognition skills to differentiate among causes of acute respiratory failure for 20 years.

 Thus, there is no “proof” that a novel pathogen or syndrome existed, it was either flu, bacterial pneumonia, a toxic exposure, or widespread vaping illness

 Following from the above, hundreds of thousands of doctors around the world were “fooled” into believing that this was a “new syndrome” while instead it represented illnesses long encountered throughout their collective careers, but it was the media, journals, and scare policies that made them view it as novel.
 See reply to #2 above

 But lets try to answer #3 above more specifically:
 Why was it not the flu? Because, in my career, I have taken care of maybe 5 patients on a vent due to the flu and three of them (maybe 4?) were pregnant - over two decades and hundreds and hundreds of days running ICU’s. Flu rarely causes severe acute hypoxic respiratory failure in my experience, nor do we see hundreds of thousands of flu cases a year. With Covid, in NYC, it was difficult to run ICU’s because you would have 18-24 patients on your service all with nearly identical chest x-rays (OP initially, then progressed to consolidations and/or ARDS). I have never in my life had ICU’s full of patients with the same “disease.” This was novel.
 Why was it not bacterial pneumonia? Well, from the features above, bacterial pneumonias are not associated with OP, are generally unilateral (the vast majority of Covid was bilateral), most often consolidative rather than with ground glass, accompanied by thick and/or colorful phlegm, can have pleurisy,, and when severe, typically causes severe sepsis/hypotension etc. Also, outside of TB, bacterial pneumonias do not exhibit human to human transmission so cannot explain all the transmission and dying unless someone was to argue that widespread immunosuppression developed making most of the population uniquely susceptible to bacterial pneumonia in their environment all of a sudden.
 Note this was before the vaccines so I have no other possible cause of sudden immunosuppression amongst the population.. Again, bacterial pneumonias are random, relatively rare events in most people’s lives, and instead mostly tend to affect the elderly as they go into immunosenescence and/or develop swallowing difficulties.
 In the young and healthy, they are very rare events. I had too many young and healthy (relatively) on vents suddenly - why/how would a bacterial pneumonia suddenly do this unless it was a new superbug which would have been quickly identified. True, people with viral illnesses can develop “secondary bacterial pneumonias” and certainly some/many Covid patients could have eventually developed a secondary bacterial pneumonia, but this is NOT what brought them to hospital in droves nor was the main cause of death. I, like Jackie, and most intensivists, would do a trial of antibiotics at the drop of a hat if there was a suggestion one was occurring (new phlegm, white count, new fever, worsening in oxygenation, new opacity on chest x-ray etc). However, despite doing this, it didn’t matter, the patients kept dying in the ICU. What I saw as the main cause of death was an initial viral induced “organizing” pneumonia (organizing patters are not associated with bacteria) which slowly led to complete lung destruction from a rapidly fibrosing process, ending up in what is called pathologically DAD (diffuse alveolar damage) and clinically is seen as ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome)..
 Why was it not Vaping?
 Vaping can be ruled out by history taking. The vast majority of patients were not vapers. Smokers and vapers make up less than 20% of the population. This syndrome spared no segment of the population and I am unaware of data showing a massive increase in the sales of vapes at that time.
 Last rebuttal of a point Mike Yeadon made above:
 YEADON: Separately, I’ve looked & looked and I’m unable to find in the literature good evidence of contagion in influenza like illnesses broadly. Patients with acute respiratory illnesses that are classified as Influenza-like illnesses (ILI) were unable to cause healthy people brought into contact with them to acquire symptoms of ILI. There were several experiments attempted & they were unsuccessful.
 REBUTTAL: Beyond the above, I was also sent this post which compiled 67 studies where, under experimental conditions, various viral illnesses could not be transmitted to another person despite exposure to secretions, breath, live virus etc.
 I have not done a literature search to find positive transmission studies, but in that list, I have to say that all of the polio studies (most were polio) should be thrown out because polio, in nearly all circumstances was not an infectious disease, the bulk of the evidence shows that it was caused by insecticide poisoning, with arsenic in the late 19th/early 20th century, and then later with DDT. However, a couple of influenza and measles studies failed which is interesting. Even more so the varicella, which I find odd, because in the little experiment that my mom did when I was sick with chicken pox as a child, she put me and my 2 brothers in the bath together, and they both got chickenpox immediately after. My mom didn’t publish that experiment though. Also, none of those viruses studied have been associated with significant aerosol transmission like Covid has. Covid is highly transmissable by aerosols. Seems contagious to me, unless some other theory of transmission or acquiring the illness can be posited. Perhaps they are all from aerosol poisonings by the sociopaths who run this world?
 I apologize that I did not have the time to find published literature “proving” under experimental conditions the contagiousness of respiratory viruses. I have treated hundreds of Covid patients where, when taking a history, the vast majority can clearly pinpoint the place or event where they contracted their illness, typically along with several others, and often after finding out later that one of the guests or friends became ill after. I have seen and cared for countless family clusters and seen passage from husband to wife numerous times. I have more than a handful of simultaneous husband-wife hospital admissions (something which effectively rules out bacterial pneumonia as cause), and in a few cases, only one made it out. I have been observing non-stop contagiousness (i.e. a symptomatic Covid patient causing an asymptomatic person to then become ill with Covid). Reproducibly and predictably. I am unaware I need to find a published paper that “proves” the contagion. Further, if contagiousness of flu or ILI has not been shown to occur in published literature, then this might strengthen our argument actually - that this was a pathogen of novel transmissibility.
 That’s all I got. I am not sure if I “squared the circle” in terms of making coherent sense of all the data and viewpoints and I think that is because there are still things we don’t know about how and why the virus spread the way it did and why it behaved so deadly in some spots at certain times and not others. One possible clue might be this paper finding that all? variants were created in a lab. Their concluding sentence: “The analysis showed that Omicron variants were formed by an entirely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biology, and knowing how the SARS-CoV-2 variants were formed prompts a reconsideration of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.”

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Summary: In a What's App group chat, a number of data experts and scientists have been debating this question with front-line clinicians. Here I compile the debate arguments.