Brian C. Joondeph, MD:
“…For the past year and a half of COVID, we have been told by those supposedly in the know, to “follow the science.” Those who question the science are at best called names, like “deniers” or “racists”, and at worst, lose their jobs and reputations, and are banned from social media.
One gets an appreciation for what scientists of centuries ago endured as they questioned science dogma of the day such as the Earth being flat or the Sun revolving around Earth. Such censorship was attributed to the medieval scientific mindset centuries ago long before the enlightened age of Facebook, Twitter, and CNN.
Last year’s outbreak of the Chinese coronavirus allowed the world to travel back in time to an age where sailors feared sailing off the edge of the world into a pit of monsters or nothingness. Instead of being called “flat Earthers” they are called anti-maskers or anti-vaxers. How did we get to such a place where science can’t be questioned, at least science deemed incontrovertible by the government and media?
It started with the climate change movement. Back in the 1970s we faced a crisis of global cooling. A few decades later it changed to global warming, where the planet would heat up enough to melt the polar icecaps, flooding coastal cities. When these fatalistic predictions failed to pan out, the movement created a new name, climate change, that conveniently covered both warm and cool temperatures, rain, drought, storms, and all other forms of weather, attributing normally changing weather to something nefarious
Scientists are supposed to follow the scientific method, observing natural phenomena, collecting data, forming a hypothesis to explain these observations, then refining the hypotheses as new data emerges. Instead, with both climate science and COVID the process has been reversed, ignoring or jiggering the data to conform with a predetermined hypothesis, rejecting new or contrary data simply because scientists did not like or approve of the source of the contrary data…”
