“The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Dear Reader,
Omicron… oy… is still spreading faster than previous variants of the insidious Covid-19. The popular media is overwhelming their audiences, as ever, with warnings about overcrowded hospitals and stories about people suffering from the virus.
Several states are declaring emergency. Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, emphasized the emergency action “does not mean any new universal mandates or passports. It does not mean lockdowns. It does not mean any business restrictions or gathering limits.”
Instead, states are devoting resources to deal with people who get the disease and need to be hospitalized.
Duh.
That’s what they should have been doing from the very beginning, my guest for this week’s Session, Dr. John Hunt, points out.
“We’ve always had years — we’re maybe on seven-year cycles, roughly — of horrible years,” John tells me. “The ICUs and the emergency rooms jammed, no beds on the wards, because of viral outbreaks, either flu or corona- or adenovirus, or whatever.”
Dr. Hunt admits that compared to those previous cycles, COVID-19 is “quite a bit worse for elderly people.” So all the effort and energy should be concentrated on helping them.
“If you’re going to isolate, it’s the elderly,” Dr. Hunt says. “If you vaccinate, it’s the elderly, because it’s not a perfectly safe vaccine.” Given the harm COVID could do to seniors, “the risk/benefit ratio is correct.”
Of course, John says, “you’ll hear the anecdotes of the young people who don’t get through it just fine.” But the reality is that those cases “are few and far between.” They just “get amplified out there like crazy, so that everyone is fearful.”
Fear.
We covered that yesterday. Dr. Hunt believes that “reassuring people is a big part of being a doctor… but that’s the antithesis of what the public health world is doing.”
Thanks to the efforts of these “so-called experts” — whom we’ve labeled the Barbarians of Specialization — “a large system of propaganda has manipulated what people believe, so that it’s really way off track.”
It’s a problem that’s infected the entire scientific community. The scientism of today is akin to the Catholic Church of the medieval age. “Believe as I say, because I am a man of the Church. If you don’t believe what I say, then you don’t believe in God.”
“Science has been completely politicized in so many ways,” Dr. Hunt says. For one thing, “the government is subsidizing, controlling, regulating, paying for so much.” And the Barbarians of Specialization “have the power of the purse and the power of guns to force their will on people.”
What if you believe in science, but simply draw a different conclusion?
Using federal grant money as a carrot, the Barbs push research “towards the way they want things to come out.” If the research “doesn’t come out according to the orthodoxy,” the researcher will shelve their work. “So only the real orthodoxy papers will ever get published, because the other ones don’t even get written.”
We see it with things like climate change… and we’re seeing it with COVID.
“We have these experts who are using government force,” Dr. Hunt says, to decide things like which businesses stay open and who should be given experimental medicines.
How did we get here? Dr. Hunt doesn’t hold back: “We gave them that power, stupidly, by electing politicians who delegated off their responsibilities to bureaucrats.”
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about what that means for our future.
Follow your bliss,
Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Financial Reserve
