Part 3: The Rise of a Deadly New Religion and its Crusade to Eliminate Non-Believers

We All Suffer Once You Can No Longer Debate "The Science"

BS”D

This is Part 3 of my reprint of A Midwestern Doctor’s very important article, “The Deadly Rise of Scientism.”

Part 2 (contains link to Part 1): https://truth613.substack.com/p/part-2-the-rise-of-a-deadly-new-religion

By A Midwestern Doctor

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:

World Health Organization (WHO) @WHO

“Anti-vaccine activism, which I actually call anti-science aggression, has now become a major killing force globally." - @PeterHotez, Professor and Dean @BCM_TropMed, on the devastating impact of #misinformation and disinformation.

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.

Pierre Kory, MD MPA @PierreKory

This might be my all time favorite Joe Rogan moment. In just a few minutes, Peter Hotez inadvertently shows the world exactly what has gone wrong with our medical system and why his endless push for more vaccines will never create health.

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.

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 theoriesand 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:

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."

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):

(See video in AMD’s original article.)

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).

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 slogans 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:

•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).

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The link to A Midwestern Doctor’s complete original article is in my Part 1.

In Part 4, I will bring some shocking examples I have found elsewhere showing how the “science” is nothing more than corrupt propaganda, “data” which is falsified for the purposes of those in power.