The anti-‘misinformation’ machine continues to hum. If we’re going to protect free speech and the integrity of the scientific method, we must stand up for these basic principles.
The upcoming Nobel Prize Summit (May 24-26) is, in a fittingly Orwellian fashion, titled “Truth, Trust, and Hope.” The event will tackle the scourge of misinformation, which is “eroding our trust in science” and “runs the risk of becoming one of the greatest threats to our society today.” Scary stuff! Of course, the truly scary aspect of this is how effectively dissenters to the accepted narratives can be shoved aside and discredited. The real danger isn’t in the spreading of “misinformation,” but in the establishment of orthodoxies that cannot be questioned.
We’ll be tuned in to the Summit to see what’s next in the misinformation witch-hunt, and we encourage all freedom-loving citizens to do the same. Follow the links here to register.
We discuss many of the pertinent issues in our companion article this week about the RESTRICT Act. Put simply, the pandemic unleashed an unprecedented wave of censorship in the US and the world. To question what the authorities were telling us about how to control the virus was heresy that could result in de-platforming from social media channels, loss of professional license, or professional marginalization. This was especially true for the natural health community. The evidence for the effectiveness of natural medicines was quite convincing from an early stage in the pandemic, yet the government was more concerned with launching a censorship campaign threatening anyone who dared to mention the benefits of basic medicines like vitamin C, quercetin, or zinc for COVID treatment or prevention. Frontline doctors used a combination of dietary supplements and off-patent drugs to save patients’ lives in the early stages of the pandemic. Again, instead of promoting these noble efforts, the government in some cases warned patients off of these treatments. Doctors who spoke about them were censored and had their medical licenses threatened.
Yet, time and time again in the pandemic, the skeptics were vindicated. When the experimental, synthetic-biology-based COVID vaccines were receiving emergency approval, we were directed to Big Pharma press releases boasting sky-high efficacy numbers with no significant safety signals. If you questioned the quality of these findings, or the lack of transparency, you were a public health threat who didn’t understand the magic of what was about to ensue.
Of course, these concerns were justified, as we learned that vaccination could lead to cases of potentially fatal vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, splanchic vein thrombosis, post-vaccine myocarditis/pericarditis and Guillain-Barré syndrome. There are nearly one million adverse events reported to the government’s system, and experts have said that only about 1-5 percent of adverse events are actually reported, so there are likely many more people who have been harmed by these shots. Yet even with this evidence, to publicly question the safety of COVID vaccines is in many cases professional suicide.
The list goes on. We were told that vaccine-induced immunity was definitely stronger than naturally-acquired immunity, that lockdowns and masking were necessary to protect us, that the “lab-leak” hypothesis was nonsense. Yet the skeptics were proven right in all of these instances.
The Nobel Prize Summit this year is yet another forum for elites to discuss and manage threats to the establishment they classify as “misinformation,” giving this movement towards censorship more gravitas. We must monitor their actions and keep abreast of what is going on.
If we are going to save science, we must allow discourse, and we must allow scientific concepts, judgments, and interpretations to be challenged. That means we must not just accept skepticism — we must encourage it, not try to banish it. Good science is the product of human understanding that has successfully withstood the rigors of challenge from those who are skeptical. Banishing dissent is the quickest and surest route to bad science.
If we’re to recover from the current challenge being mounted against dissenting science (mislabeled as ‘scientific misinformation’) in one piece, so that we might be able to use science as a force for human and planetary good, not as a force for corporate gain or political power by the government-industrial complex, than we need to stop these witch hunts and the marginalization of dissenters.
