The end of the Enlightenment era

The previous two posts (CoVID19, HIV — Enlightenment? Reason based on evidence?; CoVID19 and the HIV legacy: Toxic “antiretroviral” drugs and PrEP) described the actual lack of competence of the medical scientists whose words are being treated by the mass media as Gospel Truth, about CoVID19 as well as about related or other matters.

Quite clearly, what such acknowledged experts as Anthony Fauci (Director of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) say and advise cannot be trusted automatically. In this day and age, lauded not infrequently for its advanced medical science, how has this come about?

One part of the wider context for this bemusing and dangerous state of affairs is that since the latter decades of the 20^th century, research, “science”, has become so commonplace an activity that its practitioners are anything but a small elite distinguished by outstanding intellect and background knowledge. Instead, most people doing “science” nowadays are journeymen practitioners carrying on predetermined tasks that do not call for original thinking. “Science” in the 21^st century is a corporate, bureaucratic activity carried on without much (if any) thinking about whether accumulating evidence continues to support contemporary beliefs, the prevailing paradigm, the conventional wisdom in the given specialty. Science can no longer be relied on to be self-correcting.

Following WWII, science had increasingly become so intertwined with other social sectors as to have lost what characterized the Scientific Revolution and subsequent Enlightenment, namely, an unfettered single-minded pursuit of veritable, demonstrable truth. As John Ziman pointed out (Prometheus Bound, 1994), toward the end of the 20^th century there was no longer a substantive distinction to be made between applied science and pure science: science was serving commerce and industry and government at least as much as being a search for genuine understanding. Science has not learned that it is impossible to serve both God and Mammon.

What has happened with science is just one aspect or symptom of something even more significant, portentous, indeed cataclysmic: a distinct change in the world order, marking the end — or at least the beginning of the end — of an era in which Western Civilization dominated the Earth. For a full and erudite discussion, see Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (2000). The accuracy of Barzun’s diagnosis, published already a quarter of a century ago, is being demonstrated by the rising influence of China as well as India, while the United States and Europe have lost their dominance and are striving mightily just to keep their heads above water, so to speak.

It was not unusual in the 19^th and 20^th centuries to note that the authority of science had eclipsed that of religion. That stemmed in part from the decadence of religious institutions, progressively corrupted from their initial ideals in becoming large, bureaucratic, institutions — bureaucratic institutions being self-serving almost by definition, and “large” tends to make for mediocrity. Catholic priests and Anglican pastors were by the 20^th century quite ordinary men (and women, among the Anglicans), not at all like the idiosyncratic, highly motivated characters among the apostles of Jesus, nor at all like such strong personalities as Luther or Calvin who rejuvenated the Christian religion in the 16^th-century Reformation.

Modern science, emphasizing the careful, scrupulous attending to tangible evidence on which to base beliefs, is consensually dated to the 16^th century Scientific Revolution, which led to the 17^th century Enlightenment that sought to extend that scientific method to human culture as a whole. Just as religion became corrupted, so too has modern science become corrupted through growth and worldliness. The hosts of people nowadays doing some sort of “science” also display the pervasive mediocrity that follows inevitably as an activity attracts more and more people, with the forming of an increasing number of organizations with the inevitable consequence of bureaucracy and an effective loss of any ideals with which the enterprise might have begun. (A prescient discussion was published in 1985: Jan Klein, “Hegemony of mediocrity in contemporary sciences, particularly in immunology”, Lymphology 18:122-31; it is a little eerie in this age of deadly viruses that Klein emphasized immunology, since our only truly effective weapon against viruses is the immune system; and Klein wrote just as the HIV/AIDS blunder was taking hold.)

Religions became decadent as the host of ordinary priests and pastors merely parroted what they had been taught. Just the same decadent mediocrity has now overtaken science and its acolyte, medical science. The media feature as “experts” a variety of scientists and practicing physicians whose credentials illustrate this phenomenon: anyone with an MD or a PhD is automatically accorded the status and prestige of expertise, when in point of fact far from all of these featured experts deserve that appellation: not many of them offer added value beyond what they were taught and what the prevailing so-called consensus happens to be. Before they speak, one knows pretty much what they are going to say, for it differs in no way from what the mainstream conventional wisdom happens to be.

And so it has come about in the 21^st century that science has lost and superstition has won, as the public and the media simply accept on the authority of science — in other words, on faith, superstitiously — whatever they are told by “the experts”, no matter how unlikely or contrary to available facts. (See historian John Burnham’s How Superstition Won and Science Lost, 1987).

Almost universally accepted is the belief, disseminated by the International Panel on Climate Change, that human generation of atmospheric carbon dioxide is the prime cause of global warming, a belief that is proved wrong by the long-standing and unquestioned actual data in the geological literature (lack of correlation between global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide; for primary sources see Climate-change facts: Temperature is not determined by carbon dioxide).

The degree to which science is generally accorded unquestioned and magical powers is nicely illustrated by the fact that knowledgeable advertisers understood that it would be effective to market a remedy for declining memory (Prevagen) by claiming that its efficacy stemmed from an ingredient first discovered in jellyfish, a species not otherwise known for remarkable powers of memory.

When historian Jon Meacham notes that Trumpism marks a loss of Enlightenment values, he may not realize how deeply that loss is pervasive in contemporary culture.

 

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Caveat re contemporary CoVID19 panic: That Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield and others lack all credibility does not mean that they are necessarily wrong about CoVID19 or anything else. Many Trumpists, after all, happen to be right about climate change. We are all fallible, and we may sometimes be right just by chance, perversely and for wrong reasons.

CoVID19 and the HIV legacy: Toxic “antiretroviral” drugs and PrEP

The blunder of believing that HIV is a sexually transmitted virus that causes AIDS has brought enormous harm to innumerable people across the world for more than three decades, and it continues to do so as toxic drugs are administered to “HIV-positive” individuals; and even as “pre-exposure prophylaxis” (PrEP) to perfectly healthy people categorized as being at risk of infection — black people, of course, in Africa and elsewhere, and gay men, and those who inject drugs.

Gilead’s PrEP drugs Truvada and Descovy list as “side” effects “Kidney problems, including kidney failure. . . lactic acidosis . . . which . . . can lead to death. . . liver problems, which in rare cases can lead to death. . . . Bone problems, including bone pain, softening, or thinning, which may lead to fractures”.

All those risks in the absence of any real benefit at all.

Nevertheless, the US government recommends PrEP, alleging that “No significant health effects have been seen in people who are HIV-negative and have taken PrEP for up to 5 years”.

That bald claim is obviously misleading. All those “side” effects actually occurred in a significant number of people; that’s why they come to be listed.
It may well be true that some people, really healthy ones no doubt, and quite possibly a small number only, were able to tolerate the PrEP drugs for as much as 5 years, but that is not a legitimate basis for the sweeping generalization.
A different but also official page is only slightly less misleading:
“PrEP can cause side effects like nausea in some people, but these generally subside over time. No serious side effects have been observed, and these side effects aren’t life threatening. If you are taking PrEP, tell your health care provider about any side effects that are severe or do not go away.”
Perhaps it takes a little sophisticated cynicism to recognize this as an admission that some side effects that have not gone away might even be “severe”.

On everything pertaining to every prescription drug, it must be remembered that a drug is approved on the basis of clinical trials carried out for the drug company by groups whose livelihood depends on getting results that the drug company wants. Innumerable articles and books have documented that clinical trials always seem to find that the drug marketed by the trial-sponsoring company is better than competing ones, for example.
There are many ways to bias clinical trials toward a desired result, for example by judicious sampling of who gets included in the “treated” group and in the “placebo” group respectively.
One of the students at one of my seminars happened to have worked on arranging such trials, and she confirmed what I had read elsewhere: There are people, typically unemployed, often homeless, who get comfortable accommodation and earn some or all of their livelihood by being volunteers for clinical trials, having becoming known to and favored by trial organizers because of being outstandingly healthy and least likely to show undesired “side” effects that the drugs might have. (Leisinger et al., Healthy volunteers in clinical studies, Ch. 8 [pp. 67-70] in Schroederet al., Ethics Dumping: Case Studies from North-South Research Collaborations, Springer 2018; Sebastian Agredo, “Professional volunteers: human guinea pigs in today’s clinical research”, Voices in Bioethics, 26 March 2014).

For much more about routine deceptive practices by drug companies and their associates, see for instance (but not only) the books by Abraham, Angell, Braithwaite, Goldacre, Gøtzsche (2013), and Healy listed in What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine.

The hidden carnage perpetrated by PrEP, unremarked by pundits or mass media, is abetted with surely the best of intentions by such charities as the Gates Foundation. Mainstream “science”, “medical science”, has simply failed to recognize that HIV = AIDS is a blunder, let alone abandon it. Thus Anthony Fauci spoke favorably of Gilead’s experimental antiretroviral drug against CoVID19, Remdesivir, as “proof of concept” that SARS-CoV2 is vulnerable to drugs. Fauci recalled that AZT, the first drug used against “HIV”, had led the way to even better medications. But AZT is highly toxic (“AZT actually killed about 150,000 ‘HIV-positive’ people between the mid-1980s and the mid- 1990s” — see “HAART saves lives — but doesn’t prolong them!?”); nevertheless it remains in use, as do its toxic analogues, as well as the toxic later invented protease inhibitors, integrase inhibitors, and fusion inhibitors.
Treatment regimes for “HIV” have to be continually modified to preserve the lives of the patient-victims; see the official Treatment Guidelines.
For documentation of these facts, see   section 5, “What antiretroviral drugs do”, in The Case against HIV.

CoVID19, HIV — Enlightenment? Reason based on evidence?

The historian Jon Meacham has quite often described the presidency of Donald Trump as signifying an end to the Enlightenment era that began in the 17^th century, when reason and logic based on evidence began to supersede the authority of monarchs and clerics.

Sadly, though, those being hailed as the voices of reason against Trump over the Coronavirus hysteria cannot be said to represent reason and logic based on evidence.

Those leading the public charge for “science” are Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, and Deborah Birx. Yet they continue to uphold and disseminate the mistaken notion that HIV is a deadly, sexually transmitted, virus.

(For those who do not yet know that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, see the bibliography at The Case against HIV; consult my The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory; for a short synopsis, read “Confession of an ‘AIDS denialist’: How I became a crank because we’re being lied to about HIV/AIDS”)

The primary blame for the acceptance of that mistaken notion about “HIV” must rest on the unbridled and unscrupulous ambitions of Robert Gallo (read John Crewdson, Science   Fictions), lent institutional authority by an unwitting Secretary of Health and Human Services. Incompetent statistics at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention had set the stage (John Lauritsen, ch. 1 in The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex, 1993).

Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield were enthusiastic acolytes of Gallo from the very beginning (Birx seems to have become involved in HIV/AIDS considerably later). Redfield worked in the Army HIV Research Group in the very earliest days of AIDS. He is one of the co-authors on articles that reported in the mid-1980s that teenage female prospective recruits tested HIV-positive no less frequently than did teenage males, indeed often more frequently. That was clearly at odds with the accepted belief that HIV entered the United States first among gay men in a few large metropolitan areas. It had been this contradiction of the prevailing theory of the origin of HIV that stimulated me to look into what HIV tests were all about. Redfield, it seems, what was not so stimulated; why not? Was he not thinking about what he was finding?

Among the other evidence Redfield published, of course together with others, was that the localities in the United States with the highest prevalence of HIV were, oddly enough, not the areas with the highest prevalence of AIDS; Huh? Surely that should raise the question of whether HIV is the cause of AIDS. It didn’t for Redfield, apparently.

Then too the earliest data from HIV tests, again from the Army HIV Research Group including Redfield, showed black Americans to be more frequently HIV-positive than others by a significant multiple — a racial disparity that the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) has been quite willing to ascribe to stereotypical prejudices about black sexual behavior.
(Full details of the Redfield and associated publications are in The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory).

Later, Redfield claimed to have established heterosexual transmission of HIV through a study that presumed that an HIV-positive spouse could only have contracted HIV from the other spouse (JAMA 253 [1985] 1571-3; among 10 co-authors, Redfield comes first, and Gallo last as director of the lab). The assumption seems without obvious basis, and there also seems no a priori reason to wonder whether a sexually transmitted agent could be transmitted heterosexually — unless of course one harbors strangely homophobic views.

When Redfield was appointed Director of the CDC in 2018, Laurie Garrett reported that he had promoted a vaccine against HIV even after it was shown not to work, and that he holds views about sex that appear to be those of a religious ideologue.

Anthony Fauci, for his part, attempted in 1993 to explain away the often-noted numbers of AIDS patients who were HIV negative by declaring this to be a disease separate from AIDS, namely CD4 T-cell lymphopenia, a condition not much talked of nowadays (“CD4+ T-lymphocytopenia without HIV infection—no lights, no camera, just facts”, New England Journal of Medicine, 328 [1993] 429-31).

The legacy of the HIV blunder includes claiming a viral cause without isolating the postulated virus; using routinely tests that have never been validated because there is no gold standard test in absence of properly isolated virus; diagnosing infection because test results are positive even as the test kits warn explicitly that they are not valid for diagnosis of infection; corrupting the concept of “isolate” to call it isolation when bits of RNA or DNA can be detected by PCR.

After one of my closest friends in Australia had read The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, he remarked that a sad side-effect would be an overall loss of confidence in science. That did not happen; perhaps it will take the long-term damage from the CoVID19 affair to do that.

Meanwhile, given the history and legacy of the HIV blunder, one might be inclined not to believe what Fauci, Redfield, and Birx have to say about viral diseases (or perhaps anything else). Nevertheless, these three prominent representatives of contemporary medical science are being widely hailed for representing authentic science by contrast to Trumpist ignorance.

More later about this in the wider context of illustrating an end to the Enlightenment era.