My new blog at Substack

This blog has been largely inactive for quite a while, but I have continued to be interested in controversial issues in science and medicine, and am trying out a new blogging platform at https://henryhbauer.substack.com. I began with a couple of general discussions:

The Proper Place for Science in Modern Societies; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/the-proper-place-for-science-in-modern

and

When the Experts Disagree; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/when-the-experts-disagree-fe2

Of course I hope that those of you who have followed this blog will subscribe to the new one.

Substack gives its bloggers the possibility of offering paid subscriptions, but I do not plan to do so. My hope is that readers will find the discussions sufficiently worthwhile to tell other people about them.

This return to blogging reflects my continuing frustration at the misleading stuff that appears continually in the mass media, even in the most widely respected places and sometimes by even the least biased and most respected pundits.

A great deal is misleading because it ignores contrarian minority views and the evidence that makes those views worth attending to.

Among the things that irritate me more or less continually nowadays is the hysteria about climate change, and the continuing confusion, lack of clarity, conflicting claims, over COVID.

In a number of instances, differing views over supposedly scientific issues correlate with political leanings, and I have observed, unhappily, how political correctness, which first affected me in the 1980s, has become ever so much worse since then and has come to influence even scientific matters in a significant way: see Anna I. Krylov, The peril of politicizing science, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 12 (2021) 5371−5376;
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475, and
https://quillette.com/2021/12/18/scientists-must-gain-the-courage-to-oppose-the-politicization-of-their-disciplines.

Follow the science?

Through much of the COVID19 episode, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has denounced with outrage those who question or dispute official guidelines about masking, distancing, etc., bellowing “Just follow the science!”

— by which he means, accept what the recognized authorities state that “the science” is.

What Scarborough doesn’t know — together with almost all other media pundits and commentators — is that the recognized authorities are sometimes wrong.

For those who know something about science, and particularly about the history of science — perhaps especially medical science — the problem is, how to find out what “the science” actually is, the  pertinent facts and contextual evidence.

Most of us have to rely on what the experts and the  recognized authorities tell us, but that is not always correct.

Although quite often there are eminently expert individuals who point that out, typically they are ignored, denigrated suppressed, persecuted. Re HIV/AIDS, see for example the case of Peter Duesberg, chapter 3 in [1]. Re aluminum, consider the example of Christopher Exley [2].

The salient point is that official pronouncements by the recognized authorities about scientific matters need to be fact-checked.

The lack of fact-checking has led to some highly damaging public policies and actions. The list of topics on which the official global “scientific consensus” happens to be wrong is alarming,  both in the public importance of some of the topics and in the steady growth in the number of specific matters which the global public has been misled and continues to be misled:

HIV/AIDS [3]

Global warming and climate change (pp. 18-26 in [1]; many posts at https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com

Eugenics [4]

A host of medical matters [5]

— including notably vaccines [6]
— and the risks posed by aluminum adjuvants in vaccines as well as by other sources of aluminum  [7]

The crucial point is that truth, including truth about scientific matters, is a public good: it surely benefits humankind as a whole, in the long run; but specific truths quite typically undercut some strongly vested interests. Truths about drugs and vaccines diminish profit-making by pharmaceutical companies, and thereby lessen political campaign contributions; and so on for all the commercial and ideological sectors of society. Environmental activists don’t want truths about climate change. No political parties want real truths about economics or sociology or psychology.

Humankind needs a system capable of discerning genuine truths; which includes fact-checking of what the recognized authorities say about scientific matters.

_____________________________________________

[1]    Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland 2012

[2]    “University Shuts Down World-Renowned Aluminum Expert’s Research After Big Pharma Sets Up Shop on Campus”

[3]    The Case against HIV , listing >20 books and >900 articles

[4]    Tens of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized as recently as 1981 on the basis of expert consensus about the heritability of certain behavioral traits — Cera R. Lawrence, Oregon State Board of Eugenics, 3 May 2012

[5]    WHAT’S WRONG WITH PRESENT-DAY MEDICINE;

[6]    “Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy”
Peter C. Gøtzsche, Vaccines: truth, lies and controversy (Kindle 2020, Skyhorse 2021)

[7]    Publications by Christopher Exley summarized in recent book: Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom: Discussions With Mr. Aluminum (Skyhorse 2020)

The HIV/AIDS blunder: Missed opportunities for mainstream research to self-correct

Quite a number of specific mis-steps conspired to the acceptance and continuance of HIV/AIDS theory. They illustrate much of what has gone wrong with science: It is subject to interference by commercial, political, and ideological influences; it is comprised of a variety of institutions that do not interact usefully or reliably. Above all:

 Science has no overarching watchdog to ensure
 that theories change appropriately
 as evidence accumulates

1. 1.The first and crucial mistake was when the Secretary of Health and Human Services (Margaret Heckler) held a press conference at which Robert Gallo claimed to have discovered the probable cause of AIDS. Illustrated by this sad episode is political interference and the pervasive ignorance of how science works:
   →     Gallo had not yet published anything. Insiders regarded him as incompetent and untrustworthy. Investigative journalism later (2002) fully documented that he is an unscrupulous charlatan [1].
   →     Heckler’s background was as a lawyer and a politically active Republican.
   →     Activists had been campaigning vigorously for the Republican administration to do something about AIDS.
    →    This official endorsement of Gallo’s claim acted as a signal that anyone who wanted research support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would likely be successful by proposing to work on HIV; virologists in particular were hungry for funding after their failure to discover cancer-causing viruses in the “war on cancer” [2].
2. 2.An important contributing factor  was statistical incompetence at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC):
   →     Mistakenly taking “gay” rather than drug abuse as the most meaningful association with AIDS [3]. The CDC should also have been aware  that AIDS-like symptoms had been quite common among addicts during the 1960-70s epidemic of so-called recreational drug use [4].
   →     Initiated the misleading “young, previously healthy, gay men” characterization based on 5 cases aged 29-36, average 32.6 [5]. Its Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma had found the average age of AIDS victims to be 35. When Cochrane [6] re-examined the medical records 20 years later, she found that the average age of the first 25 AIDS patients in San Francisco had been 38. This mattered crucially: The greatest risk for sexual infections is among people <30; lifestyle ailments are increasingly likely at older ages, more compatible with a decade or two of what used to be called dissolute living.
   CDC researchers as early as 1987 failed to recognize the significance of their finding that, among Job Corps  members at ages about 17 and younger, females are more likely to test HIV-positive than males [7].
3. 3.The Army HIV Research Office also failed to recognize the significance of their finding that at ages about 17 and younger, females are more likely to test HIV-positive than males [8].
4. 4.Duesberg had published comprehensive debunkings of HIV in 1987 [9] and 1989 [10]. The latter  has a footnote promising a rebuttal from Gallo that never eventuated, despite several reminders [11: 233].
5. 5.As the years went by, more and more conundrums emerged whose significance was missed:
   →     The purple skin-patches of Kaposi’s Sarcoma had been the iconic signature of AIDS,  yet after half-a-dozen years they had become rare among AIDS patients.
   →     The correlation between drug abuse and AIDS became stronger and stronger.
   →     Prostitutes who did not use drugs were not at risk of  becoming HIV-positive.
   →     Drug abusers who used clean needles would more likely to test HIV-positive than those who exchanged needles.
   →     Marriage and pregnancy are risk factors for testing HIV-positive.
   →     Many further instances, with primary sources cited also for the points above, see The Case against HIV
   
   

Lessons:

The clearest general lesson is that policymakers and administrators should not take far-reaching actions on matters of science or medicine without advice from individuals who have at least an elementary acquaintance with the history of science and the understanding of present-day scientific activity incorporated in Science and Technology Studies (STS [12]). Anyone with that background would be familiar with the danger of accepting any scientific claim made by an individual researcher or administrator of research before the claim had even been published. The training of most scientists and most doctors neglects that important background.

A fairly general lesson is that competence in statistics may be sorely lacking even in an agency like CDC where gathering and analyzing statistical data is a central task. Much has been written during the last several decades about the pervasive abuse and misuse of statistics in medicine and medical science [13].

It is also not irrelevant that an overwhelming of proportion of those who were carrying out and reporting HIV tests were medical doctors, MDs or DVMs, rather than people trained in research. This is not to discount and the insights of the many MDs who have been able to learn from experience and to transcend some of the mistaken lore they were originally taught [14]. But medical training focuses on applying what is known, not on questioning it. By contrast,  journalists who were covering the HIV/AIDS story [1, 15] had a more holistic mindset and noticed how inadequate the officially accepted view is.

A part of understanding what contemporary scientific or research activity involves is to recognize that the overwhelming proportion of individuals doing what is loosely called “research” or “science”  are not engaged in seeking fundamental truths. Most of the published reports on HIV testing were based on taking for granted that HIV causes AIDS and gathering data for other purposes, say, recruitment into the Armed Forces, or the presumed need of for antiviral drugs in different regions of Africa; so those “researchers” had been blind to  the steady accumulation of data incompatible with the view of HIV as a contagious infection.

Present-day institutions of medical science
are incapable of self-correcting a mistaken “consensus”

That is why society needs a Science Court

***************************************************************************

[1]    John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A scientific mystery, a massive cover-up and the dark legacy of Robert Gallo, Little, Brown, 2002
[2]    Peter Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery, 1996; chapter 4
[3]    John Lauritsen, “CDC’s tables obscure AIDS-drug connection”, Philadelphia Gay News, 14 February 1985 (and five other papers); reprinted as chapter I in The AIDS war: propaganda, profiteering and genocide from the medical-industrial complex, ASKLEPIOS, 1993
[4]    Neville Hodgkinson, AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, Fourth Estate, 1996
[5]    Pneumocystis Pneumonia — Los Angeles, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 30 (#21, 5 June 1981.) 250-52
[6]    Michelle Cochrane, When AIDS began: San Francisco and the Making of an Epidemic, Routledge, 2004
[7]    Michael E. St. Louis, George A. Conway, Charles R. Hayman, Carol Miller, Lyle R. Petersen, Timothy J. Dondero,  “Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection in Disadvantaged Adolescents: Findings From the US Job Corps”, JAMA, 266
(1991): 2387-91;  Fig. 4 [authors’ training: 5 MD, 1 RN]
 [8]   John F. Brundage, Donald S. Burke, Robert Visintine, Michael Peterson, Robert R. Redfield. “HIV Infection among young adults in the New York City area”, New York State Journal of Medicine, May 1988, 232-33; Fig. 3 [authors’ training: 5 MD, 1 DVM]
Donald S. Burke, John F. Brundage, Mary Goldenbaum, Lytt I. Gardner, Michael Peterson, Robert Visintine, Robert R. Redfield, & the Walter Reed Retrovirus Research Group, “Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infections in Teenagers: Seroprevalence Among Applicants for US Military Service”, JAMA, 263 (1990) 2074-77; Table 1 [authors’ training: 4 MD, 1 DVM, 1 MS, 1 PhD]
Burke, D. S., J. F. Brundage, J. R. Herbold, W. Berner,  L. I. Gardner, J. D. Gunzenhauser,  J. Voskovitch, & R. R. Redfield, “Human immunodeficiency virus infections among civilian applicants for United States military service, October 1985 to March 1986”, New England Journal of Medicine, 317 (1987) 131-36; Fig 1 [authors’ training: 5 MD, 1 PhD, 1 DVM]
[9]    Peter H. Duesberg, “Retroviruses as carcinogens and pathogens: expectations and reality”, Cancer Research, 47 (1987) 1199-220
[10]  Peter H. Duesberg, “Human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: correlation but not causation”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 86 (1989) 755-64.
[11]  Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007
[12]  “STS draws on the full range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to examine the ways that science and technology shape, and are shaped by, our society, politics, and culture. We study contemporary controversies, historical transformations, policy dilemmas, and broad philosophical questions” (Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech)
[13]  Illustrated in many of the books cited in What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine
but see particularly the cited articles by Altman, Ioannidis, Matthews
[14]  See for example in the books listed in [13] those by Angell, Brody, Goldacre, Gøtzsche, Greene, Kendrick, LeFanu, Ravnskov, Smith
[15]      See books by Farber, Hodgkinson, Leitner, Shenton, in The Case against HIV

Corona Conumdrums

Something seems wrong about the basis for the current panic over “CoVID-19”.

2019-nCoV, the virus that is said to cause CoVID-19 disease, first appeared in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Within a few months, it had reached in Britain prime minister Boris Johnson and  Prince Charles (but not his wife) , in Russia the health minister, and in Australia Tom Hanks and his wife . According to the interactive online map at the New York Times, this new virus is now present on all continents and on islands large and small, and according to news reports it had also found its way onto cruise ships and warships.
To have spread so rapidly, it must be effectively carried through the air, on the winds, and perhaps through the oceans, as suggested in the Los Angeles Times.
But if this virus has been so widely distributed for several months, why has it caused serious illness in so few places? And why has the continent of Africa been so little affected (see NYT map)?
This seems more like something endemic, that has been around for a long time, like the normal cold or “flu” viruses say, than like a virus that newly jumped from animal to human only last December in Wuhan.
Isn’t there something wrong with the official story?
Moreover, since the virus appeared all over the globe within a few months, how can social distancing prevent it from spreading further?

 

Something old, something new

Several of my books had gone out of print over the years, including my personal favorites: The Enigma of Loch Ness and To Rise Above Principle: The Memoirs of an Unreconstructed Dean. Now they have been re-issued by Wipf & Stock, with additional material in the Dean’s Memoirs.

The Enigma of Loch Ness is not an argument for or against the reality of Nessies. As the sub-title, Making Sense of a Mystery, suggests, the book addresses such questions as
“Why has science not taken an interest in this claim?”
“What’s different about looking for Nessies and doing science, say, searching for new species?”
In discussing what differentiates science from not-science, I introduce the concept that scientific activity has 3 aspects: facts, methods, and theories. Science progresses normally by not rocking the boat in any of those aspects. Occasional scientific revolutions see dramatic change in one of those aspects. When two are in question, the claim is likely to be ignored by the mainstream for quite a long time (Mendelian genetics, continental drift). Claims that are unorthodox in all 3 aspects tend to be shunned as pseudo-science.

To Rise Above Principle was published under a pen-name because I did not want my semi-imaginative scenarios and semi-invented characters to be identified with my institution or its people. A year later, when that danger no longer seemed pressing, I had the opportunity to reveal my identity at an annual meeting of the Council of Colleges of Arts & Sciences, and this new edition of the book contains the text of what I said on that occasion. Another appendix has my introduction to a panel concerned with what a dean’s career involves, and a third appendix reproduces my change of mind on the matter of homosexuality, earlier published in a book review and posted on my website.

Both books received high critical praise when they were published. All but one review of the Nessie book noted that it was not an argument for or against and praised my evenhandedness despite my confessed personal view. The demurring review misled by implying that the book was an attempt to argue for the reality of Nessies; it had been written by someone who had earlier asked without success to be invited to give a seminar at my university — an illustration of the pitfalls of “peer” review [Peer review and consensus (Scientific literacy, lesson 2)].

🙂     I recommend both books wholeheartedly and unashamedly     🙂