How To Raise Public Confidence In Science

"Take private profit out of the picture and replace it with public benefit, engage science without lawyers and maybe create drugs safe for almost everyone. And if I get sick from a drug spare no expense at finding one that will make me better. If I drop dead, apologize and see to my family's survival without me."

                                                ----Frank Scott

 

Amen to the above, a far more sensible reaction to Covid than extravagantly emotional insistence that the virus was part of a deliberate plot to impose a universal police state. The idea that, except for "dictator" Anthony Fauci, one might have enjoyed full civil liberties while an aerosolized virus killed millions of people around the world would be too ridiculous to refute if the consequences weren't so serious.  Suffice it to say that in the U.S. one could barely feel any authoritarian presence at all during the so-called lockdowns, which U.S. cell phone data show to have barely existed in reality.

The real issue with Fauci and scientists in general is that they, like us, unconsciously embrace the contradictions of capitalism, saying nothing about capital-driven deforestation and factory farming, which sharply accelerate the rate of viral evolution and therefore pandemics. Add to this decades of mostly silence about neo-liberal austerity that saw the U.S. outsourcing the production of N95s, eliminating hospital redundancy, shredding public health budgets and attendant pandemic response plans, and you have the makings of our recent Covid disaster. THIS, not conspiracy theories, is what we should be focused on, much more than the alleged "suppression" of anti-vaxxers, who should be sharply criticized, but not suppressed.

Of course Anthony Fauci had to worry about the public health consequences of idiotic commentary about the virus, lockdowns, vaccines and treatment. The more that ignorant or malicious information spreads and is taken seriously, the more people sicken and die unnecessarily. Without a culture of criticism about how capitalism is a pandemic-producing system, there is not much else Fauci could have done except damage control on the circulation of destructive ideas.

The people who suffered by far the most are the more than a million American dead who only died because capitalism left us unprepared for a pandemic, not those saying "open 'er up!" almost from the moment pandemic response measures were put in place.

The failure to offer replacement income was the biggest problem, not the lockdowns or vaccine mandates.

The way out is what Frank Scott offers in the quote above - a system of public profit, which would eliminate lawyers from the discussion, and more importantly, make "Big Pharma" much more transparent and at least nominally a public institution. 

It will take a long time for anyone ensnared in anti-vax propaganda to see that this is indeed the way out. The problem for them, however, is that the Covid era's sharp spike in excess deaths dates from 2020, when the pandemic hit, not 2021, when mass vaccinations began. Also, excess deaths rose in tandem with case increases throughout the pandemic, not with vaccinations.

What we would need to establish that the vaccines are more injurious than Covid itself is proof of the existence of Covid vaccine injury units in hospitals (with injuries and deaths allegedly in the millions, these units should exist in abundance), an academy of science that endorsed not getting vaccinated against Covid, a professional medical association that said the vaccines were too dangerous to take, a virology or immunology department at a medical research university that recommended remaining unvaccinated, etc. 

None of this exists. 

On lab leak, suffice it to say that among scientists the issue was laid to rest long ago because the facts don't fit the theory, which isn't really a theory but a paranoid obsession.

Extremely improbable, though not outright impossible, a lab escape of the virus would have to have involved two leaks, as there were two lineages of SARS-CoV-2 that emerged. One lab worker would have had to have gotten infected, left the lab, crossed the river, traveled to the Wuhan wet market and infected someone there. Then, on a separate occasion, a different lab worker would have to have repeated this. That two workers could do this without infecting anyone else in the lab or on the way to the wet market is extremely unlikely. Also, it's just weird that a lab leak would produce an epicenter exactly in the place where we would expect an animal spillover to occur. There were far more populated sites in Wuhan than the wet market, and one of those sites should have been the epicenter had the virus escaped or been leaked.

They tested the lab workers at the Wuhan lab for the presence of SARS antibodies and none had them. An Australian scientist who worked at the lab confirmed that no one was sick during the relevant time period. Also, none of the bats used in the lab were found to have had SARS.

There's never been a novel virus leaked from a lab. Also, the genetic complexity of SARS-CoV-2 is a problem. There's no highly similar virus that could have served as a kind of template for creating SARS-CoV-2.

A lab leak represents the idea that Fauci-haters most want to believe, not the idea that best accounts for known facts.