Ever since Jenny McCarthy read a since-debunked study by Dr Andrew Wakefield and came out saying vaccines cause autism, we’ve seen a steady decline in respect for science and a sharp increase in the anti-science movement. This is in stark contrast to the 80s and 90s where almost everything “science said” was taken as truth. Now, even global warming and COVID vaccines are doubted by many millions of people.

What happened to respect for scientific method, scientific consensus, and scientists themselves? Why are people more likely to listen to Joe Rogan than a recognised expert scientist?

In this video, I address the only thing I really know anything about – honesty – and how the lack of it has hurt the scientific community, and what they need to do about it.

Podcast version on Soundcloud:

CITATIONS:

Tortuous leg restraints for polio sufferers – https://academic.oup.com/ptj/article/101/6/pzab126/6309267

Recommending thalidomide to pregnant mothers – https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/thalidomide

Shaming fat and leading to sugar epidemic – https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat

Putting mentally ill people on opoids – https://nida.nih.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdose-crisis

Mindfulness is more effective for opiod addiction and chronic pain –  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220301192410.htm

Telling everyone that the vaccine will totally prevent 95% covid and has no negative long term side effects – https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/18/pfizer-biontech-covid19-vaccine-fda-data/

Andrew Wakefield’s study made it through peer review – The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3136032/

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Full transcription (unedited)

Remember back in the days when we used to trust scientists without question, I was born in the 80s. In the 80s and 90s. You know, a scientific study found something we assume that was the absolute truth. something’s changed since then isn’t it? These days, the anti science movement is more than just a few freaks on the fringe. It’s actually quite a large range of people ranging and how much distrust they have for science or the for the scientific community. And today’s video, I want to address why this is happening. In an effort to bridge the gap between the scientific community and the general community. There’s something that we need to make clear right from the outset, being pro science, pro scientific method is not the same thing as being in agreement with scientific consensus, or scientists themselves, the human beings, science and scientific method, like in my opinion, personally, is the best system we have for finding the truth, the very best and nothing comes even close. It’s about as good as we’re ever going to get probably, in terms of finding the truth, I am very much pro science. But scientific consensus, which is human being scientists coming to an agreement together, that is open to fault and failure that can be biased that can be wrong, as I’m about to demonstrate. And so while I personally am pro science, it doesn’t mean that I believe everything scientists say, and I wish I could.

And I want to talk about why I don’t anymore, why I’ve lost that trust. And I think I represent a lot of people and how we can get that trust back. Flies are and I will give you some examples as to why the trust and scientific consensus the trust in scientists, as a community has been eroded over the years. And I’m going to include links, citations and sources to backup everything I’m saying nothing I’m saying is made up. And the links and sources that I’m going to provide are from scientific journals and sources. Polio, first came out in the very late 1800s was treated with barbaric league constraints and brutal forms of physiotherapy, leaving the sufferers often crippled for life, or at least having to be treated for many years away from home. This was the agreement of the scientific community as to how polio should be treated. The scientific community actually resisted, mocked a sister a nun who recommended a more gentle form of therapy. And that actually ended up becoming the form of therapy that people use to treat polio and actually had a huge impact on the concept of physiotherapy forevermore, who remembers the thalidomide scandal? pregnant mothers were recommended a drug called the lid amide. And it was based on the idea that the scientific consensus was a can’t cause any harm to humans. We had a whole wave 1000s up to 10,000 babies were affected, and they were severely deformed for life. Because of that recommended treatment. It was five years that this was being recommended before anybody made the link that it was the cause of the deformities that they were seeing. About 50 years ago, it’s been established that the sugar industry big sugar, which sounds very conspiracy theorist quietly paid a number of scientists to shame fat. Therefore leading people to be recommended a low fat, ie high sugar diet. It was later found that fad is actually quite fine as unnecessary intake for the human body. There’s nothing wrong with eating fat, and it’s actually eating sugar that’s totally poisonous for us. The obesity epidemic happened after this. People weren’t that obese, before fat got shamed. There was scientific consensus that fat is bad. And it was that way for many, many years. And their consensus was based on corrupted scientists and the United States they have an opioid crisis. Why? Because the scientific consensus for mental health treatment was to prescribe opioids and they’ve done more harm than good, simpler, more natural treatments like getting lots of exercise, eating healthy spending time outdoors socializing with people, these are poo pooed by the scientific community is some outdated, barbaric approach to life and medical pharmaceutical treatment is really the way to go. And yet the evidence clearly shows that quite often, the recommendation of psychiatric medicine can do more harm than good in the long Run, or just keep somebody in a holding pattern where they never really recover. And they’re dependent on the medication for the rest of their lives. Hardly a cure. And of course, more recently, and this is where it’s really come to a breaking point, the whole COVID vaccine thing. It was advised by the companies making a fucking vaccine, that they were 95% effective in completely preventing that person from getting COVID. And this was supported by both the scientific and the political community. And so people went out and got themselves vaccinated expecting it to be like any other vaccine to protect them from the illness. The evidence is later shown that at best, it reduces the harm of the symptoms. That was a lie. It’s not to say that the vaccine is bad, and that it’s worse than COVID. But it is to say that the scientific community lied. There are other issues, the scientific consensus in the scientific community. One that was pointed out by Yuval Noah Harare, in his book sapiens is the unbreakable relationship between science, capitalism, and politics. There is no scientific study on earth that isn’t in some way funded. And that fundings got to come from somewhere. And it doesn’t come from noble philanthropists just trying to find out what’s best from for humanity, it comes from governments and corporations, they pay for studies that they want done. That doesn’t mean that the studies are necessarily corrupted, but it certainly opens the door wide for that to happen. That certainly puts a lot of pressure on scientists to find certain results that they’re getting paid to find. But if nothing else, the choice of what gets studied is clearly biased by this, for example, midwifery, the delivery of babies the correct process for pregnancy, has barely made any leaps forward in centuries. Why? Because it’s not a profitable

thing to study. Whereas certain elements of engineering and other pharmaceutical treatments that are very profitable, have made huge progress over the years. Why? Because those are the studies being funded. Studies are expensive. In EU scientists as essentially a form of bigger they have to go out with their head in the hand the saying Please, can I have some funding to go study some shit? And the people who say yes, say yes, with conditions. This is what I want you to study. This is what I want to be found. Pressure, pressure, pressure, takes a lot of integrity, to go and do that study and come back and say there were no significant findings, I’ve wasted your money. With just a few movements on the graph or on the spreadsheet, you can say I found something significant, just like you wanted. The temptation for corruption is very much the end before you accuse me of some sort of conspiracy. I’ve been a research assistant. I was in a study where I was told by the lead scientist to delete certain outliers of data so that the study found a significant correlation. I was told to corrupt the data. Because otherwise, if I included all the data, the study would have had no significant findings. Right? I’ve been right in the thick of the action. And this wasn’t even a big deal study. This wasn’t some pharmaceutical company or some goddamn government telling you you’re going to be in trouble if I didn’t see what I need to see. Right? I can only imagine how often this happens. One of the biggest problems we see with the scientific community right now is how much they mock in derived the general public, for following rogue scientists, or following doctors and scientists who don’t go with the mainstream scientific consensus. You seem to be forgetting something. They’re doctors and scientists, you qualified them. You the scientific community, they’re part of you, not part of us. When we trust someone because they have the word doctor in front of the name, that’s your fault, not ours. Because say, Oh, look, you shouldn’t trust that doctor. How are we supposed to know which doctor to trust? How do we know that he’s not the one telling the truth against the grand conspiracy of lying scientists where there’s been conspiracies of lying scientists before? It’s beyond that you’ve published the articles about yourselves. And then you mock us. But trusting these wackos? Why don’t you strip them off their doctorates? Why don’t you debunk all their studies? Why are they allowed to get away with this? And then we trust them and then you tell us we’re wrong. Look at Andrew Wakefield. He was the scientist who put out the very poorly done study that said that the MMR wasn’t the MMR. vaccine causes autism. Basically, he had a tiny sample size of 12 Woman hours a shitty study, a study, peer reviewed and published in The Lancet journal. Okay, that is a revered, well respected scientific journal. And we’re the ones who are supposed to know that that’s a fraud. You’re the ones who peer reviewed it, you’re the ones that let him keep saying, I’m Dr. Wakefield, then we have other problems that are actually listened known to the public, but they’re going to become known and they’re bigger problems, again, that again, undermine the trust in the scientific community. One of those is the lack of reciprocal studies. Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with scientific method, a key element of scientific method is that once a study is peer reviewed and published, the scientific community is supposed to go and repeat that study. Other people are supposed to try and reproduce the results or try to break the study, they’re trying to prove that it’s wrong. That’s your scientific method. You don’t just say vaccine causes autism, you go get another scientist says, I don’t believe you, I’m going to find out and see if they get different results. The trouble is, there’s no funding for these studies. The corporation just wants the one answer, they’re not going to go fund scientists to prove that answer wrong when that answer is profitable. That wouldn’t make any sense. business wise. Governments roll in and out every three or four years, they don’t have time to stick around to prove something, they get the answer they want, they move on to the next policy is very rare for studies to get repeated. And yet that is a critical part of the scientific process. So a study gets through the peer review board, which just like Andrew Wakefield study did, and nobody checks up on it. Now, Andrew Wakefield studies since been debunked. But that was because people like Jenny McCarthy made it a big deal. The scientific community, right, well, shall we have another look at that one? And you’re telling us, it’s our fault that that happened? You guys should have been checking the ship. Another issue. And Muslims more specific to the field of psychology of which I’m a part I wouldn’t call myself a scientist. I don’t have the qualifications. But I’m certainly somebody works in the field of psychology. Nearly every psychology study you’ve ever heard of, has a couple of problems. One is most of them are self reported polls, okay? They’re just people filling out forms, giving whatever answers they want to give, with very few measures to prevent dishonesty. So they’re basically nonsense. Nobody really knows how they are. They just have an image of themselves. So when they fill out a form, it’s that preferred image of themselves that they answer for. They have selective memory and all sorts of biases that prevent them seeing how they really Yeah, so self report studies are basically fucking worthless. And yet, most psychological studies are self report studies. The other problem is the sample size. If you ever sat there wondered, like, How come I’ve never been asked to be in a study?

Well, you’re not alone. Most people have never been asked to be in a study. You know why? Because that special spot is reserved for university students. A vast majority of psych studies are done in universities by university professors. And the sample is university students. Do university students represent the grand whole of humanity? argue, fuck, no, they don’t have been to university. It’s a weird little world. It does not represent the grand majority. Okay? A Chinese rice farmer is not well represented by an American philosophy student. And yet the Chinese rice farmers never in the study, they never included. Right? This is a problem, because the studies come out generalizing for all humanity. And then pharmaceutical companies get those studies and recommend treatments. And then we have the opioid crisis, the opioid crisis could easily be explained by what works best for nervous uni students, put them on medication, right? If you have to go into say, a West African tribe and see how they deal with mental illness, you’re going to find a much better long term treatment plan that has nothing to do with medication, and is all about socializing an activity and being outdoors. Right, but they’re not in the fucking studies. Are they ever, almost ever. And then a more recent issue that really stands out as hand holding with politicians who have never seen this, I think, as much before, as we have with the COVID issue, the pandemic, though we did see it, in part with the global warming issue. But the global warming issue originally started as a genuine I think, a genuine attempt by governments to try and prevent global catastrophe, you know, scientists in their 70s and 80s when they’re funded to have a look at this stuff. It was like Solve the problem not give us results that we can use to win the election. These days, it’s not so sure we have a lot of doubt about why politicians are presenting the information they are about climate change. But more importantly, as the one with COVID, we see literally on stage, you will have the Prime Minister and the hired scientist saying the same thing holding hands in terms of delivering something that has a murky crossover between science and political policy. For example, vaccine mandates, vaccines, a science mandates or politics, but we have a scientist recommending a mandate. And we have a politician recommending a vaccine, it seems like the crossover is hard to distinguish the two now if you want to do that, that’s fine. But it means we will only be able to trust you, the scientist as much as we can trust the politician because you’re saying the same things and never disagreeing with each other. That’s a big problem for us, because we don’t fucking trust politicians at all. We don’t trust corporate media anymore. And you’re the ones going on corporate media using that as your sounding board. How are we supposed to trust you when you’re holding hands with these corrupted untrustworthy sources of information? Right? It’s not a conspiracy theorists thing to say that politicians are full of shit. They always fucking have been. And now you’re holding hands with them and say, No, this time they’re telling the truth. They’re literally paying you. Right? These are these are scientists being hired by the government. This isn’t some conspiracy theory, we know that you’re being paid by them. How can we trust that you have the harness? To say, Oh, by the way, they’re wrong about the mandate, they shouldn’t do that. Right? Who says that to their boss in front of an audience, no employee says My boss is wrong when they’re public speaking in front of the media line, so how can we trust that you’ll do it when it needs to be done? In because you never fuckin do it? We assume that at some point, you’re compromising your integrity, because there’s no way a scientist and a politician agree 100% Without any deviation. So when we see 100% agreement without any deviation, we go somebody bullshit. And we know the politicians bullshit. But now we start to think you are too. How are we supposed to trust you with these factors.

And a final one that I’ve seen come through, which I think is the real nail in the coffin for scientific consensus, arrogance, I follow a lot of kind of high profile scientists on Facebook, I, as I said, I’ve always been pro science really, always have been. And so my Facebook feed is full of science pages. I love hearing about the latest articles. I love weird stuff that happens around the world, you know. And so I follow these people. But lately, I’ve made the mistake of going into the comments section, there’s something that always happens in the comment section of those groups. You get a religious or anti science person, go in there and make a stupid statement, write stupid comment, or go on and say something ridiculous, usually an all caps, very bad grammar, how the community and the person running the pages of scientists themselves often responds is with pure mockery, just as high handed arrogant bullying of this uninformed person. And the community does the mob pile on things. So usually, you just see this mass of internet bullying, follow these stupid statements, just an attack. And you think that’s going to bridge the gap? Really, you think being arrogant is scientific, you think being completely closed, the idea that you might be wrong, is in line with scientific method. Right? Remember that nun who came up with a different treatment for polio. If you could take her and put her into comments form, she would look like those crazy people that come in, it would be all caps, and there’ll be a lot of Lord Jesus and so on. Turns out she was right, though. And doesn’t mean all the crazy people are right, but one of them might be for you to mock them and crush them only pushes them further away into the extremist camp with all the other extremists who have been bullied by the scientific community. Now that’s the thing with the entity is now the nerds can do the bullying, right? You finally get to give back and all those people that hurt you in high school. That’s not scientific method, unfortunately. And it just makes you look terrible. And I’ll name names is three pages and go and look at to see this happen. One is David McAfee. He’s actually not so much scientist as he is atheist, but it’s in line with scientific consensus. He often promote scientific ideas and scientific consensus ideas, say about transgender and so on. Watch how him and his community respond to somebody who disagrees or even just questions that lightly sigh bade you can go look up there one Check out just the flavor of the posts in terms of the tone towards people who aren’t quite scientifically literate yet. The people who have been let down by the education system in don’t get it. Watch how they treat those people. And Dr. Anna’s Emporium is another page I follow. A little gentler, a little more reasonable. But again, go into the comment section. Just watch what happens when somebody who doesn’t understand science has the temerity to say anything. Watch the pylon that happens. And even if the scientists running the page isn’t particularly bullying, the fact that they allow this kind of bullying to happen without any intervention shows that they condone it. It’s not like they don’t read the comments. Everyone reads fucking comments on their own pages, right? So there’s this online community feel where the pro science people are like, everybody else is stupid, and we’re awesome. That’s not scientific. Scientific is we could always be wrong, that scientific and you’re not doing that anymore. You’re saying we’re definitely right. Well, you were wrong about the vaccine. Turns out it’s not that effective. And that was just the other day. Maybe you could be wrong about other shit too. That’s the whole point of scientific method. I might always be wrong fact I probably am there to go find a better answer. You’re not doing that anymore. You just going with a we put that on the media must be true. Everybody else a stupid? Well, that’s how you divide people. That’s how you polarize people into extreme camps. And that’s why you’ve got such a strong, collaborative anti science movement. Now you’re bullied them all into being a team together. Good fucking move by the people who mock Joe Rogan fans. You remember Joe Rogan’s interviewing people who had the term scientist and their title and doctor in front of the name, you’re the one who made these people, the other ones being interviewed, and they get to keep that title.

Then you mock Joe Rogan, who’s better at communicating with his audience in newer, better respected than you are more love the newer, better trusted the newer, you shouldn’t be mocking him, you should be learning from him. He knows something new, don’t if you’re not careful, he’s going to take over as being the main voice of reason. I actually prefer listening to him than I do to scientists. Okay, and I’m pro science major, one anti science person’s going to read like, you should be signing up with go saying, let’s talk you’ve got an audience. We’ve got the information. We’re strong here, you’re strong there. Let’s combine forces instead you go eat the fucking idiot. And all he does is get paid more hundreds of millions and gets more millions of followers. And you’re you just look weak. You look weak. When you mock Joe Rogan. You just look pathetic, Kancil culture against naysayers mocking and deriving the people who don’t understand science yet or don’t trust you for very good reasons. That does not help your cause might make you feel better. You might pat the other scientists on the back and go look how smart we are. But you’re losing ground. This is not smart. politically. You are losing the fight. By telling yourselves you know, the winners, you need to humble yourselves. You need to admit something you’ve lost trust with a very significant portion of the population. And this is a very dangerous situation for us all. If we can’t trust you, where the fuck are we going to get our information from? I don’t know. But I know it’s not going to be good information. You can’t shut down open debate and still call yourself scientific. If somebody is out there questioning the vaccine, you should be holding a press conference with anti Vaxxer saying let’s talk about it, not mocking them from behind the safety of the internet. You need to find a better place to get your funding. We have crowdsourcing now you know that you know you can go on the internet and get your funding from the general public without any bias. You could go and get the studies you want done. You just got to let go the hands of the masters that feed you stop going to the corporations who are just trying to be profitable, stop going to the government who are just trying to stay in power. Go to the public and say what do you want to know what do you need to know from us? Donate 20 bucks all of your donate 20 bucks and we’ll find out the answers for you and look if there aren’t answers will tell you the truth. If it turns out the hypothesis is bullshit or sales paltry. You don’t need to worry about that people will fund anything. Price crowdfunding is brilliant. You no need to go to the corporations and the government’s anymore. Fuck that. So the scientific community puts this pressure on him like you’ve got to be published in X number of journals or nobody’s going to love you anymore. Fuck them. Right? That doesn’t mean you should pump out crappy studies funded by corporate corrupt fucking psychopaths.

go do the real work that you originally signed up for. When you started your degree in you said, I’m going to change the world, go do that work, right? Stop being corrupted by the system, you don’t have to play the game. You don’t have to be in the system. The public’s got your back, they will pay for this. And the thing is, if they pay for it, and you’re in direct communication with them with openness and humility, they’ll trust you again. That already happens with businesses that use crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. You got to understand your role in the education system. Most people coming out of high school that don’t trust science, that’s your fault. Right? I did the science classes. Some of them are good. Some of them were shit. I didn’t ever get to do a class in critical thinking, why don’t they do that in high school? That’s your fault. If you want to have people come out well educated about science, then you need to get a heavy hand in the scientific education system. You need to get heavier with the government say, Look, we ain’t going to do your studies until you fix High School. So high schools broken? How can somebody come out of high school and not believe basic physics? How can somebody come out of high school and not be able to off the top of their head tell you what scientific method is? That’s your guys issue. That’s your responsibility to fix it. Get into it, you have the power. Don’t let it happen anymore. In your studies, this so unfriendly to the layman. I mean, there’s paywalls to even read them. Why? Why can’t we read them for free? If they’re there to serve humanity? You really think the average layman, some bricklaying tradesman is going to cough up cash to read a scientific study written in scientific study terms that he doesn’t understand. Know, what you need is a friendly public face of scientific journals. It’s open, it’s accessible, it’s easy to read. It’s written in a language that people understand at dusk gives them the information they need with options to go deeper. It’s already done by science daily.com I get their emails all the time I get these like, like blog posts that summarize a finding. And it gives you all the relevant information but without being too tech heavy. Without all the big words that I wouldn’t understand. It’s perfect. Why don’t you do that more? Why is it that we have to go to corporate media to get some weird watered down heavily skewed version of the study and not even be sure it’s a scientific study we’re hearing about, we start clicking to find the original source, we can’t find it. Why. And I know what you’re saying a lot of scientists say as well, if you message me directly, I’ll give you the study for free. We don’t know that. I know that. But most people don’t know that. And most people cannot be fact doing that. Right? You have to work with the audience. You’ve got the audience you’ve got once it’s simple, and they want to deliver it easily, you could do that. Your reluctance to do it as just arrogance, yet you’re shooting yourself in the foot. If you want people to believe you, you have to make it easy for them to understand you. You can’t do that, then maybe you don’t understand it. So I was very clear. This is not an anti science video. It is a telling off to the scientific community because they are fucking it up. Our world is Imperial. Because scientists are not well trusted. I think there is not an overstatement. This pandemic should have been squashed nice and early. But it didn’t require deception. It didn’t require big pharma fucking corruption. We don’t have to be like, Hey, let’s go get forced to do a Pfizer vaccine that somehow got pumped down in a couple of months. We don’t understand why. And all the scientists or politicians are telling us to do it. Why on earth would we trust them, you really think we should trust that we should trust a scientist and a politician in a pharmaceutical company holding hands saying go buy our product. We’re supposed to think that’s totally pure and trustworthy. You can do better than that. Right? You need to do better than that. You’ve got a sacred obligation as a scientist and as a community of scientists to make the world a better place if you don’t like it fucking quit. That’s the obligation you’ve signed up for. You can just do studies and hide behind your microscope and just hope that an uneducated population has an idea of what the fuck you’re talking about. Because we don’t, we don’t. And because we don’t, we’re going to go listen to Joe Rogan instead. Because he understands us and he talks to us like he respects us, right? will prefer that. And when you hold hands and politicians and big pharmaceutical companies, we just don’t want to listen to you because you’re not trustworthy because they’re not trustworthy. See, I actually do believe that despite the incidence of corruption throughout the years, scientists in general probably do have integrity. But how the fuck am I supposed to know which one does? How do I know that the Rogue One isn’t actually the worst? So blower just because he’s on Joe Rogan doesn’t mean that he’s wrong. Or say the only one is right and the only one willing to tell us the truth. How am I supposed to know the difference? When he’s still got doctor in front of his name? When he has citations? 1000s of them when he’s published in all these journals, you made him yours? How am I supposed to know not to trust them? Until after the podcast when you suddenly bash him for not agreeing with the consents? How am I supposed to follow that? Thank you for listening. I hope this reaches some scientists somewhere and they have the confidence to deflate the ego long enough to maybe go and reach out to someone on the other side of the fence and say, How can I make this easier for you to understand? If that happens, I’d consider this video success. I don’t have huge faith in that happening but I’m always open to being proven wrong. Because it’s scientific.