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Throughout the pandemic, the constant refrain from the ruling elite and their hangers-on and camp-followers has been “trust the science”. The only problem is that “the science” increasingly isn’t science. Instead, it’s a corrupted, broken system of groupthink, cronyism and willfully blind ideology.
The problems with “science” so-called, as it is increasingly practised are manifest everywhere. There’s the crisis in peer-review, for instance: although it’s not polite to talk about it publicly, it’s an open, dirty secret that it’s a hopelessly broken system. Then there’s the ideological takeover of even “hard” scientific disciplines: astronomy courses talk about “racism” in black holes, while primitive superstitions are called “astronomy”. Worse, puffed-up, attention-seeking hacks like NZ’s Siouxsie Wiles treat stone-age mythologies as “equal to Western science” and rally ideological lynch-mobs against real scientists.
Medicine is another battlefield where science is being trampled by corruption and ideology. Especially by corruption.
This isn’t the conspiratorial ranting of right-wing nutjobs. This is the sober assessment of some of the most respected and venerable scientific journals.
The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
This is far from ivory tower brow-furrowing. It goes to the heart of some of the most contentious issues of today. Covid vaccines, for instance, have been turned into a political battleground. Advocates of “the science” unleashed unprecedented violence against protesters who contested the validity of their claims. Not only is violent suppression of dissenting opinion the polar opposite of “science”, but what if the protesters were absolutely right to distrust “the science”?
The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open, democratic society. A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses and take seriously the outcome of the most stringent experiments. This ideal is, however, threatened by corporations, in which financial interests trump the common good. Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market.
Nowhere was there such potential for market expansion as the Covid pandemic. When governments coerce whole populations to endure repeated vaccination doses (some are already pushing a fourth Covid shot) in just months, the windfall profit for pharmaceutical companies is astronomical.
Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators […]
Regulators receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to “mark their own homework” rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system?
The corruption has thoroughly white-anted academia. As a result, universities’ claims to moral leadership are hopelessly compromised.
Fixing such a thoroughly broken and corrupt system is a Herculean task. But there are some proposals to start from:
Liberation of regulators from drug company funding; taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols, on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results. With the necessary changes to trial consent forms, participants could require trialists to make the data freely available.
British Medical Journal
The global industry-scientific complex must no longer be able to hide from scrutiny behind “commercial in confidence” agreements. The big scientific publishing monoliths must no longer be allowed to control access to data.
Science — real science — can only thrive when data is freely available to all. Data is the best antidote to dogma. The truth sets us all free.
