Bhattacharya's 3 Crimes Against Science
Donald taps chief 'Herd Immunityite' as health agency chief. Would founder of modern science Sir Francis Bacon approve?
Origin of the troll that Covid’s only as bad as flu is in Silicon Valley. In January 2020 a group of scared Silicon Valley oligarchs assembled to decide how to prevent the, then foreseen, Stay At Home orders they believed would destroy their companies. A patina of academic evidence was needed to justify letting Covid rip, even if it meant millions dying. In March 2020 Stanford ‘scientists’ (including Donald’s pick for health agency chief Bhattacharya) concocted a debunked, borderline fraudulent paper that was spun throughout the world as proof Letting Covid Rip was the Right Thing to Do.
The problems with Stanford Antibodies study include faulty statistical calculations; media tour claims by Bhattacharya’s co-author Ioannidis that the study rubbish as it is doesn’t even back-up; and a cache of emails exposing apparent mismanagement of the study. The publication put co-author Bhattacharya in the dock, and yet instead of being sentenced for his crimes against science, he has been given a mandate by Donald to destroy science in America. Instead of facing sentencing for his crimes against truth (and for contributing to the deaths of 30m people world wide and 1m Americans), Bhattacharya is now being rewarded by Donald.
The Santa Clara Antibodies Study claimed that by March 2020 a majority of residents of Santa Clara county already had Covid antibodies. Therefore, the propagandists employed to spin the fraudulent paper argued across the world’s air waves, there was no point in implementing stringent measures to prevent the mass infection of humanity with Covid.
That work by Bhattacharya and his co-authors would lead to them becoming the anointed spokespersons for these oligarchs. In the fall of 2020, just as the Alpha Variant which would kill millions and morph into Delta took hold, the same group of oligarchs feared more Stay At Home orders.
They funded the baroque anti-science so-called Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) in the Fall of 2020, and Bhattacharya became GBD’s cheer-leader. GBD’s mission was to mainstream letting Covid rip throughout humanity. Sadly, they have succeeded. Now Bhattacharya is tapped by Donald to become health agency chief, it’s worth looking again (I wrote on this in April 2020: Does the Stanford Covid Study’s Debunking Harm “Science” Itself? ) at why his debunked paper of March 2020 was so flawed.
Bhattacharya’s co-author of that paper, Stanford celebrity academic Ioannidis, had previously found fame for exposing other scientists’ mistakes in the so-called Replication Crisis in academia. So it would be legitimate to expect those with such (faked?) concern about accuracy and truth to retract their flawed study after its problems were pointed out to them.
Turns out that for Bhattacharya (and his oligarch backers) common sense dictated Covid was only as deadly as flu, everyone was being hysterical and “hey presto!” they found a scientific way of “proving” this prior common sense assumption.
Crime Against Science 1: The paper was secretly funded by JetBlue airline oligarch and not declared.
Although Karma would pay a visit when Covid shut down thousands of JetBlue flights, it’s not much compensation to those whose lives have been ruined by a virus that could have been shut down as SARS had been.
Crime Against Science 2: The statistical methods Bhattacharya and his co-authors used in the Santa Clara Antibodies Study, as Columbia University’s Andrew ‘s blog showed showed, discredit its findings anyway.
The fatal statistical flaws are set out in this April 2020 paper published initially as The Fatal Flaws in Stanford Study of Coronavirus Prevalence on Columbia University statistician Andrew Gellman’s blog.
The irony that Bhattacharya’s co-author is the founder of the replication crisis movement (that seeks to discredit not only scientists but the entire scientific method itself) would be delicious if it didn’t have such a real world impact when it informs government ministers’ self-serving “anti-expert” rhetoric about going for Herd Immunity.
In Britain, for example, this hapless government official (head of UK government’s behavioural insights unit) revealed in mid-March 2020 that the then government (instead of opting to stamp out Covid) had decided to let it rip. This interview caused such a furore, that the government then had to introduce stringent measures to slow the spread of the virus. Alas, by then it was too late.
He said:
“There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows as it will do, where you want to cocoon, to protect those at-risk groups so they don’t catch the disease. They come out of their cocooning, herd immunity has been achieved in the rest of the population.”
Since then 250,000 Britons have been killed by Covid and there’s no sign of Herd Immunity. Quite the opposite: the virus keeps evolving (as many of us understood it would as soon as we discovered Herd Immunity was US and English oligarchs’ chosen strategy to Let It Rip instead of saving lives). All those who wanted to let the virus rip latched onto Bhattacharya’s work to justify this doomed immoral strategy - attempting to buy Herd Immunity at the cost of millions of lives - which was doomed to fail - because Covid keeps evolving to evade our immunity to it.
Crime Against Science 3: Bhattacharya and those behind the Herd Immunity troll (including the Vice President elect Vance and his Silicon Valley funders) worship the Harvard Behaviourist Skinner’s work.
Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff nails this point perfectly: these Instrumentarians, as she calls them, are not interested in the life of the mind or in what is aggregated into the mind’s material and spiritual attributes. Consciousness is only of interest to them in terms of its impact on behaviour.
Along with the Behaviourists (whose theories about the mind are grounded in experiments on pigeons at Harvard), it doesn’t matter what we think. All that matters is how we behave and how knowing that behaviour allows us to be “herded, tuned and conditioned” into servicing whichever ideological framework those with power have decided a generation’s people must serve.
It suits behaviourists and their followers to behave as if individual humans are just objects (pigeons) that respond in certain path-dependent ways to stimulae, like Skinner’s experiments on pigeons hopping around hot plates in his Harvard kitchen.
Faculty, Deep Mind, Palantir, etc are perfect instruments for this work as some of those driving their tech believe wholeheartedly in this Instrumentarian logic as if it was a religion. They don’t feel that they are part of the herd that’s being herded, conditioned and tuned. But the rest of us are.
There’s no crisis in science itself. Bhattacharya is being given a mandate by Donald to destroy the research basis of American science. The idea is for him to intuit what the oligarchs want and then create ‘scientific’ papers that justify these biases, just as Bhattacharya and his co-authors did with the Santa Clara Antibodies Study.
Science and the scientific method are now under mortal threat in America. When faced with allegations that the undeclared funding by JetBlue destroyed the credibility of the study itself, the defence was that money did not affect its authors’ judgements.
When he was accused of bribery the founder of the scientific method who was also Justice Minister in England and a judge Francis Bacon defended himself by saying: I may have taken money, but I didn’t let it affect my judgment.
It’s deeply ironic that the man who has done so much to undermine faith in the scientific method himself in our age should use, centuries later, almost the same defence.
