How far back must we go to discover something that was never hidden? When did it come to light that Dr. Fauci types, rather than applying the scientific method to medical issues, were foolishly pursuing political ends free from science? Could it be when a costly quest to develop an AIDS vaccine failed and they put the fear of God into people with the nonsense that AIDS would have a heterosexual breakout? Of all their deficiencies, tendencies, and psyches, the way COVID tsars reduced science to a belief could be their epitaph.

It took an Orwell to grasp that brilliant and foolish are compatible. The prophetic author of 1984 and Animal Farm saw that very clever people can be very silly. We don’t have to upturn rocks to uncover them. Look no further than all-consuming causes to find them—brilliant fools stuck like barnacles to Climate Crisis and COVID mandates. The brainiest of people are convinced that (1) unless we de-carbonize, the planet will burn up and (2) natural anti-bodies do not exempt “anti-vaxxers” from the compulsory two jabs and a booster.

If brilliant and foolish seem an impossible couplet it’s because they are not opposites. Wise is the opposite of foolish. To be wise is to be sensible and to have the common sense a fool lacks. What is it about public health that accounts for the preponderance of brilliant idiots?

I got the clue from a catchy headline. “Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?” The article opens with a decade-old quotation from Peter Turchin, at the University of Connecticut, who predicted in Nature magazine that, “The next decade is likely to be a period of instability in the USA and Europe.”

More than correct, he was perceptive. The cause, said Turchin, would be an “overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees.” In other words, too few prestigious jobs for too many educated people. Indeed, some 30% of British graduates today are overeducated for the jobs they fill. Every year, America produces 25,000 surplus lawyers. Who knows how many surplus scientists bask in jobs that a convenient mega pandemic created. Doomsday modelers and pompous virologists have had the time of their lives.

Setting the pace is Dr. Fauci, a political mover, a briber, a bully, and a charmer. Once in power, his mandates to stop the spread turned into devices to monitor the masses. Two years later, failed lockdowns, masking, and travel bans are going strong the world over. No pedestal is more elevated than Dr. Fauci’s, nursing a fantasy that he and Science are one and the same. To go against him is to endanger the health of every American.

Many countries have their own Fauci. The South African version is Professor Barry Schoub. Fellow experts hail him as a world leader in virology, vaccines, and COVID preparedness, tributes well deserved. But to what extent does he have Fauci’s hubris? To the extent that, to Schoub, his opponents are also opponents of Science.

“The 21st century has spawned a very significant, vocal, and often hostile lobby of opponents to science, are in a war on science.” People, Schoub says, have lost trust in his science resulting “in a plethora of pseudo-science.”

Pseudo-science: Isn’t that what dissenting scientists with a longer pedigree than Schoub’s are belittled for dabbling in? Close down schools and prayer houses; vaccinate everyone on two legs: And Schoub can’t fathom why the pseudo crowd wages war on his Science.

Disinformation is an equal sin for which Ivy League professors have received every mark of divine disfavor. Any disturbance of the “settled science” can bring down the gavel. There’s a term that Schoub, honest to the day, must smile at the way he’d smile at “open secret” or “exact estimate.”

A Fauci clone, Schoub protects the right of people to let Schoub think for them. After all, the narrative is licensed to all Faucis: lockdown to stop the spread, mask to stop infection, vaccine that can do only good. I’ve yet to meet a COVID-compliant person who is familiar with the name VAERS.

And there’s Schoub’s telltale habit. When decrying the mess the world is in, he keeps the lockdown Joker card face down. Mass poverty and joblessness? The virus did it. Mental illness? People caught COVID and lost their minds. Bankruptcy? The virus is anti-business. Schools and borders closed? COVID issued the cruel edicts. If tally keepers are allowed to dump road fatalities into the COVID tally, why not?

If Schoub had his way, Facebook and Twitter users would have their accounts closed for “fuelling anti-vaccination, anti-masking, chloroquine, and Ivermectin”. He wants to keep the public healthy while asserting a responsibility to protect vaccines from the competition by therapeutics, no matter the cost in human life.

Vaccine politics are impenetrable. Governments, we’re told, have always claimed the right to tell certain groups to vaccinate against viruses like yellow fever or polio. Even if we are free to refuse treatment, we are not free to infect others.

Clearly, the arguments are dishonest on two levels. (1) Vaccines for COVID and vaccines for yellow fever and polio are not comparable. The latter immunize fully and don’t need boosters soon after. (2) The argument, ‘you are not free to infect other people’ is quite brazen. Everyone knows that the fully vaxxed get and spread the virus as prolifically as the unvaxxed.

Apparently then, two types of science are in operation. The one is a ‘racket’ science followed by anti-lockdown, anti-mask, anti-vax ‘loons.’ The other science is ‘settled’ and guarded aggressively by COVID clergy.

Suppose the latter stopped their slanders for a day to debate heretics. What big argument must they present to stave off humiliation? In Schoub’s case, he’d have to shrug off the fact that he advises a health department more inept and corrupt than most. Politicians and officials thieve and murder under his nose. A whistleblower in the department was ‘taken out’ before she could testify. Then came Omicron. A dumping of almost 18,000 old COVID cases from 2020 coincided with the day on which the world learned about the new variant,  making it appear as if there had been a mass outbreak. Unsurprisingly President Ramaphosa has called the consequent travel ban on South Africa “unscientific.”

Schoub is apparently in the dark that public health, by definition, involves politics. Competing interests must be considered—a kind way of saying that vote-getting and making personal fortunes can and do outweigh virology.

As for what goes on under the Fauci nose, public and private health have been shifting medical science into the pseudo space. After BLM mobs rampaged in 2020, systemic racism was drafted into the settled science. The National Institute of Health apologized for “structural racism” in biomedical research while the prestigious JAMA declared systemic racism to be a scientific fact. The whole medical fraternity is buttering its bread on both sides. On one side is medicine and on the other Wokeism.

In a memoir of his time on the White House Corona Task Force, Scott W. Atlas details how it was hijacked by three bureaucrats. The troika, he calls them. They stoked fear using worst-case scenarios. Even then Fauci complained that Americans weren’t taking the virus seriously enough. “So you think people aren’t frightened enough?” Atlas asked. “Yes,” Fauci said, they need to be more afraid.”

Afraid! Fear = equals compliance = police state. Schoub with a stovepipe vision is oblivious to the capture of science. But then brilliant fools don’t know what they don’t know.

Steve Apfel is an economist and costing specialist, but most of all a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. His blog, ‘Balaam’s curse,’ is followed in more than 15 countries.

Image by Andrea Widburg

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