This interesting heading caught my attention in a recent issue of Time magazine: ‘ How a war on science could hurt US’. The lengthy article was about how US President Trump’s policies on the “science” of global warming and the “science” of vaccination could kill this world and so on and so forth! Ever since Trump got elected, in fact, even long before that, the US media wanted him to be defeated. Not a single paper supported him, including the ones owned by the Republicans! Why do people spend so much effort and money to spread falsehoods and mystery in the name of that “holy” word science to denigrate any effort to question the western scientific establishment’s beliefs? Science, in essence, is trying to understand Nature.
Logically, science is only a never-ending search for the truth! While the truth always eludes us, we discover a truth at a time. Naturally, science is fallible and needs continuous efforts by honest scientists to unravel the mystery. Vaccination and global warming are both based on the wrong foundation of reductionist science unravelled by our five senses only. With the advent of the new world view of quantum physics, today we can comprehend much more than what we could grasp with our five senses. Western science, therefore, is only an enterprise and is illogical to the core. Any humble scientist, not connected with the trillion dollar business of science, should welcome any war on science as it gives him an opportunity to convince the world that his theory is either right or needs further refining. Why blame President Trump for that? It is like blaming PM Modi for anything that goes wrong in this country as some people never wanted to see him as a prime minister.
The science tells us that any germ infection provokes either permanent or short lived full immunity against that particular germ infection. But there is no sound science which says that we could mimic that situation artificially by vaccination, however sophisticated that method is. The establishment that has vested interest in the business of vaccination has produced enough “scientific” studies, mostly epidemiological, to say that vaccinations work. To know that the authenticity of those studies is dubious, one only has to see the wonderful work of John Ioannidis of Stanford University where he has shown that more than 95 per cent of the establishment funded medicalscience research cannot be trusted, vaccination studies included!
A news item in the Economic Times on 9th February made me sit up and take note of it. It read: “The Centre has shut the gate on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on a critical national health mission and possible conflict of interest issues arising from the foundation’s “ties” with pharmaceutical companies is one of the reasons. All financial ties of the country’s apex immunisation advisory body, National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI), with the Gates Foundation have been cut off.” Nothing could have been better news for India’s future generation. Years ago, The Lancet, a leading medical journal, made a detailed study of Bill Gates’ efforts in healthcare and published a report under the headline: Bill Gates–a philanthrope or a commercial opportunist? The conclusion was that he was the latter! “GAVI alliance which pushes the vaccine agenda in India had to face the Indian press in 2012 (after the media) reported that some 47,500 children had been paralysed as a direct result of the polio vaccination campaign that had swept through their populous country. India’s National Polio Surveillance Project found that a sharp rise in the cases of non-polio paralysis correlated with areas where doses of oral polio vaccine were also increased. Worse, children afflicted with polio vaccine-derived non-polio paralysis were at more than twice the risk of dying than with wild polio infection,” wrote Aaron Dykes in Truth steammedia in 2013.
Al Gore’s agenda of global warming, abetted and aided by some of our crooked scientists is another area that needs further scrutiny. What is wrong if President Trump does not believe in the establishment science? A humble and honest scientist should be happy that there is a healthy debate in the world about the established facts. Debate is good for science. When you oppose any debate there is always suspicion of some hidden agenda to keep the status quo. Oral polio vaccine should not be given to malnourished children as the vaccine virus will mutate in the child’s gut and become a deadly P2-P3 variant to produce polio in other children spreading from the vaccinated child’s excreta! This has come to medical textbooks now but that was what was done in our polio campaign some years ago? When I expressed this view at that time, I was pressurised to change my opinion by the then government, which I did not.
One interesting feature in the US is that drugs and vaccines are directly advertised through electronic media and the consumer can sue the drug company for any side effect but can’t sue the vaccine company for any vaccine damage! This is strange and smacks of vaccine company pressure on the government. I am reminded of the definition of advertisement in a good book by John Kenneth Galbraith written in 1956, Affluent Society. He defines advertisement as, “not trying to tell the consumer about the product but to entice the consumer to buy the product when s/he does not need it”. Now see advertisements for vaccines and drugs in that light.
Though Trump is hated by many I think he is trying to do good work. With the GAVI out, the Centre is also doing wonderful things. In conclusion, debate is very healthy for good science. It is not a war against science.
Dr BM Hegde is a Cardiologist and former vice-chancellor of Manipal University
Email: hegdebm@gmail.com