One of the primary characteristics of the modern age is the ingredient of “science,” its methodologies, and its rhetoric, within the general disposition of society. We use words and phrases like evidence-based, objective facts, and data-driven as a means of authority in making our claims. In this way, the rhetoric of science has entered the spirit (or the mind—Geist, as in Zeitgeist) of the age in a way that is unique in world history. We have emphasized the primacy of scientific analysis, or rather, the conclusions of the scientific community, over and above lines of a priori thinking. That is, it is a distinctive feature of our epoch that things like religion and philosophy are either less important or not important at all, but regardless are relegated to their appropriate spheres.

However, what is never done is to develop or become aware of one’s underlying philosophy of science; that is, to reflect on the role of science, the possible extent of what it can accomplish, and the aligning of scientific inquiry into a general interpretive philosophical framework. The fact that this is never done consciously is a result of the way we think about science as being self-authenticating: it is the thing that verifies philosophy and religion. It is inappropriate to place philosophical boundaries on science, for the alternative defines our relationship with science: science places boundaries on what can be deemed true philosophically.

Because of modern man’s relationship with science, mixed with the fact that the vast majority of people do not actually engage in scientific analysis, we need two things: 1: someone to actually do the science and reveal discoveries; and 2: someone to interpret the science, to act as a mediator between the scientist and the people at large. This itself is not entirely problematic; after all, it’s ridiculous to expect everyone to study for, train for, and engage in scientific investigation. But the greatest of all tragedies that characterizes modern man is that he has no general philosophy of science; he therefore has no intellectual means to understand what science can actually discover, the essence of its conclusions, what its inherent limits are as a methodology, and the level of significance that its conclusions provide at a world-view level. The Miraculous Results... Bowles, Jeff T Best Price: $4.25 Buy New $6.99 (as of 01:50 UTC - Details)

Equally as important as the lack of self-conscious philosophy of science is the fact that it never occurs to people to understand that scientists and mediators may or may not be aware of their own philosophy of science, or lack thereof. There is little in the way of consideration as to intentions, criteria of judgement, compliance with underlying assumptions about the nature of their study, and (most importantly!) the interpretation of scientific conclusions that are expressed in a rhetoric that the multitudes, not having scientific training, can actually comprehend.

One simple example of the need to recognize the activities of science within a broader framework comes from a 2011 paper by the biochemist Dr. Harold Hillman, called Cell Biology at the Beginning of the 21st Century is in Dire Straits. He writes of the laboratory preparations and conditions that go into so many of modern science’s discoveries:

“When a tissue is prepared for histology, histochemistry, electron microscopy, or immunochemistry, an animal is killed; the tissue is excised; it is fixed or frozen; it is embedded; it is sectioned; it is rehydrated; it is stained; it is mounted; it is radiated by light, or bombarded by electron beams.”

And making a related point in a 2013 paper, he adds:

“Biologists have shown little interest in the effects that the procedures they use have on the structure and chemistry of the tissues they are studying.”

All these, he argued, fundamentally and irrevocably changed the substance of the “artifact” in a way that made it essentially irrelevant (or technically, not demonstrably relevant) to its condition within the living animal (and human) body. Whatever “discoveries” are made in the lab are always and everywhere not demonstrable as being able to carry over to the human being in such a way that can account for metabolism, and thousands of other physiological processes. The assumption of a straight carry over from lab to living body, we might call a sort of leap of faith inasmuch as it is literally not based on evidence. Or, more considerate than “leap of faith,” though no more “scientific,” we can say the nature of the carry-over is a judgment call. Science has a lot of these small, though significant, judgement calls throughout its entire process.

This is a philosophical issue that cannot be determined by the very method of science that it is intended to guide.

That’s a long preface to say: the majority of people on this planet—hundreds of millions of people— have no clue what is being done in the world of science (judgements or not), what its limits are, and how the mediators, even assuming the purest of intentions, completely neglect these aspects of science as a necessary prerequisite of informing the public about what is being discovered, and what it actually means (interpretation). Resveratrol Supplement... Buy New $21.95 ($0.37 / Count) (as of 02:49 UTC - Details)

The Coronavirus and its Confirmations

There has been quite a lot of people pointing out that the loudly proclaimed case confirmations of being “infected” by the coronavirus, and especially the death numbers, are highly suspect. Some people appeal to the odd (and if you don’t trust them anyway, “suspicious”) CDC ICD coding announcement (bold in original):

COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death.

The assumption would be based on symptoms since, as they never tire of reminding us, they are lacking in actual tests. What are the symptoms? The CDC lists three primary:

1. Fever

2. Cough

3. Shortness of breath

Basic flue symptoms, in other words.

But aside from all these concerns, aside from what we might call the lack of integrity in the transparency of the case-confirmation counting, I mostly wanted to drive straight to the very heart of the matter: the very possibility of testing for this thing in the first place. If the test itself is fraudulent, that is, if its authority rests on nothing more than a declaration of its authority, the “science” in all this is difficult to distinguish from religion after all.

For this, I will use as my guide a paper called Flaws in Coronavirus Pandemic Theory. Contrary to popular belief (even in the science world, where the students have been trained up on certain suppositions), there is far less known about the connection between a “virus” and the disease it is purported to cause. The reason it has been so difficult to demonstrate causation is that pathogens (that is, viruses) themselves are almost never “purified” (extracted from all other elements). This is the first rule of testing as passed down from the 1800s from the German bacteriologist Robert Koch. If you cannot purify the virus itself, you cannot prove it was the cause of the disease.

In typical form, the recent coronavirus has not been purified. At least, there’s no paper in the scientific community that has shown to have done this. This isn’t really a unique “conspiracy” because one of the great scandals of modern medicine in that last hundred years is that viruses are never purified anyway. Yet they are communicated to the public via mediators as having been scientifically proven to cause specific diseases (influenza, etc).

So then, if they cannot prove a causal link between the coronavirus and the alleged COVID-19 (which only has as its symptoms typical flu symptoms—making it, so far, distinctly not a new disease), where do we go from there?

Where we go is to consider the legitimacy of the numbers of confirmed cases of coronavirus itself. We know that they are counting cases of the allegedly new disease based on a tight range of symptomology. But putting that extremely big deal aside, what can we say about the possibility of actually confirming all these people have the coronavirus, hypothetically?

To test for the virus, they are using a test referred to as the RT-PCR. This test isn’t looking for the coronavirus directly; it is in fact looking for the presence of a certain strain of RNA. The coronavirus is believed to be an RNA virus: a certain strand of RNA wrapped in proteins. The assumption is that if this RNA itself can be detected, the patient must have the coronavirus. The fallacy here is that there is nothing to demonstrate that the RNA discovered did not come from some other source (such as “the cells of the patient, bacteria, fungi, etc”).

To prove someone actually has the virus, they would need to do what no one has yet done: find the RNA-protein structure, which is the structure they believe to be of the coronavirus, purify it, and extract the RNA from the structure to match with the original RNA that was found in the initial influenza/pneumonia patients from Wuhan. And yet, in their studies we get statements from these scientists like “we did not perform tests for detecting infectious virus in blood.”

They are not doing this, therefore there has been no actual proof of the virus itself; rather, it is all a result of the scientific habits of not taking the time to purify the coronavirus and work forward through Koch’s postulates scientifically. That is to say, regardless of the suspect nature of their declared numbers of “confirmed” cases, the very possibility of confirming the coronavirus is not achievable via their testing mechanisms.

What is even more shocking, however, can be gleaned by comparing present criteria for “confirmation” with the previous “epidemic” SARS. David Crowe, who did his initial studies during the SARS ordeal, pointed out that confirmation of SARS required symptoms, the test, AND all four of these: Jabbed: How the Vaccin... Wilcox, Brett Best Price: $13.02 Buy New $13.05 (as of 03:50 UTC - Details)

• “fever, with or without recorded temperature. Note that there is no universal definition of fever, so this may just be the opinion of a physician or nurse.”

• “radiographic evidence of pneumonia”. This can occur without illness, as was seen in – a 10 year old boy with no clinical symptoms. He was diagnosed with pneumonia despite this.

• “low or normal white-cell count or low lymphocyte count”. This is not really a criterion as every healthy person is included. This is also strange because people suffering from an infection normally have elevated white blood cell counts.

• One of the following:

  • “travel history to Wuhan”

    “direct contact with patients from Wuhan who had fever or respiratory symptoms, within 14 days before illness onset”

Yet, shockingly, in contrast to the SARS ordeal, for the coronavirus

a “confirmed case” did not originally require the criteria for a suspect case to be met. A “confirmed case” simply required a positive RNA test, without any symptoms or possibility of contact with previous cases, illustrating total faith in the PCR technology used in the test. The World Health Organization definition has the same flaw.

Battlefield America: T... John W. Whitehead Best Price: $10.95 Buy New $18.80 (as of 10:15 UTC - Details) Crowe therefore concludes from this:

There is no proof that a virus is being detected by the test and there is absolutely no concern about whether there are a significant number of false positives on the test. What is being published in medical journals is not science, every paper has the goal of enhancing the panic by interpreting the data only in ways that benefit the viral theory, even when the data is confusing or contradictory. In other words, the medical papers are propaganda.

Whether or not the reader assents to (agrees with) all the above, the more fundamental lesson here is that the proclamations of the scientific community and its mediators (some in the media, some in government agencies, some at the helm of private corporations), are a primary ingredient in the overall course of events. The point of this is not that you shouldn’t trust science (which is a rhetorically misleading way of couching the nature of “science”), the point is to remember the importance of developing a philosophy of science and remembering that there are layers of communication and interpretation between what you see in the news and in reports, and what is actually being done “scientifically.”

This originally appeared on www.cjayengel.com.

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