Cover Your Mouth, Open Your Eyes How Pseudoscience Weaponized the Covid-19 Crisis

By Jakob C Andris

If you just can’t wrap your head around the phenomenon of healthy people being under house arrest while thousands of prisoners are being released, then this is a must read. Find out what really is at play with a crisis that brought the world to its knees. All of this in the name of science! Once a highly respected and honored field, science has increasingly lost its way. Governments, politicians, corporations and ideologies have often commandeered this valuable discipline, misusing it to advance an underlying agenda. Find out what science really means, how it should be administered and recognize the pitfalls and red flags of pseudoscience, aka “fake science”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jakob C Andris
• Release date: May 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463959657

Jakob C Andris

A retired educator from the field of biology and physical science, Jakob C. Andris also earned graduate degrees in administration and counseling and was an adjunct professor. With a keen interest in the standing, quality and status of science, he explores the accuracies and fallacies of research, studies and claims in the hopes of delineating fact from fiction. He lives with his wife in the Southern United States, enjoying his family which, includes many grandchildren

Book preview

COVER YOUR MOUTH, OPEN YOUR EYES!

HOW pseudoscience weaponizeD

THE COVID-19 crisis

Jakob C. Andris

Copyright

This book’s cover and contents are copyright ©2020 by Jakob C. Andris, USA. All rights – print and digital – reserved. Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not a assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. For more information please contact the author at

Cover photo by: JNemchinova

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Don’t You Believe in Science?

The Other Side of the Pancake.

So, You Know More Than the Experts

You Can’t Compare COVID 19 to Other Diseases

Fake Science Translates into Fake News

The Real Science

The real crisis: New Normal, Censorship, Climate Emergency, Scientism, Technocracy!!!

Collateral Damage and Enduring Truths

Conclusion

About the Author

References

Introduction

March 12, 2020 Breaking News! The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently declared the COVID-19 virus a worldwide pandemic! For a moment, anxiety and curious anticipation grip us. Then, as we reflect on the announcement, we envision the viral epidemic movies we watched and begin to squirm. As more news unfolds, we become more uneasy and wonder can this really be happening? Then the provocative doomsday numbers start hitting the screen and we become downright afraid. Out of this fear, we've given up our jobs, our churches, our businesses, our civil liberties, our retirement accounts, our schools, even (in some cases) our ability to go for a walk — all for a $1,200 check and a soothing feeling that maybe we won't all die. (White, 2020)

It was Rahm Emanuel, president Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, who stated, You never let a serious crisis go to waste. (Emanuel, 2020) Emanuel continued by saying that he is referring to the opportunities that arise from a crisis allowing us to come together to solve problems. But within that context there are many opportunities that can be used to take advantage of a susceptible public that looks to authority for guidance and reassurance. Saul Alinsky put it quite simply, ...in the arena of action, a threat or a crisis becomes almost a precondition to communication. (Alinsky, Rules for Radicals, 1971) And nothing evokes more fear than the use, or more aptly put, misuse of science in a time of an emergency. The manipulation of science can even help to create a crisis.

Look no further than Hitler and Stalin in their incomprehensible misuse of science. Hitler with fear and a supremacist ideology convinced a nation that eliminating inferior races would benefit their own culture. Ernst Rüdin, a well-established German scientist praised Hitler’s political application of racial hygiene which was translated into a sterilization rule that became law under his rule. (Weigmann, 2001) Stalin’s Russia embraced a young and brash scientist, Trofim Lysenko who developed a completely new genetic hypothesis which became known as Lysenkoism. It was a direct contradiction of Mendelian genetics but was ‘politically correct’ (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with certain broader Marxist doctrines." (Ferrera, 2013) His unproven hypothesis was embedded in the culture of the Soviet Union, forbidding any scientist, or any other person in a position of influence, to question his research. This is how pseudoscience works and can evolve and even thrive in any state.

The term pseudoscience has been popping up more often of late. Science debates can deteriorate quickly accusing both sides of using pseudoscience. Simply put pseudoscience (AKA: fake science) is an ideology that poses as science, where the conclusions are rigged and normally support an incorrect worldview for fraudulent, often profit-driven motives. (Siegel, 2019) Profit driven motives, of course, but they are not limited to just that. Ideologies continually find ways to use science to propagate their agendas, as shown in the examples above. There’s no better way to influence a large segment of society than to weaponize a crisis. Pseudoscience is the perfect vehicle to accomplish this.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis that has yielded governmental control on a scale which has seldom been experienced in modern times. In a health crisis such as this, science plays a vital role. Officials use analyzed data as they try to determine the severity and possible spread of the virus, as well as treatments and vaccines. Unfortunately, data at an early stage of the emergency is limited. Scientists and researchers are working continually to find treatments and assessing incoming new data on a daily basis. All of those can hamper our ability to separate validated scientific data from unsubstantiated conjecture.

Of course, the fear factor plays a huge role in in all of this. Most Americans are looking for guidance and protocols for staying safe. Since our governments, both national and local, are responsible for providing those protocols we willingly listen and for the most part abide. As we are inundated with the government warnings, statistics and predictions, often from doctors and scientists, we presume it is all science based. And what is presented may very well be. One indication of pseudoscience, however, is the omission of other science narratives. Most Americans may not be familiar with John P.A. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University. He provides an analysis that not only needs to be presented publicly but also evaluated by policymakers. In short Ioannidis states, At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact. He goes on to say, one of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making… In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work. (Ioannidis J. P., 2020) Much of the government projections are based on computer models. Make no mistake computer models are valuable in scientific investigations. But they are also rife with uncertainty. First and foremost, computer modeling is not science. Too much mathematical modeling is going on. Worst-case scenarios, spreading dread, spreading fear, spreading panic. All these projections from Johns Hopkins and elsewhere are based on numbers they don’t really know, states Marc Siegel, medical doctor and Fox News contributor. Models