The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands

Can you share an example of real science where advice changed as more data come in?

I've tweaked my post slightly; I was referring to the perception of it being rushed for political reasons. It's clearly safe and pursued using proper scientific methods, but there was legitimate concern that the President would apply pressure to approve something prematurely. That would be very much in character -- as we saw when he applied pressure to change votes.

Exactly. It pissed me off to no end when at the beginning of the pandemic the health minister of my country mindlessly parroted WHO in their initial "masks do not help" stance. How can anyone treat what we are being told seriously when instead of telling us the truth (masks help, but please don't hoard them because we need them for first responders) they choose to lie in the simplest things.

Same thing with real numbers of people that suffer issues after receiving covid vaccines. The only countries I know of that are truthful in this is UK (their yellow card scheme) and USA(VAERS database). Anyone can see that in UK there were around 500 deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination (20 mln people vaccinated) and in US around 1000 last time I checked (for 60mln vaccinated). Anyone can search those databases and compare incidence of for example vascular issues, stroke, or anaphylaxis to their "natural" incidence in the population. However, in my country where we have 5mln people vaccinated half of people are fearing "death by vaccine" because "few cases of stroke" are linked to the vaccine. Coincidently there is no open database of issues. Clearly politicians think people are too stupid to be told the truth that the likelyhood of "death by vaccine" is extremely low as compared with "death by covid" in pretty much all age groups. Instead of presenting real numbers they claim "there is no risk" in taking the vaccine.

Additionally people stopped believing the bullshit they hear after hearing multiple "experts" telling us various versions of: "uv will kill covid so it'll end by the summer"(then brasil had huge outbreak), "children do not get ill", "children do not pass the disease to adults", "you can't get infected outside or if you keep 2 meters distance" "no need for masks at work if you can maintain 2m distance". Then a year later: "we're closing nurseries and schools because despite teachers being vaccinated we see high numbers of children spreading covid to their families" and "40% of covid transmission happens at workplaces despite adherence to measures put in place". One doesn't need to be a genius to understand those were lies of convenience and wishful thinking. I seriously hope politicians in charge will be brought to justice after this pandemic ends.

Fight me if you must, but I firmly believe that the scientific institutions are the reason that “antiscience” and “scientism” have been able to gain ground.

Faking data, using “appeal to experts” and intellectualism to pretend that what they say must be true simply by virtue of the fact they said it, stifling opposing voices, leaning in to sensationalism with misleading conclusions, laying down at the feet of funding sources, propping up the image of “scientists” even in the face of impossible-to-reproduce experiments and predatory journals with overwhelmingly clear agendas... I could go on and on.

Human ego and the need for money are challenging hurdles for experts on the unpopular fringes to be sure, but if everyone stuck to (or stood up now and reaffirmed) the basic tenets of science:

- Change a single variable and record the results in an unbiased way - The scale of knowing is from “Absolutely no clue” to “fairly sure we’re not wrong”, and there is certainly never a “we’re absolutely sure we’re right”

I think it could go a long way towards rebuilding the public trust in the data from scientific studies, or at the very least give people the space to say “Yes the previous data was flawed, but we redid the experiments from scratch and the results are even more concerning.” without getting booed off the stage.

Name three scientific papers (that you have studied) that contributed to mobile phones.