Below describes why they are just going to stick to their lie. The original link associated with the quote below is here.
Dr. Joel Kaufman writes:
Dr. Joel Kaufman
“One of the most difficult things to write is a refutation of a massive fraud, especially a health fraud, in the face of research cartels, media control, and knowledge monopolies by financial powerhouses… The obstacles to dumping the dogma are clearly highlighted as Dr. Bauer discusses the near impossibility of having so many organizations recant, partly because of the record number of lawsuits that would arise.”
Also of note from the piece accompanying the quote above.
For the last 30 years, Anthony Fauci has been America’s de facto AIDS czar. As Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he holds the purse strings on billions of dollars for AIDS research, but only to study HIV; and he maintains close ties with the drug giant Gilead. Fauci deals with Duesberg this way: “Don’t comment about Duesberg for fear it will legitimize him.” Dr. Fauci makes sure that Professor Duesberg never appears on national TV by intimidating producers that want to interview him. When already scheduled, like he was on Good Morning America, who flew him from Berkeley to New York for its show, Dr. Fauci stepped in and blocked it and appeared on the show in Duesberg’s place.
Fauci can just turn media recognition for a voice off, if that person’s opinion doesn’t suit his agenda?
That makes it sound as if Fauci is really a mega powerful publicist, right?
The link is here.
There are a lot of books on this topic. Is this the first time you’re hearing about them? There’s a reason for that. The link is here.
The link is here.
The following is a review of the book shown above.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Science, Incorporated
Reviewed in the United States on
February 19, 2014
Science, author Henry Bauer claims, is in trouble. And if this is the case, then society as a whole, which relies so heavily on the pronouncements of science for the establishment of public policy, is in trouble too. The problem exists at two levels, the first being at the level of the scientific community, and the second being with the rest of the culture which uncritically accepts as true and reliable the official pronouncements of the scientific community.
At both levels a key problem is the failure to recognize that science is not what we think it is. A deeply entrenched but false belief, according to Bauer, is that science progresses through critical discussions in which all competent specialists are free to join, reaching conclusions that are ultimately determined by the available evidence. This process, it is said, is safeguarded and policed by peer review, which supposedly keeps science reliable. However, this view of science, Bauer maintains, no longer holds (if it ever really did).
What has happened in the last fifty or so years has been the emergence of what Bauer calls “knowledge monopolies,” widely held beliefs, things everybody knows to be true. But their chief characteristic is that the general public does not know of the existence of a substantial body of well-qualified dissenters to the common view. These dissenters disagree on the basis of good evidence, but this contrary evidence is simply ignored.
Examples of some of these knowledge monopolies include the belief that global warming is caused primarily by human activities, that the universe began with a Big Bang, the idea that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs, that HIV causes AIDS, and others. Now the merits of these conclusions is not the issue; for the sake of argument they may all be correct. What is curious is that what is happening runs contrary to what science is thought to be, when an orthodoxy is enforced at the expense of assessing all the available evidence.
The author’s description of knowledge monopolies is not to be confused with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of conservative periods of normal science operating within a defined paradigm and advancing through scientific revolutions. For Kuhn’s knowledge monopolies (though he did not use that term) were internal to the scientific community; by contrast, today’s knowledge monopolies are networks encompassing industries, universities, and governments where economic and ideological agendas eclipse the pursuit of truth.
What this means is that science has become entangled with ideologies, political agendas, and conflicts of interest to the point of becoming dysfunctional and no longer being a reliable source of information. What used to be resistance to change in the traditional conservative operations of science can nowadays become actual suppression.
An example of ideology and politics poisoning science can be found in the dinosaur extinction controversy. It rapidly became a knowledge monopoly that the impact of an asteroid was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. But even before this theory was properly vetted by peer review, Carl Sagan proposed that “just as” mass extinction had resulted from a cloud of particulate matter that obscured the sun after an asteroid impact 65 million years ago, so a nuclear exchange could result in a nuclear winter that could lead to our own extinction. Never mind that a large majority of geologists rejected the asteroid impact theory to begin with, if you questioned it publicly after Sagan’s sensational proposal, you could be branded a militarist, a warmonger, on the ground that your skepticism of the impact theory undermined the nuclear winter thesis. It was better for your career to go along with the asteroid hypothesis. In this category of dysfunction, the availability of funding for research may depend on whether or not you subscribe to the knowledge monopoly.
A second type of dysfunction introduced by knowledge monopolies is equally disturbing because of its potential consequences and also because it involves the corrupting of the very mechanism that is supposed to safe-guard the supposedly orderly and objective nature of science as a reliable knowledge-gathering enterprise: peer-review.
Bauer gives clear examples of what happens in the arenas of climate change and HIV/AIDS involving the promulgation of official reports by bureaucratic organizations such as the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) that draw from peer-reviewed publications but do so selectively and are not themselves peer-reviewed. The summaries at the beginning of these reports, which are all that most people read, including those who are popularizers of science for the general public and those who make decisions of public policy, can convey very dire warnings and urging of policy initiatives that are not actually grounded in the substantive texts of those reports.
The 1995 IPCC “Summary for Policymakers” is a particularly egregious instance of this, involving changes all of which were in the direction of arguing that human-caused global warming has been established, the view promulgated by the knowledge monopoly. This selective use of data resulted in an unwarranted skewering of conclusions in the summary, leading to one scathing critique: “In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of the National Academy of Sciences……I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”
Finally, conflicts of interest are rampant in science, especially in medicine, and, according to Bauer, can vitiate the benefits of peer review. Proper peer review can only be done by outsiders who have no conflicts of interest. But this is precisely what is not happening, as peer review is done on, for example, evaluations of retroviral drugs by those who have financial connections to the drugs companies producing those very drugs.
Peer review is surely defective when both resistance to novel ideas and premature jumps to public announcement are characteristic of modern science. “The traditional taboo against making scientific claims public before they have been published in a peer-reviewed journal nowadays seems quite old-fashioned and it is increasingly ignored as researchers scramble for funds.”
Despite a thorough discussion of how modern science stifles the search for truth through active suppression and the infiltration of ideology into the practice of science, Bauer maintains that “there is no conspiracy. None is needed. The continuing hegemony of the accepted view just reflects how many have their bread buttered by the knowledge monopoly, one consequence of which is the effective suppression of pertinent contrary evidence and opinion.”
But clearly something must be done, says Bauer, since “on matters like global warming or HIV/AIDS, recovering from failed policies after they have been in place for some time can only be unimaginably messy. It behooves society to find ways to avoid going possibly wrong on issues of this sort.”
So what is the solution? Well, some sort of anti-trust policies are definitely in order to break or at least weaken the power of knowledge monopolies. This would involve essentially that the media and policy makers should get their advice from independent, disinterested, properly informed sources instead of from the established experts who are actively part of the knowledge monopolies. Perhaps it might be legislated that, when government agencies support research, they must allocate, say, 10 percent of the total to competent people of past achievement who hold contrarian views. Having these people be of past achievement would help prevent throwing money at every dumb idea that could be raised.
The solution is far from clear, but certainly begins with education, because the fact that almost everyone has a faulty view of what science is provides the soil in which dysfunctions such as knowledge monopolies can flourish. “Meaningful scientific literacy is not a matter of learning about atoms and birds and bees, as currently conceived, it is about the history of science and what sort of human activity it is, namely, beset like other human activities with flaws and fallibility.” “The inescapable fact is that something needs to be done so that scientific expertise can once more be relied upon to serve the public good as it did for many centuries.”
In some scientific fields more than others, but certainly for science as a whole, the stakes are high. “Future historians will look back on our era as the time when science led the whole world astray because, in cahoots with powerful self-interested commercial and ideological forces, science had succumbed to closed-minded dogmatism.”