Gleaned from the comments under Off-G’s announcement of a proper debate about covid which they have arranged. Commenter is ‘annette’:
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Yes what is needed is the atmosphere cleared of the very dogma at the bottom of this.
I have painstakingly gone through the papers purporting to say there is a virus, I have also read how the concept of an external virus that attacks living organisms came about in the first place, what experimental basis it has or not.
Sure Im not not a biologist, but I too have been brought up on some fundamental results in physics which happen to be dogma. I like everyone had accepted them as valid: in that particular case not a single book denied the dogma, at least regarding viruses, true scientists have written about it being an uncorroborated dogma over the decades.
I know its hard to give up dogmas, and I was only able to by going out of academia. Possibly because I happen to come from 3 generations of scientists (hands on ones: my grandfather used to take my mother to his lab when she was a child and trained her to do her experiments carefully), and good ones, because from
babyhood our home has been full of every type of scientists, from Nobel Laureates, on whose laps I sat while they discussed, to my parents’ ph.d. students who were like elder brothers and sisters, from all round the world, the academic world is my home, and I don’t become dewy eyed because someone is a professor, someone has a prize, or is associated to a prestigious institution. I too was, but I left voluntarily because I had expected to find in academia a place of dynamic debate, where knowledge is pursued in a non-dogmatic spirit, pursued in full freedom, without fear as to where it takes us. Instead I found mediocrity and I saw the very best of my generation pushed out in my subject, and my subject was far from financial eldorados. I have been literally amazed that those whom some of us thought would never be able to even get any decent job, today have named chairs at prestigious places.
It is very unfortunate that in circumstances where it is hard enough for the scientifically literate to find their way in the labyrinth of dogmas to rejoin science, for the uninitiated it is nearly impossible. Rather, they are kept in awe and made to realise that doctrinal discussions are a matter of experts: just like the spiritual world was once said to be only knowable through the Roman Church’s priesthood, so the sense-perceptible world is said to now be only knowable through the new priesthood.
Through myth creation, brought to an altogether different level thanks to the internet, the reader or the viewer is turned into a groupie of this or that researcher – a groupie totally incapable of explaining or discussing what the work is about, its relevance, the appropriateness or lack thereof of the concepts involved, let alone of what science consists of.
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