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Excellent post. It's going to be hard to "unplug the federal medical authorities". It's a cabal knowing each other for long time with no boundaries between state and science.

Q7: Is there a conflict of interest between the Director of NIAID and the Chief Medical Advisor positions being held by the same individual?

A: Yes, it is. The health policy can be driven by politics (to make the President look good) rather than by the national health interests (as the Director of NIAID position requires). I wonder if the ‘fact checkers’ can deny this. Shouldn’t the Director of NIAID resigned on Jan 20th 2021 when he accepted the Chief Medical Advisor position?

https://guessname.substack.com/p/what-is-a-wild-claim

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Peter, this is a really good post.

A related question is: What is the line between science and religion? Of course we all have a sense of what belongs to science and what to religion, but to what extent is our sense of this a sort of historical accident?

If you think of science as being about how to understand reality, and religion as being about the same thing, then the line becomes a blurry one about the proper role of experiment and observation with respect to appropriate trust in authority. To some extent science entails trust in authority. An individual scientist provisionally trusts the authority of other scientists. An individual scientist cannot do all the experiments and observations for herself.

Did Cardinal Bellarmine think he was defending religion against the encroachments of science, or did he think that both he and Galileo were trying to understand reality, but that Galileo didn’t have the appropriate trust in authority? Did Galileo agree with Bellarmine that he was not encroaching on religion, but only differed with Bellarmine in that he thought that trust in authority needed to be tempered with observation to a degree that Bellarmine did not agree with?

If there is no clear line between science and religion then the separation of church and state enshrined in the American constitution might apply as much to the separation of science and state as Peter would like it to. But perhaps the way the culture of the West has evolved makes it difficult to see this.

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Thanks. I do think the line between science and religion is blurry. The most important element of both is the same; the search for the truth. We think of science as the study of the material world while religion is the contemplation of the non-material world but both embrace the order in the world that is independent of the laws and power of the state.

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🗣Speaking of conflicts,while Fauci has been acting as the White House adviser on COVID policy as the NIAID Director he has been splitting royalties with drug companies on joint patents for vaccine and drugs.Is there a vaccine for that?Savely Yurkovsky MD, author Can Immunity be Digitally Guided to Defeat COVID-19 and Future Pandemics? J of Infectious Diseases & Therapy

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🗣Speaking of conflicts,while Fauci has been acting as the White House adviser on COVID policy as the NIAID Director he has been splitting royalties with drug companies on joint patents for vaccine and drugs.Is there a vaccine for that?Savely Yurkovsky MD, author Can Immunity be Digitally Guided to Defeat COVID-19 and Future Pandemics? J of Infectious Diseases & Therapy

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My only tactic is to starve them by never using their products. I would love to unplug them but have no idea how to do that quickly. The best defense would be an informed and dare I dream healthy populace. I heard one person say that they have lost trust with this entire generation of public (incl. the generation they have just killed/aborted?), it will take 25 years for people to trust them if they ever do. I never will and I am better for it.

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Dec 29, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021Author

My view would be that we should not be nostalgically looking to restore that historical trust of the government on science. That may have been more of a mirage than we imagined. The government has traditionally supported/promoted science but it was always prone to the grotesque manipulation of science.

Examples of the structural failure of government science are the obvious regulatory capture of the FDA. Also, the less obvious funding priorities of the NIH - minimal funding of the research of the most obvious factors in health including nutrition. Also, from my point of view, the lack of funding priority of off-label generic medicine and most ominously, the disinterest of the CDC/NIH/FDA in the potential role of the childhood vaccine schedule in autism.

The reality is that federal medical authorities response to the pandemic was just business as usual. The only difference was that public was paying attention.

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