Postcards From The Hedge

I have discussed Geert vanden Bossche's debatable theories before. Briefly, he argues that mass vaccination in a pandemic 'selects' for mutants that escape the immunity conferred by the vaccine, and this threat is reason enough to just stop. He ignores selection for escape of what is loosely, but erroneously, termed 'natural immunity', and the enormous health and social costs attaching to the sledgehammering of this nut. Unfortunately for his theories, all variants so far have arisen in poorly vaccinated settings.  Now, Bret Weinstein - who claims to be an evolutionary biologist, yet - attempts, in his podcast and substack, 'On Driving SARS-CoV-2 Extinct', to rescue vanden Bossche from the dumpster and brush the banana skins from his shoulders.  Here's an excerpt - 'Rounding the earth' is the work of one Mathew Crawford: (I am aware that a properly-conducted review would include links to sources. In my defence, I can't bear to! Do your resea...

Since last I discussed Dr John Campbell, back in October , his subscriber count has gone well over 2 million. Unfortunately, due diligence seems to have continued its march in the opposite direction.  Dr Campbell is a nurse with a PhD in nursing education. He is undoubtedly expert in some areas; in others, he's just a bloke chuntering to the internet from his office - much like myself, with a far lesser reach! But his confident manner and background give disproportionate weight to his words among some.  The most recent video I watched by him - a rare occasion these days - details a Freedom of Information request to the Office for National Statistics (​FOI/2021/3240) for 'deaths from Covid-19 with no other underlying causes'. There are perfectly good debunking videos here ,  here and here , and textual arguments such as this ; I am simply adding my own tiny voice to the counterargument. Campbell's video has gone viral - shared by, among others, Piers Corbyn and Covid-s...

Dr Robert Malone is in the news a lot lately, much amplified by the Covid/vaccine fringe. As the purported 'inventor of mRNA vaccines', his words carry enormous weight with people who think science is done by naming people and listing their credentials. He insists that vaccine development - using that technology he claims to have invented - has been rushed. Now, Malone has his name on in the region of 100 papers. I was poking through them, and came upon this which, in light of the views expressed above, is quite extraordinary. The proposal is for 'FastVax' vaccine development using nucleic acid technologies as a rapid response to a novel threat. Does this ring any bells re: present circumstances? Isn't that amazing? This is Dr "Vaccines-rushed" we're talking about here. He may not have written it, but with his name on it, we can assume that he endorsed the content, back in 2013. Reading through 2022 eyes, it anticipates nicely what happened with SARS-...

Ex-Creationist Glen Morton coined the term 'Morton's Demon' to illustrate his mindset when he was arguing as a YEC. Morton's demon was a demon who sat at the gate of my sensory input apparatus and if and when he saw supportive evidence coming in, he opened the gate. But if he saw contradictory data coming in, he closed the gate. In this way, the demon allowed me to believe that I was right and to avoid any nasty contradictory data. Now, I freely admit that I have my biases. Opponents will say "that's you, that is". Still, I was put in mind of this when - old enough to know better - I got into a lengthy discussion on Twitter with two people who I might describe as 'Covid minimisers'. One in Germany, one in the US, me in the UK (ain't the internet great?). Their basic contention was that the case and death numbers published are artificially inflated in order to stoke fear and justify 'control' of citizens. The fundamental inflationar...