No One Asked Me But… (September 29, 2021)

By DR. LARRY MOSES

No one asked me but… I would ask that you not take the following as the ranting of an anti-vaxer. I have my shots and carry my shot card on a lanyard around my neck. If the Moderna vaccine requires a booster, I will comply and go to my local grocery store and have them administer the shot. This makes me wonder if this is this like going to the barber to be bleed when you had a cold in the 1800’s.

In our battle against the COVID we have been told to “follow the science.” This caused me to look for a definition of science and scientific fact. Being a history major I made the mistake of believing that there was a definitive basis for science, but the definition of science would belie that supposition.

A dictionary definition of science is as follows: The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Accepting that definition of science, I then began to wonder about the validity of scientific facts. Again, turning to the dictionary, I found that a scientific fact is “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as true. Truth in science, however is never final and what is accepted as fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow.”

Apparently a scientist makes a set of observations about nature, and then devises a theory to fit those observations. Other scientists then test the theory, and if it withstands scrutiny it becomes widely accepted as fact. At any point in the future, if contravening evidence emerges, the original theory is discarded and this is how science works. This also explains the quickly changing theories dealing with COVID. We are in the process of watching science work in a compressed time period. Needless to say, throughout history there have been a lot of theories touted as scientific fact that have been discarded. In the last year in our nation’s fight against COVID we have seen this scientific process play out on before our very eyes. We are watching “sausage being made” and this is never pretty.

When I was a kid back in the dark ages, we were told chocolate caused acne. Then scientist held a study. For one month, scientists fed dozens of youngsters candy bars containing 10 times the usual amount of chocolate, and dozens of others fake chocolate bars. When they measured the acne before and after each diet, there was “no difference” between the two groups. Chocolate apparently has no effect on acne.

Scientist once told us that our ability to love came from our liver and this was accepted as fact. Think how romantic it must have been to say “I love you with all my liver.” “Keep me in your liver.” We all now know it is a scientific fact that love comes from our heart, scientist told us so. Yes! I know our emotions do not come from our heart. Today scientist tell us that it comes from our mind. At least that is for now.

There is the joke about scientific experimentation. The scientists cut the legs off a frog and yelled at him to make him jump. When he failed to jump they concluded he was deaf.

Let me suggest it is hard to follow the science while the science continues to change on a day to day basis. What has happened is the scientific process is being played out in the public and the public is shocked to find that scientific fact is merely a guess accepted by the majority of our “elite intellectual leaders.” What I find interesting is that the value of the booster shots is being decided not on fact, but on the vote of an eighteen member Food and Drug Administration panel. The panel originally voted 16-2 not to approve the booster for people 16 years and older dealing a blow to Pfizer and complicating the approach to boosters that is supported by the Biden Administration.

Yes! I am aware that by speaking to the issue of the FDA and the Biden Administration, I introduced politics into the issue. However, I believe this is fair since this has been a political issue from the beginning. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi both stated that they would never get the vaccine because it was sponsored by the Trump Administration. With the election of Joe Biden, they both became champions of the vaccine and this initial vote of the FDA was a setback to their plan to use the vaccine as a political tool even though it was developed in Operation Warp Speed under the Trump presidency.

The Biden administration said in August that it planned to make booster shots available during the week of Sept. 20. That announcement was controversial because it came before the FDA had weighed Pfizer’s application and before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own panel of experts on immunization practices could consider the need for boosters.

After a brief intermission following the original rejection, FDA officials were called back into session. The panel then voted 18-0 in support of the agency authorizing a booster shot of the Pfizer vaccine for people 65 and older or at high risk of severe COVID-19. One must wonder what great scientific break-through took place in that short break.

If one was cynical he might suspect that the members of the Biden Administration’s appointed FDA panel members were reminded of Biden’s commitment to the booster shot. The panel members also voted unanimously to support the authorization of a Pfizer booster for health care workers or others at high risk of occupational coronavirus exposure.

Jonathan Sterne, a statistician from the University of Bristol who made a presentation to the panel said: “The difficulty for the committee is that you’re making incredibly important policy decisions very rapidly in a situation of uncertainty,”. The real difficulty is the short term of the study and the fact that only 300 lab rats (people) were involved. Just a thought! What would motivate a parent to allow their 5-11 year old to become a lab rat to validate an untested vaccine whose future effect on the child has not been established? I am merely asking not condemning.

Thought of the week… There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
– Mark Twain