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How do they expect us to ‘believe the science’ when a government we already know to be partisan and corrupt has been bullying ‘the science’ into obedience?
As in so many places, money is both the instrument that motivates corruption and the one that perpetuates it.
The person giving a grant has private motives (financial/professional and otherwise), and the person receiving a grant has private motives (financial/professional and otherwise).
These ulterior motives will not always pull a researcher in the same direction that an impartial pursuit of the Truth per se might. We make researchers in studies publish conflicts of interest for a reason.
But what if the people GIVING the grant have conflicts of their own, and bring (not-so) subtle pressure to bear on getting the ‘right’ answer or, in some cases, an endorsement that is not even backed by evidence?
The Epoch Times broke a story about the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) getting a grant of nearly $12 Million dollars. That money was given them by Health and Human Services (HHS) to voice support for pregnant woman to get the COVID-19 shot, and was to be returned to the government if they failed to publicly endorse pregnant women getting that COVID-19 shot.
There’s a problem with that arrangement. The HHS wanted to give an endorsement of the use of the jab for which there was no corresponding data of any sort… good OR bad.
The premier professional membership organization for obstetricians and gynecologists accepted $11.8 million from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to promote COVID-19 vaccines to pregnant women, despite the exclusion of pregnant women from clinical trials and regulatory data showing the vaccine had not been tested for safety during pregnancy.
To learn more about COVID-19 funding received by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) during the pandemic and what prompted the organization’s guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant women, Dr. James Thorp, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and maternal-fetal medicine physician made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2022 to HHS.
“My request was simple: It sought only to obtain documents involving the three ‘Cooperative Agreement’ grants HHS/CDC made to ACOG during the pandemic, one of which was for $11.8 million, listed on a publicly accessible open data source for federal spending, USASPENDING.gov,” Thorp told The Epoch Times.
[…]
The contracts further provided for the return of funding to the HHS if ACOG did not adhere to the federal government’s messaging that COVID-19 vaccines were safe and effective for pregnant women and new mothers. —EpochTimes [Emphasis added]
For context — here is a story from 2005 highlighting why the government using funding grants to force ‘independent’ experts to voice support for a product or treatment is a serious threat to the public interest.
The people giving the grants are getting their palms greased for the sale of the products. Note the presence of an obscure bureaucrat named ‘Fauci’ appearing in this 2005 article who was disregarding the ethical requirements of legal disclosures for drugs he got royalties for.
The Associated Press has uncovered evidence of scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health flagrantly disregarding ethical and legal requirements of financial disclosure: “In all, 916 current and former NIH researchers are receiving royalty payments for drugs and other inventions they developed while working for the government.”
According to records obtained by the AP, among the 51 NIH scientists currently involved in testing products for which they secretly receive royalties, are Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his deputy, Dr. H. Clifford Lane who “have received tens of thousands of dollars in royalties for an experimental AIDS treatment they invented [interleukin-2]. At the same time, their office has spent millions in tax dollars to test the treatment on patients across the globe.” — AHRP
This all happened at the point in our history when the public was being bullied into ‘believing the science’.
People were ordered to take the jab or lose their job. Some people were even refused life-saving transplant surgery or other treatment because they refused to get the shot.
Remember the rationale given by government authorities for ordering people to comply with the shot? “Quit complaining. Experts have told us that the shot is safe.”
The ‘experts’ who told us it was safe were the same ones who would have their funding clawed back if they said otherwise.
That is a SERIOUS conflict of interest. And conflicts of interest are BAD for ‘the science’.
The traditional meaning of science is that endless process of subjecting everything we think we know about the world around us to the kind of endless ‘but why’ questions so often found in the wondering mind of a toddler.
That ongoing process reshapes what we know of the world around us, forcing us to rethink the very basis of things we thought we could be entirely certain of.
We see this process in real-time when we realize that some of the images coming back from the Webb telescope don’t fit easily into the neat little boxes we thought the universe should fit into.
New theories will need to be tested to explain the new data. Round and round it goes.
In our generation, where we have a clerisy of ‘experts’, we have traded ‘science’ for ‘scientism’. The ‘-ism’ makes all the difference. Hubris and and a class of gatekeepers have erected unassailable dogmas where we once had endless questions.
Grants and funding all but guarantee that the ‘core’ ideas will never be challenged — even if they stand on faulty premises.
Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap
by Doug Giles
Beginning in March 2020, many Christians went into lockdown-freak-out mode. Uncut, irrational, unbiblical, and not to mention, unconstitutional, fear gripped many churches and church leaders. Forced to choose between obeying the Word of God or the edict of man, most Western Churches buckled. We even saw it here in First Amendment-protected America.
The Apostle Peter buckled to fear on the night of Christ’s crucifixion. But he learned his lesson and lived the rest of his life bold as a lion. How can the church ‘go and do likewise’?
Read the book and find out!
Get your copy of Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap now. Better yet, grab an extra copy for any petrified pastor who dutifully put obedience to the unconstitutional edicts of Mayor McCheese ahead of obedience to the explicit commandments of the LORD God Almighty.
