Why Public Policy Should Never be Based on Science

Last Friday the world witnessed a few people make several egregious scientific misstatements regarding the COVID pandemic. It wouldn’t have mattered much except for the fact that the misstatements were made by US Supreme Court justices during oral arguments about the Biden administration COVID vaccine mandates.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor falsely claimed that 100,000 children are seriously ill with COVID-19 and on ventilators. The figure is actually around 3,500.

Justice Stephen Breyer falsely said that 750 million new COVID-19 cases were recorded on Jan. 6. The actual number was 792,000.

Justice Elena Kagan boldly claimed “we know that the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated and to prevent dangerous illness and death is for people to get vaccinated” and that “the second best is to wear masks.” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, however, has bluntly state that COVID vaccines cannot stop transmission to other people.

Granted, Breyer’s statement could be attributed to a slip of the tongue—replacing thousands with millions but they were all misstatements and some outright lies. They were making political arguments and trying to make the disease sound worse than it was and the establishment treatment protocol better than it is based on false science.

The other justices ended up ignoring these phony horrifying numbers and medical assessments and shut down Biden’s mandate for private companies, but they actually upheld the mandate specifically for healthcare workers with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh siding with the fear-mongers on the left in that 5-4 decision.

While they may not have bought completely into the misstatements of the other justices, Roberts and Kavanaugh agreed with the federal law stating, “COVID–19 is a highly contagious, dangerous, and—especially for Medicare and Medicaid patients—deadly disease. The Secretary of Health and Human Services determined that a COVID–19 vaccine mandate will substantially reduce the likelihood that healthcare workers will contract the virus and transmit it to their patients.”

They agreed that Congress gave HHS the authority to mandate vaccines for employees at Medicare and Medicaid facilities based on this scientific assessment of the disease.

The problem is that this assessment is arbitrary at best and, at worst, dead wrong.

Weird Science

Proponents of the vaccine like to toss around the death toll of COVID, claiming that it’s the worst pandemic ever. But even the fear-mongers are starting to acknowledge that the way we’ve been tracking COVID deaths is illegitimate. Public health officials have been tracking everyone who dies with COVID as a COVID death instead of looking at only the people who died from COVID.

For instance, gunshot victims were counted among COVID death tallies in Colorado if the victims had “tested positive for COVID-19 within the last 30 days.” Public health authorities in Florida counted a man who died in a motorcycle crash as a COVID victim in July 2020. The most egregious case over over-reporting we’ve seen is the Chicago infant who died after testing positive for coronavirus. The infant had been in the hospital for four weeks from a bowel obstruction and multiple organ failures, but the death is being counted in coronavirus mortality statistics.

Clearly these people didn’t die from COVID, but their deaths were used by public health officials to inflate the numbers and generate fear.

An early study out of Italy showed that 99 percent of the “coronavirus deaths” in that country had other illnesses. Nearly half had three or more illnesses at the time of death. Just 0.8% of the total, had no previous pathology.

In a “Good Morning America” appearance Sunday, Walensky admitted that “the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities.”

Public Policy should not be based on science because science can be manipulated and skewed to make any point.

Science is Never Settled

But surely we can base public policy on science if it’s good science right? If we can somehow manage to ensure that only good data are included in the science, we can make laws based on it?

Again, the answer is no, because even with legitimate, authentic science, the data change and so do the conclusions. Basing public policy is basically saying “the science is settled” and we are prepared to use the force of the state to enforce people to adhere to that settled science.

But science is never settled. Saying so is antithetical to science itself. Science requires skepticism and constant questioning and reevaluation, not stopping the process at one point and preventing further inquiry.

Basing a law on science is like basing a law on technology. Imagine if the federal government mandated the use of Internet Explorer in 2000 and prohibited the use of any other web browsers. We would be stuck with a shabby technology and lower productivity. Just imagine if they said “the science is settled” after establishing Newton’s theory of gravity as consensus. We wouldn’t have Einstein’s theory of relativity or the entire field of quantum physics.

And saying “health science is settled” is much worse. Not only does it limit possible technologies, but it can also inadvertently kill people.

For instance, data are now showing that COVID vaccines initially provide some protection against the dominant Omicron variant infection, but actually have negative efficacy and increase the chance of infection after 59 days:

So between the time that HHS wrote their mandate to the time the Supreme Court ruled on it, SARS-CoV-2 had mutated to such a degree that it had completely invalidated the vaccine. Not only does the vaccine not “substantially reduce the likelihood that healthcare workers will contract the virus and transmit it to their patients” as stated in the federal register, but it does the exact opposite. After two months post-injection, the vaccine increases the risk of recipients contracting the disease and spreading it to their patients.

That doesn’t take into account the adverse effects of the vaccine. The only official tracking system for vaccine adverse events has shown reports of death skyrocket following the rollout of the COVID vaccines. There were nearly 22,000 deaths reported to VAERS in 2021 and while those aren’t conclusively caused by the vaccine, the data represent a terrifying signal.

Whether or not Roberts and Kavanaugh knew what they were doing, they increased the risk of death for millions in America’s most vital workforce.

It all could have been avoided by rejecting public policy based on science. The state does not have the authority to mandate a medical procedure, regardless of what the “science” says. Allowing science, however legitimate it is, to influence public policy is a recipe for authoritarianism and must cease entirely.

Sources

Buchan, Sarah A., et al. “Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines against Omicron or Delta Infection.” MedRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1 Jan. 2022, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.30.21268565v1.

“CDC Director Disputes Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor’s Claim about Children Seriously Ill with Covid-19.” Www.theepochtimes.com, 25 Jan. 2022, https://www.theepochtimes.com/cdc-director-disputes-supreme-court-justice-sotomayors-claim-about-kids-seriously-ill-with-covid_4201919.html.

“CDC: Over 75% of Covid Deaths Occurred in People with Had Four or More Comorbidities.” Rumble, https://rumble.com/embed/vpuix7/.

Green, Stephen. “Seriously? Gunshot Deaths Counted among COVID-19 Fatalities in Colorado.” Pjmedia.com, PJ Media, 15 Mar. 2021, https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2020/12/16/seriously-gunshot-deaths-counted-among-covid-19-fatalities-in-colorado-n1215526.

Paleo Family. “CDC Director: Covid Vaccines Do Not Prevent Transmission of COVID.” Paleo Family, 25 Jan. 2022, https://paleofam.com/2022/01/cdc-director-covid-vaccines-do-not-prevent-transmission-of-covid/.

Portal, Lizandra. “Man Who Died in Motorcycle Crash Counted as Covid-19 Death in Florida: Report.” WPEC, WPEC, 20 July 2020, https://cbs12.com/news/local/man-who-died-in-motorcycle-crash-counted-as-covid-19-death-in-florida-report.

Press, Associated. “Illinois Gov. Says Infant with Covid-19 Has Died.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 28 Mar. 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/illinois-gov-says-infant-with-covid-19-has-died.

Report Sulle Caratteristiche Dei Pazienti Deceduti Positivi a Covid-19 … https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_17_marzo-v2.pdf.

Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21a244_hgci.pdf.

“Vaers Covid Vaccinemortality Reports.” OpenVAERS, https://openvaers.com/covid-data/mortality.