Article 8

Is There Any Science In ‘The Science’ Alluded To By Policy-Makers?

Ministers and government officials continually refer to the guidance of ‘The Science’ with which they always comply in their Covid-19 policy-making.  However while they fail to reveal the details of this ‘science’, their audience is entitled to have doubts as to whether it is science or merely political belief. These doubts are reinforced when we are told that this science is based on a mathematical model. However, my readers know or ought to know by now, that mathematical equations do not of themselves produce new knowledge; that mathematical analysis merely rearranges mathematical equations to make the knowledge which they contain applicable to other tasks; and that this analysis proceeds through a sequential series of equality signs which confirms that nothing is being added or subtracted in any of the sequential transitions of the initial equation. In contrast, however, many press articles reveal that the model which underpins ‘the science’ which underpins official policy respecting the spread of Covid-19 and the shutdown response to limit this spread has been shown to give differing results to the same inputs and  differing results when run on different computers; that none of the papers discussed by the scientific committee on which ministers rely have yet been made public; and that the public is thus entitled to treat ‘this ‘Science’ as pseudoscience on the basis of my definitive differentiation thereof.

As I have demonstrated elsewhere in the main body of this website and in the articles of this section of it, science is the body of cause-effect knowledge which as been accumulated by the reality-evaluation of beliefs (hypotheses) to positive or negative knowledge through use of the designed experimentation which eliminates all possible causes other than the one being thus reality-evaluated; and that instead of proceeding thus, pseudoscience believes the cause which it has arbitrarily selected  to be of the cause of the effect; and that consequently it conducts no experiment designed to reveal the actual cause of the said effect before proceeding to alter the magnitudes of the former to measure the corresponding changes in the later and from this relationship to acquire the mathematical equation which relates the one to the other in such a way as to enable the latter to be calculated form the former and vice versa, for ever after.

As to the science of Covid-19 we know that infectious diseases are spread by close contact between the infected and the as yet non-infected, but we also know that not all such contacts result in a transfer the infection; and that the rate of transfer will rise at a rate dependent on the number already infected in the early stages of transfer and on the number yet to be infected in the later stages of transfer; that the rate will rise in the early stages and decline in the later stages; and that isolation of those as yet unaffected will prevent their infection.  Thus, we know from the recorded diagnoses and death rates that its spread-related increase in the early stages of the lockdown must have been dependent on the large numbers then open to infection; and that at the time of writing this article (19/5/20) the number of new infections was declining, though we were not told whether this decline was due to the lockdown itself, or to the reducing number still open to infection-transfer. Accordingly, we didn’t know as of 19/5/20 which of these possibilities was and is operative, or the relative extents to which both of them might be.  However, ‘The Science’ appears to have concluded that the currently reducing rate of diagnoses and of deaths is due entirely to the lockdown, but it also appears to believe that tipping all of the previously isolated individuals into the pool of infection will not cause them to be infected to the extent of raising the diagnosis and death rates a second time.

I hope not, but ‘The Science’ appears not to foresee that the lockdown which it believes reduced the infection and death rates will not increase them again on its removal. If they do increase again we will know that the lockdown was not the sole cause of the earlier reductions in infection and death rates; and that it needlessly risks destruction of our current economic system.  Again, while we are considering the failures of ‘The Science’ on which the lockdown policy was based, we might include its failure to provide sufficient PPE for hospitals and care homes; to prevent the discharge of patients from hospitals to care homes without testing whether they were free of the infection it would otherwise introduce to these homes. Furthermore, we may recollect that while much was said about infection testing, we were never told what this testing was expected to achieve. After all, it was clearly possible to diagnose Covid-19 without testing.  However, what science could have done with such testing would have been to sample test in specific areas to determine the ratio of infected to non-infected individuals in the samples and thus to understand the progress of the decease through the population, which coupled with contact tracking would have provided knowledge on the efficiency of transmission from the infected to the as yet non-infected, more usefully than does the R value deduced from the doubtful modelling program which has demonstrated itself to have failed to prevent the above policy-failures.