Stupid paper #1: Highly educated researchers can’t understand why people who observe that their government has lied to them, don’t trust that government.
8 May 2023
In last week’s post, I introduced the thesis of Steve Patterson – that we have been living in a dark age since at least the early 20th century, because the sloppy thinking of intellectuals of the last hundred years or so has produced “shockingly bad ideas” which, instead of being knocked out by much better ideas (produced by rigorous thinking), were embraced by all the institutions of power and hence became orthodoxy.
Given the astounding technological progress of the 20th and 21st centuries, the idea that we’re living in a dark age is confounding, to say the least. Could we really have progressed so much as a species if most of what we think we know is wrong? But as Patterson points out, the vast improvements in our standard of living are largely attributable to the achievements of engineers, not scientists:
“The progress of engineers cannot be denied, though it’s a mistake to conflate the progress of scientists with the progress of engineers.”
Is Patterson correct that the vast majority of published scientific work is “embarrassingly wrong”? In the next few posts, I’m going to walk you through several recently-published papers that passed the supposedly rigorous peer-review process and appeared in high impact journals. You can be the judge of whether these examples of scientific output are in line with Patterson’s thesis.
We’ll start with a study published in npj Vaccines, which is part of the Nature portfolio, considered to be among the most prestigious stable of journals in which a researcher can gain publication.
Two US researchers whose thin publication record in the scientific press revolves around investigating ‘vaccine hesitancy’, Sarah E. Kreps and Douglas L. Kriner, conducted a survey in March 2022 to find out why a small minority of Italians continued to “hold out” (their term) on accepting an experimental transfection agent – which they labelled a “COVID-19 vaccine” – despite the government’s imposition of “some of the strictest measures to incentivize vaccination”.
These measures took the form of a “‘super’ green pass (rafforzato), which from December 2021 through April 2022 was required to go to work, eat in restaurants, and participate in almost any facet of social life”. To hold the super green pass, individuals had to furnish proof that had received a primary course of COVID-19 vaccination and a booster shot.
Yet, to Kreps’ and Kriner’s evident consternation, “a significant percentage continued to resist, despite facing among the most stringent measures in the world to mandate or incentivize vaccination.”
Ummm, excuse me Mr and Ms Very Smart Professors, I have an idea that you seem not to have considered: Maybe if you have two functioning brain cells, a government that tries to force a novel pharmaceutical with no long-term safety testing into your arm, while threatening you that if don’t comply you won’t be permitted to hold down a job, take public transport or enter private businesses such as restaurants, might provoke some mistrust. Good medical treatments sell themselves; they don’t require governments to force them on their populations.
But since Kreps and Kriner are well-socialised and right-thinking, such dangerous ideas seem never occur to them. Instead, they intrepidly set out “to understand the factors underlying this entrenched hesitancy” using social contract theory as their explanatory framework.
Social contract theory arose out of Enlightenment-era debates about the proper relationship of power between the state and its citizens. The 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the first to articulate and develop the notion that in order to reap the benefits of living in civilised societies, individuals enter into an unwritten contract with the state, in which they surrender some of their personal power and liberty, in return for the state providing them with security and the guarantee that civil liberty will be protected. How much power and liberty did Hobbes think individuals should surrender? Well, rather a lot:
“[Hobbes] is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power.”
In contrast to Hobbes’ framing of the social contract as the unconditional surrender of personal autonomy to the unchallengeable state, fellow Englishman John Locke held that the contract was only legitimate if the people willingly and conditionally ceded some of their power to the state. Consequently, if a group of individuals disagreed with significant decisions of a ruling government, Locke argued that they should be permitted to join together to form a new, mutually-agreed-upon social contract and to create a different government for themselves. Crucially, it was Locke’s framing of social contract theory that provided the philosophical fuel for both the American and French revolutions:
“Locke’s arguments for the social contract, and for the right of citizens to revolt against their king were enormously influential on the democratic revolutions that followed, especially on Thomas Jefferson, and the founders of the United States.”
Locke’s contention that citizens have the moral right to reject and replace a social contract imposed by tyrannical authority, underpins the founding document of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence unflinchingly asserts that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [the capacity of the people to exercise their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Kreps and Kriner, however – despite both being professors in the Department of Government at New York’s Cornell University, roles in which one would assume some basic familiarity with the Declaration of Independence – appear to be blissfully unaware both of the vigorous debate among moral and political philosophers about the nature of the putative social contract, and how the Lockeian argument in this debate led to the birth of their nation.
Neither their own paper, nor either of those they cite to buttress their assertion that accepting COVID vaccination is part of the social contract (this one or this one) even mention Hobbes, or Locke, or John Rawls (who developed the dominant 20th century model of the social contract), or indeed any of the other philosophers who have engaged in the development of social contract theory. Their discussion of ‘vaccination as social contract’ exists in a vacuum, completely untethered from the development of social contract theory in moral and political philosophy.
To Kreps and Kriner and their academic brethren it would seem, vaccination is a social contract because the state, and its clerisy, assert that vaccination is A Good Thing and therefore everyone has to do it:
“Getting vaccinated is a moral obligation in the sense that vaccination constitutes a social contract that every individual is morally obliged to obey (8). This stance is justified due to the social benefit of vaccines. As most vaccines also reduce the transmission of a disease, they indirectly protect the community and individuals who are too young to get vaccinated or immunocompromised (9) (‘herd immunity’ or ‘community immunity’). Hence, the social contract results from the moral obligation to protect vulnerable others.”
Note that the authors of ‘Vaccination as a social contract‘ admit that not all vaccines “reduce the transmission of a disease” (which is, by the way, a moronic formulation, since disease cannot be transmitted, only the pathogens associated with it) but that regardless, people are “morally obliged” to get vaccinated because of the “social benefit” of vaccines. Pray tell, what is the “social benefit” of a vaccine that does not prevent transmission? In what universe could a “social contract” exist that compels me to accept a vaccine that does not prevent me from infecting my neighbour*? Such complexities of thought are apparently beyond these learned academics. All vaccines are Good Things, so shut up and take your shots, pleb.
Just like the authors of ‘Vaccination as a social contract‘, Kreps and Kriner not only apparently lack grounding in social contract theory; they don’t appear to understand the technical limitations of the COVID-19 vaccines – namely, their inability to prevent infection with, and transmission of, SARS-CoV-2.
They define the purpose of their paper thus:
“In this research, we investigate compliance with vaccine mandates and incentives as adherence to a social contract in which citizens have a moral obligation to protect vulnerable others.”
Remember, the Italian population survey on which the paper was based was conducted in March 2022. As of 9 August 2021, when I wrote Why Australia’s COVID-19 exit plan can’t succeed – Part 1, it had already been acknowledged by – among many others – the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), President Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci, the UK’s expert advisory body SAGE, co-developer of the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine Dr Andrew Pollard, Chief Epidemiologist of Iceland Þórólfur Guðnason, and epidemiologists Jeffrey Shaman and Andrew Noymer, that COVID-19 vaccines did not prevent either infection with, nor transmission of, SARS-CoV-2 and that, consequently, there was no chance of achieving community/herd immunity through their use. Shaman put it the most succinctly:
“Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, said, ‘In some sense, vaccination is now about personal protection—protecting oneself against severe disease. Herd immunity is not relevant as we are seeing plenty of evidence of repeat and breakthrough infections.'”
For the hard of thinking, let me make this perfectly clear: For at least six months before Kreps and Kriner launched their survey, it was scientifically incontestable and publicly acknowledged that COVID-19 vaccines had zero capacity to “protect vulnerable others” from SARS-CoV-2 infection by preventing viral transmission. Therefore, the invocation of a “moral obligation” to take such a vaccine to fulfil the social contract is utterly preposterous, and likewise the Italian government had no right to enforce this invalidated contract through financial and social punishments. And yet this pair of professors in the School of Government at a prestigious US university obtained ethics approval and funding for their study, and got it peer-reviewed and published in a Nature journal. Do you still have any doubts that Steve Patterson is right?
But wait, there’s plenty more stupid where that came from. Let’s keep reading. Our dynamic duo set out to “empirically test a series of five hypotheses describing observable implications that would be consistent with a vaccination as social contract perspective.” In other words, they came up with five propositions that ought to be true if Italians were still dumb enough to believe that they had a moral obligation to get injected with an experimental product which didn’t protect them against infection and didn’t stop them from infecting anyone else.
Frankly, I find these five hypotheses to be so tiresome and tendentious that I couldn’t be bothered recapitulating them. Go ahead and read the study if you’re up for a bit of masochism.
Here are the highlights (or lowlights, depending on how you look at it) of their findings:
People who were ranked higher on “social trust” – which was assessed by how strongly respondents agreed or disagreed with the statement “I assume that people have only the best intentions” – were less likely to be COVID vaccine “hold-outs”. My answer to that risibly inane question is “Which people?” If you mean most people I regularly interact with, then yes, I assume they have the best intentions. And that’s because if people consistently demonstrate bad intentions toward me, I tend to minimise or avoid contact with them. Because I’m not an idiot. Now, if you mean people who work for serially criminally convicted pharmaceutical corporations or people who work for government agencies captured by those criminal pharmaceutical corporations, then no, I don’t assume they have the best intentions. Because I’m not an idiot. Only six per cent of the poor, sweet, naive, trusting souls who most strongly affirmed that they “assume that people have only the best intentions” had resisted taking a COVID transfection agent, versus 22 per cent of those cynical individuals who took the opposite view. Given Italy’s reputation as one of the most corrupt countries in Europe, I’d say the cynics are more realistic. But Kreps and Kriner don’t demonstrate any interest in why those with lower levels of trust feel the way they do. No, it’s just a given that vaccines are good, governments are good, and so people should trust their governments and take their damn vaccines already.
People with the strongest commitments to the rule of law – those who most strongly disagreed with the statements “it is not necessary to obey a law you consider unjust”; “it is not necessary to obey the laws of a government I did not vote for”; and “the government should have some ability to bend the law in order to solve pressing social and political problems” – were the most likely to have complied with the COVID vaccination mandate. Again, Kreps and Kriner pay no heed to the Lockeian contention that individuals who perceive that the state has broken the social contract by unilaterally adding unreasonable and immoral terms to it, or defaulting on its commitment to protect civil liberties, have a perfect right to withdraw from that contract. In the eyes of the pro-vaccine academics, vaccination is a Hobbesian social contract: it’s not negotiable. The state’s word is law.
People who indicated that, if a parliamentary election were held tomorrow, they would be most likely to vote for a party which “emphasized individual liberty over collective responsibility in their rhetoric” were more likely to be unvaccinated than those who signalled intention to vote for a party that supported vaccine mandates. Kreps and Kriner’s interpretation of this ‘no sh*t, Sherlock’ finding is hilariously ass-backwards. They attribute it to citizens forming “partisan attachments” as “a form of social identity that help them make sense of the political world”, and propose that citizens “may logically look to the cues transmitted by trusted co-partisan elites” to form their position on accepting or rejecting vaccines. Because, as we all know, the average pleb is way too stupid to make up their own mind on whether to take an experimental injection; they’re anxiously scanning for “cues transmitted by trusted co-partisan elites”. Elites. That’s the word they use for the gaggle of psychopaths, nepotists and mafiosi who dominate Italian politics? Ummm, excuse me again Mr and Ms Roolly Smart Intellectualz, I have an idea: Maybe some people decide to vote for politicians whose policies best represent their own values and interests. I’d say my hypothesis is the best supported by the evidence: “Vaccine refusal was highest among those who did not back a major political party with 17.7% not having received a single dose” vs 12.4 per cent refusal rates in people indicating support for either of the two parties that had opposed vaccination mandates. In other words, those most opposed to the COVID jabs were those that didn’t think any of Italy’s major political parties were likely to represent their interests once in government – again, a fairly reasonable interpretation of reality given their country’s notorious corruption (on top of the general untrustworthiness of politicians)**.
Is that enough arrant stupidity for you? Oh, we’re not done yet. We’re about to plumb depths of dumbness you never even knew existed. Take a deep breath…
“Unvaccinated respondents were 43% less likely to support government aid to Ukraine than were vaccinated respondents… unvaccinated respondents were 24% less likely to support sending Italian troops to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia.”
Furthermore, anyone with the capacity to use a search engine could easily have discovered that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was preceded by a long train of Western provocations, including
The gradual encirclement of Russia via relentless post-Cold War expansion of NATO;
The US-engineered 2014 Maidan coup which replaced a pro-Russian Ukrainian president with a pro-Sestern puppet;
The US backed ethnic cleansing of Russian-speaking people in Eastern Ukraine; and
Amassing of NATO-trained Ukrainian forces in preparation for an invasion of the Russian-backed Donbas region.
Trust me, you need to watch this presentation by Scott Horton. Just do it.
To me, it’s a no-brainer that Italians who decided they shouldn’t risk their health to take an experimental vaccine which offers them neither a personal benefit nor any form of social benefit, would also conclude that they don’t want their taxes paying for “arms to be sent to Ukraine’s government” to pointlessly perpetuate a brutal proxy war, and they certainly wouldn’t want their countrymen’s lives to be put at risk if Western leaders’ repeated sabotage of peace negotiations results in the spillover of the Russia-Ukraine conflict into a NATO country.
But these academic midwits frame the Italian government’s supply of arms to Ukraine as “collective obligations to help others in the international community”, and dispatching Italian troops to an intentionally provoked conflict as “honor[ing] collective commitments”. Hence, they conclude that the greater tendency of COVID vaccine refusers to be opposed to backing an imperialist proxy war, is merely the flip side of the selfishness they display in rejecting COVID vaccination:
“Social contract theories of vaccination emphasize the moral obligation at the heart of the contract for all in society to comply for the public good. If weak commitment to collective moral obligations underlies or enables the unwillingness of many to refuse vaccination [sic], then the unvaccinated should also exhibit less commitment to collective moral obligations in other settings… Not only did unvaccinated respondents hold significantly different opinions on these important policy questions [providing aid – including arms – to Ukraine, and sending Italian troops to defend a NATO ally attacked by Russia] than vaccinated respondents, but consistent with theoretical expectations, these opinion gaps were also largest on the questions that explicitly involved collective obligations to help others in the international community and to honor collective commitments.”
Returning to Steve Patterson’s thesis that we are living in a dark age, let’s examine this almost intolerably stupid paper in the light of his six points.
Underestimated complexity. Do Kreps and Kriner underestimate the complexity of their topic? Check. Their explanations for why some Italians rejected COVID-19 vaccines, despite enormous social, political, financial and legal pressure, are laughably simplistic. I have a helpful hint for them: next time, try asking people why they didn’t take the jab rather than trying to origami their complex reasoning process into the shape of your dumb theoretical model.
Specialisation to the point of stupidity. Do they evince specialisation-induced stupidity? Check. As behavioural scientists who enthusiastically “answered the implicit call to understand the behavioral side of vaccination, including the sources of vaccine hesitancy“, they apparently feel no need to comprehend either moral philosophy or the effect of COVID-19 vaccines on the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2. Their only mission appears to be to service an aggressively pro-vaccination agenda. This hyperspecialisation renders them highly-educated ignoramuses.
Lack of conceptual clarity. Do the key concepts of the paper – “social contract”, “collective good”, “collective commitments” – lack clarity? Check. How exactly does accepting a non-sterilising vaccine demonstrate one’s commitment to the “collective good”? How does the imposition of a vaccine mandate that offers no public benefit, with no public consultation, constitute a “social contract”, rather than a tyrannical act that breaks the social contract? Why is anyone obligated to honour “collective commitments” that were negotiated by agents transparently acting against their interests?
Conflation of academic process with scientific inquiry. Is this paper a box-checking exercise that lacks intellectual rigour? Check. This paper is the complete antithesis of scientific inquiry; it starts with the premise that Vaccines Are Good and People Who Don’t Take Them Are Bad, and then contorts complex psychosocial reality to ‘prove’ this premise.
Corruption of academia by government and corporate funding. Is this paper the product of an “institutional hierarchy [that] has been skewed to favor the best grant-winners rather than the best thinkers“? Check. There is not a single original thought expressed in the entire paper. Would it exist but for the vast pool of taxpayer funds shovelled into the academic industrial complex to produce similarly valueless baloney that buttresses the official COVID narratives?
So, are you convinced yet that Steve Patterson is correct, and we’re already living in a dark age? If not, let’s see whether my next post, on a Spanish study in which researchers unearth the startling fact that people who think the ‘experts’ did not behave in a trustworthy fashion during the scamdemic are less likely to get an experimental COVID injection, can convince you. Stay tuned!
Are you confused by the scientific claims and counter-claims that you encounter through popular and social media? Would you like to learn how to read scientific research, assess its biases, and understand how it fits within the body of scientific literature? My EmpowerEd membership program is custom-made for you. Activate your free 1-month trial today!
* There’s an important discussion to be had about whether it is morally justifiable to compel an individual to accept a vaccine that does prevent transmission of an infectious organism, and could contribute to community immunity, if such a vaccine existed (none that I’m aware of fulfil both of those criteria, given the reality of secondary vaccine failure). In other words, does the well-being of the collective trump the bodily autonomy of the individual? I take the position that it does not. I accept the imposition of temporary quarantine on an infectious individual if their refusal or inability to self-isolate puts others at risk of serious harm, but not the involuntary imposition of any form of medical treatment, including vaccination.
** Did you know that the official collective nouns for politicians are a Lie, an Equivocation, and an Odium?
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