I have just started reading a fascinating book by Arthur Koestler, “The Sleepwalkers – A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe” and have been awe-struck by its relevance to so-called vaccine science.  On the one hand, we have continuous statements that vaccines are safe and effective, rather than serious attempts to understand whether vaccines are really safe and effective.  On the other hand we had the maddening early Greek determination “to prove that the apparently irregular meanderings of the planets were the result of some combination of several simple, circular, uniform motions” (1), rather than to discover and understand the truth about their movements. 

The parallels are striking.  Plato had deemed circular motion of planets to be a fact and “the task of Academic astronomy” to prove it.  This, in spite of the fact that it flew in the face of reason and evidence, particularly when it came to the changing size of the orbiting planets when viewed from earth.  It had been so decreed and all the science, for about 1500 years, sought to prove the false decree. 

The vaccine “experts” have similarly decreed that the benefits of vaccines (far) outweigh their risks.  This, in spite of considerable evidence against them. 

And they have provided the funding and other incentives to prove it. 

Take the shameful treatment of Drs. Wakefield et al by the GMC and others.  Clearly they have provided an incentive to not question vaccinations in their treatment of the good doctors.  But The Lancet, in its retraction of their paper, has also decreed that their findings, essentially, did not happen.

How can they do that?  Well, they just did it, plain and simple.  And they were not to be confused by the facts, as Dr. Yazbak so eloquently expressed in his recent letter to the BMJ.

Koestler wrote that “Astronomy, after Aristotle, becomes an abstract sky-geometry, divorced from physical reality.  Its principal task is to explain away the scandal of non-circular motions in the sky.” (1)  So, too, the principal task of the vaccine “experts” is to “explain away” those troublesome reports of vaccine adverse consequences, whether serious or not.

We tend to view science and scientists as inherently divorced from their strengths and weaknesses as individuals, as some pure pursuit by pursuers innocent of earthly designs.

It wasn’t true then, however, and it isn’t true now. Until we recognize and accept that reality, we will be but mere sleepwalkers in the land of the recklessly pro-vaccine.

by Sandy Gottstein

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." - Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), paraphrasing John Philpot Curran (1808)