Now crystal clear: the left is weaponizing science for its benefit

It’s Now Clearer Than Ever Before, Science Bends Itself To Fit Left-Wing Politics

From The Daily Caller by Michael Bastasch Contributor June 20, 2020

I don’t know if you heard, but according to the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), we only have six months left to prevent total climate change disaster.

“This year is the last time we have, if we are not to see a carbon rebound,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol told the Guardian on Thursday in an article with the headline: “World has six months to avert climate crisis, says energy expert.”

Birol continued:

“If emissions rebound, it is very difficult to see how they will be brought down in future. This is why we are urging governments to have sustainable recovery packages.”

I’m old enough to remember when we still had 12 years left to save the planet just two years ago. That dire prediction was just as laughable as what Birol is saying today. The scientific “consensus” we used to hear so much about doesn’t support this alarmist claim at all.

What’s really going on is that Birol is using his cachet as a prominent “expert” to push bogus claims to further his political agenda. Those goals also rather conveniently align with the wishes of Democrats and the liberal media.

We’ve recently seen a lot of this type of weaponizing of science for political purposes. A couple weeks ago, we learned of one of the most egregious examples of this to date.

Late last month, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, the Lancet, published a huge study purporting to find that the decades-old anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine increased the risk of death in COVID patients.

To sum it all up, this observational study of 96,000 patients around the world found that treating COVID patients with hydroxychloroquine increased their risk of death by 34 percent, and there was a 137 percent increased risk for heart arrhythmias.

Since President Trump came out as supportive of using hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus, the liberal media quickly pounced. The study’s release also conveniently came after the Lancet put out a shockingly unusual editorial statement opposing Trump’s reelection.

“Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics,” the journal editorial board wrote.

All the pieces were in place for the media and medical establishment to set a new narrative — hydroxychloroquine kills! And President Trump is responsible for those deaths.

Amid all the alarm, the World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health temporarily halted clinical trials into hydroxychloroquine. The hype also made it harder for doctors and researchers to recruit volunteers for hydroxy studies.

Given the real world consequences, we have to ask, did anyone in the media or medical community really take the time to read the Lancet’s new bombshell study?

Thankfully, curious reporters at the Guardian (yes, the same Guardian that published the climate drivel I mentioned earlier) did take the time to read it and found what they called “glaring errors” in the study’s data on Australia.

But that wasn’t all — the Guardian found more problems with the data, and then they raised serious questions about the U.S.-based company that provided it.

The Guardian reported:

“[T]he US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model … has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.”

After Surgisphere’s CEO refused to hand over his data to independent investigators, the Lancet, to its credit, withdrew the study. Lancet editor Richard Horton called these revelations “a shocking example of research misconduct in the middle of a global health emergency.”

What’s really shocking is that the Lancet’s crack team of peer-reviewers missed all of this! Hydroxychloroquine was approved by the FDA decades ago, and has a long record of safety. Doctors around the world are also using the drug to treat thousands of COVID patients, mostly reporting positive results.

One has to wonder if the journal’s clear political bias and contempt for President Trump played a role. And if it did, will they and the media lackeys who peddled this study apologize to the patients who may have been denied this potentially life-saving drug?

Unfortunately, the scientific misconduct didn’t end there. After months of telling us the science demanded strict lockdown policies, which meant no large gatherings of any kind were safe, the scientific consensus all of the sudden shifted from pro-social distancing to pro-social justice.

“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” over 1,200 experts wrote in an open letter released in the wake of the protesting, rioting and looting sparked by the tragic death of George Floyd, an African American man, while in the custody of police.

“Protests against systemic racism, which fosters the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 on Black communities and also perpetuates police violence, must be supported,” the letter continued.

Apparently, racism is the real public health crisis and the “science” demands that people march (or loot or riot) in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and its radical leftist political goals, which include defunding the police.

Somehow those types of protests are scientifically sound, but according to those same scientists, protesting the crushing lockdown policies of blue state governors is not just dangerous, but evil!

“Those actions not only oppose public health interventions, but are also rooted in white nationalism and run contrary to respect for Black lives,” they wrote.

All this was interesting given the heavy focus in the media on the coronaviruses’ disproportionate impact on minorities, particularly African Americans. Of course, this too was chalked up to racism.

Most notably, the media and the medical class completely dismiss any concerns that weeks of mass protesting in the streets — with many people crowded together and many not wearing masks — will cause a spike in COVID cases.

Meanwhile, these same experts have no problem helping the media hype the rise in coronavirus cases in Trump country. It was also quite amusing to watch the liberal media trip over itself condemning planned Trump campaign rallies as dangerous.

Is it any wonder why American’s trust in the media has plummeted over the last few years? And the scientists, doctors and health experts will soon suffer the same fate if they continue skewing the science for partisan and ideological reasons.

Doctor Anthony Fauci, who’s on the White House COVID task force, lamented the lost faith in science, but he doesn’t blame the scientists, he blames the American people.

“One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias … they just don’t believe science and they don’t believe authority,” Fauci said in a Department of health and Human Services podcast.

“When they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who’s talking about science, that there are some people who just don’t believe that — and that’s unfortunate because, you know, science is truth,” Fauci added.

Is it the “truth” that white supremacy is a public health crisis? Well, scientists said it, so according to Fauci, it must be. And going back to my first point, should we really be worried that we only have six months left to prevent catastrophic global warming? We’re told that’s what the “science” says, and as we know, science is the truth.

People understand that science is a process and as we learn more it can change, but that’s not what we’ve seen play out over the past few weeks. Instead we’ve seen the experts and media figures we’re supposed to trust invoke the word “science” to further their political ends — actual facts and evidence be damned.