Correct me if i’m wrong but isn’t the definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect is the person or persons* that has overbearingly high self assurance and confidence and yet zero competence, knowledge and self awareness. Today that is my very definition of how most people acted during the Covid 19 Pandemic, the media and social media hysteria that followed and especially the actions of those that should have known better. For my own part I can only apologize for having not picked up on the obvious religious-like mantra of ‘follow the science’ early on and it was only much later on when I was following what Dr John Campbell and a few other brave dissenters was saying that I started to question the central message being pushed by the pharmaceutical industry, our government and very strongly by a compliant media and appalling social media bandwagon.
You might say, as I did at the time, that Covid 19 was a real and serious threat and that perhaps the best ways forward were mass vaccination and some form of prevention of the disease by limiting social contact. When it happened I had already retired from my job as a one time specialist nurse so in a way I had no skin in the game except that both my partner and I were stopped from seeing elderly relatives – now deceased – by those nurses that chose to be absolutely rule compliant with zero compassion and a staggering reduction in their actual care. If I could extend my apology now it would be for every nurse that stuck rigidly to the rules while doing their actual jobs so badly. I won’t extend even that apology to those of my former colleagues that became givers of vaccine injections themselves and being quite often the loudest in their condemnation of any dissent or question – calling any such brave souls as “anti-vaxxers”.
If you’re wondering why iv’e brought it up today it’s because I regard reading something serious as part of my working day and my chosen serious read this week is Spiked written by pathologist Dr Claire Craig : it’s almost funny how some book sellers are trying not to promote it. I thoroughly recommend that my readers read this book if, like me, you have serious doubts and questions about that whole episode. It’s a well written book although very factual such that I can only read it in short intense sessions : almost every reading session leaves me angrier than before.
Had I still been working in the NHS at that time I wonder how I would have both acted and reacted to everything that happened but as it is i’d already retired just before it all happened although I did take up the emergency re-registration and volunteered for the frontline if any of what was being said actually came to be in real life : the kind of thing i’m talking about is mass casualties among healthcare workers – a thing that never happened.
What iv’e been trying to understand, about myself, is how I went from being a ‘believer‘ in the Covid narrative even when it stretched my natural cynicism and credulity – into what iv’e since become – which is both a Covid ‘heretic‘ and a skeptic with incredibly low trust in government, the NHS and ultimately the ‘science’ that was skewed so unscientifically until Dr John Campbell came along and started walking us through some of the actual scientific papers and reporting on how Vaccine injuries were a real thing (I may be one of them)
Where it started for me was a fierce argument with my neighbor whom doesn’t believe that Covid 19 was in any way a real disease and immediately dismissing it as Pfizer Flu : this at a time when elderly patients were dying with a Covid 19 diagnosis as part of their cause of death. I had to remind him at the time that Flu (Influenza) is also a real disease and that the H1NI variant killed millions in the immediate first world war period : estimates of the death toll are 25-50 million worldwide. It was that moment that I defined that neighbor as being a great example of the Dunning kruger phenomenon as he seemed to have extreme confidence that he was right while having zero actual knowledge and not even my basic experience with medical science.
The first cracks came for me when I saw mandated mask/face covering even when most masks or face coverings (cotton) would be completely ineffective against viruses and added to that, that actual mask practice was extremely poor. One of the very first things I observed was a man that walked out of Tesco wearing an obviously woven facemask, putting his hand over it to take it off, stuffing that into his pocket and immediately rubbing his face with his mask-dirty hand : it was the kind of thing that would make an operating theater nurse spit their dummy right out of the cot.
The real cracks appeared when it became obvious that vaccine injuries and even vaccine related deaths were first reported but very much not discussed with any seriousness. As I said earlier I may even be an example of a vaccine related injury myself (stroke) although that is now impossible to ever prove. Much later on in the whole story of vaccine related medical events was the presence of organized white clot in bodies at post mortem : i’m probably one of very few people in the UK to have ever seen surgical removal of white clot from the pulmonary vascular system in a procedure known as PTE (Pulmonary thromboendarterectomy)
The cracks soon became enormous impassable chasms when I began to observe how the vaccine ‘Believers’ were acting : more as though they had signed up to a religion rather than “Following the science” : I have an analogy for this based on my time as an ocean going sailor :
I’m sorry to bring you the bad news but iv’e been to sea many times and discovered that the earth is in fact round or at the least and oblate spheroid to be exact, Iv’e even met a marine architect whom tells me that he once got to calculate the earth’s curvature by going to the indoor towing tank at Southampton university and there using a laser to measure the curvature.
Just imagine now that i’m a sailor in the late medieval period and i’m heard to make that claim in a dockside tavern : at one time such a claim – that the earth isn’t in fact flat as the Church declared to be gospel truth – would have had me declared a heretic at minimum but then us sailors were seen as rude fellows, unclean and possessing very strange notions.
Today, being a vaccine skeptic, unbeliever and asking after difficult questions is the same as being an ocean going master and navigator in the 16th century : essentially a heretic and to be immediately burnt at the stake or in today’s parlance ridiculed and cancelled. As I said above – the dogma of “follow the science” is anything but scientific unless you chose to follow the science wherever it takes you and to do that is to have the mental flexibility and humility to accept that you are in fact wrong. Luckily the Church today seems to have accepted the once heretical idea that the earth is round and doesn’t lie at the very center of the known universe.
If it was the prevailing unscientific dogma and all of the quasi religious attitudes (and platitudes) that alerted me to something being a long way wrong then it was the idea of compulsory vaccine and mandates that sealed the deal for me. What really did it was TV personality Piers Morgan declaring that vaccine deniers and refusers should be denied NHS treatment of any kind. It’s no joke and I wonder what he thinks of his own behavior now or whether he still thinks that. In brief that very thing goes against everything we learnt from the post war Nurenberg trials when bodily autonomy was declared an essential part of human life : essential until it affects commercial (big pharma) interests that is. Today, rather cynically I have to wonder how many senior government officials were bought off with backhanders.
My deepest apology is for the way that Nursing as a profession and many nurses as individuals behaved during the whole Covid 19 debacle. It’s not so much that many of the usual sicknotes took days off whenever they had a hint of a sniffle : after all nursing has a large number of highly neurotic and self serving individuals nowadays. I must say that many nurses coped with the problems of many elderly patients all dying at the same time and the response to the need for emergency registration in case of healthcare staff casualties was magnificent – I have to wonder now whether the early spike in deaths was actually caused by the vaccine reducing immune response in those patients The big issue I have is the way that actual physical care (of patients) became visibly so much worse and how obvious it was that many ward managers were content to deny access to to the elderly ill : exactly the patients that need social contact with their loved ones. Just to say that both Jackie and I were denied access to elderly parents near to the end of their lives and experiencing their poor physical state when allegedly being cared for on hospital wards.
Of all my posts this has been the hardest one to summarize and finish. I can’t give a measured critique of Dr Craig’s books because I don’t have the expertise : Spiked is a hard read because it’s so fact filled and so uncomfortable – more reading as work than reading as enjoyment. I am working my way slowly through the book although as I say, it’s more like work to be done rather than pleasure to be had.
Mt final thoughts are desperately sad : firstly that the human race having largely claimed to abandon religious belief as a way of thinking – it clearly hasn’t and instead adopted the religio-political dogma of “follow the (quasi)science” which has created it’s own enemy of heresy : what that might mean for our future is in a way terrifying. My final final thought is that of commercial capture by which I mean that a purely profit driven pharmaceutical industry has either created or directly benefited from induced fear and is still doing so. In that regard the pharmaceutical industry has now joined the tobacco industry and the food industry to first make us sick and then to make sure we pay for the management and distress of being so. So ends the lesson for today.
*sorry about my grammaticals there !
Afterword. Rather than anything more from me lets leave this to a real writer : the late great Iain Banks – this is from The Quarry and what i’m trying to say about religion vs science.
“Anyway.from what iv’e been able to work out, if you’re going to claim that you know something, then it should be provable, otherw9se how do you know that you know it? Just being surrounded by lots of people who agree with you doesn’t prove snything (well it might prove quite a lot of things actually, but not what you might like to think it does, and quite likely not stuff that you’re going to be comfortable with either
And faith is just mad ; it’s like you have to leap to the end of an argument or discussion about something, and act as though you’ve been convinced, even though you haven’t been, and then, apparently – well, allegedly – it all makes sense. But what wouldn’t, if you’ve already committed to believing in it? you might stick with any kind of nonsense out of sheer embarrassment at admitting you’ve been taken for such a fool. If you’re going to apply this faith thing to anything, then anybody can believe whatever they please and who’s to say they are wrong?
I reckon claims to knowing stuff need to be open to discussion and argument, and the person doing the claiming has to be open to the possibility of having to change their mind because they didn’t have all the facts before, or because a new explanation works better, otherwise how can you trust them?“
Iain Banks 2013
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 