The medical-scientific industrial complex (I’ll call it MSIC for short, since I made up the term) loves to weaponize semantics, create terms that sound more complex than they are, and build straw men to shut down pesky patients who want to think for themselves. Three years ago, I would not have ascribed nefarious motives to this pompous obfuscation of scientific information, but now I’m not so sure. The public health establishment seems to believe that the general public cannot be trusted with, and is too unintelligent to understand, clear scientific information. They believe it is necessary to water down the science and that providing the details that underlie their conclusions will just lead to people making their own decisions, which they describe as “dangerous”.
I have long been bothered by the way that medical scientists and physicians overcomplicate simple concepts with jargon, and oversimplify complex ones with banal analogies. It really solidified for me during the COVID lockdowns but it’s been going on for longer than that. Take the example of Basic Mass Index (BMI). When I was younger, we had height and weight charts-one for men and one for women, each with 3 weight ranges depending on whether you had a small, medium, or large frame. A muscular athlete with relatively low body fat might be at the upper end of a weight chart for a small frame, but the low end for a large frame. Most people have a pretty good idea of what their frame is. But then the medical community decided that people couldn’t be trusted to accurately pick their frames and were lying to themselves about their weight, contributing to an epidemic of obesity. Under the guise of a new method for taking body fat into account, BMI was created-which is really just a glorified height and weight table masquerading as a complex medical measurement. Now that lean, muscular big-boned individual will likely have a BMI in the upper normal range, the same as a smaller-boned, less well-muscled individual with bit more fat. The algorithm for determining the ranges assumes most people are of average frame and muscle tone and uses mathematical modeling to estimate “body fat percentage”. In actuality, it hides the differences that were clearer with the old height and weight charts, and it ignores the fact that this methodology contributes to eating disorders in young people. Don’t argue with a physician about this though-they’ll tell you it’s for your own good to aspire to a BMI of 20, whether you’re tiny and frail or big and muscular, and the benefits outweigh any possible downsides. They’ve been treating us like we’re too stupid to take care of ourselves for a long time.
When COVID hit, this urge to condescend turned authoritarian. The general public was bombarded with a constant ticker tape on every news channel with a “COVID case count” and a “COVID death count”, the definitions of which kept changing. We all thought we knew what it meant to be sick, and to die of something, but we were quickly told that these concepts were far too complex for us. Just believe the numbers and listen to the experts, we were told. What was called a COVID death was not comparable to death by any other means, and that was obvious to many people without medical degrees or PhDs in a biomedical field. One of the reasons this was obvious to me, was not because I have a PhD, but because I had recently watched my mother pass away from nothing in particular at 87. I expected her to live to 97, but her body gave out and dementia set in earlier than that. Her death certificate read “protein/calorie malnutrition” – in other words, she starved to death? That is what happens when someone dies of old age, it seems; they slowly shut down and stop eating. If there is a virus afoot, no amount of locking down, social distancing, masking and vaccinating can prevent that inevitable end. In my mother’s case, she did have an underlying condition called polycythemia, that results in too many red blood cells, a condition that had led to a small stroke 10 years prior. There was no obvious change in her after the stroke. In fact, she only knew she had it because she had commented on a slight numbness in her right cheek and hand and I told her to go to a neurologist because it sounded like a stroke. An MRI later confirmed my suspicion. She called it a “teeny-tiny little stroke” and would bristle at the idea that she had any serious neurological problems because she really didn’t seem to have any for quite some time-until she started to get a bit confused, and had a number of falls. Her last fall resulted in a broken hip leaving her bed-ridden and hastening the descent into dementia. “Cerebrovascular accident” was mentioned as an underlying cause on her death certificate, but not the polycythemia. The point is, having watched my mother die and then seeing the statistics on who was dying “from COVID”, I knew that “cause of death” is not as cut and dry as it was being presented to the public. The CDC essentially acknowledged this with their instructions to label the death of anyone testing positive as a COVID death and with breakdown of demographics that revealed over 90% of those who died “from COVID” had multiple life-threatening conditions. Had my mother’s deterioration occurred in 2020, and she had tested positive for SARSCoV2, her death certificate would have read “COVID-19” instead of “protein/calorie malnutrition”. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. The medical community, the media and the government didn’t believe the general public could be trusted with understanding mortality. Were they to acknowledge the actual life expectancy of the vast majority of those who died with positive COVID tests, or be honest about underlying causes, we might not be as afraid of the disease. We might not want the vaccine. Then, what use are they? Best to play around with the meaning of the term “COVID death”.
Another semantic sword used by the scientific community during this pandemic, was the distinction between COVID and the flu. It was immediately evident that, for most people, COVID-19 was “no worse than a seasonal flu”, a claim that would be met with a condescending, “This is NOT the flu” retort. That statement is true in that coronaviruses are not influenza viruses, although they ARE both RNA viruses, but that is not what people mean when they throw around the term flu. In fact, the same people that disdainfully dismiss those comparing COVID-19 to flu have been calling an illness a flu when it’s caused by a rhinovirus, a respiratory syncytial virus, or a common cold coronavirus (and not actually due to an influenza infection) for years. People have colloquially used the term flu for multiple unrelated viruses because the symptoms overlap, and the treatments are the same. Stay home (aka shelter in place), avoid close contact with family and friends (aka social distance), take some acetaminophen or ibuprofen, and rest. If symptoms persist or worsen, call your physician. With COVID-19, we had an entire new language to describe what we’ve always done. The powers that be used the fact that the two viruses are different to dismiss the colloquial use of the word flu and instill fear of the unknown. When convenient, they would reference influenza as a comparison (e.g., “COVID is 10X more lethal than the flu”) with absolutely no rigorous scientific evidence to support that statement, because they changed how they count cases and deaths specifically for COVID. COVID statistics cannot be compared to influenza statistics because they are not calculated the same way.
Then we have the question of what it means to be sick, something we all thought we understood in 2019. It doesn’t take a physician or a molecular biologist to know that a positive RT-PCR test is not the same as an illness, but it wasn’t long before the two were equated and we started talking about asymptomatic cases. What is an asymptomatic illness? That’s an oxymoron. What we were really detecting was possible exposure to the virus, because the RT-PCR test can detect minute quantities of RNA that are far below what is needed to cause an infection. If everyone who tested positive was followed up with an antigen and/or antibody test, we could have had a possible handle on who was actually infected, and what viral load truly corresponded to a high risk of symptomatic illness and transmission, but only cursory attempts to address these questions were made, in studies in which a handful of previously collected samples were analyzed attempting to correlate symptoms with the cycle threshold numbers. Overnight, the definitions of an illness, a case and cause of death were changed and you were not allowed to question it or point out the obvious flaws in the methodology.
It’s a NOVEL virus, we were told. That’s why we don’t know what it’s going to do. Actually, it’s not that novel, which by the way is the most overused word in the scientific lexicon. Scientists use “novel” because we are encouraged to do so. When you submit a grant to the NIH, one of the major categories on which you are scored is “Innovation” and demonstrating that some aspect of what you are doing is somehow new and exciting is essential to obtain funding, encouraging scientists to play up the “novel” aspects of their project. Almost every grant I have ever reviewed is using a “novel” technology, working on a “novel” pathway, or describing a “novel” drug. That overused bit of science jargon was used to shut anyone up who questioned why we were embracing unprecedented government overreach, despite the facts that the constellation of symptoms associated with COVID-19 were common to a multitude of other viruses, and that the virus itself shares considerable sequence homology to its predecessor, SARSCoV1. We did, in fact, know quite a bit about SARSCoV2, and now we know even more. We would probably know more still, if the microphone hadn’t been handed to those doing epidemiological models instead of empirical science.
The vaccines and their cult-like worshippers brought another bout of semantic nonsense. For whatever reason, both those who worshipped at the altar of Moderna and those who were opposed to the vaccine began to focus on the meaning of the word itself, leading the public health officials to keep redefining “vaccine”. The word has its origins in the first smallpox vaccine, in which the cowpox virus (which was called vaccina) was injected into humans to prevent contraction of smallpox. A common feature of all vaccines is that they induce antibody production by your immune system, such that your body can recognize and fight off the virus should you be exposed at a later date. Sometimes inoculation with a virus, viral antigen, or viral nucleic acid can result in neutralizing antibodies that block viral entry into your cells thus preventing infection. Other times, the main result is the priming of the immune system to recognize and combat infected cells if an infection occurs. Many achieve both outcomes. The word vaccine describes the process, not the outcome. The original goal of any vaccine was to keep you from becoming sick and dying from a serious infection. For a disease like smallpox, most individuals would find it worth the risk; with COVID-19, many would not. But it doesn’t matter what you call it or how you define a vaccine. You can call it a preventative therapy and they can still call it a vaccine, but the important point is that the medical establishment should be transparent about efficacy and safety for each individual and it should remain a personal choice.
The semantic argument surrounding the word vaccine is not the only term being abused by the public health officials to shut down dissent. Many people, particularly devout Christians, were opposed to the vaccine because of the use of human embryonic kidney (HEK293) cells in the preparation of, and studies characterizing, most of the vaccines. What was the response of the scientific community? A pedantic and condescending assurance that, “no, there aren’t aborted fetuses in the vaccine”. Technically, this is true, but the people dishing out this missive disingenuously ignore the actual concerns of a large swath of the general public. HEK293 cells are a commonly used cell line-so common that it would be hard to find any drug that didn’t have experiments using those cells somewhere in the discovery process. The cells were cultured from a female fetus, immortalized by expressing an adenoviral vector, and a single infected cell line (the 293rd attempt) was cloned by a scientist in the Netherlands in 1973. The claim is that it is unknown whether they were originally cultured from an aborted fetus or a miscarriage, which is possible given record-keeping at that time. All of the HEK293 cell lines used by scientists around the world are cultures of this original clonal cell line. The cells themselves were used to test the mRNA vaccines and to produce significant amounts of the Adenovirus containing Spike DNA used in the J and J vaccines. For some people, the uncertainty as to whether the cells came from an aborted fetus or a miscarriage is sufficient to warrant avoiding anything that relied on them. Condescendingly explaining aborted fetuses are not IN the vaccines belittles their moral objections. To me, there is an enormous difference between harvesting aborted fetuses for human cell culture and using cells derived from a single fetus in 1973, but it is not my place to force that position on someone else. It is both dishonest and disrespectful to downplay the thing to which people object, i.e., the use of fetal cells for research, by pretending their concern is the presence of aborted tissue in the vaccine.
Another bit of wordplay being used by the powers that be is the dismissal of the concerns some of these same people have that the vaccine would “alter their DNA”. In general, mRNA is not very stable and should be degraded within days to weeks of administering the vaccine. Even studies that have suggested it can still be detected months after the vaccine do not reveal a significant amount of it, or demonstrate it is actively being translated. The Adenoviral vector used in the J and J vaccine is designed not to integrate into the host chromosomes which would constitute “altering your DNA” if it did. That’s why the public health officials dismiss this fear as silly. They focus on the physical definition of “altering DNA”, as if they were grading a molecular biology exam, but this explanation ignores the moral objection some have to these technologies. DNA and RNA exist to encode proteins. These vaccines involve the injection of a synthetic piece of DNA or RNA into your body such that your cells express the protein encoded in those sequences. You are altering the proteins expressed on the surface of your cells, albeit transiently. If you are a devout believer in God, I would think that the difference between physically altering the genetic material encoding your cell’s proteins, and altering the proteins expressed by your cells by adding in a foreign gene, is not a game-changer. The two are completely different from a molecular biological standpoint, but may not be from a spiritual standpoint. It is disingenuous to focus on the nuts and bolts of DNA alteration so as to dismiss someone’s moral objection to a medical treatment. It is one thing for a physician to explain the difference, and make sure the patient has sufficient information to decide how he or she feels about the process, but it is highly disrespectful to dismiss the concern outright simply because the phrase “alters your DNA” is not a scientifically accurate description of what occurs.
There is more of this semantic wordplay going on in the medical community. The MSIC is usually quite careful to maintain at least one thread of scientific truth, but they often spin quite a web of lies with that thread. It’s important to know how to untangle it so you can make informed decisions for your own health and comfort level.
I like the phrase "...this urge to condescend turned authoritarian." It describes so well this character flaw in the highly trained, highly intelligent but also arrogant class of pundits, journalists, doctors and scientists -- and maybe even in people generally?
I also appreciate "COVID statistics cannot be compared to influenza statistics because they are not calculated the same way." This clear statement needs to be repeated all over the place. If we'd all heard and internalized this at the start of the pandemic, it would have transformed our insane fear of Covid 19 into something we could reasonably manage.