Br. Ockham, Meet Covid-19
We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses.
— Aristotle, “Posterior Analytics”
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William of Ockham was born in Southwest England in about 1287. When he was about ten years old, he was “given” to the Franciscans, which is religious order founded by St. Francis of Assisi. The basic precept of the order is to live an ascetic life of poverty and of preaching repentance in order to imitate the life of Jesus.
In about 1310, William began his formal theological training. He never completed his training. Instead, in 1324, he was accused of teaching heresy, and he was ordered to appear in Avignon to answer the charges. The case did not proceed smoothly. The chief defense which developed was that it was Pope John XXII who was the heretic.
The dispute centered on property rights. William argued that in the Franciscan ideal, not only do the individual friars have no property of their own, but also the order itself owned nothing. In this ideal, the Franciscans are true “mendicants,” and anything donated to the order, such as a house or a piece of land always remained the property of the original owner. This means that if everyone lived by the Franciscan ideal, there would be no property rights at all.
This argument was a clear reproach to the Papacy, which at Avignon, was dripping in a wealth and splendor which it had never previously enjoyed. The Franciscan ideal implied quite clearly that the Avignon Popes were not living their lives in imitation of Christ.
Pope John XXII decided to settle the question of Apostolic poverty.
The Pope drew his inferences from Roman law, which postulated that “ownership” and “legitimate use” cannot be permanently separated. For example, borrowing a book is different from being granted permanent use of it with no obligation ever to return it. The Pope held that the latter scenario makes no sense, because there is no practical difference between having permanent use of the book and owning it.
Apparently a strong sense of foreboding intruded. Under the cover of the night of May 26, 1328, William and some of the other Franciscans fled Avignon and entered exile in Munich by way of Pisa. They came under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, who was in a political dispute with the Papacy. Then, on June 6, 1328, William was officially excommunicated for leaving Avignon without permission.
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While all of this controversy surrounded him, William wrote fairly extensively on theology, logic and natural philosophy, and politics. One of his most enduring thoughts is related to the nature of being, which was then a philosophical study called, “ontology.” It is very easy to get lost in pointless arguments over the meaning of words with even a few steps down this road. Suffice it to say that William advocated that simplicity in explanation is preferred.
Simplicity in this sense means that ontology should be reduced to the bare minimum number of fundamental categories. Isaac Newton elaborated on this in 1687, in his “Principia Mathematica,” which argues that Rule No. 1 of rational enquiry is:
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
The corollary to this principle is that if two or more hypotheses explain a phenomenon, the simplest is the preferred. For example, Galileo argued that Copernicus was right, that the mathematics provided a much simpler explanation of the relationship between the Sun and the Earth if the premise is that the Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than the scientific dogma that the Sun must by theological necessity revolve around the Earth.
Galileo, of course, was convicted and sentenced to prison, later commuted to house arrest, by the Inquisition for having spoken truth to power.
This corollary, which is sometimes called, “the principle of parsimony,” is commonly known as “Ockham’s Razor.” (Alt., “Occam’s Razor.”)
The framing in which medical students are taught this principle is that “When you hear hoof-beats, think of horses not zebras.” For example, a patient presenting with a cough may have the Bubonic Plague, but he more likely has a cold. This, however, is only a reminder that simpler diagnoses which explain multiple symptoms are more probably correct than a series of unconnected and rare conditions. The practitioner should, obviously, evaluate a presentation fully.
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I thought of Ockham’s Razor, when I read an interesting argument from Dr. Michael Yeadon. Although he is slandered in the corporate media as an “anti-vaccine activist,” and as a “hero of Covid conspiracy theorists,” Dr. Yeadon is a highly credentialed medical researcher, and was, in fact, the chief scientist of the allergy and respiratory research division of Pfizer.
Dr. Yeadon argues that SARS-CoV-2 does not exist (and that it never did).
He argues that there is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 ever existed. There was significant cheating with the genetic sequences, the PCR test is unreliable in detection of viruses and the protocols used were inconsistent, and contamination of samples with bacteria and fungi was ignored.
He also argues that it is suspicious that having been unable to prove a natural source, the government has now essentially conceded that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. This is suspicious, because the government has nearly the entirety of the media at its beck and call, and as such, can sell the public on any story.
It appears, therefore, that most likely the real story being sold is not the “lab leak” theory. Instead, this story has been propagated merely to maintain the original claim that there is/ was a novel coronavirus. Dr. Yeadon argues that the embarrassment to those who would/ should be held responsible for the “lab leak” is a small price to pay to perpetuate the public’s fear of that novel coronavirus.
Dr. Yeadon posits that one reason why this is the likely explanation for the government’s (apparent) concession is that the creation and release of an infectious pathogen is too unpredictable. On the one hand, it is something that might burn out quickly, and provide no benefit to the malefactors. On the other hand, it could turn out to be far more lethal than anticipated, which would outweigh its utility. As a result, releasing such a pathogen would be too risky.
Furthermore, he notes that the prevailing view is that the creation of an infectious pathogen is not technologically possible. Hence, even if a coterie of criminals desired to create (and release) an infectious pathogen, they probably couldn’t do it.
Dr. Yeadon is particularly persuaded by the data on “all-cause mortality.”
This premise has been prominent in the dissent over the past few years. The essential point is that while total deaths from all causes was static year-over-year from 2019 to 2020, total deaths spiked in 2021.
Two inferences are asserted thereon. First, because “Covid-19” did not result in an increase in deaths when it was supposedly wreaking havoc in 2020, the whole thing was a hoax. And, second, it was the mRNA products, not an infectious disease, which caused the spike in deaths in 2021.
This is a much more complicated claim than it appears. However, on first take, it does not appear to be true.
It appears that total deaths were relatively static from 2015 to 2019, and then spiked by almost nineteen percent in 2020, i.e., the Covid-19 year. Then, total deaths in 2021 were nearly static year-over-year compared to 2020.
Obviously, these are government numbers, and the government lies about everything, so maintaining a healthy skepticism is warranted. Notably, however, the reported increase in deaths does roughly correlate with the reported Covid-19 deaths.
The government reports that about 1.13 million people have died with Covid-19. This is almost exactly the same number of people who died from pneumonia in the designated time period. In addition, seventy-six percent of the people who died were older than sixty-five, which again is reflected almost exactly in the pneumonia death numbers. This percentage in the Covid-19 and pneumonia categories is lower than the ninety percent number of all deaths which are suffered by people who are over the age of sixty-five.
These numbers also warrant some skepticism. The fact is that medical providers were financially incentivized to find Covid-19 in their patients. Moreover, as noted, there is no legitimate test for “SARS-CoV-2,” so that even if it exists, it is not detectable by the methods used. Nevertheless, the numbers are the numbers, and when taken together, and at face value, they do tend to undermine Dr. Yeadon’s argument.
Dr. Yeadon does not ignore these numbers. He points out that:
(1) nearly all of the Covid-19 era deaths were actually due to comorbidities;
(2) antibiotic prescriptions fell in the United States by fifty percent in 2020;
(3) many older, frail people were mechanically ventilated, which is contraindicated for respiratory infections;
(4) toxic interventions such as remdesivir, midazolam, and morphine were also contraindicated but were liberally administered to people with respiratory infections; and
(5) the flu, which has symptoms nearly identical to the symptoms of “Covid-19,” essentially disappeared from humanity in 2020, so that it is likely that it was not “Covid-19,” with which people were dying, but the flu.
These are all serious points. These are all serious points which have for the most part, been ignored. These are all serious points which should be considered and fully examined. Until they are, it’s simply not rational to conclude that the deaths which the government reports are necessarily related to a novel coronavirus.
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If we are to be fact-based, if we are to be evidence-based, and if we are to be guided by science and the scientific method, we must be honest with our facts, we must have reliable and truthful evidence, and we must relentlessly question and test our hypotheses. We must be able to verify our results. If we cannot, then we will remain ignorant, and we would be just as well off relying on superstition as on the person in a lab coat who is paid to tell lies on television.
The cynical and calculated application of military psychological theory generated a society wide hysteria. This, in turn, lead to the wholesale suspension of civil rights, the destruction of the economy, and the compulsion of hundreds of millions of people into a medical experiment which was, and is, wholly lacking in evidence of either safety or efficacy. Meanwhile, millions of people have been killed and many millions more are emotionally miserable and financially distressed, and the richest few have increased their share of the nation’s wealth to levels beyond those of the Jazz Age.
Surely it’s worth asking whether all of this has an explanation as simple as that it was effected intentionally. Doesn’t that enquiry have at least as much scientific merit as speculating about someone in China, who ate an under-cooked pangolin, which had been bitten by a bat, which had been infected with a mutated virus, which was highly toxic to human beings, which was transmissible to pangolins, and which set off a global pandemic, which required everyone to wear a useless paper mask, and which only coincidentally turned out to be highly profitable?