Experts say...
Researchers accused of manipulating data images with copy-and-paste.
arstechnica.com
To be fair to
@booo, It is clear that the word "expert" is very often misused. If anything, the pandemic made it clear to me, that experts in positions of power are often more driven by political and conflicts of interest than their commitment to upholding scientific truth. Its quite obvious to those who have followed experts' publications like
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 which are well cited, and have still not been retracted despite a clear scientific case for doing so, and despite the conflicts of interest of those involved.
Its unbelievable that those at the apex of the scientific establishment continue to drive certain narratives while the wider scientific community is generally quiet just because it is not politically tenable to question these publications. Those who question them are often unheard, and often face ad-hominem attacks from vested interests. The truth emerges over years, sometimes decades.
It is still a consensus view of most "experts" that COVID vaccines worked as intended and that none of the rising heart attacks among the young could possibly be due to the vaccines or due to COVID exposure itself. Feel free to see the media coverage and the expert statements vaguely advising the young to exercise under supervision/guidance/in moderation or correct their lifestyles to avoid heart-attacks.
Oh and nobody questions our Indian "expert" doctors when they repeatedly diagnose large scale local flare-ups of of illness as Dengue / Chikungunya despite the known different epidemiology of their spread, and widespread prevalence suggesting that these are most likely driven by strains of SARS-COV-2 doing the rounds. This dumbness is accompanied by zero public transparency and no questioning of the absence of COVID testing and genomic sequencing. We as a nation would rather be like ostritches, and pretend that mosquito populations now grow and infect human populations like airborne virus vector driven diseases of pre-2020. If the next pandemic comes, I expect us to be as badly prepared, if not worse because of the absence of multidisciplinary skills in public health decision making bodies.
And yet, it is already known that the virus infests multiple organs that have ACE-2 receptors, including the brain, heart, and testicles if I read the scientific papers right and my memory serves me right. The virus also impairs the human immune system through mechanisms too complex for me to comprehend.
It is not generally the case, but there are times and instances when human civilization is not too much better than the times when Galileo discovered that the earth revolved around the Sun, and nobody believed it because of interests of the powers that be, and the conventional wisdom (groupthink).
