Category: Unsettled Science

Safe and Effective®

>=A major new study from Stanford Medicine, published in Science Translational Medicine, offers a fundamentally new explanation for rare cases of mRNA vaccine–associated myocarditis. Rather than simply showing that cardiac injury occurs, the researchers identify a specific immune signaling mechanism that can trigger heart cells to damage themselves from within.

Crucially, the authors describe this mechanism as a potential class effect of mRNA technology, raising important design considerations not only for current COVID vaccines, but also for future mRNA vaccines and cancer therapies.

The Sound Of Settled Science

The CDC has updated its “Autism and vaccines” page.

Pursuant to the Data Quality Act (DQA), which requires federal agencies to ensure the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information they disseminate to the public, this webpage has been updated because the statement “Vaccines do not cause autism” is not an evidence-based claim. Scientific studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines contribute to the development of autism. However, this statement has historically been disseminated by the CDC and other federal health agencies within HHS to prevent vaccine hesitancy.

HHS has launched a comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism, including investigations on plausible biologic mechanisms and potential causal links. This webpage will be updated with gold-standard science that results from the HHS comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism as required by the DQA.

I expect we’ll be hearing lots about this.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Strange glassy blobs strewn across the Australian desert are evidence of an ancient meteorite impact that scientists hadn’t noticed until now. […]

“They formed when an asteroid slammed into Earth, melting surface rock and scattering debris for thousands of kilometres. These tiny pieces of glass are like little time capsules from deep in our planet’s history.

“What makes the discovery even more intriguing is that, although the impact must have been immense, scientists are yet to locate the crater.”

Younger Dryas, call your office.

What Would We Do Without Peer Review?

Dear Dr. Kuttner:

I am writing in response to your invitation to review the manuscript titled “Large circular dichroism in the total photoemission yield of free chiral nanoparticles created by a pure electric dipole effect” submitted for publication in Nature Communications.

Although the topic is within my field of expertise and I would normally welcome the opportunity to contribute to peer review, I must decline. Furthermore, I have decided not to engage with journals belonging to the Nature group in any professional capacity in the future because the group has adopted policies and practices that are incompatible with the mission of a scientific publisher.

Scientific publishers play a key role in the production of knowledge — they are a pillar of what Jonathan Rauch has termed the “the Constitution of Knowledge” (Rauch, 2025). The role of the publisher is to be an epistemic funnel: it accepts claims to truth at one end, but permits only those that withstand organized scrutiny to emerge from the other, a function traditionally performed by a rigorous peer-review and editorial process. This process should be guided by scientific rigor and a commitment to finding objective truth.

Unfortunately, the Nature group has abandoned its mission in favor of advancing a social justice agenda. The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process. The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.

The Science Is Settled?

I’ve always been skeptical of the disease model of addiction, and the treatment industry that flows from that theory. Disagreements of a fundamental nature in the scientific community on a host of issues are remarkably common, contrary to what the mainstream media would like you to think.

Smith was steadfast in her belief that her actions were volitional from the start. Her drug use and crimes were not the products of an immoral character or a faulty brain incapable of change, but rather of an environment where heroin was accessible and desirable. This outlook determined her experiences in prison and beyond, ultimately leading her to dedicate her life to challenging predominant medical models of addiction with her research. Today, she is an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

 

The Sound Of Silenced Science

ADHD – the Truth Goes Down the Memory Hole

This is in my view one of the great scandals of our age. We have turned away in horror from the chastisement of naughty children, to such an extent that in some European countries it is a crime to smack a child. Yet we drug children, often at very young ages and in increasing numbers, with amphetamines whose use is in general sternly banned by law. If smacking a defenceless child is wrong, then surely drugging a defenceless child is just as wrong. And yet conventional wisdom, which decides these things, regards the smack as an outrage, and the drug as normal and right. It is in these anomalies that we find out what is really wrong with our world.

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