A Safe Bet: Politicized Consensus "Science" Is Wrong

Today has been a good day for the incipient unraveling of a couple of major categories of the fake “consensus” orthodox science that have plagued us for the past few years.

One such category is transgenderism, where activists seek the provision of “gender affirming care” to any young person claiming to suffer from “gender dysphoria.” This morning the Supreme Court heard oral argument in a case called United States v. Skrmetti, where the Court is asked to rule that Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for teens claiming to be “transgender” violates their constitutional rights. A second such category is the Coronavirus pandemic, including its origins and what policies were appropriate to address it. On that subject, also today, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued its rather damning Report titled “The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward.”

The subjects of teenagers claiming to be “transgender,” and of the origins and appropriate policy responses to the Coronavirus pandemic, have been two areas where loud claques of activists, claiming the mantle of “science,” have worked overtime to impose their agendas and to silence critics, by force if necessary. Of course, they have sought the support of a friendly government; and, needless to say, the Biden Administration has been all in on the wrong side of both of these subjects. The Biden-led government has, among many other things, provided vast funding to the agencies promulgating the orthodox positions, issued regulations to hamstring any opposition, used its megaphone to characterize dissenters as crazy or “fringe,” organized a censorship complex to silence critics, and taken the side of the orthodoxy in various court cases.

But as luck would have it, none of this is working. The fundamental problem is that the “consensus” orthodox science lacks evidentiary support. It would be a safe bet in just about any case to wager that consensus orthodox science is wrong. Science that doesn’t take account of all available evidence and of reasonable criticisms has almost no chance of being right. Someday, perhaps those lessons will be learned in the biggest arena of all for consensus orthodox science, that of energy and “climate change.”

Transgenderism: United States v. Skrmetti

In 2023 Tennessee banned various gender treatments for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy. A group of Tennessee teens challenged the ban (one of them is only 12 years old). The District Court initially granted a preliminary injunction for the plaintiffs, preventing enforcement of Tennessee’s ban pending trial on the merits; but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the preliminary injunction in a 2-1 ruling. Despite the pre-discovery state of the case, the Biden Administration sought Supreme Court review.

An op-ed in the Wall Sreet Journal on Monday by a guy named Steve Marshall outlines the government’s position and the problems with it. (Marshall is Attorney General of Alabama, and involved in a parallel case.) As Marshall outlines the situation, the government’s position is that the case is ripe for consideration pre-discovery because the relevant “facts” are already known. The linchpin of those “facts” is that the treatments in question are “medically necessary,” which we allegedly know because the relevant professional organization, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has issued Standards of Care so stating.

They [the government’s lawyers] rely on the so-called Standards of Care from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH, to assure the justices that “overwhelming evidence establishes” the wisdom of medically “transitioning” minors diagnosed with “gender dysphoria”—stress caused by the feeling of being the wrong sex—through hormones and surgery.

But in the Alabama case, Marshall has had discovery, which has enabled him to put together a demonstration that the WPATH Standards were based on the intentional ignoring of adverse evidence. The WPATH advocates ignored adverse evidence in order to engineer their Standards to be a more effective litigation weapon for their position. Excerpt:

One way to make the guidelines a more effective litigation weapon was by not looking for evidence. Some authors of the WPATH standards reported that they avoided conducting systematic evidence reviews of the safety and efficacy of transition treatments because of “concerns, echoed by the social justice lawyers we spoke with,” that “evidence-based review reveals little or no evidence and puts us in an untenable position in terms of affecting policy or winning lawsuits.” In other words, to get courts to defer to “evidence-based” guidelines, WPATH obscured the lack of evidence supporting them.

As time passes, the evidence is accumulating of the harmful and permanent effects of what is called “gender affirming care” on the minors on which it is practiced. Because of the procedural status of the case, only a limited amount of such evidence is getting presented to the Supreme Court. But see, for example, this amicus brief from something called Partners for Ethical Care, which collects some evidence from Europe.

Reports from today’s argument indicate that the Supreme Court is likely to affirm and send the case back to the trial court for further proceedings. In that forum, there is likely to be considerable discovery about the true state of the evidence.

Coronavirus origins and responses

The House Select Committee Report is very lengthy, and has no useful introduction or executive summary. However, it is chock full of information eviscerating the fake consensus science that has been the hallmark of the pandemic and response since the outset. A few key examples follow:

Origin of the virus:

(From page 1) Four years after the onset of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis. Since the Select Subcommittee commenced its work in February 2023, more and more senior intelligence officials, politicians, science editors, and scientists increasingly have endorsed the hypothesis that COVID-191 emerged as the result of a laboratory or research related accident.

And a particularly critical piece of evidence:

Mr. Wade astutely noted that “SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871 known members of its viral family, so it cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family.”

Six foot social distancing rule — there was a complete lack of evidence to support it:

(From page 198-99) FINDING: There Was No Quantitative Scientific Support for Six Feet of Social Distancing. Six feet of social distancing was a phrase and rule known by every single American during the pandemic. Amazingly, social distancing guidance was not revised until August 2022. Even though it was CDC guidance and not a mandate, it was forcefully implemented by state and local governments and caused lots of strife amongst Americans.766 Social distancing requirements were largely responsible for closing businesses, heightening a sense in loss of community, and were part of the reasoning schools could not reopen for so long.

Masking — again, there was never any scientific basis to support it:

(From page 204) Ultimately, a systematic review carried out by Cochrane Collaboration—one of the most highly regarded methodologies in evidence-based healthcare—found that the pooled randomized control trials they analyzed “did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks” and that “[t]here were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.”782 These results appear to directly contradict public health agencies’ and local governments’ support for broadly requiring masking throughout much of the pandemic.

There is lots and lots of useful information here on everything from government misinformation, to the vaccines, to natural immunity, and much more — essentially all of it unfavorable to the bureaucratic response and to consensus orthodox science. Will they ever learn? Unlikely. That’s why empowered bureaucrats are such a negative force.