Thoughts on Science, Medicine And Sundry Things
This is the private homepage of Prof. Dr. Dr. Harald Walach →.
A complete overview of my publications can be found here →. One focus of content is my small Methodology for Beginners →, which now has 25 chapters.
In my personal blog, I chat about my everyday scientific life and share some thoughts on what I see and experience.
During the COVID period, I co-authored two papers with colleagues, both of which were published in succession and retracted in close sequence; known as “retractions” in scientific parlance. One was a risk-benefit analysis of the COVID-19 “vaccines,” and the other was our study on children’s masks. Both have been republished [1-4].
“RKI files” is what I call the RKI documents released by Mr Schreyer and his multipolar magazine. These are mainly minutes of meetings about the events that led to the declaration of a national state of emergency with all its consequences: curfews, restaurant, theatre, sports club and other closures, popularly known as “measures”. They are available in their entirety and have already been commented on in detail by Multipolarmagazin and others (RKI Protocols 1 and RKI Protocols 2). I would like to point out a few important details and, in the second part of this article, discuss a study that I helped with a little and which is now available on the Zenodo preprint server [1]. It shows that Just 13.5% of all people who have ever tested PCR-positive for SARS-CoV-2 were actually infected or had an immune response, detectable by IgG antibodies. The RKI knew this very early on, or could have known it. So they could have stopped the testing mania and the measures very soon if they had wanted to. The whole thing runs like a train on two tracks. Both tracks are called “political will”. And the train is not travelling in the direction of “caring for citizens”. I don’t know where it’s going. But I do know that none of this had anything to do with care and diligence, but at best with political power.
Our field study in Africa has been published
Background story
I’ve always found off-the-wall therapies interesting because, historically, scientific innovations and new findings have very often come from the fringes of the mainstream. Not always, but very often. That’s why I became interested in homeopathy when friends and colleagues dragged me to Dr Köhler’s legendary homeopathy lectures during my student days. At the time I thought: This is so crazy, if it’s true, then it’s revolutionary. As a result, I became scientifically involved with homeopathy. I did some drug trials and clinical research and then, after about 10 years of intensive research, 3 books [1-3], a series of peer-reviewed papers [4-10], extensive work on placebo effects [11-15], I realized: Yes, something is happening that is beyond random fluctuations, but that we do not understand in any way and certainly cannot explain with the conventional causal models of science [16]. I have tried to make this tangible with the scientific models currently available, but I still don’t know whether that actually leads anywhere [17].
While my hot homeopathic research period was cooling down in the early 2000s, I was approached by Harry van der Zee, a Dutch homeopathic doctor. He wanted to replicate our headache study, but better than us. That study is one of the studies in the homeopathic database that found by far the worst effect for homeopathy [7, 10]. I invited Harry round. We spent a few days together and cooked up the supposedly unbeatable design. Harry went home, did a pilot study, which turned out to be what I predicted, not what he expected. And because there was no funding, nothing came of it in the end.
When I was young and read Orwell’s “1984” at school, what Orwell described was about 14 years in the future. An eternity for a schoolboy. Back then, we were all sure that the “Ministry of Truth” and the social structures described there would only occur under communism. No more could we imagine in 1970 that the Soviet Union could ever end and with it the threat of world communism. That’s how history works: it amazes you, and faster than you think, because things keep happening that you never thought possible.
Now the Ministry of Truth is on the horizon. Unthinkable just 10 years ago. Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that the new Medienstaatsvertrag (“Federal Media Treaty, a unified regulatory framework agreed upon by the federal states within Germany) already gives the state media authorities the right to criticize and ban published articles. There would be no pre-censorship, but there would be post-censorship. The EU Digital Services Act has been in force since February 17, 2024. It requires operators of digital services, i.e. web platforms, hosting organizations and social media, to independently monitor and remove “hate speech and disinformation”. Who decides what constitutes “hate speech and misinformation”? Good question. In case of doubt, apparently a commission set up by the government.
As always, France is again one step ahead. Macron already had a law against fake news passed in 2018 and recently added to it, as a colleague from France confirmed to me: anyone who advises against medical measures that are scientifically proven and generally recommended will be liable to prosecution and up to three years in prison. The law is apparently intended to combat sectarianism. However, it is easy to see that opposition to medical measures recommended by official government bodies, such as COVID “vaccinations”, are clearly covered. That’s why it’s called the Pfizer law in France.
Our commentary on the study by Buergin et al. is now published Sometimes you have to take detours to reach your destination. Ours now led to the Egyptian Heart Journal, which has just published our commentary on the study by Buergin and colleagues [1, 2]. I had previously complimented the study by Buergin and colleagues … Read more