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.
Michael Esfeld & Cristian Lopez: Restoring Science and the Rule of Law. Cham: Palgrave-macmillan/Springer. Palgrave Studies in Austrian Economics. 216 Seiten; CHF 142,00, eBook 114,00 CHF; ISBN 978-3-031-71185-5
Michael Esfeld is professor of science studies and the history of science with Lausanne University and the Swiss Technical University (EPFL) at Lausanne in Switzerland. He gained some fame, when he criticized the president of the time-honored academy Leopoldina, after it had produced a consensus statement backing the German government’s corona regime. He thought this was scientific bogus, and said so publicly.
I have met him at various occasions, interviewed him and had some very fruitful discussions with him. Otherwise, I have no conflict of interest. His postdoc Cristian Lopez works with him in Lausanne. Together they have authored this thought-provoking book, which sends the reader on a roller-coaster ride.
On roller coasters, you suddenly plunge into the depths and think you are going to hit the ground before a sharp curve takes you back up. Then you feel the sharp wind, look down anxiously, until you finally end up through several curves, mountains and valleys where you knew you had to end up from the beginning. Only now you are richer by your experience. Reading this book is a bit like that. Its message can be summarized briefly, and the rollercoaster ride is ultimately its argumentative development over several stages.
The message is this:
Since the Enlightenment, science, especially natural science, has become a motor of liberation. At the same time, it has contributed to the replacement of absolutist political structures by republican-democratic ones, and thus the rule of law has been established. This is not to be confused with the political rule of a state. But now this very success of science has turned to the fact that, on the one hand, the state has become more and more powerful and now demands a mediator, regulator and guide. Science must now serve this purpose. On the other hand, science, especially in the public perception, has become so entrenched that it has degenerated into scientism, into a belief in science. This threatens both concerns of the Enlightenment, namely, the liberation of man from the constraints of nature through good science and a liberal political structure. For the political structures have crippled themselves into a welfare state that exercises more and more domination and restricts more and more freedom. To justify this, it calls a warped science into the arena of political struggles to fight for it. Scientific scientism and political dirigisme thus go hand in hand. For reason and freedom fall by the wayside in both domains. And where reason is no longer the measure of research and action, ideologies take hold. Then a pseudoscience is used to justify a political agenda. Both support each other, and the whole thing ends in the forced beneficence of the modern welfare state. What is needed, therefore, is a new, proper Enlightenment that breaks open the narrowing of the first Enlightenment, removes the crippling of political structures, and thus liberates both science and society and, with it, economic forces.
This can be achieved by limiting science to its core competence. This is exclusively committed to the objective description of reality through perpetual critical discourse and critique of positive findings. It cannot and must not be used to justify political narratives because that contradicts its essence. After all, science never has a final answer, but only provisionally valid ones. Science by consensus, as it is increasingly being claimed in various subject areas, is always a self-contradiction. If science is left free from political paternalism, then science provides very useful insights, the utilization of which is then determined in a free society by free citizens who know how to use their own minds and are engaged in free discourse and exchange of goods. Furthermore, it is important to limit the community again to what it was intended for by the Enlightenment: as an institution that, through the rule of law, defines above all defensive rights. These are negative rights, in the face of an intrusive state and greedy neighbors. In such a view, positive rights, on the other hand, have little or nothing to do with it. Positive rights are those that the state takes upon itself to regulate coexistence beyond what is necessary, e.g. the right to collect taxes to finance state tasks and to redistribute wealth. Ultimately, the model proposed by Esfeld and Lopez amounts to an anarchistic solution to the Hobbesian dilemma.
Our new representative survey in Germany has recently been published [1]. It shows that people who have had at least one Covid-19 ‘vaccination’ are sicker, have Covid-19 infections and muscle and joint problems more often than people who have not had a ‘vaccination’. The news is piling up and showing that these interventions are dangerous. The high water mark, above which a safety signal should have been triggered, was crossed long ago. Compared to other vaccinations or interventions that have been withdrawn from the market, this ‘vaccination’ is associated with at least five times as many deaths [2].
Our survey was recently published by ‘Medical Research Archives’, the official organ of the European Society of Medicine, of which I am a member. You can download the PDF directly here. As we have done before [3], we used a professional panel provided by the company Debaro GmbH. Approximately 20,000 people participate in such a panel, and whenever a new survey is conducted, they are contacted and the company then collects as many responses as needed to reach a number that can be assumed to be representative based on sampling characteristics such as age, gender and socio-economic status.
For quite some time now, I have been investigating a phenomenon that I find very curious: the improvement rates of patients in clinical trials who are in the treatment groups and those who are in the placebo groups are highly correlated, regardless of the disease and treatment. The correlation is somewhere between r =.70 and r =.78. A typical correlation plot, which we published years ago in an initial meta-analysis, looks like this:
‘God became man so that we might be deified’ [1, PG 36, 265], says the church father Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 325–390 AD) in his first Christmas address, which he gave as Bishop of Constantinople in 380. This was not a one-off observation. In his famous theological speech, he says essentially the same thing: ‘… until he made me God by virtue of his incarnation’ [2, 4, 14, 12f.].
Gregory of Nazianzus was one of the great Greek Fathers of the consolidation period of Christian theology, venerably titled ‘Theologos – the Theologian’ by the Orthodox Church. He thus conveys one of the essential theological insights of the Christian tradition: the goal of the entire history of salvation, which begins with the birth of Jesus, is the deification of man. In other words, we are called upon to let ourselves be deified. For that is what one could call the ‘redemptive impulse’ of Christ and Christian tradition.
What exactly does that mean? Basically, this has often and repeatedly been said since the words of the historical Jesus, but rarely understood. Because it is essentially about a transformation from within, in the depths of the soul or consciousness. Because that is exactly where the son is born. The medieval scholar and mystic Meister Eckhart emphasised this again and again. There, in the depths of the soul, God gives birth to his son, just as he gives birth to him in himself:
Insight into larger contexts, also known as truth, freedom and peace are interrelated. In the Gospel of John, it sounds like this: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). War and conflict arise, among other things, from the fact that someone can only take a certain perspective and cannot see and accept that of the other person. To see the truth, you have to have a broad view. If you don’t, you run the risk of slipping into the dichotomy of ‘either/or’, ‘me or you’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. And the result is war.
We have seen a lot of this ‘culture of war’ in recent years. Currently, politically in the Ukraine crisis. I have just recently written a text about peace in times of war for the MWGFD website. In it, I take the beatification of Max Josef Metzger in the Freiburg Minster on 17 November 2024 as an opportunity to point out the danger of the current warmongering. Metzger was a pacifist and was executed by the Nazis for treason because of his pacifism. At the moment, no one is punished by death for treason in Germany. But many who do not go along with the warmongering are virtually and socially assassinated.