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.
I have already said goodbye to Germany once under this title. That was in 2005, in my farewell lecture from Freiburg. At that time, I went to England because German university legislation made it impossible for me to continue financing my position as a non-scheduled professor at the University Hospital in Freiburg with my third-party funds, which I possessed sufficiently. I found England very congenial. The colleagues were friendly and collegial. There was almost a conspiratorial community spirit. I soon realized why, and that’s what drove me out of England 5 years later: The system there is divided into academics – those who add value by teaching and researching and thus earning the money that keeps the university going – and administrators and managers – who tell academics what to do. German academics have it better in that regard. At least in theory, they are free in their research and teaching. In addition, the English system is extremely hierarchical and reflects the English class society: There are the universities at the top, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Queen Mary, University College, the excellent universities of the Russell Group, and a host in the back ranks. The top universities take in just under 50% of their students, mainly the best students from the 7% or so English private schools (they are not allowed to take in more of these, otherwise they lose their grants from the state; I have reflected on these connections elsewhere [1, 2]). The pupils of these private schools are, with very few exceptions, those from rich homes. This is because the tuition for such schools costs at least a year’s salary of an average wage earner. (When I was in Northampton, the average annual income in the area was £27,000; the local private school would have cost £25,000 a year, and it was still one of the cheapest in the country). In this way, the English class system distills upward. In the country’s good universities, the upper classes meet. That’s how the social system is fixed.
When I understood this at that time, I decided, if there was an opportunity, to return to Germany, where I experienced a very egalitarian university system and a permeable education system, the quality of which did not depend on the income of the parents. As a child of simple parents with a farming background and no tutoring from home, I was able to graduate from a good school and study without paying fees. To this system, I wanted to give back something of what I once received myself.
I have long thought that we are living in times of upheaval that can only be compared to the great plague epidemics of the 14th century, roughly from 1345 to 1349. At that time, the orderly world of the High Middle Ages collapsed. William of Ockham (Illustration: portrait sketch of William Ockham, probably one of the first portraits of a philosopher, from an Oxford manuscript [1]) dismantled with his critique the edifice of High Scholasticism as it had been built up by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, or Bonaventure and others (I have presented this in somewhat more detail in my little introductory textbook [2]).
In brief: Thomas Aquinas, in particular, had developed a very rational worldview, based on Aristotle, in which Christian theology was well embedded. From Ockham’s point of view – who was a Franciscan and wanted to promote Franciscan piety – it had a decisive disadvantage: it distanced the soul from a direct contact with God. For in the Thomasian-Aristotelian view there was no direct knowledge of God, only an indirect one, and all that could be learned about the world was mediated through abstractions. The price of the medieval cosmos and its security was thus an insertion of the individual into a system of hierarchies and dependencies, politically as well as philosophically and theologically. It was mainly Franciscan scholars who revolted against this, and among them Ockham was the most profiled, eloquent and influential (a good detailed exposition of all these issues at [3]). For they wanted one thing above all: to secure direct access of the soul to God, conceptually-theologically and practically.
I’ve referred to the study by Rockenfeller and colleagues before. It is now officially published in Royal Society Open Science [1]. It produces a careful estimate of mortality trends in Germany for each age cohort, and from this can calculate what the presumed excess mortality was during the corona years. In the first corona year, 2020, the result is undermortality of about 18,500 people. That’s how many fewer died in the evil Corona year than expected, without vaccination. That’s a finding that gives the lie to all the scaremongering at this time.
Then, as we all know, the “corona vaccinations” came to the “rescue”, which were, after all, supposed to prevent so many people from dying. What happened in 2021 and 2022? In 2021, there was a slight excess mortality of just under 7,000 people, and in 2022, there was an excess mortality of about 41,000 people.
If one looks at a longer period from 2016 to 2020, then one recognizes that in the years before a clear under-mortality is to be registered, which is compensated just in the years 2021/2022. This can also be seen in the cohorts: the excess mortality in 2021/2022 is mainly due to higher mortality among the elderly and compares well with the mortality waves of earlier influenza years.
I have pointed to data and publications on Covid-19 “vaccinations” and rising death rates in several blog posts (most recently here and here). At the same time, I observe how the official narrative propagated by medical associations, the press, and the government simply ignores this fact. The medical association “Hippocratic Oath“, of which I am a member of the board of directors, points out in various publications the holes in this official narrative. Physicians who also carry concerns can join together here.
Now a preprint has made an impact. (A preprint is a paper that is available on servers in a version to be submitted, but has not yet officially gone through the peer-review system and therefore has not yet been published in a scientific journal). It is a systematic review, that is, an overview paper, of all studies in the scientific literature that have investigated by autopsy the causal relationship of Covid-19 “vaccination” and deaths [1].
Before I say a few things about the reception and furor, here’s a synopsis:
The work, the responsibility of a group of American university-based physicians, examined all scientific publications that attempted to determine whether or not the death was causally related to the “vaccination” based on autopsy findings of deaths following Covid-19 “vaccinations.” There was one such review relatively early, toward the end of 2021 [2]. At that time, there were 17 studies. Now, the authors Hulscher and others included 44 studies. The criterion was: all autopsy or necropsy studies (autopsy: deaths and whole corpses; necropsy: tissues from dead bodies) of deaths that occurred after Covid-19 “vaccination” and were autopsied.
A well-known story of the Muslim sage Nasreddin Hodsha reports Nasreddin standing under a lamp at night, searching frantically for something. A passer-by asks him: “Nasreddin, what are you looking for?” Nasreddin answers: “I am looking for my house keys.” “Did you lose them here?” “Almost certainly not, but I am looking here, because this is where the light is.”
It is a common phenomenon: We are looking for something not where it might be found in all likelihood, but where it is most convenient to look for. Something similar, it appears to me, happened and is happening at the Science of Consciousness (TSC) Conferences. The most recent of them was convened from May 22nd to 27th 2023 in Taormina, Sicily (see https://tsc2023-taormina.it/ for a full program and book of abstracts), and I had the privilege to attend it on behalf of the SMN in a beautiful surrounding.