A Member of the Jury, by Richard Hobby

Anybody who can give the following talk at Harvard University deserves top billing. Richard Hobby is the President of Greengage—a communication company.  He is also the Co-Founder of Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train, which presents ideas about movies and culture:  thosewholovemecantakethetrain.substack.com. Although he is SLL’s unofficial movie critic, his talk at Harvard challenges conventional wisdom about non cinematic issues. It has become both unpopular and risky to do so, especially at a place like Harvard.

If you’d like to communicate with Richard about this talk, movies, or anything else, his email is lecerclerouge@icloud.com.

A Member of the Jury

A talk given by Richard Hobby at Harvard University

Wednesday October 5, 2022
to graduate students in the course
ID 250: Ethical Basis of the Practice of Public Health

Thursday December 1, 2022
to graduate students in the course
GHP 293: Individual and Social Responsibility for Health

both taught by

Daniel Wikler, Ph.D.
Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Ethics and Population Health
Department of Global Health & Population
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

A Member of the Jury

“If thou hast eyes to see . . . “ —Othello Act 1 Scene 3

Thank you, Dan, for that nice introduction.

I lived in Cambridge for nine years and used to ride my three-speed bicycle from Coolidge Hill along the Charles into Harvard Square every day.

It is good to be back!

Well let us plunge right in!

My senior year at Oberlin I took a course in Epistemology with Professor Jim Bogan, who began the first class by holding a tomato in his hand and asking: how do you know this really is a tomato?

And I ask you today: how do any of us know if something is true or false?

I am going to focus on Sars Cov 2 and the vaccines a little later in this talk. First let me set the stage for that.

1. CO2 is a harmless trace gas and global warming is not a problem
2. HIV is a harmless retrovirus and does not cause AIDS
3. Sars Cov 2 is not dangerous but the vaccines are very dangerous

How did I arrive at these conclusions? We humans have only two methods for arriving at an opinion about anything:

1 Appeal to authority

Dr Jones, an expert in a given field, says X is the truth so we will believe that too. But Dr Smith, also an expert in this field, takes the opposite position. So why did we choose Jones in the first place?

Aristotle said appeal to authority was a logical fallacy. And he is still right 2500 years later.

Appeal to authority is no way to arrive at the truth. You might as well flip a coin.

2 Be—conceptually—all of the following:

a member of a jury
an impartial judge
a private detective
an investigative journalist
a scientist

What do these five people all have in common? Their goal is to discover the truth by looking at the actual evidence.

As a member of a jury you are not expected to be an expert in anything. Instead you listen to a witness for the prosecution and then you hear cross examination. And then the redirect. Then you listen to a witness for the defense. Then cross examination. Then redirect. Over and over and over and over and over again.

This is due process. Cross examination is great because it allows each side to challenge the experts and witnesses of the other side.

Using this method gives you a 90 percent chance or better of arriving at the truth.

If only the plaintiff or only the defendant is allowed to make its case we would all cry foul. And rightly so.

But that is exactly what has happened with the three issues I opened with. Actual science has been hijacked.

Dr. Richard Lindzen at MIT, one of the most respected climatologists in the world, stated that CO2 is a harmless trace gas and human activity has an insignificant effect on climate. He was condemned by colleagues and those in power and marginalized.

Dr. Peter Duesberg at UC Berkeley was considered one of the top virologists in the world and perhaps the top expert in retroviruses. He published his papers in prestigious journals. He was invited to speak at important professional events. He easily won grants. Then in 1987 he stated that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. Immediately he became persona non grata. He was excommunicated.

Robert Kennedy Jr does not have an official PhD in viruses but if you read what he has written you can easily see that he has carried out rigorous and in- depth study of viruses and vaccines. From that study he has concluded that the vaccines are very dangerous. Those in power have responded with smear, insult, condemnation, censorship.

Lindzen, Duesberg, and Kennedy have been exiled and anyone who speaks positively about them can expect the same treatment and can even be fired from his or her job.

Smear, insult, ridicule, scorn, intimidation, censorship, banishment, threat of being fired,—these are the tactics of people who are not interested in the truth.

Calling someone a denialist, a science denier, a misinformation spreader, a disinformation spreader, a conspiracy theorist: these are all nasty smears—preemptive strikes designed to prevent the person’s ideas from being heard.

Another smear is to call someone a contrarian. A contrarian takes a perverse pleasure in always saying the opposite of what is in vogue. This is stupid and boring. So calling someone a contrarian is a smear that serves two purposes: to prevent the person’s ideas from being heard and at the same time to insult the person as a trivial idiot.

Smear is an expression of raw power and has nothing to do with scientific inquiry.

But no real scientist would ever use any of these nasty tactics. Instead a real scientist would welcome Lindzen and Duesberg and Kennedy and say to them respectfully: tell us more—maybe we are wrong and you are right. Let’s work together to arrive at the truth. We want to get this right. Lives are at stake.

I have talked to many people who believe in global warming, HIV/AIDS, and most recently Covid and the vaccines. Most of these people resist even hearing the other side. If someone does agree to read an article that I recommend, almost always the person reads a paragraph or two and then runs off to a so- called fact-checker who “debunks” the ideas and often smears the author.

But this is an appeal to authority. And why is a debunker considered an authority in the first place? Who are these fact-checkers and debunkers? Are they really speaking ex cathedra?

Throughout history challenges to the orthodox have often been met with similar hostility. Here are a few examples of people with heretical views who challenged those in power:

The little boy in the fable who said the Emperor has no clothes when the sycophants said what the emperor wanted to hear

Galileo
Darwin
Alfred Wegener versus the orthodoxy on plate tectonics
Ignaz Semmelweis versus the medical establishment on hand washing
Richard Feynman challenging NASA with the space shuttle O ring
and now most recently
Richard Lindzen
Peter Duesberg
Robert Kennedy Jr

If you do not openly explore both sides of an issue and simply go along with the views of those in power, you live in a bubble, an echo chamber of ideas that are pre-determined and self-congratulatory. And anything coming in that goes against your beliefs is seen as a threat to be fended off by appeal to authority and often smear, insult, ridicule, intimidation, censorship.

In order to make this less abstract I am now going to read from an article in Harpers by Celia Farber: “Out of Control: AIDS and the Corruption of Medical Science.”

In 1987, Duesberg published a paper in the journal Cancer Research entitled “Retroviruses as Carcinogens and Pathogens: Expectations and Reality.” He was, at the time, at the top of the field of retrovirology, having mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses and defined the first cancer gene in the 1970s. . . . In this paper, which in the words of his scientific biographer, Harvey Bialy, “sealed his scientific fate for a dozen years,” Duesberg argued that retroviruses don’t cause cancer and concluded by detailing how and why the retrovirus HIV cannot cause AIDS.

As AIDS grew in the 1980s into a global, multibillion-dollar juggernaut of diagnostics, drugs, and activist organizations, whose sole target in the fight against AIDS was HIV, condemning Duesberg became part of the moral crusade. Prior to that 1987 paper, Duesberg was one of a handful of the most highly funded and prized scientists in the country. Subsequently, his NIH funding was terminated and he has received not one single federal research dollar since his pre-1987 Outstanding Investigator Grant ran out. Duesberg lost his lab facilities and had to move twice within a few years to smaller labs on the Berkeley campus, where he spent much of his time writing futile research grant proposals asking to test his hypothesis that AIDS is a chemical syndrome, caused by accumulated toxins from heavy drug use. He lost his graduate students, who were warned that to emerge from his lab would blight their careers. He was denied and had to fight for routine pay increases by his employers at UC Berkeley, where he has tenure and still teaches. He was “disinvited” from scientific conferences, and colleagues even declared that they would refuse to attend any conference that included him. Duesberg also was banished from publishing in scientific journals that previously had welcomed his contributions, most theatrically by the editor of Nature, Sir John Maddox, who wrote a bizarre editorial declaring that Duesberg would be denied the standard scientific “right of reply” in response to personal attacks that were frequently published in that journal. Prior to 1987, Peter Duesberg never had a single grant proposal rejected by the NIH. Since 1991 he has written a total of twenty-five research proposals, every single one of which has been rejected. “They took him out, just took him right out,” says Richard Strohman, an emeritus professor of biology at UC Berkeley.

And what was it, exactly, that Peter Duesberg had done? He simply pointed out that no one had yet proven that HIV is capable of causing a single disease, much less the twenty-five diseases that are now part of the clinical definition of AIDS.

He pointed to a number of paradoxes regarding HIV and argued that far from being evidence that HIV is “mysterious” or “enigmatic,” these paradoxes were evidence that HIV is a passenger virus.

You can see why very few people are willing to come out publicly in support of Duesberg.

Let us now focus on Covid and the vaccines.

A doctor who employs my method of open inquiry will discover the following:

1 Sars Cov 2 has never been isolated. Various papers have been published claiming it has been isolated but upon close scrutiny this turns out not to be true.

2 Despite claims to the contrary, Koch’s postulates are still correct and do apply here. Without isolation and without carrying out all four of Koch’s postulates there is no way to prove causality.

3 Actual genetic sequencing from a complete sample of virus was never done. Instead bits and pieces were assembled by computer to guess at the genetic structure of the virus.

4 The symptoms for Covid are much the same as those for the flu. By one counting the number of flu cases for the 2019/2020 flu season was 38,000,000 and the number of flu cases for the 2020/2021 flu season dropped to 1,822. The most likely explanation is that all these millions of people with flu were labeled Covid.

5 Most of the deaths attributed to Covid are with people who already have significant co-morbidities.

6 Kary Mullis, Nobel laureate and inventor of the PCR test, said that the test should not be used to test for Sars Cov 2

7 The PCR test has been run at very high cycle thresholds: 35, 40, and even 45 and at these levels the number of false positives is huge so the number of cases is meaningless.

8 The Covid vaccines are very dangerous. Reports from around the world attest to this on a daily basis. The article by Steve Kirsch that you were assigned—”Evidence of Harm”—gives you many but by no means all such reports. And the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System—VAERS—shows dramatic never-before-seen numbers of deaths and serous injury from the vaccines.

And so that doctor would easily conclude that Sars Cov 2 is not dangerous but the vaccines are very dangerous.

At this point the doctor has a major problem with serious ethical considerations.

Acting on his new-found understanding he should by the Hippocratic Oath do the ethical thing and recommend that none of his patients get the vaccines. But he knows that as soon as he does this he will most likely lose his license and be fired.

I put it to you that it is unethical for the powers that be to put doctors in this position.

Furthermore, pressuring—and even forcing—millions of people to be injected with a vaccine that was rushed into production without the usual safety protocols is unethical.

These people may not be literally in a concentration camp having medical experiments performed on them by Nazis. Nonetheless the Nuremberg Code with its ten points was created to prevent anyone from receiving any medical intervention without informed consent. But this is what has happened with the Covid vaccines.

This is a violation of medical ethics.

On August 20, 2022, doctors and other people from around the world traveled to Nuremberg to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of The Nuremberg Code and to protest forcing people to take the vaccines.

Claims are made that the vaccines are saving millions of lives and yet no actual study has been carried out comparing the death and injury rate of those who took the vaccines and those who have not.

However, based on the information coming in from around the world we now have overwhelming evidence that the death and injury rate for people who have taken the vaccines is off the charts.

Let me give you one example. Steve Kirsch, in that same article “Evidence of Harm,” says and I quote:

My neurologist has been in practice for 11 years. She has 20,000 patients in her multi-physician practice. In that time, she’s never had to report a single event to VAERS. With the COVID vaccines, she now needs to make 1,000 reports. If the vaccines are safe and effective and most all the symptoms are mild and short term, how do you explain this?

So in conclusion and in summary I offer you six points:

1 Remember this one principle: evidence only

2 Listen to both sides equally and completely openly as if you were
a member of a jury
an impartial judge
a private detective
an investigative journalist
a true scientist

Your chances of arriving at the truth by this method are excellent.

3 Appeal to authority is no better than flipping a coin and so it is not just lazy but it is unethical because you are taking action with only 50 percent certainty when you have at the ready a method for arriving at 90 percent.

4 Never resort to smear, insult, intimidation, censorship. This is nasty, vicious, dirty, and unethical.

Never call people denialists, science deniers, misinformation spreaders, disinformation spreaders, conspiracy theorists, or contrarians. And do not run off to so-called fact-checkers and so-called debunkers. All of these tactics are unethical.

5 Do not trust anyone who resorts to such tactics.

6 Dan Wikler knows my views but he invited me to speak anyway. This shows openness and respect. I encourage all of you to do the same. In your personal lives and in your careers be sure to welcome the Lindzens and the Duesbergs and the Kennedys to the table as respected colleagues. Send a message to the world that you welcome all views, that your goal is the truth no matter what, and that you will not be intimidated by power run amok.

Thank you for listening.

And now I welcome your questions and ideas.

I promise to listen to you with the same care and respect that you have shown me.

© Richard Hobby 2022