If You’re Hunting for Heresy, You Aren’t a Scientist

The latter is probably true, but Dr. Ladapo’s study shows that some young men may experience severe effects. And it’s far from clear, as Dr. Ladapo notes, that the benefits of the mRNA vaccines for young, healthy men—who were at low risk to begin with, and the vast majority of whom now have some immunity from prior infection or inoculation—outweigh the risks.

This is a fair and important discussion to have, but the so-called experts don’t want to have it because they worry it will undermine their assertion that vaccines are an unalloyed public-health good. Instead, they are denouncing Dr. Ladapo as “antiscience”—the same epithet they’ve used against critics of lockdowns, mask mandates and climate policies.

But science relies on challenging assumptions and debating evidence. People who refuse to do this shouldn’t call themselves scientists. This includes the editor in chief of Science,

H. Holden Thorp,

who on Thursday published an ad hominem attack on Dr. Ladapo purporting to be a defense of science.

A “credentialed scientist from outside the field”—Dr. Ladapo trained in internal medicine—shouldn’t question the “scientific consensus in a public manner that undermines trust in science,” asserted Mr. Thorp, a former college administrator whose background is in chemistry. “Unequal perspectives do not deserve equal time, and challenging scientific consensus requires evidence that has been subjected to peer review and published with all the data disclosed so that the scientific community can replicate the findings.”

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studies, including the ones that were used to support government vaccine and mask mandates, aren’t peer-reviewed by outside scientists, and the CDC’s underlying data aren’t published for outside scientists to replicate.

Food and Drug Administration rules require that trial data for vaccines and drugs be made available to the public after their approval. The FDA didn’t do so for the Covid-19 vaccines. Scientists seeking to replicate the safety and efficacy findings from

Pfizer’s

trial sued the agency to release the data. A federal judge forced the FDA’s hand in January, but it still hasn’t released critical datasets.

The CDC also recommended the new bivalent Covid boosters without any clinical trial data, based on a projected benefit-harm analysis that didn’t undergo peer review. Pfizer on Thursday issued a press release claiming the boosters produced a stronger antibody response to the newer variants compared with its original Wuhan vaccine, but it included no data.

Dr. Ladapo is being condemned by the public-health pharisees for breaking cardinal commandments of science, which the government, drugmakers and scientists who conform to the “consensus” violate all the time.

Some experts have taken to

Twitter

to quibble with Dr. Ladapo’s methodology. No study is flawless, and Dr. Ladapo includes a section in his analysis acknowledging its limitations. He tweeted: “I love the discussion that we’ve stimulated.”

Mr. Thorp characterized Dr. Ladapo’s “move” of encouraging debate as coming “from page 1 of the anti-science playbook.” The actual antiscience playbook is the one Mr. Thorp and his team are running: Smear scientists who question orthodoxy as “antiscience” to shut down dissent. Remember

Anthony Fauci’s

declaration that his critics were “really criticizing science because I represent science”?

Or recall how Dr. Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director

Francis Collins

conspired to discredit the authors of the Great Barrington declaration, which urged focused protection on the vulnerable while liberating young people from lockdowns. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote to Dr. Fauci.

Mr. Thorp participated in the takedown of this approach too, writing that the “risky and misguided course” of “opening of colleges and schools has accelerated the spread of the virus and will mean untold suffering among both students and the people to whom they are now spreading the virus.” Imagine how much bigger youth mental-health problems and learning loss would be if the “consensus” hadn’t been challenged.

Now Mr. Thorp calls for a purge of scientists like Dr. Ladapo who challenge the consensus: “Until the scientific community deals with misinformation from within, it cannot expect to deal with it from without.” One of America’s scientific advantages over our adversaries is a political system that allows free inquiry and discourse. Too many scientists nowadays want to give it away.