According to Aeon, scientists seeking demigod status fly too close to the sun with their claims. There’s also the increase of retractions which can leave an entire scientific community frightened of the resulting stigma.
These retractions are fascinating when they hit the mainstream – the infamous 1998 paper in The Lancet by the British researcher Andrew Wakefield and others that linked autism and vaccines, influenced many thousands of parents on both sides of the Atlantic to stop vaccinating their children. But they’re also damaging – when there’s a lot of bad science out there sometimes it’s hard to know who to believe.
Usually scientists understand one small corner of the whole picture and make all sorts of assumptions about how the situation really is until that corner becomes a little bigger hence shifting opinions about what really is true. Wakefield is onto something and I believe that we live in a world where global health censorship occurs and Wakefield was one of the first ones to speak out against a dogma that mainstream honestly believe in. He has been vilified. Awareness is the first step. Do you honestly think that nature was created so sloppily that we need something like vaccination to thrive? It is a barbaric, theoretical practice which hopefully will end in the years ahead. We need to redefine what “Public Health” means.