Epistemology Unpacked -The Covid-19 pandemic

I guess philosophy is important after all lol.My two favourite terms these days are Epistemology and Empiricism and its sister Philosophical Materialism.So my apologies to Wittgenstein and John Stuart Mills after all lol.

So( not supposed to use that word according to current anal grammarians lol.Another form of political correctness-this time in the  world of grammar.).And yet(probably also banned as a term lol) it is SO useful lol.Maybe that’s why they want to ban it! (the conspiratorial epistemology-to be unveiled shortly).So,I repeat,the current pandemic gives us a chance to examine different forms of Epistemology.Epistemology basically means “how do you get to the Truth,The Realty of any situation or question?”(same word btw in Arabic-Truth and Reality=Haqq!)

So let us examine four forms of Epistemology as applied to the Covid pandemic and  try to see their relative value.I will personalize these approaches in order to make the point more vividly and graspable(sorry again grammarians-probably not a legitimate word!).

  1. The Didier Raoult paradigm-information on the ground.For those that don’t know this fascinating character from Marseilles,he is one of the first doctors to promote hydroxychloriquine as a Covid treatment-mostly based on his clinical experience at a hospital in Marseilles.He even took the trouble to document his cases and show that at his clinic ,they had reduced the death rate by about 70% by this approach.Further studies done in the right way,using HCT early in the illness with azithromycin and Zinc came to similar conclusions-anywhere from a 60-80% reduction! All of this based on exanining the facts on the ground.This principle is applicable to many other situations .Ask the people who are there experiencing it.But no! The current Epistemological paradigm forbids this It is dismissed either as subjective or anecdotal or some other disparaging term.         I was pleased to hear from my brother in NYC whose future son-in-law was himself working on the ground in a Brooklyn hospital where the doctors noticed that HCT was useful early in the illness and they were not even using it with antibiotics and zinc! But no,the CDC and WHO will hear nothing of this .They need their prospective, double-blind ,placebo-controlled peer-reviewed i.e. non-existent studies lol to arrive at conclusions.)
  2. The Chris Martenson(peakprosperity.com) paradigm.Unlike the former paradigm  Chris is working from outside the battlefield.But he uses the on the ground workers as one source amongst others.Then he interviews people who have experienced the illness,looks at the research including the less high-profile journals and the non-statistical scientific reports.He scours the newspapers,TV Cable News and radio reports.From this vast array of sources he is able to discern the chaff from the wheat,pick out the B.S. even in hot-shot journals like Lancet and JAMA and then come to conclusions.He is almost invariably right and when he isn’t he admits it.   Oddly enough I have seen judges in the courts using a very similar process of teasing out the reality from an abundance of sources.And they consistently understand the Reality better than the expert doctors who are supposed to be experts in the area. That is because the doctors are using the next paradigm-the Fauci approach lol
  3.  The Fauci and his acolyte Sanjay Gupta approach- also known as current scientific consensus.These people only believe in peer-reviewed,placebo-controlled,double blind prospective studies and Cochrane database metastudies and official organizations like WHO and FDA and CDC..They are very often wrong as has been Fauci all along in this pandemic.He got the mask issue wrong(not enough studies?!)the hydroxychloroquine issue wrong(looking at the wrong studies and ignoring the right ones) and the man-made nature of the virus(how he could get that one wrong is beyond me as HE was instrumental in creating it!). The problem is that most medical personnel and certainly the formal afore-mentioned institutions(WHO,FDA,CDC,NIH) are all using that paradigm! No wonder we are in such confusion and such trouble.
  4. I can’t complete this abbreviated list of Epistemological approaches without mentioning the Brian Rose,Sayer Ji Plandemic conspiratorial epistemology.These people see the lies and the deceptions of the official stories of government and health institutions but go way beyond the facts into paranoid projections.So the fact that there was a 201 Event meeting of government and public health officials and businessmen Organized by John’s Hopkins University  in October 2019 that simulated a pandemic to try to develop strategies to deal with such an event means for them that the pandemic was planned.Wrong! The fact that the Wuhan lab was under the control of the Chinese military means that this virus was a bio-weapon of war.Wrong again. The fact that Bill Gates screwed up with vaccines in India and Africa means that he is trying to depopulate the world so that he can better control it.Anyone with familiarity with the paranoid mind-set(I was a psychiatrist for 45 years lol) can recognize the cognitive errors in these kinds of distortions and projections.On top of it,they may be dangerous as they stir up unnecessary fear and anger in a situation where there is enough realistic fear and anger to go around already!
  5. Btw, each of these types of Epistemology can be used in many other areas of life as well.As I have indicated in other articles on this blogsite-which you are free to explore.In fact,I consider myself to be an Epistemologist of Spiritual Reality and Truth.Keep reading and keep in touch if this interests you in any way .Salaams,Joel Ibrahim Kreps

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