Baby W’s case raises critical questions: What is science and who is an expert?

On Tuesday night we heard the decision of the New Zealand High Court Judge in the Baby W case, who ruled that the state should enforce a transfusion from the national blood bank in defiance of the wishes of the parents. He declined to allow an obvious and simple workaround of donated unvaccinated blood. In so doing, he was ruling on a scientific matter, but was his ruling scientific? What is science and who is an expert?

Note: The High Court Judge ruled that the baby involved in the case cannot be named hence the baby is referred to as ‘Baby W’.

To qualify as science, a theory must accurately describe a large class of observations or measurements on the basis of a model or set of rules which is simple and plausible. Crucially it must make definite and accurate predictions about the results of future measurements. If its predictions fail to agree with measurement, the theory should be adjusted or in some cases it might need to be abandoned and a new theory sought.

This was the case with the early Egyptian theory that the sun and the planets go around the earth in a set of crystal spheres. The model was adjusted to try to account for the observation of retrograde motions of planets, but eventually it became very complicated and didn’t ever quite fit observed planetary positions. When Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter through a telescope, the theory was abandoned and the sun-centred ideas of Copernicus were accepted.

Adequate theories must make predictions which can in principle be falsified by experiments. For example, a theory which predicts that a jolly green giant lives at the centre of the earth is not scientific because it cannot be proved right or wrong, as no one can travel there to look. Nor is such a theory plausible. A person who claims to be an expert on jolly green giants, should rightly be laughed at and dismissed.

The public has been offered a relatively simple theory of the action of mRNA vaccines. They invade a few of our cells, instruct the cells to produce spike proteins which are similar to those found on the surface of the Covid virus. The immune system detects these and in theory learns to neutralise the Covid virus if and when we are exposed to it. The physiology is supposed to rapidly clean up any excess spike protein or vaccine ingredients within a few days of vaccination.

It won’t have escaped your notice that a lot of predictions about the effect of Covid vaccines have been found to be false when actual health data is examined. They are clearly not effective or safe as claimed. Recent data indicates they fail to even provide protection against severe disease or death. They appear to suppress immune system function and leave some recipients vulnerable to a range of illnesses.

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