1/ Been thinking a lot about the vaccine announcement yesterday. Assuming it holds up, a true example of science and scientists at their best - a small group of people working together to produce an advance that is almost magical both in its complexity and its impact...

2/ Those are SCIENTISTS. Not sciencyists. What if Pfizer HADN'T run a clinical trial on the vaccine but just insisted that the vaccine worked because of studies on rats and ferrets? What if the government then mandated we all take the vaccine?

People would be in the streets...

3/ But that, friends, is EXACTLY what has happened with masks. There is NO real-world clinical trial evidence that masks either protect their wearers or slow the spread of #sarscov2. There are only THEORIES, some more plausible than others.

4/ But somehow we have exempted masks - and most of what we've done in the last eight months - from the ordinary rules of science. Well-meaning (and sometimes not so well-meaning, see schools) judgments have driven policies that have affected BILLIONS of people...

5/ This has to stop. Unfortunately it will only get worse next year. The sciencyists draft in the real brilliance of the scientists, and only a few actual scientists and ornery laypeople will stand up and point out the difference...

6/ When I wrote Tell Your Children, I learned that PhDs HATE being challenged by people outside the academy. They have put in lots of time for that credential, and for the most part they are not well-paid (ex tech types). Their arrogance is all they have.

7/ Now they have frightened us into giving them massive power (I've been reading up on the swine flu vaccine fiasco of 1976, when something similar happened)... and we are going to have to figure out how to take it back.