Something is ALWAYS the leading cause of death. The phrase is a tautology. If two infants died from a lightning strike and one from measles, then lightning would be the "leading cause of death" among that group. "Leading cause of death" is NOT necessarily "excessive cause of death." When folks tell me heart disease is the leading cause of death among Americans, I always ask, "And what would you prefer to have as the leading cause of death? Something has to head the list."
That's a very salient point. "Leading cause of death is NOT necessarily excessive cause of death." is an idea far too many people fail to grasp.
On the topic of:
So there are some numbers, but can I ask how you could possibly trust any statistics? I mean the vast majority of scientists and doctors are not anti vaccine/medicine, so they must be in on the fraud. If they are the ones doing the studies, wouldn't anything they produce be false to keep up the conspiracy?
Or more generally the thought of "how can all of science be wrong" / "how can all (or majority) of scientists be fools or frauds"...
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I don't think all of science is either "wrong" or "fraudulent"... however... having been involved in academia to a... let's say "original research" level (which, mind you, is not that high. Some research degrees, masters degrees MANDATE that you MUST contribute ORIGINAL research to be awarded your degree - and I have).
I've learned that most research... probably around 50% (if not more at this point) is generated by people who simply want to obtain their current degree as a stepping stone towards their future goals (Masters or PhD). They aren't doing that research because they WANT to... what they want comes later.... what they are doing now is just a means to an end, and they have to pass various biased obstacles to get to their end goal.
If you are a masters student who needs a good grade to proceed to your doctorate, and your masters supervisory board has some collective bias... are you going to be a hero and risk sacrificing your future career and every prospect of your goal to go toe to toe against established authority figures in your field as a mere graduate student? Who will believe you and take your side? Would you rather not just suck it up and get through your masters and phd, submitting whatever bullshit will get you the highest result possible and THEN join a research group and do original research?
Aha, there's the conundrum. In that process, not only are you producing and publishing biased and engineered results in original research that contributes to the body of evidence against the actual truth you initially wanted to disseminate? Not only that, but through the process of bending to the will of your academic superiors for anywhere from 5-15 years, you yourself naturally end up indoctrinating yourself into their biased thinking point.
And that's the issue with modern "academic research" and "studies". Well, one of the issues.
Another point is that the further a subject moves away from MATH, the harder it is to have your work itself stand on it's own and prove your point. In maths, you prove something with IRREFUTABLE axioms, logic, and calculations. If yous biased supervisor even foolishly attempts to say it's not right, you can easily appeal to the community as a whole, who can in most cases read your paper with little to no contextual understanding and still come to the same conclusion and validate your findings.
Physics is similar, although, some subject matter context may be required. Chemisty a little more...
And that's it. That's where you can draw a line in the sand. Because from Biology onwards (to the more esoteric and... lets say... less factual... less logical fields of study - medicine -> psychiatry -> psychology etc) it becomes MUCH MUCH harder for your work to stand on it's own. That's where we enter the realm of "studies" come in. And truly I don't know any other way to say this, but... if you really read most of these studies it will become clear to you how woefully inadequate they are when it comes to acertaining FACTS. Yes, many of them provide fairly valuable information regarding trends, probabilities, good suggested models to handle various situations etc... but almost none of the more applied sciencfe fields' studies are ever going to provide you with FACTS. It's simply not possible with the need to sample small selections, the difficulty in weeding out bias... and the muddled line between correlation and causation.
Another point. Look at what happened with Theranos. How a few uneducated, unqualified but fairly intelligent and ambitious individuals over the span of a decade or so managed to fool some of the largest players in industry, gain 100s of millions in investments, skirting around regulatory authorities, fooling independent auditors/verifiers... literally up to the highest levels of corporate america/ american govt. The point here being all of these supposedly sacred, oathbound fields of study and practice have been corrupted and devolved into a capitalist industrial machine where learning, understanding, technological progress have degraded to be nothing more than a means to accumulate more profits and wealth.
That's not to say there haven't been outstanding benefits and leaps of progress that for all we know could have only succeeded in a profit-driven, capitalistic society... it's just that over time, this type of economy/government/society tends to lead towards rewarding recurring profits as opposed to actual curing/absolving of suffering.
To summarise.. it's not that all scientists are fools and/or frauds. It's that they are also part of a much larger system. A system which is so big, powerful and complex that even if a majority of scientists stood up against, they would pale in comparison to the overall weight and power of the multi-field, global, political-military-commerical-tech-industrial-complex machine. Whether no one, or one person, or a small cabal, or a multi-national, highly-faceted cooprerative runs it... it is a big heavy machine, with inertia, and at this point, may be beyond even human control.
That's the takeaway here.
We are all born into this machine. Scientists too. They go to the same schools, where they are programmed. They go to agenda and bias ridden universities, where they are programmed. They join corporate and government funded research groups, where they are programmed. On and on and on until they've done programming themselves.
You are an occultist. Does the scientific consensus validate - or ever recognize anything occult? Does that mean they are all frauds... or lying to themselves... or part of some secret anti-occult cabal? Or is the more likely explanation that over millenia the drifting sands, the tumbling stones of fledgeling human thought and conciousness has coalesced into a huge, monolithic, rolling ball of rock who's path we all hopelessly yield to?
Of course, there's people like us. Outliers. There's also the crazy crackhead conspiracy theorists. Scientists used to be outliers. They used to be diven by the sole purpose of seeking the truth, finding out how the world works, looking for answers and pioneering the cutting edge of knowledge and technology.
Of course there's still a few scientists like that. But with the boom in the tertiary education industry, and the massive rise in people taking up the mantle of scientist for reasons other than the above... most "scientists" these days are just regular people.
And as we all know... sometimes...
