What follows, below the three dashes, is from page 178 of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. — MCM

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[S]ome four hundred years after Galileo . . . politics and power continue to dictate “scientific consensus,” rather than empiricism, critical thinking, or the established steps of the scientific method. It is a hazard to both democracy and public health when a kind of religious faith in authoritative pronouncements supplants disciplined observation, rigorous proofs, and reproducible results as the source of “truth” in the medical field.

While consensus may be an admirable political objective, it is the enemy of science and truth. The term “settled science” is an oxymoron. The admonishment that we should “trust the experts” is a trope of authoritarianism. Science is disruptive, irreverent, dynamic, rebellious, and democratic. Consensus and appeals to authority (be it CDC, WHO, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, or the Vatican) are features of religion, not science, Science is tumult. Empirical truth generally rises from the tilled, agitated, and upturned soils of debate. Doubt, skepticism, questioning and dissent are its fertilizers. Every great scientific advance in history, every transformative idea, from evolution to heliocentrism to relativity, met initial ridicule from the panjandrums of “scientific consensus.” As novelist and physician Michael Crichton observed,

Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.