A better way to challenge scientific consensus

Are COVID vaccines safe? I think not, but the "scientific consensus" is that they are. How can we definitively determine who is right? I suggest a way using science!

Executive summary

In this article, I suggest a simple way to resolve scientific disagreements on important issues.

The method is simple:

1. The two parties mutually agree on a series of experiments to resolve the conflict.

2. The experiments are designed so the results are reproducible, for example, by having several independent efforts doing the same thing.

3. Win or lose, the “mainstream view” party (who should be led by a prominent scientist in the field being explored) agrees to write up the results of the experiment(s) and submit it to a prominent peer-reviewed technical journal.

4. The “mainstream” party gets a large monetary award (a research grant) upon publication. The more prestigious the author, the higher the reward.

5. We pay all costs in addition to the reward for people’s time and to fund the experiment(s).

6. The idea is to make this “an offer that nobody can refuse.”

For example…

Suppose we want to prove whether vaccines cause autism.

The two parties could agree on two experiments and how they are carried out such as:

1. Gather data from a randomly selected list of parents of autistic kids which looks at the date the parents first noticed symptoms of ASD vs. the date of the most recent vaccination prior to the diagnosis.

2. Gather the same data from doctors who treat autistic kids.

The parties agree in advance what success (for each hypothesis) looks like.

The parties agree that if both experiments agree with each other on deciding the question that they will publicly accept the result as scientific truth going forward, until such time as there is more persuasive data showing otherwise.

If we set the reward at $1M and there are no takers, the question is resolved by default.

Did the COVID vaccines save lives?

This question is even easier to test. We pick hospitals at random and look at the vaccination rates of people hospitalized for COVID vs. the flu.

This is a simple, fair test.

Anyone rejecting attempts like this to expose the truth is not acting in good faith.

Summary

The problem with challenging scientific consensus is that the party with the mainstream beliefs simply ignores anyone who challenges them.

So it’s up to the challengers to get their attention.

By providing a large monetary incentive to create and execute a set of mutually agreeable scientific experiments to answer the question, we may be able to make progress on these intractable issues which have been unresolved for decades.

What’s new here is large monetary incentives combined with a mutually agreeable set of experiments.

This resolves the issue under investigation definitively.

Either: 1) the mainstream party accepts and we do the experiments or 2) the mainstream party refuses to engage in which case it is a tacit admission of defeat.

Either way, there is finally resolution on each issue explored.

Let me know what you think of this idea in the comments.