About your "research"

Twitter/Google/YouTube don't count

Thanks, Mike, for the meme.

We have among us a significant portion of weekend scientists, and bless their hearts if they think they can earn a medical degree online, or if their mad Google skills qualifies them as a research scientist.

As if. “Research” means a systemic exploration using evidence untainted by bias. It takes training — which most of us do not have. Why should we trust experts? Because they’ve spent years on serious inquiry while we? Have been catching up on “Downton Abby.” (Ask me if I think Sybil should have stayed on the show, rather than died in childbirth. THAT is a field in which I am an expert.)

(The answer is no. She shouldn’t have died in childbirth, so that we could continue to follow her reverse-Cinderella story, where a member of the English landed gentry says “So much for all that” and goes rogue.)

(Sorry. I get excited.)

The grandtwins and I recently conducted an experiment for their fifth-grade science class assignment. We cut up a diaper, shook out the white powdery stuff, added water, and waited for it to solidify into some kind of cosmic goo, as it did on the video we watched.

But nothing happened. And so we had to conclude that we’d done something wrong (Too much powdery stuff. Not enough? Wrong temperature of water?) and that we would need to start over because science is messy and you don’t always get it right on the first try. This is the first step of the scientific method.

So, if you’re still vaccine-resistant because that website that had all the great ads told you to be, please understand that “research” includes *but is not limited to:

• Compiling a literature review and writing abstracts on each article you read.

• Collecting a random sample of sources and performing independent probability statistics on the reported results.

• Taking every article you read and tracking it back to its source.

• Critiquing each article for logic.

• Assessing our own gaps in understanding (and accepting that we don’t know everything).

• We should probably throw in “peer-review” here. Have you run your notion past a field of experts? Your Aunt Fanny? This is important.

So. The COVID vaccine is trustworthy (I’m going to go with Johns Hopkins on this, and not your crappy little website). The vaccine does not contain microchips (Bill Gates gives nary a shit of your comings and goings, and thanks, CDC). The vaccine won’t alter your DNA, either. It’s safe for pregnant women, and soon (we hope), it will be declared safe for children.

So for the next person who says their own research has told them not to get vaccinated (as their right-wing talking head told them to do), ask them to name the active ingredients of that aspirin they took last night. And then tell them to pound sodium chloride.