Post-truth Incidence, Part 1: The Ubiquity of ‘Post-truth’

What lies behind The Oxford English Dictionary’s selection of ‘post-truth’ as the 2016 Word of the Year? Our survival depends on disentangling truth from falsehood.

Jun 26, 2025

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In this series of three articles, the focus will be on the incidence of ‘post-truth’ in the three sectors of (a) science and medicine, (b) education, and (c) the legal system in Britain. We will start here with a look at science and medicine.

In 2016, The Oxford English Dictionary named post-truth as the Word of the Year. Its meaning? They give it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. The phrase has been used by establishment sources to debunk alternative narratives, for example when The Economist in 2016 dubbed the claim that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was faked as "post-truth politics". It has also been used by Yuval Harari to depict his picture of humans as a “post-truth species” and to assert that only “post-truth, and not truth, can co-exist with power”.

In reality, the situation is not as black and white as Harari suggests. According to the Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer’s book Eclipse of Reason (1947), subjective and instrumental rationality, both elements of ‘post-truth’, are born of a fascistic society. By contrast, what he terms “objective reality” has its roots in a context of free critical thinking, grounded in a commitment to human emancipation and the pursuit of a more just society. In this way, truth stands in opposition to tyranny, and its presence in society is contingent on the degree of freedom permitted.

The association between post-truth and tyranny is well exemplified by George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984, in which O’Brien, the high-ranking member of INGSOC, the English Socialist party ruling Oceania, asserts that sometimes 2+2 equals 5, sometimes 3, and sometimes “all of them at once”. Indeed, one of INGSOC’s three slogans is the notorious “Ignorance is strength”. Yes, this is fiction, but as Walter Besant and Henry James expressed in an 1884 magazine article and lecture ‘The Art of Fiction’, a novel is "a direct impression of life", a view echoing Aristotle’s notion of mimesis that appears in his work Poetics, advising writers on the art of creating fiction.

So, Orwell’s novel appeared in 1949, and a few years before that, H. G. Wells, a Fabian and proponent of the New World Order, wrote in his essay The New World Order of the need for a shift in "directive ideas". Then, ten years following Orwell’s novel, fellow Fabian Aldous Huxley, in his 1958 essay ‘Propaganda in a Democratic Society’ described the world as suffering from “organised lying”. In 1972, Hannah Arendt’s Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers, referred to the concept of defactualization. She perceived the origins of this in advertising and commerce, where the money motive is a prime driver. So, power and money appear to be major drivers of ‘post-truth’.

Does Science and Medicine Research Funding Favour ‘Post-truth’ Findings?

In 2018, 57% of all research was funded by taxation—in other words, government sources—and you might well ask whether this would fund research that questioned government narratives. Where science research was concerned, an OECD study found that in 2015, 30% of funding was provided through taxations, and then on through government and university funding. The balance and lion’s share of the funding will come from private business. The significance? According to a 2018 study, corporate funding of medical research drives the research agenda away from public health priorities.

The implications? According to a 2021 study by Bath University, five research strategies are prioritised by eight industry sectors to ensure that the research narrative reflects well on their industries. The industries spanned a range of sectors, including alcohol, chemicals, manufacturing and extractive industries, food and drink, fossil fuels, gambling, pharmaceuticals, medical technologies, and tobacco. The strategies prioritised the funding of ‘safe’ research that would ensure attention was deflected from industry harms. Other strategies involved using inappropriate study design or statistical analyses to ensure favourable findings, and cherry-picking papers in literature reviews to obscure parts of the evidence base.

Based on Bath’s findings, we would have to conclude that post-truth is a feature of privately-funded science research, a concern that seeps into the issue of peer peview.

Does Peer Review in Medicine and Science Favour Post-truth Findings?

Within mainstream academia, the litmus test for new knowledge is the peer review journal article. How valid and reliable are these in the field of medicine and healthcare? Dr Marcia Angell, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the second most reputable medical journal with an acceptance rate of just 5  percent, wrote in 2009 of the questionable reliability of clinical research findings:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Should one be surprised to find similar views from Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet, a few years later, in 2015?

The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability—not the validity—of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.

One might have hoped that views like these would be rarities, opinions expressed by oddball scientists with an axe to grind. However, the sheer range of people sounding off against the system forces us to sit up. Stephen Lock, when Editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), for example, conducted an experiment in which he himself decided which papers to accept for publication. He also submitted all the papers received to the usual process of selection for peer review, and the result was that there was little to no difference between the papers he chose and those selected after the full process of peer review. Even this small study suggested that an elaborate process is unnecessary.

Then in, March  2022, we find a scorching attack on medical research in the BMJ. Its authors, Jon Jureidini, research leader at the University of Adelaide, and Leemon B. McHenry, Professor Emeritus at California State University, pull no punches in their short article, and it is so extraordinary that we quote two of its paragraphs here:

The advent of evidence-based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry-sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence-based medicine will remain an illusion …

The authors go on to discuss the obstacles:

The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghost writing of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products. When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed.

This is shocking stuff, and the tendency for journals to protect the status quo is confirmed by two studies. The first, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in 2021 by Chu (Northwestern University) and Evans (University of Chicago), reached the disturbing conclusion that innovative papers were more likely to be rejected than less innovative ones. The second paper, from 2024, by academics from the Universities of Toronto, California, and Sydney, also published in PNAS, investigated journal article acceptances by three elite medical journals. It found that these journals had desk rejected 12 of the 14 articles that had become the most popular in their field (this was because these articles went on to be published elsewhere). The authors’ conclusions are chilling when they state that “These journals are ill-suited to recognise and gestate the most impactful ideas and research”.

The proposition that high-ranking journals reject innovative findings is borne out by history. For example, we know of the following instances of rejection:

Professor Dan Shechtman’s early work on quasicrystals broke the laws of crystallography and was rejected by the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters. He went on to win 2011’s Nobel Prize in Physics.
Professor Peter Higgs’ seminal paper on the Higgs model was initially rejected in 1964. He won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for the Higgs boson theory, which explains the origins of mass of subatomic particles.
Professor Giorgio Parisi had a paper rejected with the words “This article is not worth the cost of the paper on which it is printed”. In 2021, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on complex systems.
Dr Kary Mullis’ first paper was rejected by Science, but in 1993, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of the PCR method.

It gets worse. In 2020, The Lancet published an article on trials of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), finding that it was associated with elevated levels of death. However, the journal retracted the article after discovering that the data as bogus. Despite this retraction, the article caused the WHO to halt trials concerning the effectiveness of HCQ as an antidote to Covid. In this way, the whole episode served to sideline HCQ as a potential treatment in favour of vaccines.

And it gets still worse. A paper co-authored by eminent cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough in 2023, claiming that 74% of over 300 autopsy deaths were linked to the Covid jab, was removed from the website within 24 hours of submission of The Lancet, the medical journal with the second-highest impact scores. The other co-authors were Yale epidemiologist Dr Harvey Risch and top pathologist Dr Roger Hodkinson.

Even worse still, the editor of The Lancet, Dominic Horton, spoke in 2020 of the need to “reinvent the idea of the scientific journal” so that it becomes “more activist in its engagement with the challenges of society”. He also spoke of the need for the journal to follow the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), despite the fact that these are not underpinned by real science. So could it be that the central pillars of mainstream science and medicine are propped up by post-truth? Let us take a selective look at the all-important paradigms of virus theory, vaccine safety, cures for cancer, climate change, and energy.

Virus Theory

The notion of viruses originated with Pasteur, who, in 1881, performed a public experiment at Pouilly-Le-Fort to demonstrate his concept of vaccination. He prepared two groups of 25 sheep, one goat, and several cattle. The animals of one group were twice injected with an anthrax vaccine prepared by Pasteur, at an interval of fifteen days; the control group was left unvaccinated. Thirty days after the first injection, the two groups were injected with a culture of live anthrax bacteria. All the animals in the unvaccinated group died, while all the animals in the vaccinated group survived.

This apparent triumph was widely reported in the local, national, and international press, and made Pasteur a national hero. This ensured the acceptance of vaccination in the practice of medicine. Was this truth or post-truth?

In the book Pasteur: Plagiarist, Imposter! The Germ Theory Exploded!, R. B. Pearson noted that Pasteur began to receive letters of complaint from towns in France and from as far away as Hungary, describing fields littered with dead sheep vaccinated the day before. The Hungarian Government, for example, spoke of “the worst diseases, pneumonia, and catarrhal fever that have exclusively struck down the animals subjected to injection”. In 1882, a trial in Turin found the vaccination worthless, while in southern Russia, anthrax vaccines killed 81 percent of the sheep receiving them.

Pasteur’s work on anthrax was not uniquely problematic, since his work on rabies is likewise so. Indeed, according to the testimony of Dr Charles Dulles in 1886, Pasteur relied on the presence of particular brain tissue granules as a marker even though these were already known to exist in non-rabid animals. Lacking the qualifications to properly diagnose rabies, Pasteur arbitrarily labelled his experimental disease as the real one, and stretched public credulity by stating that a dog could harbour rabies even when displaying no symptoms.

Physicians in the 19th century were quick to question Pasteur’s germ theory, including Dr Thomas Powell in the US, who  deliberately exposed himself to pure cultures of bacteria with no effect,  providing compelling evidence against the germ “theory” of disease as proposed by Pasteur. Then, in the early 1900s, over 150 similar experiments in Canada were conducted by Dr John Fraser, with once again no signs of disease following exposure to the so-called germs. These doctors demonstrated that even direct exposure to substantial amounts of bacteria—often regarded as the “deadliest” strains—did not give rise to any illness. Even a review in The Lancet of the 2004 book The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science states that “Louis Pasteur's notebooks, long kept secret, reveal that he misled the world and his fellow scientists about the research behind two of his most famous experiments: the vaccination of sheep against anthrax, and that of a boy against rabies”. Indeed, in Chapter 1 of Cowan and Morrell’s book The Contagion Myth, we read that Pasteur “injected the unvaccinated animals with poisons”.

Below is a portrait of Pasteur from 1866, one that offers clues as to the connections that Pasteur had, and that may have contributed to his influence, signalled by his holding, at one time, one-tenth of all French Government grants.

Pasteur portrait — M. Pasteur and His Grand-Daughter, from the painting by L. Bonnat. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The questions posed by Drs Powell and Fraser concerning Pasteur’s germ theory re-emerged in 1918-1919 in the wake of the so-called Spanish flu, a horrifying affliction that killed up to 500 million people worldwide. This time, it was the turn of physician Dr Milton Rosenau to oversee studies, these being conducted exhaustively at a US naval and quarantine facility. These studies involved transferring mucous secretions from the noses, throats and upper respiratory tracts of ‘flu’ victims and to the noses, lungs and mouths of volunteers, injecting the blood of sick donors into the blood of healthy volunteers, and having the sick breath and cough over the healthy volunteers. The results, published by Rosenau in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that none of these measures caused the sick to take sick “in any way”.

A growing number of modern commentators are now debunking germ theory, including former MDs Drs Sam and Mark Bailey, Dr Tom Cowan and his co-author Sally Farron Morell, in the book The Truth about Contagion, with Farron Morell boldly stating that “contagion is a myth”. Other voices include those of Dawn Lester and David Parker, authors of What Really Makes You Ill. Christine Massey, with a background in biostatistics, has been coordinating Freedom of Information responses from 105 global bodies to requests for information concerning isolated or purified viruses. To date, no organisation has responded with the information requested in respect of SARS-CoV-2, HIV, influenza, measles, or polio.

Of course, germ theory provides the pretext for ‘protective’ measures such as masks, isolation, and vaccination, and although we do not have space here to discuss the troubling history of vaccination, two individual instances offer insights into the presentation of post-truth as truth and vice versa. The first concerns the polio vaccine which, according to Dr Biskind in the US, was unrelated to the real cause of polio, namely DDT poisoning. He may or may not have been correct as to the ultimate cause but posing the question is vital in a world that presents us with settled fact when, in reality, this may be post-truth masquerading as truth.

The second instance concerns claims of adverse effects of the Covid vaccine. The first one highlighted here relates to cardiologist Dr Peter McCullough, imputing a connection with chronic heart conditions. His questioning of the Covid narrative and the safety of vaccination led Wikipedia, bastion of received opinion, to describe him as “promoting misinformation concerning Covid-19, its treatments and mRNA vaccines”. His license was revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine in 2022.

The jab’s role in plunging successful conceptions has been highlighted by a recent preprint study from the Czech Republic. Dr Vibeke Manniche, a Danish MD, and mathematician  Dr Tomáš Fürst, Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, tried to get their study published, with their paper rejected by six scientific journals within two hours of submission of the paper for consideration.

Their results, taken from  official government  data, show that in June 2021, unvaccinated women enjoyed an increase in successful conceptions which continued for the next six months. Throughout 2022, successful conception rates were 1.5 times higher in unvaccinated women compared with vaccinated women. Overall, successful conceptions in vaccinated women were about a third lower than unvaccinated women. Many women were reporting irregular menstruation and no country ever released birth data according to vaccination status apart from the Czech Republic. The two researchers held a conference in the Czech Parliament, but only opposition MPs attended, amidst allegations that the Association of Microbiologists, Immunologists, and Statisticians (SMIS), co-founded by Dr Fürst, were spreading ‘misinformation’.

Really? With the ubiquity of ‘post-truth’, it is essential we now put all information through the litmus test of evidence-based critical thinking. Examples? Take the company name ‘AstraZeneca’, formed from several Latin words (‘a’ means by; ‘stra’ is a straw or thin hollow tube of plastic for sucking liquid; ‘ze’ means absolutely, certainly; and ‘neca’, imperative of verb ‘necare’, ‘to die’). This selection of words translate as ‘certain death through injection of a liquid’. It is now acknowledged that the jab creates blood clots and low platelet levels, producing a condition called Vaccine-induced Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia (VITT), so maybe this translation is plausible. Certainly, the risk of VITT led several countries to reconsider providing the jab. Given the higher incidence of this in younger people, its use was then age-restricted (for example, limited to the over 60s in Germany, Italy, and Ireland), and Denmark halted its use altogether.

What, then, of the name of Moderna’s new Covid-19 vaccine, ‘mNEXSPIKE’? This contains the Latin word ‘nex’, meaning ‘death’, and critical thinkers might well be asking whether this is a pointer to a truth, hidden in a post-truth world of modern pharmacy.

Cancer Treatments

Talk of cover-ups and post-truth narratives that pertain to cancer presents a world in which only orthodox methods of treating cancer exist. Occasionally, a chink of light appears in which a contrary narrative appears. One instance, recently exposed, concerns the genius of Dr William Koch, a man who worked on a cure, Glyoxyide, that showed enormous, almost unimaginably disruptive promise. He was relentlessly pursued as a charlatan by the US Government and the American Medical Association (AMA), ensuring that the Koch Treatment could never be established in large clinical trials.

He was the object of several poisoning attempts, showing the extent to which his findings posed a threat to established post-truth beliefs. Accumulating these examples will, again, lead us out of the post-truth maze.

Climate Science

Cover-ups, or as we might say, ‘post-truth’, in the field of climate science are legion too, with cover-ups of the truth demonstrated by the infamous hockey stick graph of University of Virginia academic Dr Michael Mann from the 1990s, showing temperatures rising inexorably since 1600. The lack of any real underpinning data has been exposed but attempts to falsify data continue.

For example, in 2013, an article by Cook et al. in Environmental Research Letters asserted that a literature review revealed the existence of a scientific consensus on man-made climate change. A withering riposte, however, argued that only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers examined by Cook explicitly stated humans to be the cause of most of the post-1950 warming. The authors of the second article, Legates et al., stated that Cook et al. had excluded around 8,000 papers in their sample on the unacceptable ground that the papers had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus. What is more, Legates et al. went on to point out that the 64 papers identified by Cook et al. as explicitly supporting anthropogenic climate change could be narrowed down to only 41 on the basis that 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.

This level of disinformation is shocking, making it imperative to examine all claims concerning climate. Take the case of data from the Met Office in Britain, for example. In April 2025, a citizen journalist found that 103 stations out of 302 sites allegedly supplying temperature averages do not actually exist. What is more, where Met Office weather stations do actually exist, only 52, a paltry 13.7 percent, are reliably capturing the weather, placing them in Class 1 and 2. The rest are placed in environments that distort temperatures; for example, in walled kitchen gardens and botanical gardens specifically designed to produce artificially increased temperatures and microclimates.

This is of great concern not only for our understanding of the present, but also of the past, since the Met Office produces 30-year average temperatures from these 103 non-existent stations. All this supports a political agenda of the need for Net Zero, supported by scorched earth weather maps that have been doctored to represent warm days as dangerous nd extreme heat using red colour. If ever there was a time for truth detectives, it is now.

All vigilant critical thinkers will notice that unusually hot periods, though a feature of the past; for example, the Cantona megadrought in ancient Mexico, and the Medieval Warm Period of 950-1250, are not accurately described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  (IPCC). An explanation may lie in the fact that the warmth during the Medieval Warm Period may have been driven by  El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a phenomenon linked to solar activity or ocean circulations, not anthropogenic activity. In other words, ‘greenhouse gas’ concentrations played no identifiable role in this “huge warm pulse event”.

This prompts the conclusion that “The most insidious and fraudulent aspect of modern climate science isn’t flawed models or uncertain predictions … it’s the deliberate erasure of past climatic states that undermine the prevailing narrative”. From an economic perspective, Richard Lindzen, Professor Emeritus at MIT, states that: If you reach Net Zero by 2050, if you do it worldwide, you avoid about a third of a degree of warming. If it’s just Europe and the Anglosphere, it’s closer to a tenth of a degree. So, you have avoided a tenth of a degree of warming at a cost of probably tens of trillions of dollars. Injecting a sense of humour, he adds: “Doesn’t seem like a bargain to me”.

Energy

The importance of energy is not in dispute and according to anthropologist Leslie White, writing in 1959, “the primary function of culture is to harness and control energy”, with cultures becoming more advanced as they become more efficient at harnessing energy. He may be right, but this theory does not allow of a world in which discoveries concerning free energy generation are suppressed. Ask yourself why electric cars are being promoted, with a supply chain involving child labour in dangerous lithium mines, when history threw up viable alternatives. Henry Ford, for example, created a car that could run on hemp oil, and Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed it to run on vegetable and seed oils like hemp; “he actually ran the thing on peanut oil for the 1900 World’s Fair”.

According to Wikipedia, the notion that cheap sources of energy have been suppressed is a ‘conspiracy theory’ and so the reader is invited to explore the many videos presenting evidence supporting this view. Wikipedia may speak of Conspiracy Theory, but the initial letters are shared by Critical Thinking, and this is the tool of choice in discerning truth.

Conclusions

Establishment forces are quick to censor and denigrate information that contradicts mainstream narratives as ‘misinformation’ or ‘post-truth’. Evidence-based critical thinking will reveal the truth, leaving mainstream narratives exposed as ‘post-truth’. As Max Horkheimer warned us in 1947, the eclipse of reason is a feature of fascistic society, and so using critical thinking provides a counterweight. As he wrote, the pursuit of truth, aka the denial of ‘post-truth’, provides the path to human emancipation and the pursuit of a more just society.

Thirty years later, Václav Havel, future President of Czechoslovakia, provides a suitable epilogue in his essay The Power of the Powerless, writing of the then-repressive Communist regime:

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

What followed could have been penned today:

“Individuals need not believe all these mystifications … they need not accept the lie”.

Whether to follow truth or post-truth, that is the question.

Originally published on UKColumn

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