In 2005, Dr. Robin Warren and Dr. Barry Marshall received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the “bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.”
Gastric ulcers were not treated with antibiotics prior to their work. The view held by the medical community was that gastric ulcers were caused by stress. Before their work became widely accepted in the 1990s, patients were given antacids that relieved symptoms but provided no cure.
In the early 1980s, Marshall started working with Warren on the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. Marshall was fully convinced that nearly all gastric ulcers were caused by the bacterium. He presented the work at the annual meeting of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in Perth and was mostly met with skepticism. As Marshall has reportedly said, “To gastroenterologists, the concept of a germ causing ulcers was like saying the Earth is flat. The idea was too weird.” What was worse, his discovery “could undermine a $3 billion industry, not just the drugs but the entire field of endoscopy”, as he said in an interview.
When he kept seeing patients suffering immensely and dying from the disease, he realized that he had to prove his point. After failing to induce ulcers in animals by infecting them with the bacteria, he decided to perform an experiment on himself. He created a broth of H. pylori bacteria and drank it. Within a week, he started feeling sick and vomiting. An endoscopy showed that the bacteria were everywhere. He then eventually cured himself by taking a course of antibiotics.
It seems safe to say that the work of Warren and Marshall was regarded as fringe science at the time. If their work was done today, how would it be received by the mainstream media and the medical establishment?
One can get a good sense on this question by considering the following. Back in December 2020 (!), Dr. Peter Doshi wrote in a BMJ blog post regarding the Pfizer and Moderna trials for their COVID-19 injections, “I previously argued that the trials are studying the wrong endpoint, and for an urgent need to correct course and study more important endpoints like prevention of severe disease and transmission in high risk people.” It does not take much internet searching to see what sort of attacks Doshi received for expressing his concerns. Yet here we are, more than a year later, and the Omicron variant has proved his concerns.
Critics might say that the injections were never meant for combating the Omicron variant. In that case, why are governments and employers all over the world mandating the injections and even boosters? Doshi’s concerns would still remain valid.
Recently, Dr. Byram Bridle challenged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to assemble a team of scientists to hold a scientific debate against his own team of scientists on issues related to the injections. Those who have been following Bridle already know that he has been asking for such a debate for months. Why hasn’t such a debate taken place already? Does the establishment have too much to lose?
The fact is, scientists like Bridle had much to lose by speaking out against the public health narrative. In fact, they have already lost much. Will history be kind to us if they turn out to be right?
Dr. Kevin Cheung holds a doctorate in mathematics specializing in operations research. He has a strong interest in machine-verifiable results. He is a member of Canadian Academics for Covid Ethics.