On April 19, 2023, I received the following email from a man whom I’ll identify only by his first initial, T:
I think Dan _______ beat you.
Your defense of your money rests on two fraudulent statements:1) “I don’t believe the evidence. I don’t believe the numbers accepted by historians as factual show a decline in rate of disease compared to prior wars.” Well now, then your challenge is fraudulent on that basis because it’s a simple counting we’re talking about. You can claim there is no wind-power in Germany, and I can show you the statistics of megawatt-hours generated by wind-turbines, and your response would be ‘I don’t believe your numbers’.
2) Your secondary argument is that lower disease rate is attributable to “new sanitation techniques”. What sanitation can you show was in use *in* the trenches? We are not talking about hospital sanitation here as that’s not the site where the infectious diseases were contracted.
The evidence we have shows a success in reducing death by disease in WW1. Unless you can provide an adequate alternative explanation for what caused that, the vaccination campaign must be judged a success by its own stated goals.
As to your other challenge-plank; what qualifies a book to have ‘stood the test of time’? Did you even think about how vague and slippery and unquantifiable that challenge is? What book *has* stood the test of time? (End of email.)
While T’s letter was not vicious, it was rather unfriendly. Let’s face it, the world is filled with people who will never see eye to eye on many topics, whose minds work differently, and if they can’t be civil with me, as Dan was, I won’t waste my time replying because nothing is accomplished. He thinks I’m intellectually dishonest. I think he’s out to lunch. I’ll leave it at that and let you decide.
The reason I’m writing this is because he ends his email with an interesting question that deserves an answer. He asks what qualifies a book to have stood the test of time, and he wants me to name such a book. I’ll answer this by citing two examples.
A book that qualifies would be a book whose central thesis no one has rationally refuted, such as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published in 1859,which ever since has been considered the foundation of the theory of evolution. No sooner was it published than it provoked a firestorm of controversy because it contradicted the biblical doctrine of creationism, sacred to all devout Christians. To this day, people get emotional about it, ridiculing and attacking Darwin but never explaining how he’s wrong — if, in fact, one in a thousand has bothered to read the book. I read it a long time ago, and was struck by how flexible and open-minded Darwin was in expounding his theory, the main meat of which is that all life forms, including man, developed from lower life forms, and branched into new species in adapting to their environment or else went extinct.
The second example is The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur Butz, published in 1976, which put paid to the Holocaust legend — the allegation that Adolf Hitler attempted to exterminate the Jewish race, and managed to kill off some six million of them, mostly in gas chambers located in “death” camps, mainly in Poland. Butz’s research was so comprehensive and his arguments so clear and meticulous that to my knowledge, no so-called Holocaust scholar has ever dared to challenge him, and only very rarely is his name even mentioned. It’s so much more effective to give his book the silent treatment, to keep it out of bookstores and public libraries, to berate “Holocaust deniers,” and to prosecute them using hate speech laws, as is done in several European countries.
While researching my own book, I read twelve pro-vaccine books, just to hear out both sides. All contained obvious lies or absurdities, usually both, and I quoted from some of them to get my point across. So, T, if you’re reading this, I’ll say it again: show me one pro-vaccine book that has stood the test of time. (If T emails me with the title of such a book, I’ll post his reply.)