Neil DeGrasse Tyson's Precipitous fall from the Heavens

Tyson becomes another victim of a public that is starting to understand the difference between a scientist and someone who plays one on TV

Earlier this month the popular astrophysicist appeared on Del Bigtree’s show, the Highwire, to discuss science, the scientific method, Covid-19 vaccines and a movie Tyson produced with filmmaker Scott Hamilton Kennedy called “Shot in the Arm” which, among other things, is critical of so-called antivax misinformation spreaders like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Del himself.

The conversation between the two was tedious at times, but there were segments that I believe offer some precious insights into the problem we are having right now as a species: We are rapidly dividing into two groups, both who think the other has lost their minds. Is there a way we can know which side is out of touch with reality?

In the end, if we are able to ever unite under a common understanding of what exactly is unfolding around us, one side will eventually have to see that they have been wrong. This has seemed unachievable because direct communication between the two groups has been severed. The Tyson/Bigtree discussion is one that many of us wish we could have with certain people in our lives whom we love but disagree with around the most important issues of our generation. That’s why it deserves some unpacking.

You can watch the full interview here:

https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/del-debates-neil-degrasse-tyson/

First, props to both men. Del for inviting Neil on his show and Neil for choosing to appear.

Bigtree wanted to openly and collegially get Tyson to explain and defend his rationale around these three matters:

1. How does he, an astrophysicist and public educator, decide who to believe on matters of epidemiology and immunology?

2. If the scientific process has been corrupted, how would Tyson know?

3. How would he respond to Del’s critique and evidence that the film was biasing, misleading and misinforming the audience?

Bigtree was able to extract, through much patience and determination, answers from his highly educated guest who seemed more interested in evading questions than responding to them.

That’s my opinion. I am probably biased. It’s not that I don’t like Tyson as a human being. I have never met him. I have just been disappointed in him for a while now. 

Tyson has Big Shoes to Fill

Tyson is an astrophysicist like his predecessor, Carl Sagan, who were both hosts of a series called “Cosmos”. Sagan wrote and narrated the original TV series in 1980. In my mind Tyson had very big shoes to fill when he served the same role in a follow-up series 34 years later.

Sagan blew open my world and sparked my lifelong interest in astronomy when I was 13.

The Universe is Expanding!

Time slows down as you speed up! How amazing!

Years before Cosmos aired, Sagan designed the first message to the universe. It was in the form of a 6x9 inch plaques that were mounted to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the first two objects ever built to leave our own solar system.

What would you write to an extraterrestrial intelligence? How would you convey anything? After getting the okay from NASA to design such a thing, Sagan came up with this:

In four pictographs, Sagan conveyed a time and length scale based on the frequency of radiation emitted from spin-flip transition of Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the Universe. He used binary, the most basic way of expressing numeric quantities.

The size and shape of the average human being is then given. The man raises his hand in friendly greeting. Even if sentiment might get lost on beings from another star system, the hand, thought Sagan, depicts our opposable thumb, a feature of our physical bodies that has endowed us with great ability to manipulate our surroundings.

Using the frequency of 14 neighboring pulsars and their relative distances from the Earth, space-faring ETs would be able to, in theory, triangulate the location of our solar system with respect to local star systems.

Finally, our planet’s relative position with respect to the Sun is given.

Sagan came up with the design in three weeks. He’s a genius in my book. Thankfully we had people like that to represent and speak for us.

I don’t know why I was so moved by Sagan’s storytelling and so unimpressed by Tyson’s. The cosmos is just as mysterious as it always was. Maybe it was because I was less impressionable three decades later. Or maybe it was because there was something missing in Tyson’s delivery. 

Tyson earned a PhD in astrophysics from Columbia University after his pursuit of a doctorate in the same field from University of Texas, Austin was dissolved by his faculty advisors. Wikipedia reports that Tyson admits that he could have spent more time in the lab at UT. Nevertheless his work at Columbia around Type 1a supernovae and the phenomenon of galactic bulge present in spiral galaxies earned him a doctorate degree.

The astrophysicist’s “meteoric” rise in popularity over the years stemmed from his work with the Hayden planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History in NY, where he was appointed director in 1996 and oversaw its reconstruction. He has since authored dozens of books and has appeared on and hosted numerous television programs and series. He also has a large on-line presence in social media.

Although the vast majority of his public messages have been around celestial matters, something he knows more about than most, the few around vaccines flew in the face of what I thought was insurmountable evidence that the original trials were fraudulent and that the rapidly and poorly tested therapy was being overly hyped by the media. Tyson caught my attention early on in the pandemic with messages such as this:

His post about the vaccines being 99% effective at preventing hospitalization and death was unfounded. Tyson was just parroting news sources like the Associated Press and public health officials like Dr. Rachelle Walinsky. 

Yes. I am throwing the director of the CDC and the AP into the same bucket because neither could substantiate their position with any data. The CDC was not releasing mortality rates based on vaccination status at the time. Data from Israel confirmed that the Pfizer mRNA vaccine offered some modest, short-lived benefit with regard to severe outcomes but nowhere near the 99% mark.

Nevertheless, Tyson had no problem throwing people like me into a bucket of our own. I am a “science denier” who thinks the world is flat:

Data and reproducible evidence are important to scientists, something that Tyson explicitly stated in his exchange with Bigtree. Yet these posts and tweets exemplified the opposite. He trusts without confirming for himself. He wasn’t behaving as a scientist, he was using his reputation to promote unfounded claims, an important criticism that Del Bigtree politely leveled against him in their conversation.

The exchange between the two was long, as is my commentary. In the end, Tyson was completely unprepared to respond to Bigtree’s methodical dissection of his take on public health policy, his blind trust in scientific authority, his understanding of the Covid-19 vaccines’ true risk/benefit and the lines of reason offered in his own movie.

I believe Tyson thought he could enter the Highwire studios and defend his position with reasonable sounding generalizations and figurative and literal hand-waving. He couldn’t. More than once Tyson was forced to crawl through an escape hatch and claim that he was only an astrophysicist and that Bigtree should be talking to a “consensus scientist”, not him.

This is true. But why then is he speaking publicly about matters that he hasn’t investigated sufficiently?

What’s wrong with Tyson’s movie?

“Shot in the Arm” has not yet been released. The central theme of the film was around vaccine hesitancy, specifically around the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine. The hesitancy, according to Tyson and director, Scott Kennedy, stems from misinformation spread by Bigtree and others. Decreased uptake of the measles vaccine, according to the filmmakers, led to outbreaks of the disease around the world.

Bigtree understood that he would be a likely target of such a movie. He produced the documentary “VAXXED” in 2016 which gave voice to families with autistic children they believe were directly caused by the MMR formulation. Moreover the film showcased a CDC scientist and whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson, who claimed that the CDC asked him to destroy documents that linked the vaccine to autism in some children. 

Bigtree clarified that the movie did not prove that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism, only that the question remains unanswered and that there is a high likelihood of fraud being committed by what should be a trusted agency of public health.

In their conversation, Bigtree noted the bias and inaccuracies in how his position was portrayed in the “Shot in the Arm”. A clip of Bigtree speaking with members of a Hasidic community in NY was shown. A measles outbreak in this community was offered as an example of the repercussions of vaccine hesitancy leading to illness that could be prevented.

Bigtree pointed out that this community was actually having “measles parties”. They exposed their children to the virus intentionally so that they would develop lifetime immunity without subjecting themselves to a vaccine that they did not trust. This wasn’t an example of unvaccinated vulnerability at all.

The movie also told the story of a measles outbreak in Disneyland in 2014. The movie cites this as another example of the consequences of Bigtree’s work even though “VAXXED” was released two years later.

Bigtree showed his guest the California Department of Public Health data behind the Disneyland outbreak. The majority of the cases were in adults. These were people who chose not to get the vaccine long before Bigtree entered the scene. Vaccination status could not be confirmed in nearly 40% of the people who got sick. Moreover, a third of the cases were in people who were vaccinated. This wasn’t the result of vaccine hesitancy. This was proof of the vaccine’s failure.

Is scientific information with regard to vaccines distributed to the public in an unbiased manner? Shouldn’t Tyson, a heavyweight in the department of rationality and an advocate for the education of the public around scientific matters, be concerned that he wasn’t leveling the playing field between two opposing viewpoints in his own movie? 

Tyson did not respond.

Finally Bigtree pointed out that vaccine advocates like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Peter Hotez were interviewed formally and were allowed to give responses to questions they were likely made aware of in advance in “sit-down” interviews. BigTree, on the other hand, was not offered the same treatment. Instead, he was confronted and filmed as he was leaving a meeting at the CDC and was forced to respond “on the fly”.

Having not seen the movie myself, I cannot comment on the validity of BigTree’s complaint. Tyson promised he would bring his complaint to the film director, Scott Hamilton Kennedy, while never acknowledging that Del had a point.

What do we do when experts disagree?

The central question that Bigtree posed to Tyson was this: How does a scientist like Tyson, who readily admits that he is not an authority on vaccines, decide who and what to believe when there is a disagreement between experts that know more than he does on a subject?

Tyson is in the same boat as most people. Few of us are authorities on any subject, let alone two. We are all faced with the same problem: how do we know who or what to trust?

Tyson’s response was formulaic. He goes with the scientific consensus, whatever it is. Tyson went further, consensus was not simply a bunch of smart people opining. The consensus position must be backed up by evidence that is peer reviewed and reproducible.

This is not an unreasonable position. Bigtree then confronted him with this: How can there be consensus if experts on one side of the argument were not involved in the discussion? Tyson appeared mystified at this notion. Bigtree, in turn, seemed mystified that this fact was lost on his guest.

To demonstrate, Del showed Neil an email from NIH director Francis Collins demanding that highly respected voices and their premises behind the Great Barrington Declaration, a sensible plan to forgo lockdowns while selectively protecting the most vulnerable, be subjected to a “quick and devastating published takedown”.

With regard to scientific evidence, he showed Neil age stratified Covid-19 survivability rates from our authorities that proved that for the vast majority of people the disease did not pose a threat. The risk/benefit ratio is different for different people. Why are there no caveats, nuances or exemptions from the mandates?

Tyson responded that vaccination is not just to protect an individual. It is also to protect those who cannot be vaccinated.

Bigtree then showed him a clip of Pfizer president of International Developed Markets, Janine Small, admitting that studies of the vaccine were never designed to test the prevention of transmission, yet that is what the public was told. 

Prevention of disease transmission, the basis of Tyson’s primary argument that getting the Covid vaccine was part of a social contract that required us to accept the therapy to protect those that couldn’t, was not possible. 

Pfizer knew this. Our authorities knew this because Pfizer let them know in a briefing document they wrote to the FDA’s advisory panel in December 2020. Bigtree knew this because he read the document from Pfizer when it was released. Did Tyson know this?

Tyson said he did read the document, and when pressed, confirmed that he was aware of this too. 

It was a blunder that Del courteously chose not to press him on. I don’t believe Tyson ever read the document or was aware that we knew in December 2020 that there was no evidence that Covid-19 vaccines prevented transmission of the disease. If he did it would be more of an embarrassment for him. Why would he have made the “social contract” argument on the Highwire and prior platforms?

Not surprisingly, he could not come up with any coherent explanation of why he continued to insist that getting vaccinated was about protecting others, not themselves.

Bigtree then offered this attack: if the vaccine only diminishes symptoms but does not prevent transmission, then vaccinated people are turned into asymptomatic spreaders who will unknowingly spread the disease to the people Tyson wishes to protect. Getting vaccinated does the exact opposite thing that Tyson is professing.

Tyson: “I don’t know the risk of you being asymptomatic and transmitting the disease. I just don’t know that risk.”

Neil, if you don’t know the risk, why are you assuming that there is none? If there were no risk, why then the lockdowns, social distancing and mask mandates on people who felt perfectly fine? These measures were recommended by the same scientific consensus that you trust.

Tyson never admitted that his advice to vaccinate to save the vulnerable may have been ill-founded. He and Bigtree’s audience are smart enough to know he got it wrong. Rather than admitting this, Tyson instead redirected, “Why are you asking me? I am an astrophysicist, not a doctor.”

Good point. 

What’s an Astrophysicist to do?

This is where things get interesting. We can excuse him from being factually wrong about a topic outside his wheelhouse. If we are feeling generous we may even excuse him from not doing his own investigation into these subjects. But what can an astrophysicist learn from his own field that is germane to the challenge we have around who and what to believe?

Early in the interview Bigtree pointed out that whenever the consensus position held by experts has been proven wrong it was always, by definition, a non-consensus scientist that had it right. He offered Galileo as an example.

Galileo’s story has been often cited over the last three years. The Italian astronomer, who held very respectable positions in academia, maintained that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the Earth as the papacy, the authority in scientific matters at the time, insisted. Galileo was right. The scientific consensus was wrong.

Tyson countered that there was no consensus at the time. The Church’s position was not actually the kind of consensus that Tyson speaks of. There was no data to support the consensus position, that the Earth was the center of creation. Consensus around this enormous topic began with Galileo and it remains factual four centuries later. Scientific consensus got it right according to Tyson.

This was puzzling. Tyson is not only an astrophysicist, he is a historian when it comes to discoveries in his field. He should know that although Galileo was right, he wasn’t the first person to put forth the idea that we are living in a heliocentric (Sun centered) solar system. The Greek astronomer, Aristarcus, proposed the same model eighteen centuries before Galileo’s time. 

In fact many astronomers likely realized that a sun centered solar system would explain what they were observing in the skies much more easily. This was done openly in ancient Greece where all opinions were given just consideration. It was only during the Dark Ages where the central authority, the Catholic Church, condemned such discussions as heretical, a vaguely familiar situation to say the least.

But more importantly, Tyson should know that Galileo never changed the Pope’s mind. He died under house arrest because he refused to recant.​​​ The world did not wake up to what was in front of their eyes for another fifty years.

Why did it take so long? The answer reveals something crucial that has present-day relevance. The reality is that through observations made from the Earth’s surface alone we can not prove that the Sun is in the center of the solar system. The only conclusion we can make is that if the Earth were the center of the universe, the stuff in the skies are doing some crazy things.

An Earth-centered (Geocentric) solar system makes things much more complicated. How can we explain why observable constellations change with the seasons? It would require the Sun to circle the Earth each day slightly faster than the stars so that after 365.25 days it would “lap” the stars.

Why do planets move with respect to the stars in one direction, reverse themselves (retrograde motion) and return to their original path? Why do certain stars appear to slightly shift their position with respect to other stars every six months (stellar parallax)?

The Church could blithely respond that these oddities were not an issue. That’s the way God in Heaven made it. It’s not a problem; it’s a design feature. It works something like this:

Apparent motion of the Sun, Venus and Mercury as viewed from the Earth

What other evidence do you need?

Using his rudimentary telescope, Galileo could also demonstrate that Jupiter’s moons orbited the giant planet and not the Earth. He could also show that the phases of Venus must be due to its position in an orbit around the Sun, also not the Earth.

This wasn’t a problem for the Church either. These were just a few exceptions to the rule. There’s nothing to see here.

One may argue that a heliocentric model explains things much more simply. However Occam’s Razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, is not a method of proof.

So how did scientific consensus, by Tyson’s definition, eventually emerge? The solution had nothing to do with observational astronomy. Instead, it came by way of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosphea Naturalis Principea Mathematica.

Newton demonstrated that the motion of any object with mass could be accurately predicted. The haphazard motion of celestial objects necessitated by the Church’s model was simply not possible. Five more decades passed after Galileo's death before the Church was forced to recant their position. Scientific consensus around this enormous topic came by way of Newton, not Galileo.

How can this help our friend Neil DeGrasse Tyson in his struggle to get things right?

The geocentric model was dismantled once it was accepted that planets, moons and apples all move in highly predictable and immutable ways. Gravity defines how the solar system behaves. Once you know how a system behaves you gain insight into how to correctly interpret what you are observing.

What are the forces in play in our pandemic? 

First, the Pharmaceutical industry is a for-profit entity designed to create the most amount of money for their stakeholders.

Second, the products they make and sell fall into two distinct categories, medicines and biologics (vaccines). Not all medicines are completely safe for everyone. Neither are vaccines. The difference is that these companies are liable for injuries that result from use of their drugs. They are indemnified from liability with regard to vaccines.

What, then, is the solution that will emerge from these forces? In other words, what can we predict will be the business model that will result in the most profit for the industry?

Clearly, making drugs or vaccines that kill the majority of people would be antithetical to profit making. Who is going to buy their products if there isn't anyone around? Likewise, curing people with a short regimen of medication also doesn’t help them in the long run. Who is going to buy their products if everyone is healthy?

The optimal solution that emerges from the forces at play is quite obvious: Make vaccines that have a short term benefit that can be proven and a long-term detriment that will be difficult to ascribe to them. Vaccines can be sold on a large scale because of the exigency of a pandemic while expanding the future demand for the medicines to treat the chronic diseases that result. As morbid and unthinkable as it sounds, that is the system we have set up. It’s an unassailable fact.

But hold on now, what about all the evidence that they are safe and effective?? It’s an illusion conjured up through very basic lapses in scientific rigor.

The trials were designed to only examine efficacy for a very short period. They effectively ended when these same vaccine manufacturers offered their product to the placebo wing within a few months. There is no way to definitively measure long-term benefit or risk anymore.

Is this in fact happening? It’s up to you to decide. But shouldn’t we assume it is until proven otherwise and not the other way around?

I suggest that Tyson refuses to believe that this could be the case because we have regulatory agencies that are protecting the public, but are they? The profit maximizing vaccine/pharma companies contribute billions to these agencies. How can he know that these agencies are not captured?

The point here is that we are in a very similar situation that Western Europe was in towards the end of the Renaissance. The authority with regard to the movement and organization of the planets and the sun, refused to budge. Evidence was offered without context. Different interpretations of what could be observed were trashed and considered dangerous. What if people lost their trust in authority? Dissenters had to be punished through house arrest and excommunication and now through shadow banning and threats to medical licensure.

Summary

Tyson’s position is built on enormous assumptions:

• Scientific consensus around Covid-19 Vaccines was obtained through an open and fair vetting of differing opinions from people who are qualified to speak on such matters.

• The evidence that supports the consensus comes from sources that are unbiased and vetted by experts who have no conflicts of interest.

• The regulatory process has not been corrupted by corporate influence and will prevent the most profitable solution for the corporate influencers from emerging.

• The hundreds of thousands of serious reports in vaccine surveillance systems from around the world are invalid and unworthy of any serious inquiry.

How can an astrophysicist like Tyson intuit that he may have been wrong this whole time?

It takes humility and courage. That’s the difference between a scientist and a person with letters after their name. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is teaching us this through his own example.

The evidence is not on your side Neil. It’s going to take some humility to admit that you may have been wrong. And by the way, setting the record straight won’t condemn you to house arrest but it will likely cost you your position at the Hayden Planetarium, your paid appearances, book sales, etc. etc.

Is it worth it? It depends on whether you are a scientist or someone who plays one on TV.