Abstract
Let me start this review with my declaration of conflict of interest, intellectually of course: I have done some background research and reading on mercury toxicity (Mutter et al., 2010; Mutter et al., 2005), from thimerosal (ethylmercury, a preservative that used to be in vaccines until about 10 years ago) and amalgams. This is an area, where Robert F. Kennedy has been politically quite active with his Children’s Health Defence foundation. I am therefore favorably inclined to Kennedy’s activities, although I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer. My personal stance here is: some vaccines are useful and safe, some are not, and likely it is best to take them in separate steps, as we did with our children. I have also done primary research on Covid-19 right from the beginning (Walach & Hockertz, 2020a, 2020b) – modeling (Klement & Walach, 2021), conducting surveys (Walach et al., 2022; Walach, Ruof, et al., 2021), looking at data, blogging in Germany – conducting two highly visible and highly controversial studies (Walach, Klement, et al., 2021a; Walach, Weikl, et al., 2021), which have both been retracted within a week, one of them republished (Walach, Klement, et al., 2021b), the other still under a new review. I was critical of the official Covid-19 narrative as soon as I discovered huge discrepancies between original data and reports in the media, as well as analyses of media-prone scientists that were ostensibly wrong; we have succeeded in publishing a critique of one such dangerously wrong analysis (Dehning et al., 2020) about 2 years after the original one was out, following two rejections and long rounds of reviewing (Kuhbandner et al., 2022). So, I have learned a lot of lessons there. I initially thought, we are dealing with a mistake, due to a novel threat and confusion in how to react. The more I saw and experienced myself, the more I lost that stance of innocence and thought that, perhaps there was an initial accident or problem, but surely very soon some people used it to ride their own hobby horses. Collateral utility, as I call it. That is the reason, why I embarked on my own social-science study: interviews with activists in Germany and elsewhere, who wrote articles, blogged, were visible in the public. I have conducted 13 interviews so far, and the tacit and express knowledge from those interviews is of course also feeding my viewpoint.
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