There’s a group of people who have unselfishly worked to help protect everyone during the “COVID Crisis”. Without these unsung heroes, it would be impossible to measure the effectiveness of the efforts to fight the disease. It’s time we recognized them and their sacrifice.
In typical scientific experiment there are two groups of participants, an experimental group, and a control group.
A control group is a statistically significant portion of participants in an experiment that are shielded from exposure to variables. The experimental group, however, is modified in a specific way so that meaningful results can be harvested from the experiment.
That’s a fancy way of saying that the scientists change the behavior of the experimental group while the control group is left to live their life as they normally would.
Control groups are valuable because, if you make everyone do the same thing, then you can’t measure the impact of everyone doing what you’re making them do. Well, you can, but you’ll never know if what you’re measuring would have happened anyway.
To draw any kind of meaningful conclusions from an experiment, you need both an experimental group and a control group. Without the control group, you have no way of proving your theory.
Now, let’s apply this to a real-world example:
Let’s say we have a bunch of CDC recommendations that led to government mandates. But, we don’t know which are actually going to work. We’d need to run some tests to figure that out. The people who fall in line and blindly follow the mandates are the experimental group, and the ones that don’t believe everything they’re told are the control group.
To generate meaningful results from an experiment, you change the experimental group a little bit at a time, observe both groups and compare results.
For example, if you want to determine if masks are effective, you’d instruct your experimental group to wear masks all the time. And, at the same time, you’d instruct your control group to go about their lives without wearing face diapers.
Then, you’d observe both groups and use those observations to determine if masks made any difference at all.
To test the efficacy of the government mandates, having a control group is essential. Without the control group, there is no way of knowing if any of the recommendations or mandates are worth doing.
You can also apply that same process to determine the effectiveness of social distancing, sanitizing everything, elbow bumping and staying at home. The experimental subjects are instructed to wear masks OR social distance OR sanitize everything OR elbow bump OR stay at home. Then, you observe the results and compare them to the control group to see which of those are effective.
But, when you make your test subjects wear masks AND social distance AND sanitize everything AND elbow bump AND stay at home, you have no idea how effective any of the individual techniques are. Sadly, this what happened and it wasted a chance to understand which of these techniques (if any) were necessary. Even though there was no useful data collected, the members of the control group courageously did none of those things, all in the name of science.
Now, let’s look at vacksinees.
Let’s say you have a theory that vackseens are safe and that the instances of adverse reactions in vacksinated people are the same as what you’d see in a non-vacksinated population. To prove your theory, you’d again need two groups. The experimental group is comprised of everyone who willingly allowed themselves to be injected and have self-identified as Guinea pig. You’ll also need a group of non-vacksinated people (aka control group) to observe.
Next, you watch some vacksinated people and count the number of severe reactions they have to the drug. Simultaneously, you observe approximately the same number of non-vacksinated people and count how many of them spontaneously develop blood clots, lose their memory, have heart attacks, fall over from anaphylactic shock, and/or die. Then you compare your results and draw a conclusion.
Without the control group, there is no way to prove or disprove your theory. You need a control group in order to determine if the vackseens are truly safe and effective over the long term. But, if you vacksinate everyone, you lose your control group forever.
If you truly believe that COVID-19 is as dangerous as we’re being told to believe, then you must also believe that following the CDC recommendations and getting vacksinated is the safest way to go. And if you believe that, then you must believe the members of the control group are incredibly brave and are performing a valuable service, at great personal risk.
Because the control group isn’t following the safe path, they’re putting themselves directly in the path of danger. And they’re doing it for the sake of everyone.
I don’t like to brag but I’m proud to say I’m a member of the control group. And there are hundreds of millions of people just like me. People who are willing to do whatever it takes, perhaps at great personal risk, to ensure the safety of others.
The control group isn’t thoughtless or selfish. Quite the contrary. We are extraordinarily brave.
If you self-identified as a lab rat, you should be thanking the control group instead of trying to shame us for not getting vacksinated. Because we’re putting ourselves in harm’s way in the name of science. And doing what you’re afraid to do.
Related Article:
What’s In a Name
Control Group Update: May 2021
