Science, Scientists, and the Pandemic

here's a video by UpAndAtom about why the scientists seemed to make such a hash of dealing with Covid.



It's good stuff, until the end, when she lets them all off the hook. (See point Seven about this.)

With my former-philospher hat on, I want to add a few points.

First. Making policy decisions is not something that science can do. Facts can inform policy decisions, but not constrain them. This is Hume: facts cannot entail policies. Scientists and historians can dig out what studies there may be, what happened last time, and figure out if any of it is relevant to whatever they are dealing with. Those are facts. The leap to e.g. locking children up at home for months on end can only be made by a judgement that the bad effects of doing that are worth whatever the bad effects of letting them stay at school might be. That's not a "scientific" decision. It's a flat-out political one.

Second. Mathematical models are guesswork unless they are based on well-confirmed physical theories of the phenomenon. There is a textbook model of infection spread, based on a pair of coupled partial differential equations. It relies on some parameters that are specific to the disease, and if the disease is new, nobody will know what those parameters are until it has spread, and they have had time to collect and analyse the data. Which is already too late.

Third. Scientists are human, and some are more human than others. Neil Ferguson had long been known as the go-to forecaster for Government departments wanting to justify slaughtering vast herds of animals. That's how he keeps his job at Imperial. Nobody who knew about forecasting and Ferguson put any credibility in his announcements. Treating his forecasts as credible was either incredibly naive or incredibly cynical.

Fourth. When Governments quote a known scienziati di comodo, you know the decisions sono state fissate(*). Politicians and corporate managers decide what they are going to do first, and back-fill the facts and business plans to fit the decision. There is a very brief period between a problem appearing and the bad decision about handling it being made, when facts can sway the managers and politicians, and then only if the facts are presented by people they trust. And sometimes even the consiglieri has to accept that the wrong thing is going to be done. Because politics.

Fifth. There are no experts on pandemics. There haven't been enough pandemics to produce the conditions for expertise. See a very good video by Veristatium about this.



Sixth. Medicine and Public Health are not sciences, but technologies. Both make use of the products of scientific theories as filtered through technology and pharmaceutical companies. Doctors used leeches when that was the best theory, and they prescribe statins now that's the best theory. Most doctors have no idea about how PET scanners work (or Ibuprofen, for that matter), but they can follow the operating instructions and interpret the results. This is okay until something goes wrong or the results are atypical, when nobody can do anything about it. When diagnosing, if the symptoms don't add up to something they have a cure for, they tend to tell the patient there's nothing wrong with them, or resort to the current all-purpose explanation (diabetes, obesity, long Covid, and so on). Public health is even worse. It hasn't had another success on the scale of public sewers and water treatment plants, and that was nearly 170 years ago. See Ben Goldacre's Bad Science if you want to know just how dreadful pharmaceutical industry research is, and Dr James Le Fanu's The Rise And Fall Of Modern Medicine if you want to know just how medicine has stagnated in the past decades. (Unless it benefits from technological advances elsewhere, such as keyhole surgery.)

Seventh. Using extra-scientific criteria to justify one's decision to pursue one theory rather than another is okay, though you may risk being thought a little eccentric if the facts just aren't with you. Deciding on your personal line of research is not the same as deciding on public health policies that will mess up the lives of millions of children and young people, or consign a million or so vulnerable people to living in one room of their family home and avoiding everyone for months on end. It is not okay for scientists to add extra-scientific arguments to make life easier for the politicians. If the scientists have no relevant facts, they should say so and leave the room. I know they aren't going to, because holding an establishment post (Chief Medical Officer, say) means they are ambitious, and ambitious people please their political patrons. That's why, if you ever get to be a Minister, you should not listen too closely to the official experts.(**)

Eighth. The last of the old-fashioned experts died a while ago. What we have instead are true-believer activists. Whereas the old-fashioned experts said that they didn't know when they didn't, and weren't pushing any explicit agendas, activists know already what is wrong and what must be done, and facts are merely rhetorical devices. This is especially so in the fact-lite, speculation-heavy subjects where the systems, from the weather to the human body, are way more complex than any bunch of equations could describe. Major organisations from the Met Office to Public Health England facts are run by people who are pushing socio-economic agendas that are defended by repeated cries that "the science is in" or "the consensus is overwhelming". Facts can be publicised when it helps The Cause, and kept quiet otherwise. Which is why you never hear anything about climate change during a long spell of dull, mild weather.

Science, as the search for a better theory, did not fail us during the pandemic. If anything, the political establishment failed science, trying to impose a consensus that had no basis in fact.

Many scientists failed in their role as citizens, from the crowd that covered up the Wuhan Lab leak, to the deceitful and panic-mongering briefings of Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and others. They went along with policies, especially mask-wearing, that they knew had no basis in fact, and were proposed for political reasons. It doesn't matter why they did it, or even if they were sincere. They should have stayed out of the policy debate, and they should not have been on the rostrum in Press Briefings. As for Anthony Fauci, he has a special circle of Hell being dug for him even now.

The failings of some scientists were compounded by the failure of the mainstream and social media, most of which obligingly spewed out a stream of poisonous and misleading propaganda about the threat posed by Covid, and did everything they could to suppress dissent about Government policy, and to create an illusion that there was a factual basis for any of it. The real failures were and still are in Broadcasting House.

They created the panic in the first place.