Trust was harmed because people were asked to trust scientists who were in no place to make well grounded statements. Robust science takes years to produce.
The whole "trust the science" mantra from the covid years was a complete publicity nightmare for science as an institution, as the scientists eventually ended up contradicting themselves when additional data came in.
Science ultimately does not operate on faith, but on skepticism and doubt. This is its greatest asset, that you can question it freely and it will have answers to all your questions (though sometimes they are "we don't know"). Propping it up as dogmatic truth that must be trusted and never investigated is probably the most anti-scientific thing you can do.
I think it’s even a little worse than that. A bunch of the people saying “trust the science” actually meant “trust a particular policy.” Science is not policy, and policy is not science.
Oh yeah, it's been an ongoing problem for years. The name of science has been used to lend credence to all sorts of unscientific nonsense, usually by slapping some citations onto it and calling it facts-based or science-based.
We began developing modern germ theory in the mid-19th century. We've gotten really good at retarding the transmission of infectious disease. We know what works.
Just like we've known for well over 100 years that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation.
To your point, science is not policy - but policy that is not informed by science is just wishful thinking.
Let’s pretend for a second that we absolutely, unequivocally, know and knew what would prevent transmission of COVID-19 [0]. It still does not follow that anyone in the government saying “stay home” or “no non-essential travel” or “wear a mask indoors” is science. It’s policy. It may or may not be well informed by science and it may or may not be a good idea. Science might be able to determine how disease spreads, but deciding what to do with that information is outside the scope is most science.
[0] At least judging by what various branches of the government said and still say, this requires a lot of suspension of disbelief.
It's then on the public policymakers to inform the public how the policy was driven by science so that the public understands why the policy is being adopted.
I'm curious about the "next crisis" and whether or not there's a swing in the other direction though. I feel like we're stuck in hindsight bias, and forgetting that a lot of decisions weren't made in ideal circumstances. That's not to say that there's not things to learn, and that's not to say that these lessons shouldn't be analyzed.
But during a crisis you have to balance skepticism and doubt with the need to take decisive action. The fact that we seem to be focusing our blame on the scientific community, rather than politicians, is this magical judo that politicians have made. The scientists goal is to share the data and it's impacts, the politicians is to shape that data and impact into policy.
It's that plus statements they made where you could clearly see the statement was in service of politics rather than science.
One particular example I remember is during the protests after the death of George Floyd, there were several scientists saying something along the lines of "you shouldn't attend large crowds, but it's OK if you are going to the protest" [1] [2] [3]
It was just so blatant and such an insult to people's intelligence and was just so obviously fueled by politics and not public health. IMO the real villans of the pandemic were the doctors out there trying to make themselves famous and shooting up the credibility of their field in the process while also giving fuel to the other side to make their points.
The kind of crowd matters. 1000 people attending an indoor concert is a massively more effective spreader of COVID than 1000 people marching outdoors at a protest.
The chances of getting infected from someone nearby who is spreading the virus depends on how much of the virus got in you which is a function of how long you are near to them, the rate they are expelling viruses, and how long those viruses stay around you.
In a crowd all of those factors depend heavily on what the crowd is doing and where they are doing it and what percent of the crowd is infected.
I remember seeing papers that looked at the actual results of various large crowds and found that the George Floyd protests in fact did very little to spread COVID.
> We have robust science about climate change for decades now and yet it is pushed against all the time.
There's economic incentives against the politicial policies interwoven with climate change studies, so of course there's pushback. But how is this relevant to covid?
> Is germ theory a "dogmatic truth" for you?
Why would it be? I'm allowed to ask any questions I want about germ theory, and there are no shortage of answers. Nobody is asking me to just believe in germs, I can look in a microscope and see the lil' critters with my own eyes.
> Scepticism is just a gateway drug to nihilism, were nothing is ever true.
That's a category error. The skeptic position is until demonstrated otherwise, things are not known. Nihilism is the position that all values are unfounded and nothing matters. One makes statements about what is known, the other about how we should act. That is not the same.
As if there hasn't been any economic incentives during COVID... If you want to debate, do it in good faith. I will reply to your other points, but I am not going to go any further when you aren't honest.
>I can look in a microscope and see the lil' critters with my own eyes.
That's not the proof of germ theory, as spontaneous generation will pretend those "little critters" appeared after the illness, aren't the cause for it.
And how does that work for viruses? There is AIDS denial at the higher levels of science (like Duesberg, or the very "inventor" of PCR, Nobel prize Kary Mullis) who argue that aids is caused by "lifestyle" and antiviral treatment, not by HIV. Have they not "seen" HIV in electron microscopes?
>The skeptic position is until demonstrated otherwise, things are not known.
And then doubt any "demonstration" ad infinitum. Sceptics just answer any proof - any data that would shut down their doubts - with more doubt, until it is all a planetary conspiracy by the New World Order.
> As if there hasn't been any economic incentives during COVID... If you want to debate, do it in good faith. I will reply to your other points, but I am not going to go any further when you aren't honest.
Sure there were some economic incentives, granted, but it's pennies in comparison. Covid policy became such a hot potato because it became strongly associated with controverisal political figures. It was really a proxy war for an entirely different conflict.
> That's not the proof of germ theory, as spontaneous generation will pretend those "little critters" appeared after the illness, aren't the cause for it.
Even so given it's possible to take a sample of bacteria, expose a subject to the sample, and the subject will become ill; and this can be repeated many times reliably, making it hard to defend spontaneous generation.
> And how does that work for viruses? There is AIDS denial at the higher levels of science (like Duesberg, or the very "inventor" of PCR, Nobel prize Kary Mullis) who argue that aids is caused by "lifestyle" and antiviral treatment, not by HIV. Have they not "seen" HIV in electron microscopes?
Well so what if a scientist questions a theory? Einstein was an outspoken skeptic of quantum physics, this sort of doubt is a central part of the scientific process.
Being wrong about things is in many ways the default epistemilogical state as a human being. It's ok to be wrong. I'm wrong about things. You're wrong about things. We're all wrong about things all the time. Even acclaimed scientists get things wrong.
This is why we should hold our opinions about things tentatively. That, not nihilism, is at the core of being a skeptic.
> And then doubt any "demonstration" ad infinitum. Sceptics just answer any proof - any data that would shut down their doubts - with more doubt, until it is all a planetary conspiracy by the New World Order.
Nothing is certain therefore this one particular conspiracy theory is a given? I don't think this sounds particularly skeptical. I'll grant many self-proclaimed skeptics are only skeptics with regard to things they do not already believe, but this practice is not a fool's skepticism.
> we don't relitigate everything all the time. E.g. is germ theory a "dogmatic truth" for you?
Sure. Germ theory is incomplete. This became obvious during COVID, but the incomplete version of it was indeed taken as dogma. Things ordinary germ theory does not successfully explain:
1. Why did SARS-CoV-2 variants immediately exterminate each other instead of coexisting side by side for the long term? And why did flu apparently disappear during COVID?
2. How did around 80% of people appear to have pre-existing immunity to a supposedly novel coronavirus, as measured by household transmission studies?
3. Why is it possible for people on isolated Antarctic bases to spontaneously get sick from a cold, when there is nobody to get sick from?
4. Why are respiratory viruses seasonal to the extent that influenza outbreaks start everywhere at once rather than spreading from an index case like COVID did (there are lots of ad-hoc folk explanations for this kicking around, none of which are obviously derived from germ theory).
5. If germ theory is correct, why do epidemiological models that implement it never correctly predict the course of epidemics? (and they don't, even though epidemiologists like to pretend they do).
What we're looking at here is likely to be similar to physics pre-Einstein. We have a theory, it sometimes yields very accurate predictions, and we have lots of evidence for it. But there are cases that it fails for. The theory must therefore need refinement. Non-dogmatic scientists would be intrigued by this and even excited to explore it, but if you look at the public health literature you don't see this kind of excitement. Instead you see lots of papers that ignore all the questions above and just sort of assert that the theory side is done, so here's our predictions Mr Health Minister.
How does ordinary germ theory not explain what happened with flu during the pandemic?
The measures people took to reduce the spread of COVID would also reduce the spread of flu, and because flu is less infectious and infected people do not spread at for as many days those measures would be even more effective against flu.
If the flu season without COVID would have just been an average flu season instead of some particular infectious strain then it would not be hard for the measures taken for COVID to push the effective R value for the flu that year to under 1, which would mean it would not spread.
That's the explanation public health departments like but it's inconsistent with the data. Much more likely to be the same phenomenon that caused other variants to disappear as well.
> And why did flu apparently disappear during COVID?
Because they stopped tracking it to give resources to tracking SARS-CoV-2, nothing more. The CDC had a note at the bottom of their site explaining why their graphs flatlined, and despite it people used those graphs as evidence it really did disappear.
It disappeared because of social distancing. Influenza is less transmissible than SARS-CoV-2, so the measures used to keep SARS-CoV-2 under control were even more effective at shutting down transmission of the flu.
> Propping it up as dogmatic truth that must be trusted and never investigated is probably the most anti-scientific thing you can do.
Honestly, that's what all the science-denying cranks say. You may not be such a person, but you need to be aware of the mindset of many people making this claim.
With regards to the retardation of the spread of infectious disease, that is robust science. We've spent over 100 years developing and practicing it, too. Our success rate has been incredible.
Also, this wasn't even humankind's first rodeo with the SARS coronavirus. We knew what we needed to do, we failed to do it, and hundreds of thousands of Americans needlessly lost their life as a result. That's the nightmare.
Not only infection disease science is robust with humans, but it is also a veterinary science. And with livestock outnumbering humans and being a huge industry where every dollar counts, we have a good idea on the efficiency of e.g. vaccines.
> Honestly, that's what all the science-denying cranks say. You may not be such a person, but you need to be aware of the mindset of many people making this claim.
It's also what science advocates like e.g. Carl Sagan[1] says, because it's true. "Science deniers" may be wrong about other things, but not about this.
The truth does not fear questions, and does not require people to believe in it.
> With regards to the retardation of the spread of infectious disease, that is robust science. We've spent over 100 years developing and practicing it, too. Our success rate has been incredible.
We don't seem to really be making significant headway stopping these respiratory diseases. There's a new seasonal influenza every year, and then there's the common cold sloshing around on top of that. These annual global epidemics seem to be washing over us with such regularity they're a fact of life in modern society. Most of them less severe than Covid, for certain, but I think you're overstating our ability to stop them.
[1] e.g. "If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."
Common misconception, no there isn't. The vaccines target whole strains and it is extremely rare for a new one to show up. What happens is, every spring the best guess is made about which strains will be most common in the coming fall, then the summer is spent manufacturing the existing vaccines for those strains. For cost and compatibility reasons, yearly shots only contain a small handful of the possible flu vaccines, so you're supposed to get them every year to ensure you've gotten one that includes the currently expected dominant strains.
...and? We've deemed it far more cost-effective to vaccinate the population against the new flu variants that continually emerge. Our strategy changes when we have no vaccine, and the disease is particularly virulent.
> there's the common cold sloshing around on top of that
ditto with flu. Common cold is an annoyance, not a disease that we must eradicate. The cost to do so would be astronomical compared to the benefit.
Meanwhile, how many people do you know suffering from TB?
Skepticism is one thing; ignorance is an entirely different animal altogether. One challenge facing us is a populace poorly educated in science is increasingly unable to differentiate between the two.
If we had a $1 pill you could take that innoculated you against the common cold, it would be cheap and worthwhile to eradicate. These things are expensive exactly because we have poor tools to deal with them.
TB on the other hand mostly went away because we developed a working vaccine.
> Skepticism is one thing; ignorance is an entirely different animal altogether. One challenge facing us is a populace poorly educated in science is increasingly unable to differentiate between the two.
The solution to poor scientific understanding is not to bully people into beleiving in science as an article of faith, but to fix the scientific education so that's not necessary.
> If we had a $1 pill you could take that innoculated you against the common cold, it would be cheap and worthwhile to eradicate.
That's looking at the wrong side of the equation and is tantamount to wishful thinking. The correct side of the equation is looking at the billions and billions of dollars you would have to spend developing that $1 pill. That is the actual cost to achieve. There are better things to do with our time and money.
If our hypothetical $1 common cold pill turns out anything like our COVID pill, it will only be effective for a few months before making you marginally more susceptible than you were before.
The whole "trust the science" mantra from the covid years was a complete publicity nightmare for science as an institution, as the scientists eventually ended up contradicting themselves when additional data came in.
Science ultimately does not operate on faith, but on skepticism and doubt. This is its greatest asset, that you can question it freely and it will have answers to all your questions (though sometimes they are "we don't know"). Propping it up as dogmatic truth that must be trusted and never investigated is probably the most anti-scientific thing you can do.