You can’t just “follow the science”

Science is a decision-making tool, not a decision maker

As we slump into the endemic phase of the COVID19 pandemic, David Leonhardt of the NYT has perhaps improbably become my Common Sense COVID Hero. His essay today, “Follow the Science? If Only It Were So Easy” says a bunch of things I totally wanted to say too. Leonhardt says them so well, I’m just going to direct you to him. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/briefing/covid-cdc-follow-the-science.html

Because this article may be behind a paywall that you can’t access, but also I cannot plagiarize and reprint the whole thing here, I’ll copy a few key phrases and summarize the rest.

• Amid the messiness and uncertainty of a complicated infectious disease event, people crave clarity and certainty.

“Many people have come to believe that expert opinion is a unitary, omniscient force. That’s the assumption behind the phrases “follow the science” and “what the science says.” It imagines science almost as a god — Science — who could solve our dilemmas if we only listened.”

• Some things science-based are unambiguous, for example, the astonishing effectiveness of vaccines.

“Many other Covid questions, however, are complicated. What does the science say about them? It says many things. Above all, science makes clear that public health, like the rest of life, usually involves trade-offs…If you wade into the angry, polarized Covid debates on social media and cable television, you will find people who try to wish away these trade-offs.”

• COVID restrictions “can both slow the virus’s spread and have harmful side effects.” To balance these we should use values informed by data. Unfortunately data are often ambiguous, and everyone has biases.

This all relates, of course, to the intense tribal polarization which has made many Americans “position absolutists”. Rather than acknowledge that their position may have weaknesses or points of debate, they go all-in with black and white certainty, never admitting that well, maybe the other side has a point. 

“Proponents of an immediate return to normalcy claim, implausibly, that masks and social distancing do nothing to reduce the spread of Covid and that anyone who says otherwise doesn’t care about schoolchildren. Proponents of rigorous Covid mitigation claim, just as implausibly, that isolation and masking have no real downsides and that anyone who says otherwise doesn’t care about the immunocompromised.”

• Things constantly change. As the reality changes, so can our choices. It drives me nuts when people use changing recommendations as evidence that somebody was wrong before. Maybe they were. Or maybe they were right at the time.

Questions? amy@amyrogers.com

Amy Rogers, MD, PhD, is a Harvard-educated scientist, novelist, journalist, and educator. Learn more about Amy’s science thriller novels at AmyRogers.com.