Follow the Science, not the Scientists By Eric D. Hargan
During the pandemic, our public health community was forced to address an unprecedented number of controversies– from extended lockdowns and school closures to mask mandates and nursing home directives. At the same time, the Covid response saw a number of uncontroversial victories of medicine, such as Operation Warp Speed and the expansion of telemedicine.
When public health officials followed the science, good policies translated into good health outcomes. When we followed the scientists without the science, the pandemic response went sideways, and our public health recommendations proved unfruitful or counterproductive.
The public discussion was often minute and technical, with cable channels offering 24 hours of rapidly evolving medical “facts,” theories, and hunches proffered by a gaggle of doctors, scientists, and public health professionals. Conventional wisdom holds that, ‘When you are sick, do not google your symptoms’. Yet the televised version of symptom googling was broadcasted into our living rooms nightly, for the better part of two years.
Do not get me wrong. There was a public demand – and need – for information and advice. But some of this advice was not really advice. Instead, experts issued decrees accompanied by threats of enforcement – with governments and businesses recruited to provide the muscle. Because so much scientific “advice” was transformed into legal edicts, it is prudent to examine the proper role of science and scientists in future public health crises.
In response to a medical crisis, it makes sense to rely on medical science. But science produces all kinds of information, often contradictory and changing. Hopefully, this information continuously converges to a better understanding of the matters at hand. Scientists who have the task of generating, sorting through and understanding masses of data are performing vital, life-saving work. We should be grateful to them. It is often dry, confusing, and unrewarding work that must be done right. However, the need to leverage science in the service of saving lives induced some doctors and scientists to take on a role for which they were ill-suited: that of political leader.
The medical crisis, combined with outdated laws, policymakers’ desire to follow the best science, and scientists being thrust into positions of public leadership resulted in some demonstrably counterproductive public policy, such as our collective approach to lockdowns.
Now that we are returning to political and social normalcy, we must recognize how we succumbed to an unseemly creeping authoritarianism during the pandemic. Public health experts became celebrities and political influencers. We became accustomed to hanging on the every word of once-unseen health experts. Soon the pandemic response became more about particular scientists than the science. Meanwhile, the public health community failed to articulate bright-line goals that would signal control of the pandemic and the end of the need for the use of emergency powers. This endless emergency has led much of the populace to believe that its extension is serving the personal and political interests of the public health scientists, rather than those of the public.
It is important to distinguish between science and policy. Scientists may have laudable intentions, but in the context of politics and policy those intentions could prove disastrous. Imagine a scientist dedicated to eliminating infectious disease, who wishes to reorder society to prevent the transmission of even one case. Do we want to empower him to mandate Shanghai-style lockdowns? Zero Covid is a dangerous fantasy threatening both individual and economic liberty, illustrating how good intentions can lead to bad outcomes. Where zero Covid was attempted, freedom and prosperity were destroyed in the service of a goal that was not even remotely achieved. Not only have zero Covid lockdowns failed to stop transmission; they barely had an impact on hospitalizations and deaths.
In the past, a robust debate would have resulted over a zero Covid proscription. But the crisis revealed that our system has no way of ensuring that our scientific institutions and their recommendations can be tested, so as to prove their credibility when subjected to pressure. The scientific community’s internal safeguards- peer review, the scientific method, credentialed institutions, and so on-proved utterly incapable of standing up to pressure. As such, policy was often dictated by politics, not science, despite claims to the contrary.
The ground zero of all this is the public health agencies, such as the CDC. The CDC is the summit of public health institutions in the United States. All state and local institutions look to the CDC as a disseminator of the best scientific judgments. It represents the final word on all matters public health related. However, the CDC is not only the most powerful voice in public health: it controls—and funds—in some way a vast number of public health programs, policies, and practices in the United States. Considering its power, few in the public health community have the standing or courage to contradict it.
So, the CDC is never really challenged. And this is not its fault. It is acting always—or at least usually—the best it can according to its lights. But what if the CDC is wrong? Who says so? Any public health entity that picks a fight with the CDC or its senior officials, risks losing its grants, contracts, or other resources. Because the CDC’s pronouncements on public policy cannot be effectively contradicted by the sector it regulates, an impression of unanimity and consensus develops, even where there is none. The traditional American method of checks and balances, divided power, is notably absent, resulting in many ill-advised and counterproductive policy proscriptions being promulgated and enacted.
The pandemic flipped the usual regulatory dilemma on its head. It was not a question of ‘agency capture,’ meaning outside forces adversely influencing the regulator. Rather, it was the older policy dilemma pointed to by the Founders: government agencies that are powerful enough to silence all dissent. This is a defect in American law and governance that must be reformed, agency by agency, state by state, and locality by locality, until it is contained.
If we return to our long-standing system of checks and balances, if we reform our way out of this dangerous culture and the false impression of unanimity it generates, where should we look for guidance if not our experts in our agencies?
The answer is in front of us, though it may not satisfy everyone.
The political system in the United States contains the possibility of reform and renewal. Voters periodically remove elected officials and their political teams when dissatisfied. This includes scientists who take political jobs within an administration.
And this is as it should be.
But if a scientist who is immune to public dissatisfaction, correction, and removal from office becomes a controlling policymaker, the possibility of democratic self-governance in these kinds of crises is lost. Strange and contradictory as it may seem, the institutions of the United States most resistant to corruption in such cases are the political ones, that is to say, the elected ones, which are subject to checks and balances that prevent an unaccountable concentration of power.
Policy decisions that affect our populace must remain where our institutions may be most resistant to groupthink and false unanimity: political leadership. And for political leadership, a central lesson of the pandemic must be: follow the science, not the scientists.
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