I wouldn’t want to be Dr. Anthony Fauci right now any more than I would want to be a police officer. Both are now subjected to incredible scrutiny by an increasingly jaded public.
Without accusing Fauci of being an adherent of scientism, I must say that his self-portrayal as one who “sticks to the facts and evidence” ought to have a few major qualifications if scores of journalists and laypeople are going to embrace it. In a recent interview for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s podcast Learning Curve, Fauci said, “I do stick to the science. I have the responsibility, which I take very seriously, of always being consistent and basing what you say on evidence.”
That’s fine as far as it goes. But if there is a philosophical problem here, it is that it oversimplifies science, downplaying the inconclusive and uncertain nature of many scientific findings. Not all science is gathered with equal rigor. We cannot be equally confident about all findings or even about many of our widespread beliefs. Just to name one well-worn example, how often do we see reversed before our very eyes the facts that “everybody knows” about nutrition?
Second, scientific findings are not capable of speaking for themselves. They have to be interpreted, and unfortunately, they rarely reach the public without a game of telephone that results in a significant loss of truthfulness. How many news stories have you read about scientific studies with shocking conclusions? How often have you gone and read the journal articles underpinning them? If you did, you would find that a very large percentage of the time, the journalists who write about these studies for a popular audience have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and are probably more likely to misrepresent the studies’ conclusions than they are to present them accurately. And so scientific shortcomings are passed on as conclusive by “science only”-adhering journalists and activists.
Fauci, who has worked in public health for 50 years, possesses a lot more interpretive authority than your average lazy reporter skimming science journals. And much to his credit, he offers some qualification for “stick to the science,” saying, “As long as science is humble enough, and open enough, and transparent enough to accept the self-correction, it’s a beautiful process. The science doesn’t change. What it is is sometimes the interpretation.”
But then, in some cases, the science really does change. Or maybe it just isn’t very scientific. When the Lancet withdrew its massive study on hydroxychloroquine, it did so because its data sources were called out as highly questionable, and its findings were rebuked.
This happens a lot more often than you’d think. Science is currently in the midst of a reproducibility or replication crisis. Many studies, and in some fields a large majority of studies, that reach statistically significant conclusions cannot be reproduced by other scientists.
In the interview, Fauci also laments an anti-science bias.
“One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are — for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable — they just don’t believe science, and they don’t believe authority,” he says. “That’s unfortunate because science is truth, and if you go by the evidence and by the data, you are speaking the truth. It’s amazing sometimes the denial there is.”
One expression of the anti-science bias undoubtedly comes from a small conspiratorial crowd, which distrusts all and without discrimination. But what is one to make of the sentiment expressed by Sen. Rand Paul, in rejecting popular but not necessarily science-based conclusions that others have drawn from data?
Likewise, the “humility” that Fauci praises entails an acknowledgment that science can’t answer every question at every moment in time. That admission spares us all from the intellectually incomplete and morally monstrous notion that science and truth are equivalent — that science is truth.
In using the “science alone” mantra, Fauci is surely trying to dispel any notion that he acts from ideological predilections. I can’t blame him for that. But I’m also unconvinced of this mantra’s persuasive value, either as a worldview or as a disposition for making policy. More than that, there’s an incredible risk when our communication channels accept “science alone” as the layers of complexity tied up in science begin to be stripped away for a sound bite’s sake.
