This year, 2020, was a good year for scientific expertise. Its fruits have been born in the form of coronavirus vaccines, therapies, and treatment strategies. Some astronauts went to the space station.
At the same time, 2020 demonstrated that scientific expertise is not all there is.
As things shaped up, it became clear that the scientific genius at work in the labs of Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and elsewhere would be the thing to get us out of this mess. The ball is rolling as people get vaccinated.
In the interim, physicians have become better equipped to save lives because of monoclonal antibodies, proning, more targeted ventilation of the lungs, and the like, none of which would have been realized without experienced and intelligent minds doing the work. Thank God for expertise. We would struggle to get along without it.
In any case, science doesn’t speak through parted clouds, giving mission and direction, as God does in Monty Python. And it was disappointing to see how many people adopted “trust” in abstracted “science” as a guiding philosophy, as if science reveals final truth.
The following examples are low-hanging fruit, but there are lessons to be learned, especially when considering how many people genuflected before science at any given time, even as public health officials positioned themselves to change their guidance when evidence changed. “As the data changes, then you change the recommendation,” Anthony Fauci said in July. That’s a huge qualification about the assurances of expertise.
The country was told early on that this coronavirus was nothing to worry about. “The American people should not be worried or frightened by this,” Fauci said in late January. “It’s a very, very low risk to the United States.” On Jan. 31, in the early days of the coronavirus task force, CDC Director Robert Redfield said during a White House press conference that “the risk at this time to the American public is low.” Had they only known it would end up becoming everything.
They told us that masks don’t work, and they had good reason to. Evidence didn’t support masking early on (see this meta-analysis published by the CDC in May). As Joseph Ladapo, an associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, offered for the Wall Street Journal, “In March, when Anthony Fauci said, ‘wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better’ but ‘it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think it is,’ his statement reflected scientific consensus, and was consistent with the World Health Organization’s guidance.”
Then, in September, Redfield posited this: “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”
Now, I don’t belabor public health officials where they genuinely got things wrong, though the recent New York Times report detailing Fauci’s shiftiness on herd immunity makes me want to be less charitable. So does the apparent noble lying about masks. Though on balance, Fauci, Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, among a few others, demonstrated good national bedside manner. They wanted to save lives, and there’s no reason to think otherwise. But the consensus was, at one time, wrong about some important things.
There’s one more thing about scientific expertise that was made evident this year: It can provide some of the material necessary for developing a course of action but is not itself a course of action. It must be interpreted and applied in conjunction with other values. “Trust the science” is a complete sham. If you want to know whether people should be able to go to church, science will not drop an answer on your plate. And besides, under the guise of scientific expertise, authorities continually cited the potential for virus transmission in schools and churches as a justification for keeping them closed or limited, even though most of the virus spread was happening elsewhere.
In sum, we learned how difficult it can be to balance what came to be considered competing interests, in this case, the interest of preserving life, actual breath, with things that might be treated as the accidents of life: going, doing, learning, working, worshiping.
In 2021, may we revere science and expertise while also recognizing its limits.
