Lack of trust in “the science” has soared since COVID

From Reason magazine

This article in Reason magazine is worth the read:

'The Science' Suffers from Self-Inflicted Political Wounds

Of course, Fauci figures prominently.

“Sanctimonious" is a good description for officials who wield "science" to shield against criticism.

"It's easy to criticize, but they're really criticizing science because I represent science," Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and then medical advisor to President Biden, told CBS News in 2021. "If you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave."

Fauci and company "represent science," they claim, but medical experts who disagree with their takes on COVID-19, its source in a lab leak or nature, and proper pandemic responses, do not.

Let’s spend a moment on his second sentence. “If you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave.” So, not only does he “represent science,” but he appears to be setting himself up as not only a gatekeeper but a savior of sorts. What hubris. If society is “damaged” by people’s erosion of trust in the institution, perhaps Fauci ought to consider how his heavy handed, condescending, and censorial attitude over the years has contributed to people’s lack of trust in mainstream science.

Let’s look at what the numbers actually are:

"A new Pew Research Center survey finds the share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive effect on society has fallen and there's been a continued decline in public trust in scientists," the organization reported last week. "Overall, 57% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society. This share is down 8 percentage points since November 2021 and down 16 points since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak."

A full third of Americans say science is a wash, equally positive and negative. Eight percent say it's mostly negative. The plunge in support since the appearance of COVID-19 is no coincidence; that's when some scientists, especially those in official positions, began wielding "science" as a shield against debate and a tool for control.

Eight percentage points in only two years strikes me as quite significant, and also entirely unsurprising. I remember at the very beginning of Covid, when China and Italy modeled lockdowns for the entire world, feeling a sinking sensation at how many people fell into line immediately. Mathematically, the rationale behind locking down is to decrease the basic reproductive ratio, sometimes denoted as R_0 and sometimes as R_t, which is simply how many secondary infections result from a single infected person, to below 1, at which point theoretically the epidemic will die out.

There are a few problems with this. First of all, lockdowns need to be complete and total, and almost no one would, or could, comply with that. (To be very clear, I was completely against lockdowns from the beginning, so I’m not trying to justify their implementation.) But most importantly, with a contagious respiratory infection such as Covid is claimed to be, you kind of have to get out in front of transmission, which effectively means that you have to lock down before the disease is even there (and even in that case, there is a good chance it won’t work for reasons including but not limited to those I mentioned above). Clearly this is a ridiculous idea, because taken to its logical conclusion, you’d have to lock down for almost every possible epidemic, which as you can imagine would quickly lead to economic disaster and worse. Lockdowns are perhaps an appropriate response to active military action in an area, or a bomb threat or something similar, but not for a virus.

Luckily, I think that even the most ardent lockdown enthusiasts of 2020 have pretty much given up on the concept as a tool for mitigation of infectious disease.

Returning to the results of the survey mentioned above, it is interesting to note the levels of confidence in science on both sides of the political aisle.

A year later, after the social media files and court cases, the same survey showed that "confidence among Democrats was back to its pre-pandemic level after a short-term surge of trust during the pandemic." Democrats expressing a "great deal" of confidence fell from 64 to 53 percent (Republican confidence plummeted from 34 to 22 percent). That result is echoed elsewhere.

There is some discussion of the censorship that occurred, as well. I won’t comment on this, but I want to remind everyone that it happened.

After Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), he released internal documents to the press revealing "concerted efforts by various federal agencies—including the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and even the White House—to convince Twitter to restrict speech," noted Reason's Robby Soave. "According to a trove of confidential documents obtained by Reason, health advisers at the CDC had significant input on pandemic-era social media policies at Facebook as well."

The article concludes with the following:

Last month, the Senate confirmed Monica Bertagnolli as the new director of the National Institutes of Health with a mandate to "rebuild trust in science." Jettisoning politics and refraining from using science to push policies and personal preferences would be a good start.

Oh goody, let’s leave the NIH in charge of rebuilding trust in science. That’s bound to go well.

Overall, I think it’s a really good article, and I unreservedly support science and politics filing for divorce. I’m not holding my breath though.

What do you think? How can public trust in science be rebuilt? Is it even possible at this point, or has its credibility been irreparably damaged by the interventionist, drug-obsessed approach to health care that has been prevalent in the US for many decades? Also, just out of curiosity, how did you react at the beginning of Covid? Were you suspicious immediately? If not, what caused you to become skeptical?

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