Science doesn’t have a monopoly on answers

Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield may have spent the first days of a well-earned holiday murmuring a quiet ‘‘I told you so’’. Opponents of the Bloomfield model of hard lockdown have been dealt a harsh blow by research from Spain that shows the ineffectiveness of the alternative strategy on Covid-19, allowing the virus to ravage the country in pursuit of herd immunity.

The research, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, surveyed more than 61,000 people and found that only 5 per cent of the Spanish population had developed antibodies, leaving 95 per cent of the population vulnerable to the virus.

The Lancet said it strengthened evidence that herd immunity was ‘‘unachievable’’.

New Zealand is, rightly, in a self-congratulatory mood for its coronavirus response. But we should be careful not to learn the wrong lessons from our success. One lesson that deserves some scrutiny is the role that science played in the Government’s response to the virus.

The Government has repeatedly stressed the importance of its science-led approach and the advice the prime minister received from her chief science adviser, epidemiologists, and Dr Bloomfield before each decision. This is, of course, a good thing. Far too many governments reject science outright, with disastrous results.

But there’s a world of difference between an approach based on an outright rejection of science and the pithy defence marshalled in favour of New Zealand’s approach, which often amounts to little more than, ‘‘We did it because science says so’’.

It’s a clever defence. The subtext is that whatever is going on is above politics – it’s simply too important for the hurly-burly of inexpert political decision-makers. Politics be damned, what’s needed is depoliticised expertise.

The problem is that in a political system such as ours, depoliticising a contentious scientific issue only politicises it further: ‘‘We’re the party of science and you’re not’’. This neuters the ability of politicians to debate differing scientific viewpoints. This is important, because what’s often forgotten when ‘‘following the science’’ is that not all scientists appear to speak with one voice.

This is a painful issue for the politicians and media who shape public debate. Media are still somewhat traumatised by our role in fuelling the denial of anthropogenic climate change by writing stories that framed the issue as a debate between those who believed climate change was caused by human activity and those who disagreed.

Media did this for decades after the science was well settled. What looked like a rational debate between opposing scientific camps was in fact a debate between more or less the entire scientific community and a pack of kooks.

Understandably, this has fuelled a desire not to repeat the same mistakes. There’s a rush to settle politically contentious scientific issues, neutering any dissent as dangerous bad science.

What’s left of the climate change debate is a gordian knot of political and scientific issues. These are a set of contentious decisions made by politicians based on the scientific advice.

But not every issue is climate change, where the settled science is the result of decades of research. The science around the Covid-19 virus is constantly changing as new research is published. Much-derided Sweden also followed a scientific approach. Its no lockdown, herd immunity strategy was advocated by Anders Tegnell, who, as its chief epidemiologist, is arguably more expert in the area of infectious diseases than Dr Bloomfield.

It’s easy to see a situation where the roles had been reversed and our top health official advocated a herd immunity approach and Sweden a full lockdown. The science-led approach would have been the same, but, with different science behind it, the results would have been vastly different.

There’s a greater risk to this too. Using science to depoliticise politics ends up politicising science. Some of the worst political regimes in history have built themselves on the back of bunk science. It’s important to have a robust politics, capable of debating and standing up to science when necessary. Even eugenics was good science once.

Politics is the art of weighing competing interests. Sometimes this means knowing good science from bad, other times it’s knowing where even good science stops.

A new report from the Ministry for the Environment notes that the fastest and cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to convert acres of sheep and beef farms to forestry. It’s a great idea, but for the fact it would wreck rural communities who quite like their sheep and beef farms and the towns they sustain.

That’s fair enough. It’s also where politics comes in. Politics has to be able to balance the desires of political communities with the needs of the wider national community. It’s difficult and inexpert, but there’s a reason why they say it’s more art than science.

It’s easy to see a situation where the roles had been reversed and our top health official advocated a herd immunity approach while Sweden opted for full lockdown.