When you can’t ‘trust the science’
One of many regrettable features of the Donald Trump era is the way that the president’s lies and conspiracy theories have seemed to vindicate some of his opponents’ most fatuous slogans. I have in mind the claim that has echoed through the liberal side of coronavirus-era debates — the key to sound leadership in a pandemic is to follow the science, to trust science and scientists, to do what experts suggest instead of letting grubby politics determine your response.
Trump made this slogan powerful by conspicuously disdaining expertise and indulging marginal experts who told him that the virus isn’t so bad. And to the extent that trust the science means that Dr. Anthony Fauci is a better guide to epidemiological trends than someone the president liked on cable news, then it’s a sound idea.
But for many crucial decisions of the past year, that trust of science didn’t get you far. And when it had more sweeping implications, what the slogan implied was often more dubious: a deference to the science bureaucracy during a crisis when bureaucratic norms needed to give way; an attempt by para-scientific enterprises to trade on science’s credibility for the sake of political agendas; and an abdication by elected officials of responsibility for decisions that are fundamentally political in nature.
The progress of coronavirus vaccines offers good examples of all these issues. That the vaccines exist is an example of science at its purest — a challenge posed, a problem solved.
But the further you get from the laboratory work, the more complicated and less scientific the key issues become. The timeline on which vaccines have become available reflects an attempt to balance the rules of bureaucratic science, their priority on safety and certainty of knowledge, with the urgency of trying something to halt a disease that’s killing thousands of Americans every day. Many scientific factors weigh in that balance, but so do all kinds of extra-scientific variables: moral assumptions about what kinds of vaccine testing we should pursue; legal assumptions about who should be allowed to experiment with unproven treatments; political assumptions about how much bureaucratic hoop-jumping it takes to persuade Americans that a vaccine is safe.
Then there’s the pressing question of who gets the vaccine first. Last month their Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices produced a working document that’s a masterpiece of para-scientific effort, in which questions that are legitimately medical and scientific, questions that are more logistical and sociological and moral questions about who deserves a vaccine are all jumbled up, assessed with a form of pseudorigor that resembles someone bluffing the way through a Mckinsey job interview and then used to justify the conclusion that we should vaccinate essential workers before seniors … because seniors are more likely to be privileged and white.
As Matthew Yglesias noted, this recommendation is an example of how progressive moral thinking ignores the actual needs of racial minorities. Because if you vaccinate working-age people before you vaccinate older people, you will end up not vaccinating the most vulnerable minority population, African-american seniors.
But even if the recommendation didn’t have that kind of perverse implication, it’s still not the kind of question that the CDC’S Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices has any competency to address. If policy X leads to racially disparate death rates but policy Y requires overt racial discrimination, then the choice between the two is moral and political, not medical or scientific — as are other important questions like, “Who is actually an essential worker?” or “Should we focus more on slowing the spread or reducing the death rate?”
When we look back over the pandemic era, one of the signal failures will be the inability to acknowledge that many key decisions are fundamentally questions of statesmanship, involving the prudential balancing of many competing goods.
On the libertarian and populist right, that failure usually involved a recourse to “freedom” as a conversation-stopper, a way to deny that even a deadly disease required any compromises with normal life at all.
But for liberals, especially blue-state politicians and officials, the failure has more often involved invoking capital- S Science to evade their own responsibilities: pretending that a certain kind of scientific knowledge, ideally backed by impeccable credentials, can substitute for prudential and moral judgments that we are all qualified to argue over, and that our elected leaders, not our scientists, have the final responsibility to make.