Israeli health guru: ‘Data prone to manipulations’
Discussion surrounding public policy failure humanizes researchers, makes them accessible to the public
Data is not objective. A lot of answers are not black and white.
These were two of the messages shared with The Jerusalem Post late Sunday night by former head of Public Health Services Siegal Sadetzki following a TEDstyle talk in Tel Aviv.
“Data is prone to manipulations, to agendas, to views,” she said. “If data were just one objective thing, then scientists would not argue about it.”
Sadetzki, who helped lead Israel through its first wave of COVID-19, said scientists do not yet know enough about teen vaccination – although she is in favor of it. She said that there is not enough information about whether people need a third shot of the coronavirus vaccine – but health officials are likely to consider giving one anyway.
“We need to look at safety, what’s happening with serology and when Pfizer will have a version update that is more effective against variants,” Sadetzki said. “These are the considerations that we need to consider. However, a decision will be made before we have the answers – before we have full data.”
The Health Ministry announced Monday evening that it would begin recommending a third shot for people who are immunocompromised, though it would not yet be offering a booster to the general public.
“I hope the public realizes how complicated science is,” Sadetzki offered. “I hope that we [scientists] remember to stay modest, because there is really an ocean of knowledge out there and it is really difficult to chase it – even if you are a very good scientist.”
She admitted that during this long coronavirus crisis, which began in March 2020 in Israel, “a lot of shortcuts were taken” due to the need to create policy fast.
“We don’t have 10 years to investigate, we don’t know all the answers – so at each point, we need to weigh the risks,” she said. “We don’t have the privilege of making public health policy only when the situations are black and white. A lot of challenges are in the gray zones.”
SADETZKI SPOKE on Sunday about a previous project in which her research team was trying to determine whether cell phones were safe for children. But the experiment, which took longer than expected, was admittedly flawed and failed in many ways, she said.
“There is still no definitive conclusion. There were methodological issues that we could have known about from the beginning, and there were compromises during the study and the publication about the study was much later than it was supposed to be,” she explained. “It does not matter what you do – research, public health, public policy, whatever – there is always this question of to what degree you are willing to compromise on something.”
She said that it is hard for scientists to say: “I don’t have a scientific answer,” but sometimes this is the case.
Sadetzki was asked to speak about a failure as part of an event held collaboratively by the EcoScience community of the Science and Technology Ministry and F***up Nights Tel Aviv. The event was held in Tel Aviv City Park. Also taking part in the event in addition to the former Public Health Services head were former Justice Ministry director-general Emi Palmor, former Ben-Gurion University of the Negev president Prof. Rivka Carmi and Israeli entrepreneur Dr. Yossi Vardi.
The EcoScience community is working to create connections between scientists and technology professionals from academia, industry and government, and to make knowledge accessible to decision-makers as a tool to help solve national challenges.
The researchers involved also say that they want to go beyond academic curiosity and professional advancement to produce change and make a positive impact on unresolved issues on the national agenda.
“Scientists often do science, but they rarely work with decision-makers,” said Shai-Lee Spigelman, Director-General of the Science and Technology Ministry. “During coronavirus, it was especially important because all the national decisions were based on science. We established a community that was a big success to make scientists more accessible to decision-makers.”
She said that F***up Night was another way to humanize the researchers and make them accessible to the public, as well as to teach participants a lesson: that “very successful people, from government to academia, have had their failures – and they never gave up.”