I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and…
I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to keep pestering me in this pandemic. Why is science not doing more to fight this pandemic? /1
How is it possible or acceptable that we can have prominent scientists and scientific bodies opining on the same topic, the pandemic, in fundamentally incompatible ways? Of course science has disagreement, but pandemics are hardly new phenomena. /2
How is it acceptable to have senior figures in science giving completely contradictory messaging, in public discussions? To say a pandemic is an emergency, requiring ongoing urgent action. Or to say it’s nothing of the sort, something to be ‘lived with’, time to move on? /3
The public would have every right to be furious at the hopeless mess of scientific messaging that’s been going on for the past 3+ years. And it goes beyond science, into the governance of science as well, to the highest levels of government and the WHO. It’s a disgrace. /4
Many of us see why this is occurring, the Covid minimisers in particular who have used this disaster as a platform to build public profiles, and often get rich from them. To further their political beliefs, under cover of science. And the libertarian politics of our time. /5
A huge player in this, the decades-long dismantling of public institutions and their processes. But even where there’s scientific disagreement as to what’s happening and what we should be doing, for example around ideas like hybrid and herd immunity, why has science itself…/6
…not moved to tidy up the extraordinary mess of public policy we find ourselves in, where pandemics are redefined as being about hospitalisations and deaths? Rather than infections, the definition as old as civilisation itself? Why is this not sanctioned, within science? /7
Why are the people creating this deliberate confusion not held to account? We know changing the politics of all of it is beyond science, we saw that with climate change. That’s not its job. But it’s a profession, and it has standards to be upheld. /8
A doctor who freelanced a procedure using a device knocked up in his shed, that then caused harm to patients, would be struck off by medical registration bodies, and likely face criminal charges as well. That same mechanism doesn’t exist for public health, but it should. /9
The vast majority of scientists who see the bullshit going on here could be doing more to call out this lethal charade. Not just on social media, but collectively. @RealOzSAGE tries, more power to them. But it feels like we haven’t progressed an inch post-Oppenheimer. /10
Science has again ‘become death, the destroyer of worlds’. Oppenheimer saw it, and nuclear weapons have killed orders of magnitude fewer people than Covid. The disgust and anger at the lethal stupidity of trying to ‘live with’ a pandemic, where is it? /11
https://t.co/wJInXwGLYP
Enough is enough. Calling it our here individually each day won’t change it. The people in science enabling this disaster need to be held to account, collectively. /end