Chapter 1
Politicizing Science at the Expense of the People
August 12, 2020, was not the hottest day of the summer in Wilmington, Delaware. It was only in the mid-80s at its peak. It was, however, quite stickyâverging at points in the late afternoon on uncomfortably humid. It made sense, then, that the kickoff for the newly united Democratic ticket for president and vice president of the United Statesâcomprising former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harrisâtook place not in the heat of the outdoors, but in the almost empty gymnasium of A. I. du Pont High School in Greenville, Delaware.
Harris, as expected, wasted no time in attacking her political opponent on the grounds that he had destroyed the economy. Had she been named as the candidate for vice president prior to the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, of course, her opening remarks would have fallen flat. Prior to the pandemic, the American economy was roaring ahead. But in the wake of the lockdown, as most American readers know, the picture was very different.
Not only did Harris lambaste the current administration for forcing the economy into ruin, she also attempted to indict it for an incompetent response to the pandemic. She sought to contrast President Trumpâs response to SARS-CoV-2 to the reaction of then-President Obama for the 2013 Ebola outbreak.
The Ebola crisis, of course, was nothing like the COVID-19 pandemic. But a lack of facts did not stop the deriding by Harris. In her account, one administrationârepresenting that of the party with which she is alliedâdid brilliantly in handling the threat of a dangerous disease while the otherârepresenting the party that she opposesâdid horribly. Harris went so far as to falsely imply Ebola, like SARS-CoV-2âwas a pandemic. âSix years ago, in fact, we had a different health crisis,â Harris said. âIt was called Ebola. We all remember that pandemic.â
Indeed, we do notâsince Ebola was not a pandemic and there are more dissimilarities between the two public health emergencies than actual similarities. Had Senator Harris or her speechwriters consulted the World Health Organization website or learned a minuscule amount about virology and public health, the distinction between an outbreak and a pandemic, as well as the stark transmissibility differences between SARS-CoV-2 and Ebolavirus, would have been readily evident. But accuracy was not really the point. Scoring political points through bombastic statements under the guise of âscience,â whether they were correct or not, was the goal.
Politicizing science for talking points ultimately undermines public faith in science, especially when the politicians speaking about it are in fact wrong. It didnât take long in the pandemic for the process to start, for after an initial showing of unity when the novel coronavirus entered our borders, people in the United States divided over basic scientific facts about COVID-19.
At the beginning of the crisis, people were mostly united. We trusted what science and government told usâand what government told us the science was. We were all in it together, Republican and Democrat.
Eventually the phrase âfollow the scienceâ became one of the most divisive messaging campaigns of the period. Truthfully, most people believed they were following the science and doing what was best for them and those around them. Unfortunately, recommendations and data were changing constantly, nothing was consistent, and misinformation ran rampant.
Once the pandemic gained footing in the United States, conflicting messages flooded a panicking public. Some of the people spreading lies had political motivations, like the Chinese Communist Party providing inaccurate information about the virus, while whistleblower accounts from medical personnel were stifled. In the United States, Democratic hopefuls criticized any moves by the Trump administration as âfailures.â Some people, domestic and foreign, attempted to make a profit on sham miracle cures, while others were trying to increase their media presence and academic clout.
Throughout all of this, the collective emotional response was filtered through a rosy view of scientists as the white knights who would shepherd us through this trial. One popular misconception, though, is that scientists are, by definition, altruistic figures devoted solely to the pursuit of objective truth.
Science is immune to politics, in this line of thinking, because it subjects claims to the rigors of experimental proof and deep theoretical exploration. Scientists, therefore, are egalitarian saints, who would never be led astray by the wish to promote their careers or political commitments. We should never question them. We should simply âhave faith in scienceâ and dismiss any others who give contrarian advice as being corrupt stooges and even bad scientists to boot.
But science, of course, is as fallible as any other field, and subject to the political biases of its practitioner. One only has to remember the rise and fall of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko to understand why there is a movement questioning government control on the basis of science. Lysenko famously, or rather infamously, rejected traditional Mendelian genetics and proposed an alternate to farming crops, called vernalization. His method proposed fertilizing fields without traditional fertilizers and minerals while being less costly and able to produce more robust crops, providing a solution to the agriculture crisis the country was facing in the 1930s. He went to the government with his solution, and given the crisis on hand, no one thought to verify his claims.
Lysenko was portrayed as a genius and became skillful at denouncing his scientific opponents who failed at reproducing his claims on the basis of not following the science. He used surveys from farmers to prove that vernalization increased crop yields, thus avoiding any controlled tests of his methods. Ultimately, years of famine and poor crop production led to millions of people starving to death at the hands of a scientist who made claims that could not be substantiated through controlled trials, and who got political support for it, perverting science through politics and misleading populations under the guise of following the science.
Nearly a century later, Americans are caught in the middle of controlling a pandemic with methods being drawn from the support of politicians, scientists, and even Hollywood celebrities. As with Lysenko, legislation is being passed and local directives are put forth in the name of science with limited evidence, and with critics being censored and demeaned as anti-science.
Once more, there are actions being taken without being backed by facts or science. Many claim to follow the science, but theyâre really just using this charade of intellectual and moral superiority to justify harsh restrictions. And once more, the fact that many people are suffering is disregarded as the overall cause is alleged to be more important than other human consequences.
As regulatory standards, treatment discovery, mask-wearing, and even the number of confirmed infections were being aggressively politicized, two narratives materialized dominating the discourse about SARS-CoV-2, both being grounded in politics under the guise of the pursuit of science. The first narrative was that Democrats were noble public servants, intrepidly following the science, in every particular of their many lockdown regulations. The other narrative, of course, was that anyone who complained about Democrat policies was, therefore, anti-science, no matter how well-reasoned their objections.
How did the commentary develop that, with respect to SARS-CoV-2, one political party became known as pro-science and the other anti-science? We might certainly read this phenomenon as just another chapter in the popular representation of Republicans being anti-science conspiracy theorists and Democrats as oppressive socialists, but that doesnât really explain how regulatory standards, testing, and even immunity have come to serve as grounds for political warfare in the context of the pandemic. The reality is that the âscienceâ we got was often contradictory, confusing, and sometimes, straight up wrong. This wasnât always scientistsâ faultsâbeing wrong or uncertain about a mystery disease is normal and serves as the impetus behind trial-and-error experimentation. But politicians would often, once they were committed to a course of action, refuse to reverse course even when new scientific data showed they should. This broke the fragile trust that the crisis had forged between Americans of different beliefs.
Feeling they couldnât trust official science, many Americans turned to pseudoscience. As the pandemic continued playing out, it was no surprise when the development of a controversial video promoting an alternate theory became widely shared and promoted on social media platforms: âPlandemicââa video full of hoax theories highlighting a disgraced former researcher who spoke disparagingly about the nationâs health experts, the CDC, and vaccines. The production even suggested Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health intentionally released the virus in an effort to kill people. The video went âviralâ because by that point, people needed to identify an adversary and assign blame, despite the lack of evidence for the accusations. The video itself followed the blueprint of every conspiracy theory: a proposed philosophy in contradiction to the commonly accepted explanation, suspicion of official accounts (CDC, WHO), allegations of nefarious intentions by such officials, and victimization of the conspirators. Unfortunately, itâs nearly impossible to change a conspiracy theoristâs mind because their philosophies have become solidified and self-referential. The basic lack of evidence for such theories further adds to the âevidenceâ of a cover-up. The concepts therefore become immune to contradictory evidence because any scientific evidence provided that doesnât fit into the narrative must be falsified. This, of course, undermines medical workers and expert scientists, causing massive suspicion of any subsequent public health recommendations.
Trust continued to fade as Americans started voting in the 2020 presidential election.
It is hard to imagine anyone naĂŻve enough to think that the 2020 presidential election cycle would not hinge upon the politicization of SARS-CoV-2. At this point, we have become so used to scientific results, standards, and even data being manipulated that it may seem hard to even react to this problem or to imagine that things could be otherwise. We have come to expect that one political party will devoutly claim it âbelieves in scienceâ (a somewhat ironic claim since it posits following science as an object of faith) and that the other believes only in God, guns, and limited government. Both portraits, needless to say, are based upon hyperbole.
The pandemic has affected every American and has caused so much pain for so many people that it was irresistibly attractive for politicians on both sides of the aisle to weaponize it. Politicians thrive on the principle that one should never let a crisis go to waste. Thus, itâs not hard to see why this has become the case.
Politicians hope to blame their opponent for a disaster and the pain it has caused, and to represent themselves as the means of resolving the calamity and bringing prosperity back to the nation.
âVote for me and I will make all of your troubles disappear.â
Isnât that what all campaigning politicians tell us? Clearly the tactic isnât new; in fact we have been seeing it our entire lives.
The easiest way to convince the public of their need to vote for you is to cast your opponent as an object of fear, and yourself as a means of relieving that fear. What greater opportunity than during a pandemic coinciding with a presidential election year to manipulate the fear of the public to get elected? If you have to distort science, so what?
Thereâs a lot of political opportunity in turning every single public health directive into a partisan issue, which should then be debated to death by talk show hosts and YouTubers and politicians cynically wishing to cast the other side as the villains. The danger, of course, is that in the absence of consistent and sound messaging from the top down, the ability to rely on voluntary compliance of public health measures shrinks. So much of public health is about relying on individuals to make voluntary choices. People get confused and rebellious when they perceive politicians to simply be pushing âscienceâ thatâs suspiciously similar to those politiciansâ previously stated policy objectives. Politicizing science erodes trust at a moment when voluntary actions of following public health directives is vital.
Clearly, it is much easier to force entities rather than individuals to change behaviors. Unfortunately, the political about-face and harsh measures rebuffed entire communities, and convinced few, if any, to change their minds or their ways.
Tragedies allow people to form communities by identifying villains and heroes, and subsequently allowing us to reject the former and rally around the latter. It can be consoling to be part of a group allied against a clearly evil rogue, even if the villain and hero are the products of partisan distortion. With respect to real-life struggles, the idea that there are heroes and villains battling it out who need our support enhances morale and helps us to endure sacrifices in the spirit of, to use the British idiom, âdoing our bitâ as part of a larger effort.
The ideal of everyone pitching in to a collective effort, to a large extent, is wonderful and, indeed, necessary as we are social creatures. The problem is that when a common effort is viewed through the lens of a crisis, we tend to see only heroes in our allies and villains as anyone contrarian, leading us to potentially hinder progress, and forgo tolerance of our fellow Americans.
The other threat, of course, is that we will pretend that there is no crisis at all, pretending all is normal, and thereby possibly harming or even fatally exposing others and ourselves to hazards.
We might call these two stances the âToe the Lineâ approach where one lines up and acts accordingly without challenge, and the âHead in the Sandâ approach where one is stubbornly unwilling to acknowledge an unpleasantry.
Neither approach is the best way to view public health emergencies. For one thing, either style raises the risk that, caught up in our enthusiasm to defeat the enemy, we will turn everything into weaponsâincluding scientific research and dataâto push our narrative. One of the most difficult things that can be done is trying to explain to someone why something would work when that person hasnât committed to making âitâ work.
The weaponization of everything in the quest of victory is not a phenomenon that came into play with the spread of SARS-CoV-2, of course. It is a tendency of human nature. When politicians get involved, this tendencyâcreating âevilsâ particular to either political partyâresults in the politicization of science.
Indeed, such politicization is a weakness of the American project, which was itself envisioned by the founders as an âexperimentâ as to whether human beings could live on the basis of reflection and choice rather than the passions arising from accident and force.
When scienceâalong with its regulatory standards and resultsâbecomes politically influenced, we risk abandoning the American experiment and reverting to government control out of fear.
As it turned out in 2020, misinformation about the pandemic led to a second emergency: a profound underlying emergency of panic across America.