{"id":75655,"date":"2021-12-29T06:35:39","date_gmt":"2021-12-29T12:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=75655"},"modified":"2021-12-29T06:35:39","modified_gmt":"2021-12-29T12:35:39","slug":"75655","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=75655","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Year-End Musings on COVID, Science, and Chainsaws<\/a><\/p>\n

COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal.<\/p>\n

The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife of therapeutics. It\u2019s already being mobilized against cancer and genetic illnesses.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m no virologist or geneticist, but experts I respect persuaded me of the vaccines\u2019 safety and efficacy. I got jabbed as soon as possible and regret that others chose not to. I wear masks in some situations, and not others. I see people socially but avoid large crowds. I favored lockdowns and school closings in early 2020 but think they lingered too long. My guess is that jurisdictions focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly, immunocompromised, etc.) will seem wiser in hindsight than those that applied draconian mitigation strategies over their entire populations.<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019m right on these things, though I recognize that future evidence might say otherwise. I\u2019m grateful for the scientists who developed the vaccines but strive to maintain an open mind on all scientific matters, along with a sense of humility and a generous spirit toward those who disagree with me. A proper understanding of science demands no less.<\/p>\n

The history of medicine offers ample reasons to avoid smug certitude which, unfortunately, is abundant on social and traditional media. Science is always about likelihood and never about certainty, though word apparently hasn\u2019t reached Twitter and TV news.<\/p>\n

Then there is the flagrantly political demeanor of so many COVID experts. I\u2019m not at all prepared to say whether red states or blue states were wiser in their public policies. Too many confounding variables. I\u2019ll make one exception, which is to say that the press and others besoiled themselves by relentlessly lionizing ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Today, few Democrats or Republicans quote his\u00a0tweet<\/a>\u00a0from May 5, 2020: \u201cLook at the data. Follow the science. Listen to the experts. \u2026 Be smart.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s why they shouldn\u2019t. Science, like a chainsaw, is an exceedingly powerful and useful tool. But \u201cfollow the science\u201d makes no more sense than \u201cfollow the chainsaw.\u201d The chainsaw doesn\u2019t know the safest way to cut a tree, and science\u2014let alone some anthropomorphic vision of it\u2014can\u2019t weigh the tradeoffs between slowing COVID and shutting down schools and cancer surgeries.<\/p>\n

Science informs individual and collective choices, which depend not only on those scientific findings but also on subjective preferences and one\u2019s degree of confidence in those scientific findings. As for \u201clisten to the experts,\u201d Cuomo\u00a0wrote the book<\/a>\u00a0on COVID expertise, and that book\u2019s fall has been as spectacular as its author\u2019s plummet.<\/p>\n

Medical history is littered with experts who were spectacularly wrong. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested that doctors employ antiseptic medical procedures (e.g., washing hands in maternity wards), medical experts were offended and conspired to destroy Semmelweis. When Stanley Prusiner suggested that misfolded proteins could cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, he was pilloried as a heretic\u2014a pejorative that didn\u2019t entirely vanish when he received a Nobel Prize for his work. As physicist Max Planck said, \u201cScience progresses one funeral at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

In October, novelist and essayist Ann Bauer wrote a poignant column, \u201cI Have Been Through This Before<\/a>,\u201d on her discomfort with the parade of cocksure COVID experts issuing ever-changing diktats and pronouncements. When vaccines didn\u2019t end the pandemic, she wrote, \u201cdoctors and officials blamed their audience of 3 billion for the disease. The more the cures failed, the greater the fault of the public.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title of her column referred to her personal experience as the mother of an autistic son born in the late 1980s. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim had hypothesized that autism was caused by \u201crefrigerator mothers\u201d who failed to show their children sufficient love\u2014a theory we now know to be nonsense. But for a time, Bettelheim\u2019s ideas were gospel-truth, showering mothers of autistic children with guilt and opprobrium. Today, he is regarded as something of a charlatan, but back then, he was a pop icon and celebrity expert on television. One questioned Bettelheim at one\u2019s own peril.<\/p>\n

During the pandemic, yard signs have sprouted with the message, \u201cScience Doesn\u2019t Care What You Believe.\u201d For what it\u2019s worth, chainsaws don\u2019t care what you believe, either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Year-End Musings on COVID, Science, and Chainsaws COVID-19 has provided a best-of-times, worst-of-times experience for expertise. The science has been spectacular, but discourse on that science has often been abysmal. The same-year development, testing, and approval of vaccines was remarkable. The mRNA platform behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines could become the Swiss army knife … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,41,27,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goobermint","category-health-medicine","category-science","category-the-more-things-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75655"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75656,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75655\/revisions\/75656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}