The Pandemic brought about the end of Science. The sad words of Ioannidis
The greatest victim of the global pandemic is science , or at least the scientific method as traditionally understood, which has allowed a few centuries of technological advancement and the creation of widespread well-being. It is not us who say this, but Professor John Ioannidis , who teaches medicine at Stanford, index h 217 and known for having published a paper in which he criticized, from a scientific point of view, the effectiveness of the lockdowns decided by governments .
Ioannidis' words are very clear:
A problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, have never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. Unfortunately, Mertonian norms of communitarianism, universalism, disinterest and organized skepticism have never been mainstream in education, in the media or even in science museums and television documentaries on scientific topics.
Science is based on skepticism, on "not believing" in anything that is not proven, or cannot be proven, by every scientist. This system cannot work in modern mass media which are unable to handle a normal democratic discussion, but which act only as bulletins of power from which they are directly (as in Italy) or indirectly funded.
Honest and continuous research and exploration of alternative routes are indispensable for good science. In the authoritarian (as opposed to participatory) version of public health, these activities were seen as betrayal and desertion. The dominant narrative has become that "we are at war". In war, everyone must follow orders. If a platoon is ordered to go right and some soldiers try to go left, they are shot as deserters. Scientific skepticism had to be eliminated, no questions asked. The orders were clear.
The current policy does not tolerate discussion, so one cannot look for alternatives, even better ones, to the plan that is implemented from the political point of view. But real science is a search for alternatives, so it must be eliminated.
Politics has had a deleterious influence on pandemic science. Anything that any apolitical scientist has said or written could be used as a weapon for political agendas. Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to one faction, political or otherwise, pleases those who are devoted to that faction, but infuriates the opposing faction. This process undermines the broader adoption needed for such interventions to be effective. Politics disguised as public health hasn't just hurt science. It has also brought down participatory public health where people are empowered rather than forced and humiliated.
A scientist cannot and must not try to modify his data and inferences based on the current doctrine of political parties or the reading of the day of the social media thermometer. In an environment where traditional political divisions between left and right no longer seem to make much sense, data, phrases and interpretations are taken out of context and turned into weapons. The apolitical scientist himself could be attacked by left-wing commentators in one place and right-wing commentators in another. Many excellent scientists have had to keep quiet themselves in this chaos. Their self-censorship was a major loss to scientific investigation and the public health effort. My heroes are the many well-meaning scientists who have been abused, vilified and threatened during the pandemic. I respect them all and suffer from what they have been through, regardless of whether their scientific positions agree or disagree with mine. I suffer and appreciate even more those whose positions disagreed with mine.
The management of the pandemic made by bad politics, the authoritarian, a-democratic or undemocratic one, that in America of the Executive Orders and in Italy of the DPCM or the DL, not only damaged the image of power in the population, but also destroyed the same science that cannot exist with apodictic positions. The scientist is not, of his own, a hero: threatened by politics he censors himself, but this destroys scientific research itself, therefore the basis of modern society and of our well-being.
In economics we had seen these processes for some time in the monetary field, where it was not possible to question the decisions taken in the past, although obviously wrong, we have seen it in climatology, where scientific evidence that passes the scrutiny of courts is ignored in favor of Greta, we see it now in medicine.
Let's finish with this sentence: any reference to Italian talk show experts is accidental ..
Social and mainstream media have helped create this new generation of experts. Anyone who is not an epidemiologist or health policy specialist could suddenly be cited as an epidemiologist or health policy specialist by journalists who often knew little about those fields but immediately knew which opinions were true.
Thanks to our Telegram channel you can stay updated on the publication of new articles of Economic Scenarios.
The article The Pandemic led to the end of Science. The sad words of Ioannidis comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-pandemia-ha-portato-alla-fine-della-scienza-le-tristi-parole-di-ioannidis/ on Mon, 04 Oct 2021 08:32:15 +0000.