Epidemiologist Jayanta Bhattacharya argues that during COVID-19, public health officials abandoned scientific debate for unified messaging before evidence supported the policies. This shift stifled the scientific process and eroded public trust, he says, and science needs to reclaim open discourse.
what you have said, should take medical authority seriously. You said that might be a little too extreme of you. I don't know why it is, but you were talking about two norms. Please, so please continue.
Sure. So there's two norms, right? One is scientific debate has to be open. When there's evidence that comes out, you decide who's right, who's wrong. It has to be absolutely open to new ideas and challenges. There cannot be any violation of that or you're not doing science. That's norm 1. On the other hand, there's a public health norm where there has to be some unanimity of messaging. So when there's dissent in public health, well, I mean, that might undermine public health. It's dangerous to undermine public health. I mean, and that's actually not an unreasonable norm, right? If you have a whole range of opinions about public health, what the right thing to do, it sort of may undermine the ability of public health people to give out good information to help guide the public who's not paying attention reasonably to the scientific literature. The problem I think has been the substitute— in a situation where there really was deep scientific uncertainty, we immediately jumped to the public health norm of unity messaging. The moral basis of that norm is that the science has been done to justify it, but it hadn't been done to justify it. And through the whole epidemic we've seen this, that somehow it's dangerous to push back on public health messaging and ideas that actually don't have a solid scientific basis, where there's great deep uncertainty and huge amount of debate still left to be done. And it's been dangerous for science and incredibly damaging for public health. I think we need to address both. Both science and public health have been harmed by this epidemic, about the way that the policies have been moved forward in the epidemic. And I hope to be able to help address that in the coming year.
Well, you are, and I salute you. It's an honor to speak to you. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you, Dennis. Really honored to speak to you as well.
Yes, the people who love science do not love lockdowns and masks. That's the science. I'm Dennis Prager.
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