COVID-19: Science Behind Bars
Opinion piece by Michael Sadek, Staff Writer
May 21st, 2020
‘The era of science.’
Perhaps the simplest way to describe a revolution of digits and cyphers, this phrase possesses an inherent weight in our contemporary societies. For our world is one that idolizes the likes of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, a world actively seeking to inspire a generation of scientists.
It is a world that glorifies equations, a world that uses mathematical models to determine tumor growth rates and physical therapy effectiveness. Every day, we hear about the prominence of science in politics, the prominence of science in public administration. We hear about the status of scientific-advisory committees, whose recommendations can radically influence the decisions taken by executives and policymakers.
And then, boom. COVID-19.
Unparalleled transmission rates, mounting death tolls, and no vaccine.
Without a doubt, there have been those who have attributed the spread to a scientific miscalculation, a fault committed by researchers at the level of foretelling transmission mechanisms. Keenly pointing their fingers at scientific-advisory committees, they have been calling for measures to mitigate what science ‘failed to foresee.’
But how could science have failed so miserably? How could the same science that has predicted quantum fluctuations and planetary trajectories fail to predict the severity of a virus?
The tools are there, the expertise is there, so what went wrong?
Early in 2019, approximately a year before the virus reached the UK, word about the fragility of the British healthcare system had begun to spur across the nation. Specialists in public health spoke adamantly about the importance of stockpiling personal protective equipment in healthcare facilities, while furthering disease surveillance initiatives in order to track the progression of a pandemic.
On a legal scale, the 2019 National Security Risk Assessment warned that “even a mild pandemic could cost tens of thousands of lives.”[1] In fact, the 600-page document stressed particularly on the prospective emergence of a virus from the corona family, akin to MERS and SARS, which could be detrimental to the worldwide economy. It even entails forecasts of estimated death tolls and transmission velocities.
And saying that this was the first grounded prediction would just be unfair.
In the 1993 masterpiece A Dancing Matrix, writer Robin Henig put forth a prophecy that, if taken into consideration, may have saved countless lives. The intuitive virologist detailed the threat of a “potentially devastating pathogen” whose spread could be facilitated by globalization and transnational air commute[2]. He effectually used the book as a platform to advocate against pollution and urbanization, factors which could lead to viral mutations, as he explains via biological processes.
Science, thus, did not fail to foresee the reality we are living today. In remarkable detail, we’d been warned about the prospect of quarantine, of having to put on facemasks everywhere we went. The problem was not in the accuracy of the information at hand, but rather in what was done with it.
In an interview with Boston’s WBUR, Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes put forth an interesting perspective on the topic. “What we’ve seen in the last few weeks and months is … a fault line that already existed for the last 40 years or so in the United States. We’ve seen the growth of what my colleagues and I call ‘implicatory denial’ – people who reject scientific evidence, not because there’s anything wrong with [it], but because they don’t like its implications.”
And where is this more applicable than in partisan politics?
Let us say a government has just received a noteworthy fund from the IMF to invest in the health sector. Would politicians be more likely to spend the sum stacking up facemasks as an emergency supply, or invest in a profit-generating public hospital?
The idea that science is knowledge, knowledge is power, and power is politics does not justly outline the relationship between science and politics. It is rather too superficial to point to an intrinsic incompatibility between the two – obviously, not in all cases. The goals of politicians often do not go hand in hand with recommendations made by scientific advisory committees, be it for economic or ideological reasons.
At the heart of the scientific/political interface, there exists a veiled tension that makes the simultaneous fulfillment of both almost impossible, at times. The notorious “policy-based evidence” principle can effectively refer to the act by which politicians cherry-pick scientific data: they choose to heed only the information that does not directly conflict with their benefits or objectives.
While the role of science is to ensure an informed decision-making process founded on transparency and accountability, ideology-based think tanks have contributed to the diversion of resources from sectors deemed vital by science to other more lucrative projects. Objective evidence can become a mere torn page in the lexicon of political debates, that is when it challenges the ambitions of the powerful.
This idea can be well seen in the Bisri Dam Project in Lebanon. Indeed, the Department of Geology at the American University of Beirut warned that constructing the dam could trigger a major earthquake, since the geography of the area is associated with regular seismic activity. Assistant Professor Dr. Tony Nemer goes on to describe the project as “a ticking atomic bomb” waiting to explode in a national catastrophe[3].
But who cares right, when the alternative solution is spending millions of dollars on water and power supply every year?
So no. We do not live in ‘the era of science.’
We live in an era of science constrained by the crudeness of politics. We live in an era in which personal interests may take precedence over scientific advice, a world in which the recommendation of a scientist is futile in the absence of political will.
As long as it is a victim of this conflicting constitution of the public decision-making process, science will never be able to attain its full potential in terms of serving society. In schemes orchestrated by fraudulent officials, science may even become politicized, hence transforming the mere ‘not serving society’ to ‘harming society.’
Until today, science has not been the deal-breaker in decisions at the highest levels. And the COVID-19 crisis constitutes direct proof of that. But we should not be so pessimistic about it.
This worldwide pandemic should be a wake-up call for administrations across the globe to value science to a greater extent in their agendas. It has paved the way for easing the tension between science and politics, in the hopes of one day reaching a true era of science where the power of knowledge is prioritized.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/revealed-uk-ministers-were-warned-last-year-of-risks-of-coronavirus-pandemic
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/experts-warned-pandemic-decades-ago-why-not-ready-for-coronavirus/