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With covid now an afterthought rather than an emergency in the minds of many Americans, politicians and pundits are rushing to have the final word on who handled the crisis well — and who dropped the ball.
These recent declarations of pandemic winners and losers often ignore the iterative and uncertain nature of science in favor of blunt headlines and slogans bolstered by cherry-picked studies, as I wrote a few days ago. And they often elide scientists’ and policymakers’ honest grappling with major decisions in the face of limited and evolving data.
“The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens declared last month, flattening a highly nuanced, heavily caveated scientific study of mask-wearing into a single talking point. And after reports this week that the Energy Department concluded with “low confidence” that a lab leak in China likely caused the pandemic, several prominent Republicans touted it as ruling out a natural origin. They included Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who tweeted that “China is responsible for COVID.”
It’s not going to stop any time soon: At a House subcommittee hearing today on covid’s origins, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) touted the Energy Department report without noting that the agency itself characterized its conclusion as “low confidence,” and suggested that the SARS-CoV-2 virus contains features that could not have evolved naturally – despite strong evidence to the contrary, including analyses of SARS-2 itself and the discovery of related viruses.
Such black-and-white pronouncements can muddy the public’s understanding of what worked (like vaccines), what didn’t (ivermectin) and the wide gray area around other measures, like mask mandates or school closures, that scientists are still evaluating. Three years into the pandemic, the United States’ political war over covid has eroded public trust in science, with the biggest drop — more than 20 percentage points — among Republicans. That polarization makes responding to the next crisis, whether it’s a pandemic or something else, even harder.
“Those who have dogmatic positions and are playing to the politics can be extreme, use hyperbole and be definitive in their pronouncements,” said Timothy Caulfield, research director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. “Those who are trying to be close to what the science actually says have to have all these caveats and hedge what they say, and it’s just like [they’re] going to gunfight with a knife.”
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