In 2022, Retire the ‘Trust the Scientists’ Platitude

O ver the course of the pandemic, “trust the scientists” has devolved into an empty platitude meant to shut down any layperson who has the temerity to question the wisdom of Covid policies. It needs to be swiftly retired as we enter 2022.

The problem with “trust the scientists” is twofold. One is that the so-called experts have often been wrong. People have distanced, locked down, and masked up for nearly two years, and Covid continues to spread, with more than 800,000 Americans now dead. Nor can it be said that Covid outbreaks have been limited to areas that have disregarded the public-health community. Right now, New York City, which requires masks and is home to one of the earliest and strictest vaccine-passport regimes in the U.S., is reporting record numbers of cases. The argument that Omicron is different because it is able to evade vaccines is not a particularly compelling defense of the experts, either. Before Omicron, there were four major variants of Covid, and it was only a matter of time before one variant found a way around vaccines. Arguing that people should get vaccinated and boosted anyway because it reduces the chances of severe Covid or death is fair. But were we to shift focus to “reducing death” as opposed to “stopping” or “slowing” the spread, our policies would look a lot differently than they do now.

But put aside the fact that expert guidance has not proven effective in preventing the spread of Covid. Even if the guidance were more effective than it has been, it still wouldn’t justify blindly “trusting the scientists.” The reason is that even if they were doing their jobs effectively, infectious-disease scientists would be myopically focused on providing guidance as to the most effective way to fight infectious diseases. But it is the job of policy-makers, and ultimately, the people, to balance the risk of the disease against other considerations.

It’s popular to taunt those of us who question public-health guidance with absurd statements such as, “When somebody in your family needs surgery, do you do it yourself or have a doctor do it?” This is beside the point, but let’s tease it out. No, it would not make sense for an untrained family member, or a rando at a diner, to perform surgery instead of a doctor. But before even getting to the point of surgery, a doctor would offer the patient some details on the risks of surgery and the recovery period, as well as the consequences of not doing anything. Let’s say that back surgery carries some degree of risk and a long recovery period. Some patients may decide to live with the pain rather than go through it. Others may decide that the potential of a successful surgery relieving pain is worth it. Families with loved ones facing the final stages of a terminal illness grapple all the time with decisions about whether, at a certain point, it’s better to continue treating the illness aggressively, or to transition to hospice care and focus on keeping them as comfortable as possible in their remaining days.

The obvious counter to this is that Covid is different, because it is an infectious disease and individual decisions have consequences for society as a whole. But as a society, we make all sorts of decisions that try to strike a balance between preventing death and regulating human behavior. We could probably reduce traffic deaths substantially were we to set speed limits at 20 miles per hour and the legal blood-alcohol level at zero, and punish offenders with life in prison. But we don’t, because such extreme policies would be undesirable.

On Covid, there has always been a trade-off between disruption to people’s lives and the desire to minimize sickness and death. Over time, though, the calculus has changed. Early on, the trade-off was presented as: “If people stay at home for two weeks, they can reduce the chance of unwittingly spreading a virus that has a decent chance of killing somebody older or in poor health.” At that point, most Americans, even those in deep-red states, were willing to make such a trade-off.

Now, we’re operating in a situation in which older and more vulnerable people have the ability to get vaccinated and boosted, thus substantially reducing their risk of serious illness. In 2022, the recently authorized Covid pill Paxlovid will become widely available. At that point, anybody who gets sick — vaccinated or unvaccinated — will have another tool available to reduce the threat of serious illness. So, on one side of the ledger, the threat of dying from Covid is not the same as it was in early 2020.

On the other side of the ledger, we are no longer debating whether to hunker down for a few weeks. We are debating permanent changes — whether children as young as two should wear masks eight hours a day in school and at day-care facilities, and whether people should have to show evidence of vaccination within the past six months to hold a job, board a plane, eat at a restaurant, or go to a movie theater.

People may end up on different sides of these questions. But the reality is that these debates are much more complicated than the silly “trust the scientists” rejoinder would have us believe. A scientist merely interested in combating a virus does not have to pay attention to the survival of businesses, the effect on people’s jobs, on the education of children — or their mental health. But the rest of us do.

Unfortunately, President Biden has surrendered all judgment in dealing with Covid, taking to an extreme his campaign slogan of trusting the experts. This week, he said he could not comment on the idea of taking the draconian step of mandating vaccination for domestic travel, saying he would only be able to weigh in “when I get a recommendation from the medical team.”

Biden’s comment came even as some of the most prominent voices in the public-health arena have conceded in recent days that the decision to halve quarantine times was not primarily motivated by changing science but more in practical considerations of maintaining a functioning society.

Explaining the decision, CDC director Rochelle Walensky told CNN, “It really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate.”

Speaking to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Anthony Fauci said that because so many people will be infected in the coming weeks, if everybody had to quarantine for ten days, “that might have a negative impact on our ability to maintain the structure of society, of all the essential workers you would need if you keep them all out for a period of ten days.” Pressed on whether the decision was motivated by science or practical concerns, Fauci said, “Nothing is going to be 100 percent” and “we don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”

As long as we’re exiting the realm of myopically following “the science” when making policy decisions based on CDC’s arbitrary judgment of what people can “tolerate,” it is perfectly appropriate for nonscientists to question a Covid regime that has a significant effect on their lives, their businesses, and their children. In other words, “trust the scientists” should not get to see the new year.