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7/6/2023

Crisis Science

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If there was a dominate media narrative during the pandemic, it was “ignorance is a virus.” It was a story reinforced by journalists, demonstrators, and public officials who simply could not comprehend the Americans who refused to get vaccinated. Misinformation became the second pandemic, the so-called “infodemic,” appearing to lead people to believe things like “COVID shots contain tracking devices.” Seemingly needed most was the reassertion of science’s authority. President Biden distinguished himself on the campaign trail by saying, “I believe in science. Donald Trump doesn’t,” promising to “marshal the forces of science” in his victory speech.
Yet, for all the pandemic-era lecturing to “follow the science” and mocking of citizens who failed to do so, American public health seems worse off today. Kindergarten vaccination rates have dropped from 95 to 93 percent since 2020, a level that makes measles outbreaks now possible among the 250 thousand unprotected five-year olds. That 28 percent of Americans are now opposed to mandatory school vaccinations portends further declines. While COVID may no longer loom large as an existential threat, Americans’ growing vaccine skepticism will continue to wreak havoc on public health efforts.
The authority of science can no longer be taken for granted. It relies on political support and public trust. This is Robert Crease’s and Peter Bond’s argument in The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory. A philosopher at Stonybrook and a Brookhaven Lab (BNL) physicist, respectively, Crease and Bond recount the aftermath of what should have been a trivial tritium leak at the Long Island, New York research facility. They tell of an innocent nuclear research reactor being shuttered because, in the words of a Physics Today columnist, “politics and protest prevailed.”
Read the rest at Taming Complexity

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