Today, science is routinely weaponized for political ends. Not surprisingly, it’s the people who know the least about it who abuse it the most, like the power-seekers whose educational preparation is limited to the verbose college subjects – subjects reliant on the manipulation of the written and spoken word, the “soft sciences”. Graduates of international relations and communications studies, for instance, promiscuously trot out “science” to boost their ideological prejudices. So, for them, “science” becomes their go-to means to feed their socialist inclinations. It’s the bane of our times.
Take two cases to illustrate the point: climate change and the pandemic. Climate change – “global warming” in an earlier incarnation – is riddled with Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. And many unknown unknowns by the way. We definitely can take temperatures readings throughout the layers of the atmosphere and at the exosphere (top). We know pollution in the form of carbonates, etc., and cloud cover, can create a warming effect. But beyond those facts, politically exploitable grand predictions are the rankest of speculation. The unknowns are trampled asunder to get right to the activists’ solution of giving them and their fellow-travelers power, to the ruin of us all.
As the Gospels reported Jesus as saying on the cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Jim Geraghty, a reporter for National Review, in a recent article illustrates the persistence of the many unknowns about the pandemic. In the beginning of the COVID affair – or I should say when we first noticed its presence – we didn’t know much. Nonetheless, confident announcements obscured the ignorance.
At this time of innocence, prudence justified strong but short-term measures: lockdowns, school closures, masking, social distancing. The development of therapeutics and the knowledge of who is vulnerable should have led to a lessening of the grip. It didn’t. Once power is acquired, it’s awfully hard to give it up, proving once again that power is intoxicating.
At this juncture, many confidently talked about the date that the virus first entered the U.S. Now we’re getting the idea that we really don’t know, and neither do our masters. Honestly, our “experts” were aping each other in confusing the moment when they first noticed it with its actual appearance in the country or the world. With each new tranche of evidence, we’ve had to push back the start date in halting steps. This has significant implications about the virus and our response to it.
The official appearance of the bug in China has been moved back from December to October to “late summer and early fall” of 2019. Geraghty quotes the South China Post, NBC News, and US intelligence sources to raise suspicions of a far earlier pandemic birth date. Cell-phone activity in the Wuhan lab vicinity suddenly went dark for 17 days in October and satellites pictured unusually-packed Wuhan hospital parking lots “in the months before the pandemic became international news”. How much time before October was it mistaken for the common flu? “Late summer and early fall”?
If it had an earlier start date in China, did it have an earlier start date in other parts of the world? China didn’t shutdown flights to other parts of China till the last week of January 2020, and other countries didn’t stop travel till the next month. If the virus first appeared in “late summer and early fall” 2019, for how much time was it mistaken for the flu? Since international travel wasn’t suspended for the whole of the last third of 2019, and the virus was active, there was ample opportunity for the virus to spread to God knows where. It could be anywhere floating about on cruise ships, visits to American college campuses, malls, Disneyland/Disney World, Las Vegas, etc. How many Americans contracted it and nobody knew, least of all the patient, doctor, and our vaunted public health experts?
During this time of ignorance, many people who may have had it didn’t die, were treated, and a few may have succumbed, which matches our experience with any virus. For 90+% of the population, symptoms range from a cold to a nasty flu. As in all outbreaks, the vulnerable are the people with weakened immune systems, the aged with age-related conditions, and for that matter anyone with serious medical problems.
It’s entirely possible for the thing to fly under the radar for an extensive period of time before somebody with a microphone hits the panic button. Was the panic justified? Yes, maybe no. I’m reluctant to draw a hard and fast conclusion, but let’s just say that my BS-sonar is registering pings. Stringent measures in the beginning are excusable, but when we know more – not when we get a handle on its spread – they should be adjusted to fit that better understanding. So, instead of nearly everyone under stay-at-home orders, lockdowns with accommodations should have been limited to the vulnerable. Similar targeting should apply to masking, social distancing, and school in-person attendance. Instead, our scalpels were put away in favor of sledge hammers.
We have mangled science and our lives. Back in March of 2020, I proclaimed that “We Can’t Do This”, the “this” being lockdowns. The costs in the trade-offs were too severe. Now we know that many of the powerful were making decisions to wreck our lives as if there were no gaps in their knowledge. Heck, as it turns out, they still don’t know when the bug started to circulate. It’s probably been with us much longer than anyone knew.
In the end, our power-hungry politicos and their supporting cast of lickspittle and self-aggrandizing “experts” have soiled the reputation of science. A good reputation once lost is hard to regain.
RogerG