The announcement of Horacio Arruda’s resignation as Quebec’s national director of public health provides an opportunity to revisit the many critics invoking “THE” science to point out alleged mistakes made at various times over the past two years. .
While we should rejoice in the fact that the call for “THE” science and “proven data” has become a kind of reflex to demand that any decision be justified, we should, on the other hand, criticize the erroneous tendency to believe that “THE” science is unequivocal and can always dictate the “true” and only right decision. The field of public health is not an exact science, given the very large number of variables involved that must be taken into account. And no “algorithm” exists to weight them and decide the relative importance of these variables.
Even more problematic is the fact that this simplistic conception of “THE” science brings with it the equally simplistic idea that one can easily eradicate “fake” science by creating “detectors” to erase space public the “erroneous” opinions. Any observer who pays the slightest attention to the numerous public interventions by the various experts who have expressed themselves in the media cannot fail to notice that they were rarely unanimous.
Risks and benefits
Just take the debate about vaccinating people who have recently been infected with COVID-19. Some say they are immune because the virus allowed them to create antibodies to defend themselves, while others say not everyone reacts the same way and a third dose, even soon after the disease, can be useful to further boost the immune system! What to do ? Are we going to wait months for the results of scientific studies comparing the rate of antibody production in vaccinees with that observed in people with the Omicron variant? Obviously not. It is therefore necessary to evaluate, to the best of current knowledge, the benefits and the risks, and this requires experience, and above all judgment, and is not just a matter of science. And those who cite certain studies to cry decision error often forget to take into account other studies with contradictory results.
Direct empirical observation no longer exists in most sciences, any study is open to criticism in principle and one can always find an “expert” and even an “ex-peer” (think of Didier Raoult) to question the method. used by a search. The question is therefore to assess whether the hypotheses are plausible or not, which requires, once again, a certain habit of critical thinking and especially of statistical thinking. This is the work of public health teams. Unlike off-the-cuff critics who offer their opinions of the moment, Dr. Arruda was never the only one to decide, even though he was the public face of the announced decisions.
Science progresses by overcoming disagreements, and that takes time. We must therefore learn to live with uncertainties, which will only become clearer in the weeks and months to come and may lead to modifications of previous decisions, which do not turn into “errors” for all that. In the context of an unprecedented pandemic with, among other things, the appearance of different variants, each with their own and unforeseen characteristics, requiring irrefutable scientific evidence for any decision therefore makes no sense in practice when the situation requires quick decisions.
The simplistic belief in the existence of irrefutable evidence is also the basis of demands for censorship of supposedly erroneous claims. An extreme, but very instructive example of this trend is provided by the censorship, at the beginning of last November, of the Instagram account of the scientific collaboration group Cochrane, nevertheless recognized worldwide for its literature reviews aimed precisely at establishing “data evidence” on public health topics. Without knowing by what “scientific” method this was done, Instagram officials have indeed announced that the information published by this group could not be disseminated on their site, “because it had repeatedly posted content that goes against our community guidelines on misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine”! This blunder shows that nuanced thinking is made difficult in times of crisis — not to say collective hysteria — which cannot stand ambiguity and uncertainty.
The sciences are collective and even fairly anonymous undertakings, and this seems hardly compatible with the media which thrive on personalization, which facilitates the search for scapegoats, which, as the philosopher René Girard says, makes it possible to satisfy “the anguish and collective frustrations” by designating “victims who easily unite against them”. The same phenomenon is underway with the fixation on the “non-vaccinated”, a heterogeneous group among all, but whose grouping under the same name gives the illusion of an easily identifiable unit as responsible for the evil that must be eradicated. This kind of behavior is, alas, far from any truly scientific thought, always sensitive to the complexity of social phenomena.