“It’s only March 2020, and so much has already happened!” I’m listening to a three-month-old comedy show in the background and thinking to myself, just you wait. That was before a pandemic seized the world, before the collapse of the global economy, before the fabric of civil life in the United States frayed apart. The antecedents for 2020 have been building: the re-ignition of right-wing populism, an unbalanced economic recovery from the last big panic, unresolved and ever-worsening racial and ethnic tensions, and the destabilization of norms and institutions set after the Second World War.
For scientists and science writers, there’s been the parallel story of the rise over the past decade in mistrust in science. Anti-vax, flat-earth, climate-denying, it’s-just-the-flu, what-makes-you-an-expert-anyway-huh talk has made its way deep into public discourse. The response to the COVID pandemic is threatened by policies riding on the rejection of science. It’s hard enough that the disease we’re all facing is a relatively new one, beside the fact that in 2003 and 2012 we had plenty of fair warning about the havoc a SARS-type infection could bring.
Places led by anti-science strongmen have hamstrung the responses, which had been otherwise crafted from years of rigorous albeit careful research and trial-and-error. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is either sidelined or giving advice that has been redacted by politicians before release. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which is willfully ignoring the crisis, has cycled through two health ministers in a month’s span over ethical disagreements. Russia is suspected of doctoring its infection numbers. As remedies for COVID, Belarus recommended saunas and vodka. China tried to prevent word of the virus’s emergence from even coming out and is attempting to build a narrative friendly to its own interests. The United Kingdom has inconsistent rules and, as with some of the other countries mentioned, is in a rush to reopen and has one of the highest infection rates in the world.
Most of these ill-fitting responses to COVID emerge from “flooding the zone with shit,” the authoritarian guru Steve Bannon’s phrase for confusing a populace enough to seize attention from opposition parties. Ill-thought pandemic policies are talked in the same breath as the need to get economies moving again, even if it harms significantly more people. It’s a matter of political importance for all of the illiberal leaders of these countries, who are either autocratic or have autocratic tendencies: they need to appear to be in complete control of the situation. All of these leaders have variously blown the pandemic off, said prematurely that it was over, or gave questionable information about treating it, sometimes all at the same time.
For us talking about science, it’s the questionable information where things get interesting—and not in a good way. These leaders need to fix this problem immediately, for the good of their own image. They have either full control or are gaining control of the fonds of knowledge in their countries.
#democracy #science-policy #analysis #journalism #science #data analysis
