Follow the Science

Back in the depths of the pandemic over a year ago, we talked a lot about the social lessons we had learned, or at least hoped we might learn. I have also, I think, picked up some new thoughts about how science works and how it interacts with the media, which may not be new to anyone but me, of course.

Firstly there is what I would call the distinction between experimental science and experiential science. The first is what happens in laboratories: it’s about measurements, the physical properties of substances, double-blind trials, repetition of results, proving or disproving theses. It is controlled and discrete. It’s this kind of science which has produced our vaccines. On the other hand, experiential science happens outside the lab: it brings data and observation to bear on the ‘real world’ and seeks to answer questions about it. It is a far, far more hazardous venture than experimentation. In truth, it isn’t amenable to the ’scientific method’ at all, because you can’t isolate, say, an entire society and screen off various factors which might be affecting it to assess the truth of your hypothesis: you end up with a mass of data and really very limited means to analyse them in a way that would rule out other analyses. Human behaviour is too complex. It’s this second type of science which characterises the epidemiological decisions governments across the world have had to make, and its relatively indeterminate nature obviously makes it much more subject to bias. This leads onto the second observation, how different scientists and groups of scientists, once they move outside the laboratory, are driven by their own preferences and personalities to read the data they confront in different ways; perhaps not as much as the rest of us, but to some degree. My favourite covid commentator is possibly Sir John Bell, the Canadian Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, favourite partly because he is the living spit of 1940s band leader Spike Jones so whenever he comes on the wireless I half expect to hear him playing farty noises on a trumpet and firing a gun. ‘You know me’, Professor Bell told an interviewer on Today once, ‘I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy’, and so he is. At least he admits it, and thus you can apply an optimism discount to his pronouncements. Then there is (for instance) Dr Carl Henegham who I heard opining the other day that there isn’t anything really wrong at the moment, and that everything we hear about the Omicron variant is exaggerated. Everybody seems to have forgotten about the study his Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine published in May 2020 alleging that covid had been in the UK far longer than anyone thought, that therefore everyone had had it already and it was massively less lethal than supposed, and that the pandemic was essentially over. An academic friend of mine commented that ‘Carl Henegham tests my belief in tenure’. Again, does anyone now remember the days when the World Health Organisation was advising us not to wear masks? The reasoning seemed to be that masks encouraged ‘a false sense of security’, and this is a piece with the WHO’s apparent concern less with medical facts than with how it thinks people behave, and ought to behave. Whereas it changed its mind about masks, it’s consistently argued against travel restrictions: now, it seems to me that, while restrictions on international travel obviously aren’t any kind of long-term solution to a pandemic, they logically must do something in the short term to impede a pathogen’s spread, in exactly the same way that getting people to stand two yards apart does something. The WHO’s concern appears to be that travel bans break down international solidarity, which I can’t help thinking is a) not necessarily true, and b) isn’t its business. 

Finally, the media. I am a great defender, in general, of the BBC, but a lot of its coverage, even via the sedate medium of radio, has been disgraceful. Barely a day passes without some headline along the lines of ‘Professor A says Y is possible’ or ‘Dr B warns of risk of Z’ when neither Professor A nor Dr B are speaking on behalf of anything like a consensus. Well, you can always find someone to say nearly anything, and the fact that someone says it is hardly of itself worthy of a screaming news item, especially when you can just as easily source an opposite opinion. Very few things aren't possible, and hardly anything isn't a risk.

A friend complained some time ago that the reporting of the different brands of vaccine was a capitalistic development, making heroes out of the companies that manufactured the medicines, whereas once we had no idea where our drugs came from. I argued that this was in fact a good thing: it cast light on the process of pharmaceutical research and procurement which had previously been mysterious and obscure. People would know more in the future. I think that probably applies to ‘the science’ as well.