It was sooo bad
The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols has a book called The Death Of Expertise which he’s updated with a new chapter on the pandemic. He’s interviewed in the magazine:
Isabel: You argue that one mistake scientists made was to take on the role of elected officials. Can you talk me through that shift?
Tom: If you look back at those White House press briefings, where you had people such as Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci standing there uncomfortably while Donald Trump ranted about bleach and lights, you can see where they and other experts felt the need to clarify useful policies in a way that ordinary people could follow, especially because elected leaders—and not just Trump—were making a mess of things. Early in the pandemic, for example, I was impressed by then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who seemed like a steady and capable hand on the tiller. But Cuomo—as we now know and as I discuss in the book—was desperately trying to cover up his own lethal mistakes.
The scientists, people we’d mostly never heard of at the state and federal levels, stepped forward to issue guidance. But that’s not their job, and, frankly, talking to the public isn’t their main skill set. People, understandably, don’t want to take orders from appointed officials. When it came time to close public places—and, even more important, to reopen them, including schools—scientists got dragged into a huge fight that was more about politics than science. They got tagged as political figures rather than dispassionate experts.
You can blame a lot of that on Trump and the GOP making pandemic measures into political issues. But the way medical professionals supported the George Floyd protests was a big mistake and a completely self-inflicted wound on the cause of expertise.
Isabel: How so?
Tom: As I say in the Atlantic excerpt, a vocal part of the medical community said: These protests are so important that they should be allowed to happen despite all of our advice warning against such gatherings.
To say this while people couldn’t go to church, get married, or bury their dead inflamed a lot of people, including me. (My brother died in a VA long-term-care facility at the start of the pandemic that was later at the center of a scandal about the mishandling of COVID measures, and we couldn’t lay him to rest for weeks.) Many doctors, who had argued that their advice was apolitical, made a nakedly political decision. Fauci, wisely, tried to stay neutral, but by late summer, the damage was done.
I don’t think we can say definitively whether the protests increased COVID cases, but the bigger problem is that the argument is a no-win trap for experts: If the doctors were concerned that the protests could spread the disease, then they shouldn’t have signed on to the protests. But if the protests were acceptable with the appropriate precautions, then the doctors and the public-health officials should have allowed gatherings for everyone willing to use the same measures.
Isabel: I was really struck by the quote you include from a member of the COVID Crisis Group: “Trump was a comorbidity.” Is there a world in which COVID didn’t get quite so politicized?
Tom: I think, given decades of narcissism, political polarization, and general distrust in government, a pandemic was always going to be politicized. But in my view, Trump’s personal influence and his mobilization of an entire political party around the demonization of expertise cost lives. It’s still a remarkable thing, and it astounds me that anyone would think of putting him back in any position of responsibility anywhere.
Isabel: Why is listening to experts the task of a responsible American citizen?
Tom: It’s not our task to obey experts without question, but, yes, listening is a requirement of being a citizen in a democracy. In the end, political leaders should, and do, have the last word and make the call on most things, including war and peace. But we are not a rabble. We don’t just all shout in the public square and then demand that the loudest voices carry the day. Experts give all of us, including our elected leaders, information we need to make decisions.
We can choose to ignore that advice. Experts can tell us about risks, and we can choose to take those risks. But if we simply block our ears and insist that we know better than everyone else because our gut, or some TV personality, or some politician, told us that we’re smarter than the experts, that’s on us.
I too winced at at the doctors and scientists on TV making that clearly political commentary about the protests at the time, not because I was especially terrified of the spread of the virus through that means but because it was obvious it was a political not a scientific decision and would, therefore, further politicize all the scientific advice going forward. It was dissonant and weird but then everything was during that period.
But nobody politicized the scientific community that Trump and his henchmen. I don’t know if the professions will ever fully recover from it.