Commentary:
Hearing friends recently discuss vaccine skeptics’ lack of critical thinking set me thinking.
Yes, science apparently had the better argument, that vaccines and masks were helping fight COVID-19. This seemed pretty clear fairly soon. But believing in the science doesn’t automatically mean I thought critically. Maybe I listened just as vacuously as someone else, but to different speakers.
Yes, it got bound up in politics; yes, Mr. Trump misinformed anyone who listened to him; but consider the context of vaccine skepticism.
Historically, science needed centuries to supplant religion and folklore as humanity’s most trusted guide. Scientific method deserves its status, although only an idiot assumes it’s infallible. (See thalidomide, asbestos flowerpots, shock treatment.)
But many tributaries flowed into the powerful river of anti-vaccine sentiment.
First, like that dam that burst recently in Ukraine, weakened by months of sustained shelling, science suffered some cynical but long and strong artillery attacks: as we finally began to take seriously the health dangers of cigarettes (referred to casually as “cancer sticks” even in 1905), the tobacco industry fought like cornered rats. They denied science, attacked the scientific method, and hired greedy scientists to spout untruths in scientific wording. And hired politicians. Oil companies borrowed that playbook to deny that our climate was changing largely because of human (mis)conduct. They convinced many and dangerously delayed or prevented meaningful action.
Not only did these cynical bombardments of science weaken science’s strong position in some minds, but watching apparently serious scientists delivering scripted lines as earnestly as movie actors taught us all that scientists can be bought. If that’s so, unless you give the subject a sustained study, why should a non-scientist accept the authority of peer-reviewed journals? Maybe all the peers got bought!
Science also suffers from self-imposed wounds by its practitioners. Scientists have praised some useless medicines. Drug companies have deep-sixed bad test results while exaggerating the significance of others. There’s been a revolving door through which young industry employees take jobs with the FDA, do “regulatory” work than sometimes falls short of “neutral and unbiased,” then return to industry in higher-paid positions.
Most in the FDA want the process to work. But we litigated one case for a small company that developed an extremely promising and affordable drug to combat a deadly disease, and contracted with a company in the U.S. to shepherd the drug through tests and FDA approval. A larger company was charging folks $50,000 per year for a drug that merely weakened symptoms. Our client’s drug could have stopped that gravy train. The big company cleverly bought the shepherd company, paused work on our drug, and announced the drug was dangerous and ineffective. Yeah, years later we prevailed in court, with a jury ordering the bad guys to pay almost $600 million dollars, but too late to help the patients our client’s drug might have helped. At trial, both sides had scientific “expert witnesses” – some sincere, and others with long records of saying what the got paid to say. That stuff makes scientists and drug companies look even less trustworthy than used-car salespersons.
Yeah, it’s startling to kids who lined up to get polio shots, seeing all this skepticism; and devious folks foment that, for profit or politics.
But fighting those folks, and repairing Science’s reputation, might require an enhanced understanding of where skeptics are coming from – including a realistic look at industry misconduct.