You’ve probably heard the old saying that goes something like: ‘To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.’ After the last 18 months, we can add science to that list.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw how medical and scientific advice, as played out in public policy, changed. At times, the advice even seemed contradictory. At first, masks didn’t help quell the spread of disease, then they did. We needed to be worried about surface spread, then, oh wait, it was probably less of a concern than we thought. Respiratory droplets were the main source of contagion, and then it was aerosols.
To the casual onlooker, this flip-flopping may indicate that the so-called experts have no idea what they’re doing. If you’ve spent any time in a comments section on the internet (my condolences), you will have seen how this changing advice led to doubt and scepticism among the general population, evidence that scientists and public health officials have lost the plot. But instead, what is actually happening is that we are seeing the proverbial sausage of science being made in real time through our public health discourse.
The pandemic has been a clear demonstration that science is a method, not an endpoint. It is an ongoing process of hypothesising, testing, and interpreting the results of those tests through public policy. Though the hypothesis may be accepted or rejected, these interpretations are unlikely to be absolutely definitive statements or recommendations and are usually made with varying degrees of certainty.
And herein lies the problem that we are facing on a social level: in times of uncertainty what people understandably crave is certainty. For many, it is not enough that we can say with a very high degree of assuredness that, for example, society-wide mask wearing significantly reduces the spread of COVID-19. People desire a security in certainty that nobody can provide: an assurance that if you do this simple thing, you will be absolutely safe.
I use mask wearing as the prototypical example during this pandemic because it is one where the public health advice has clearly changed since the start of the outbreak. Early in 2020, it was unclear whether the benefits of mask-wearing outweighed the potential risks. At the time, the public health advice was affected by concerns around mask shortages impacting health-care providers (who definitely did need them), and even concerns that mask-wearing would promote