The American people have a right to know what policies a President Biden would pursue to combat COVID. A politically self-serving declaration that he will “follow the science” is pure obfuscation.
“Let’s end the politics and follow the science,” declares Joe Biden.
Biden’s declaration is politically self-serving because it suggests that, as president, his policies to address COVID will be apolitical and simply science-based. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
As Faye Flam points out at Bloomberg:
Joe Biden’s promise to “follow the science” does not amount to a strategy. It’s just a slogan.
A strategy to deal with the pandemic needs to set priorities and incorporate values that science isn’t equipped to provide. If Biden and his fans think following the science is the plan, they misunderstand the nature of science and its limitations.
Science can give insights into the nature of the pandemic, but there is no scientific formula pointing to a solution
“This year has driven home as never before the message that there is no such thing as ‘the science,'” writes Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal. “There are different scientific views on how to suppress the virus.”
Sweden. As we’ve previously noted, for instance, Swedish scientists and public health authorities have taken a strikingly different approach to combating COVID than their counterparts in the United States.
The Swedes have eschewed lockdowns and mandatory mask orders and instead, have focused their efforts on protecting the most vulnerable members of the population. Thus schools, restaurants, and fitness centers have remained open.
Early on in the pandemic, as Ridley notes, the Swedish approach looked foolish and shortsighted. “Now, with cases low and the Swedish economy in much better health than other countries,” he observes, Swedish public health authorities look prescient and wise.
“Different countries,” explains Flam, “can ‘follow the science’ to different strategies.”
Science. Yet, “follow the science” resonates with us because it appeals to our belief that politics involves opinions and value judgments about which people can and do vigorously disagree. Science, by contrast, deals with facts and empirical reality which we all must acknowledge and recognize.
If only it were that simple! In truth, our scientific understanding of the coronavirus is not fixed and settled dogma; it is developing and evolving based on new discoveries and new empirical realities.
“In 2020,”writes Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz,
science has gone from a gradual accumulation of knowledge to a train at full steam.
It’s worth remembering that what is true today will almost certainly be proven false next week, and that when people appear to change their minds it is an inherently good thing—adapting to new evidence is the cornerstone of science.
Just last week, for instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledged for the first time that the coronavirus sometimes can spread through airborne particles “that can linger in the air for minutes to hours,” thereby infecting people “who are further than six feet apart.”
The implications of this finding, though, are a legitimate source of political debate. Is the risk of airborne infection serious enough to warrant a different public health strategy? Or is the risk sufficiently low that no change in strategy is warranted?
“The science” ought to inform how we answer these and other public health questions; but ultimately, policymakers must make value judgments that balance competing interests, assess what is most important, and determine how much risk the public should assume.
Politics. In short, the science of COVID cannot be divorced from the politics of COVID. It is, therefore, too glib and self-serving for Biden to declare that his strategy for combating the coronavirus will be simply to “follow the science.”
As Bruce Trogdon observes, this is a great political “sound-byte. But the scientists don’t even agree and the consensus is constantly shifting. Which scientist? Which study? Which day?”
We don’t know because Biden won’t say.
Bide says he’ll “follow the science,” because he wants us to ignore his politics, which mirror those of blue state governors like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and New York’s Andrew Cuomo, who embrace lockdowns.
“Joe Biden is the shutdown candidate,” explains the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Hennninger. “At last week’s presidential non-debate,” he writes,
perhaps the most consequential remark by Mr. Biden was about living with the virus. “You can’t fix the economy,” Mr. Biden said, “until you fix the Covid crisis.” Virus first, economy later.
I take that to mean Mr. Biden’s coronavirus policy would be to support reviving shutdowns if the virus-case metric goes up, and support governors who push back against openings.
As such, his policy would reflect minimal adjustment of the Democratic party’s lockdown bias, no matter the country’s experience with the virus since March.
That’s a legitimate position to take, even if it is, as I think, seriously mistaken and misguided. What is utterly illegitimate and wrong is for Biden to continue to dodge the question in an effort to deceive the American people.
Voters have a right to know precisely what the former Vice President means when he says he’ll “follow the science”: because, as he surely knows, the meaning of that phrase is anything but self-evident and self-explanatory. It is, though, politically self-serving.
Feature photo credit: The Yeshiva World.