Dishonesty in Scientific and Medical Discourse
"Talking nonsense solves no problems."
If you've been paying critical attention to the Pandemic Accountability Index, you'll notice that a recent theme keeps emerging time and time again: people keep getting rewarded for talking very abrasively about topics they clearly know very little about.
Here's a choice sampling:
This is a topic we keep revisiting here at the PAI time and time again: Every time you mash out a tweet, yelp into a webcam, or rant on a podcast, you run the risk of sharing nothing but a broadcast of your own ignorance. Unfortunately, some are seemingly very proud to speak authoritatively about complicated topics they've chosen not to put in the work to understand - and are being rewarded by our government and academic institutions for doing so. A requirement of being a mature adult professional is acknowledging what you know little about and deferring to those who have put in the work to truly understand the topic being discussed.
Imagine going to college to study a hard scientific field such as epidemiology or engineering, spending the better part of a decade building a career in research & development, and winding up with a tenured professorship at a prestigious university. After weeks of hard work in a research lab on the verge of making an important breakthrough, a professor from a completely different department slams open the lab door, declares your entire field of study to be fraudulent. They start slamming a steel baseball bat against your lab equipment, ruining all of your hard work. Even worse, they're gleefully livestreaming this across social media, as their dedicated audience laughs on in mockery of everything you've dedicated your life towards.
This is precisely how many scientists, and their important work have been mistreated regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. mRNA vaccine development, PPE engineering, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and countless other fields of study have been degraded as worthless by loudmouths who never thought seriously about them before 2020 yet suddenly assume themselves to be experts.
This is the sort of attitude we've seen repeated time and time again over the past five years, and it's completely unacceptable. It's one thing to make a detailed criticism in good faith while accepting the potential of being incorrect, but another to make ridiculous and childish insults in the public square. Worse is a credentialed academic talking arrogantly about entire scientific fields they have refused to make a good effort to try and understand, disparaging the hard work of others and spreading misleading fictions.
Without university administrators brave enough to enforce professional standards, the consequences can be devastating. Should another pandemic disaster such as COVID-19 begin in our lifetimes, a significant portion of the public have been propagandized into denying the scientific realities of these life-saving tools, including numerous politicians. Worse, the medical students of now who will be the frontline healthcare workers of tomorrow will be taught that loudmouthed contrarianism - which inevitably gets patients killed - is what's rewarded, instead of intellectual rigor and empathetic humility.
The fear was always that learning the wrong lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic would inevitably lead to disastrous outcomes in future disasters, making 2020 look like a spring picnic in comparison. Why wouldn't a bad actor who sought to cause harm to Americans unleash a bioweapon in this political environment, so poised to blame public health mitigations for the harms that the SARS-CoV-2 caused? With Democrats essentially conceding public health to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the Republicans - the bi-partisan consensus is that America's doors are open to whatever new virus is poised to threaten the nation's health, and we’ll offer up our kids on a silver platter without a second thought.
We're being primed to look even more incredibly foolish than we did in 2020, with countless innocent lives paying a horrific price as a result. While we can't predict precisely when the next pandemic-level crisis will hit us, we can't wait until hospitals are overwhelmed and mass graves are being filled yet again. It's time to shift our thinking out of this prison of toxic positivity.
The Pandemic Accountability Index needs your support now, more than ever, to keep the public informed about this ongoing threat to your health. Consider a paid subscription or a one-time donation via Paypal.