How Did the Experts Turn Everything Upside Down?

By Bret Swanson

When it comes to Covid, most of the supposedly high-information policy world is still living two to three years behind the cutting-edge science and data. Covid censorship and propaganda (or CCP, no pun intended) was extraordinarily effective. We recently argued as much in The Wall Street Journal. CCP was surprisingly potent in the very communities which should have had the analytical tools to resist its charms and misdirections. 

For some reason, regular people slowly figured things out. Yo, Canadian truckers! Examples keep rolling in, however, showing those most vulnerable to the infowarp were experts in public health and the wider public policy world. 

The latest is an item from Richard Hanania, a social scientist who writes mostly about culture and discrimination law, including a new book called The Origins of Woke. I wouldn’t have noticed or replied here except that I saw smart people citing his new article as a successful vindication of the Covid vaccines. Another sigh-inducing item is from Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now and Rationality, among other good books. Pinker still thinks SARS2 first jumped to humans in a wet market.

A third example comes from economist Tyler Cowen, who believes China’s zero-Covid lockdowns worked and maybe the country should still be closed until it adopts mRNA technology. All three demonstrate the folly of cursory cheerleading, rather than deep scientific analysis. 

Most would understandably prefer to move on from Covid. But the issues are simply too important. Increasingly powerful biotechnologies, and thus bioethics, will dominate policy discussions in coming years. We need to understand what happened during Covid, and we need accountability. Even more generally, our sense-making institutions, which promote individual and collective information processing and good decisions, are broken. They must be returned to health or replaced with better ones. 

These three examples also highlight another growing problem – the superficiality of analysis by some in the pro-innovation “progress studies” universe. Their hearts are almost always in the right place. Their brains, too, for the most part. I share their enthusiasm for exuberant, technology-led economic growth. Progress in biotech, energy, and other fields should be a central objective of our civilization. 

The moniker of “technology,” however, is never decisive. Labeling windmills “green energy” does not make them a greener or more efficient electricity source than natural gas or nuclear power. Modern medicine’s ability to interrupt puberty does not mean lots of 12-year olds should indulge in, nor doctors push, extreme hormone therapy. Likewise, the label “vaccine” does not tell you anything about a medicine’s underlying biology or its safety and effectiveness. 

In fact, skipping over the details may, by leading to or excusing (or covering up) catastrophic mistakes, undermine the bigger mission of technological progress. As we’ve seen with nuclear power, even one innocuous misstep (Three Mile Island) and one real disaster (Chernobyl) can set back a crucial technology for decades. 

Let’s address the examples and then return to bigger themes. 

Read the entire post at author’s substack:

Covid and the Golly Folly