At the government’s daily press briefing about COVID-19 on the 11th April, the government’s spokesperson, Priti Patel, repeated the mantra first put forward by Boris Johnson, and repeated ad nauseam by ministers since: “We are following,” she said, “the expert scientific and medical advice and taking the right steps at the right moment in time.” Patel was careful with her emphasis. The right steps. At the right moment in time. How does she know? The science says. It’s a bit like that game of Simon says… If Science says so, we do it.
What Patel does not understand, or is not acknowledging, is that Science doesn’t speak to us like that. There is no single guiding voice, providing us with ‘the evidence’, making it clear what we should do and when. Doing-the-right-thing-at-the-right-time is little more than a political slogan, a ditty for us to sing as we merrily dig our graves. The message may provide some comfort—we all want to feel that the government is in control—but it is a false comfort at best. It is not a sign of good judgement and wise decision-making. It hides the details that we so desperately need to debate. It reveals a failure of our society to place the right people in the right positions, a failure of our education system above all else. We don’t need a government which can meekly defer to a scientist standing on the side to answer the difficult questions, but one that understands how to incorporate scientific evidence into policy making. This is not a matter of doing what The Science says. We are lacking leaders with a scientific attitude and an understanding of how science works. Why?
We have been trying to teach how science works at schools since the introduction of the first national curriculum in 1988. Having taught undergraduate philosophy of science, as well as secondary-school science, I have been left believing that we’ve never really been any good at giving young people a sense of what it is like to do science. How hard it can be to see what is important in the data. How controversial new ideas can be. How multifaceted and creative the sciences are, and how very intertwined with society. There is so much for young adults to take away with them from a good scientific education as they pursue non-scientific interests and careers, but it is certainly not the ability to name parts of a cell nor the skill of rearranging equations.
I suspect our difficulty in presenting a true image of science is partly because understanding the daily work of scientists is not a strength of many science teachers, despite their very many other remarkable talents. But perhaps most of all, a feel for science is a difficult thing to measure and it doesn’t therefore easily fit into the testing regimes of English education. Very sadly, our society’s ability to effectively apply scientific knowledge is being tested to the ultimate limit now.
1. The government can pick any answer it likes and say it is backed up by Science.
There isn’t a single thing called ‘Science’. Today’s crisis isn’t just about the microbiology of coronaviruses, or the mathematical modelling of pandemics, or the sociology of disease transmission, or the psychology of lockdown. It cuts across mathematical, natural and social sciences and there are a lot of voices to listen to. Even in the same discipline, scientists don’t agree. So what does the government mean when, for example, it says it implemented lockdown at the right time, on the basis of the scientific evidence? One scientist, backed up by mathematical models, may point out that the most effective way to reduce deaths is to enforce a lockdown as early as possible. Another scientist, with knowledge of behavioural psychology, might worry that people won’t obey lockdown rules for very long and it’s therefore possible to start a lockdown too early. There are relevant ideas, theories, studies from many difference sciences—although none have been tested in a comparable situation—that need to be weighed up. It is easy for the government to pick any answer it fancies and claim to be backed up by The Science. So it is insufficient to justify governmental actions by a vacuous principle of this kind. From the start, we have deserved more detailed answers from the government: what particular scientific studies has it turned to in order to make this particular decision?
2. Interpreting scientific evidence well is a talent in itself.
There’s no set of equations we can input ‘the data’ to churn out the hour at which the lockdown can be relaxed. Evidence has to be interpreted; interpretation can be done badly. We have to decide what counts as evidence, how strong it is, what its limitations are, what it means. Interpretation is more difficult when, as in the current crisis, we’re facing a severe lack of evidence. This is partly because the virus is new: we don’t understand the details of its transmission, the endurance of antibodies, its long-term impact on heath. But pandemic research is underfunded, in the U.K. and globally—it is, after all, psychologically difficult to prioritise things you don’t really believe are going to happen—so there is also a great deal lacking in our understanding of viruses in general. What is the reach of a cough? Should we spray roads with disinfectant? What is the impact of closing schools on transmission of any disease?
At the beginning of the pandemic, we seemed to take it as a fact that face masks don’t work at reducing transmission in public. That is an extremely simplified interpretation of what turns out to be limited and murky evidence, to the extent that it is likely to be more false than true. Sifting through evidence of this kind is a mountainous task in itself. That’s why epidemiologists are calling first and foremost with help in tackling the literature: organising it, summarising it, trying to figure out what is important. This is a call for good judgement; the evidence doesn’t speak by itself. So, as much as the government may be hoping to deflect blame when this is all over, “Science told me to do it,” will never be a good excuse.
3. Scientific thinking is often nothing more than an extension of good judgement.
It doesn’t take our ablest scientists to recommend that we test as much as possible, that we provide adequate PPE, or that we build more ventilators. As the crisis has unfolded, the critical points of this pandemic have not hinged upon the most abstruse science. The mistakes we are making are not a result of failing to listen to scientists, which was never a fail-safe plan. From the beginning, we needed to plan and prepare for the worst, to think like mad, but to think well. The government soon hooked up to the idea that it needed to flatten the curve, but it doing so it missed a more ambitious target. Flattening the curve saves the lives of people who wouldn’t otherwise get a ventilator. But what about the people who do get ventilation and still die? Once it was clear what we were facing, the ultimate goal should simply have been to limit the number of deaths as much as possible, not just make the deaths manageable.
This planning and preparing and figuring things out is best done with a scientific attitude. That requires a hunger and respect for the truth. Exactly the opposite of what Boris Johnson demonstrated as a journalist. Taking a scientific attitude, the government would be desperate to do as much testing as possible just to get a fair picture of the outbreak. It would be keen to measure, not just the cases in hospitals, but in care homes and the wider community. A scientifically-minded government would always want more data, and the best information possible, to guide its decisions. This isn’t the same as waiting to be told by the scientists about what to do. It is the approach of Germany, whose chancellor, Angela Merkel, is a former chemist. Unfortunately, U.K. politicians don’t have a reputation for confronting data with openness and curiosity and a determination to present it how it is.
To take a scientific attitude is to be always asking good questions. When confronted with PPE distribution issues across the U.K., for example, ministers have frequently trotted out numbers: “761 million pieces of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) have already been delivered.” The specificity of these figures is part of the government’s façade of scientificness, but they aren’t the details ministers should be memorising for the daily briefing. The questions they should be concerned with: How many gowns are needed in this region? How many face masks are care homes short of? The scientist needs a good grasp of the details and the scientific attitude is immersed in the details. Are our politicians desperately trying to understand the situation in depth? “We’re doing the right thing at the right time” is not an answer to anything at all. It is not reassuring just to tell us everything is being done right in a situation where there is so much uncertainty. To ask good questions, scientists need to admit and understand what they don’t know.
There have been many plausible suggestions why other countries are dealing better with the coronavirus than the U.K. Some are known to have better resourced health care systems, with more critical care beds. Some have been quicker to enforce a lockdown, or a more stringent lockdown. Some have closely monitored patients with mild symptoms and tested for coronavirus widely. Some have built upon their experience of previous pandemics. Some have female leaders. To this list I’d like to add one more angle: some countries have approached the crisis with a scientific attitude. And that is a very different thing to, “doing what The Science tells us.”