How science became politicised

Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers across the world have successfully promoted a series of controversial public policies by claiming they’re based on ‘the science’ rather than a particular moral or ideological vision. I’m thinking of lockdowns and net zero in particular. Yet at the same time, this group has engaged in behaviour that has undermined public confidence in science. Why appeal to the authority of science to win support for a series of politically contentious policies – and then diminish its authority?

Take Anthony Fauci, for instance, who recently announced he’s stepping down as chief medical adviser to Joe Biden. Even though he once claimed to ‘represent science’ in the eyes of the American people, he misled them about the likely duration of the lockdowns (‘15 days to slow the spread’), overstated the efficacy of the Covid vaccines when they were first rolled out, refused to countenance the possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (it later emerged that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under his leadership, had given a grant to the EcoHealth Alliance, which helped fund ‘gain of function’ research at the Chinese lab) and conspired with other prominent scientists, such as Francis Collins, to besmirch the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (‘There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises,’ Collins told Fauci in an email). A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal concluded: ‘His legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust government health experts in the same way again.’

Another case in point is a recent editorial in Nature Human Behaviour, one of several journals in the Nature Research stable, the world’s pre-eminent publisher of scientific research.