This is why academic science has so many institutional checks and balances, such as peer review, to try to filter it all out – checks and balances that the Great Barrington declaration sidesteps altogether. Scientists are human, with all the cognitive biases, flaws and personal grudges that entails. The natural authority that imbues a professorship – and the perception that scientists are somehow neutral experts – makes this very dangerous. But there are also scientists who use science as a screen for pushing their own values. In recent months, politicians have claimed they are “following the science”, which rarely points in a single direction, as a way of escaping accountability for bad political judgments. Pielke argues that “stealth advocacy” is damaging to science. There is no such thing as public policy informed purely by science as we have seen with Covid-19, policy juggles limited scientific knowledge alongside economic considerations and normative value judgments informed by competing political ideologies.
It’s fine for scientists to become advocates of a particular policy so long as they are transparent about where expertise stops and advocacy begins.
In his 2007 book The Honest Broker, Roger Pielke sets out a typology of science engagement, including the “science arbiter” and the “issue advocate”. They may be well-meaning but naive if so, they are falling into well-documented traps. Nothing, from the self-aggrandising name to the video of the three professors toasting with champagne their statement about a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million, suggests the epistemological humility we might expect from scientists during this pandemic. And what are scientists doing fronting a campaign whose back office is run by a thinktank that flirts with climate change denial? When Sky News pressed one of the co-authors on this, he said: “We do not have the resources to audit each signature.” Consider what this approach would mean for scientific endeavour were it applied more broadly. The statement claims to have been signed by more than 6,000 medical scientists, but anyone can sign up claiming to be one (there are a number of fake medical signatories on the list, including a Dr Harold Shipman). There is no acknowledgement of the massive scientific uncertainty that exists with a new disease. The declaration sets itself up against a straw proposal that nobody is arguing for – a full-scale national lockdown until a vaccine is made available. The professors do not define who is “vulnerable”, nor do they set out a workable plan for shielding them. It makes claims about herd immunity – the idea that letting the virus rip among less vulnerable groups will allow a degree of population-level immunity to build up which will eventually protect the more vulnerable – that are unsupported by existing scientific evidence. But there is much to set alarm bells ringing. The declaration, which calls for an immediate resumption of “life as normal” for everyone except the “vulnerable”, is written by three science professors from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, giving it the sheen of academic respectability.