His alien thought experiment in the “Political Takeaway” section at the bottom is a masterpiece. If you’ve struggled to explain where science lost democracy, this must be as crisp as it’ll ever be described.
But that isn't reflective of every position against a vaccination (or additional measures), it is more the explanation of a naive child. There are millions of reasons that could drive people to not play along:
- Don't trust doctors
- Don't trust politicians
- Don't trust media
- Has environment that shares the same opinions, difficult to go against the grain
- There a doctors critical of methods like lockdown and even the vaccine itself
- There a doctors that warned against vaccinating within a pandemic and their predictions became true to a degree
- Countries that didn't lock down came decently through the pandemic if they had otherwise good healthcare
- We combine vaccination with secondary measures like passes and mandatory health controls
- Covid is endemic and you will get it anyway, we still see different rules for vaccinated/unvaccinated people
- There are people unreasonably afraid of Covid
- People throw away liberties for questionable safety and will still end up getting Covid in the end
- ...
Most of it is indeed a trust issue, but the problem is that there are currently few people in the public sphere that deserve that trust. I am vaccinated, I make this statement because there are fearful people that demand that you justify yourself. I am not really inclined to accommodate them, there is a saying that "the smarter one gives in" and this is clearly a case like that.
Ivermectin wouldn't be the wonder cure, if criticism of it would be more analyzed in a way the author did. It is a good step. This is getting to a principled discussion if you just ban other voices.
The site might look professional, but it still could just be another true believer. If you frenetically ban the content, more people will believe the message and more importantly disbelieve yours since it "obviously" cannot stand scrutiny.
And there are real problems here, the infrastructure to censor certain message on social media got quite effective and to believe tech companies as government contractors won't use it to spread falsehoods is naive. Not by conspiracy, it is just a dynamic government will certainly show.
Overall it was just a colossal failure of communication by policy makers, who had already eroded most of their trust before the pandemic, which then got exacerbated by contemporary journalism that felt like it had no qualms about making everything as divisive as possible for engagement.
I don't think people have lost trust in science, but politicians using "science" in this way of communication are doing a pretty good job of trying to erode that trust.
Not to be adversarial, but there have definitely been a few instances which are just censorship and not moderating misinformation. And there are definitely some hot topics on which I will flat out ignore research, because I know only some conclusions are allowed and publishable.
I think it's pointless to discuss specific examples - my point is, it's not only an issue of managing trust, because the science doesn't deserve that trust.
There is a degree of nuance that is definitely lost when people say to trust the science, which is to say that the rigorous process is what is generally trusted, but that isn't how it is communicated which is why "trusting the science" is probably a slogan that does more harm than benefit. For example it is sort of tone deaf to say that now, after how science experts have handled the first part of the pandemic, or how science has been used to justify things like the oversubscribing of opioids, or what they have said regarding nutrition (sugars vs fats), or carbon emissions and even smoking in the past. Politicizing science taints science more than it benefits politicians, but since they don't bear the costs of that erosion of trust, they will continue to politicize it.