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Comment by benjaminwootton | Hacker News Reader

The editor at The Lancet Richard Horton was extremely vocal in his views over Covid and skewed quite political.

He wasn’t arguing from specific research, just using his platform for ask for more of what he wanted. If anything, he should have been publicising what the actual science said.

Now when I see the name The Lancet, I just see how science can also be politicised and operate at the whims of big business.

Covid times destroyed trust in so many institutions.

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> Covid times destroyed trust in so many institutions.

I don’t dispute the negative impact of the pandemic on trust in many institutions. And I won’t speak to the broader world, but Americans’ trust in our institutions has been taking a beaten since long before the pandemic.

Pew Research Center has written about trust in government over time. We seem to be asymptotically approaching some lower bound rather than seeing a sharp drop. [1]

I remember reading about declining trust of Americans in our institutions more broadly but without digging through my notebooks I’m not certain precisely where. My guesses would be either Watt’s “Mortal Republic”, Lukianoff’s “The Coddling of the American Mind”, or maybe Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”. Someone with better recall than I have would probably know.

I think the pandemic is more of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” rather than a fundamental driver of mistrust.

I mostly bring this up because I don’t think focusing on the side effects of public policy with regard to the pandemic will solve the broader and more deep-seated issues about our trust in our institutions.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/06/06/public-trust...

The pandemic (in terms of public health institutions) and recent apparent scandals demonstrating an apparent political bend in the justice system have really accelerated the distrust IMO. Strangely, I think a small segment has grown more and more trusting of government because of the pandemic and some of the institutional scandals. Those now trusting the government seem to have risen to the level of being apologists…almost zealots…and that is really odd to me being on the other side of that coin.

What did he say that was against actual science? Do you have any citations?

I didn’t say he was anti-science, but I don’t believe he should be saying stuff like this as the editor of a prestigious scientific journal:

“ Horton’s The Covid-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop it Happening Again (2020) has managed to stand out for its sharp polemic (Knight 2020). Horton denounces Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw funding from the World Health Organization (WHO) as a crime against humanity and accuses Boris Johnson of misconduct in public office.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7383067/

Note his book was written in 2020 so before he even had much science, let alone formed a scientifically rigorous view.

Is it right that science at the highest levels is so politicised?

"No, no, the science backs him; he's actually totally right, I just think that prominent people shouldn't say things that are politically controversial. What? Yeah, I know that it's only controversial because one of the two major political parties has decided its primary platform will be to deny reality, so what?"

Still trying to understand what was wrong.

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