Lydia Fairchild was told that her two children were not a genetic match with her and that therefore, biologically, she could not be their mother. The state accused Fairchild of fraud and filed a lawsuit against her. Researchers later determined that the genetic mismatch was due to chimerism.
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/case-lydia-fairchild-and-her-ch...The DNA information did show relation, but suggested that she was the aunt rather than the mother of the children. In some sense, due to mosaicism, the mother was her own sister. One "sister" showed up in the cheek swabs, and the other "sister" produced the eggs.
The entire basis for being so enamored with science, as so many of us are, is that it provides a method for establishing facts without needing trust.
Despite the noise to the contrary, we live in a highly literate age, and are a species filled with curiosity and compassion. There's no reason that scientific findings - especially those used to underwrite public policy - cannot be made easy to understand and straightforward to replicate.
What interventions might those be? I'm only aware of the interventions that time and time again have been proven to be highly effective that were implemented here, masking, improved guidelines for hygiene, distancing, and vaccination.
Lockdowns were roundly rejected by an enormous chorus of the top experts in relevant fields, and yet somehow the messaging was spun to make it sound like there was significant debate. And of course, no actual data was ever made available by proponents for the rest of us to even consider, let alone replicate. This is what I mean by the "trust the science" message being a contradiction in terms.
Of the interventions you mention: masking was not shown "time and time again" to be highly - or even moderately - effective. The dearth of rigorous study on the matter is bizarre. The Bangladesh study showed no statistically significant effect for cloth masks, and very modest effects for others - certainly nowhere near enough to justify mandates.
I'm not very aware of the literature on distancing - can you provide sources to research which you think shows that it has "time and time again proven to be highly effective"?
Vaccination of course appeared incredible out of the gate, but we now know that there was significant unblinding during phase III, and the real-world results have not lived up to either the safety or efficacy claims. So, while the vaccines are a great achievement, I'm not sure we can draw the conclusions that the scientific method was as rigorously adopted as we might hope in the context of this discussion about the pitfalls of "trust the science" in matters of public policy. Instead, profit seems to have motivated a relatively shoddy series of rollouts. Moreover, the fallout over the disastrous booster approval cost us a number of experts who resigned in protest (obviously Gruber and Krause are the most notable, but there were many others both at FDA and in academia). So I think it still belongs in the 'loss' column as science-based policy goes.
(The founders were of course criticized as being too left wing; have they over-corrected?)
The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank that dedicates all of his time to his hatred of reasonable responses to a disease.
> The "founders" of this appear to be a single crank
I presume the "single crank" to whom you refer here is the author of the piece whose headling you've partially quoted, Kevin Bardosh, who is a professor of public health, expert and front-line responder on arbovirus epidemics (the threat of which still loom large), and widely regarded as an up-and-comer in this field.
The actual founders are unassailable - Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan are Oxford powerhouses, among the top minds in the world on the subject matter, and have published many of the most influential and enduring pieces over their decades of professorship. Other than crude trolling, I cannot fathom what might drive you to the conclusion that their are either invisible (per your use of the word "single") or that they lack the expertise required to take the positions they take.
You'll note that the editor in chief (who happens to be a friend of mine) is a professor of epidemiology at Stanford and a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution. In addition to his work at CG, he has also worked closely throughout the pandemic in his publishing and advocacy with professors from the other three of the top 5.
Like... I hate credentialism too, but if that's your angle, it seems bizarre to attempt to smear the top professors at the world's top medical schools as cranks.
As for your quote:
> Anthony Fauci is finally facing his reckoning
...this strikes me as roundly true. Fauci was a respected professional in his field, albeit surely a PITA bureaucrat for those who depend on NIH grants for research (and perhaps already with one strike given his half-assedness and homophobia early in the AIDS pandemic, but that was fashionable then I guess).
He threw it all away in the past 3 years. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been almost all wrong at almost every moment. He misinterpreted the significance of the Diamond Princess dataset. He misled the public about the empirical foundations of social distancing. He unambiguously lied to Congress about the presence of gain-of-function research, which he personally greenlit. I mean... that's pretty bad.
He's not going to be sitting at the cool kid's table anymore. And yeah, he is facing a long road of reckoning ahead for what he's done.
One of the vaccines was recalled due to causing potentially fatal blood clots: https://www.pfpdocs.com/jj-vaccine-recall
You can't be one-in-a-trillion confident about any particular DNA result, even if that's what the nominal probability from the DNA analysis itself seems to say, because it is objectively observable that there are plenty of other sources of errors of all sorts. You can only get down to that "noise floor" of probabilities. This can still be a very useful result, but it's important to not let it be any more important that it deserves.
Even if you have a magic machine that you can point at someone and it goes "boop" if they are guilty, you still must consider the probability that someone faked the "boop", or has swapped in a different shell that looks the same but makes the same "boop" when someone remotely triggers it or that the speaker was broken so even though the magic machine tried to "boop" nobody could hear it. All of these are quite realistic and of a much higher probability than the magic machine existing in the first place.
(This is also arguably the root problem with the still-popular "The computer said it so it must be true". Even if you assume the computer really is 100% accurate, which itself is a transparently false proposition when examined in daylight, there's still plenty of other reasons why one should not give the computer too much confidence.)
You could predict someone's behavior, but why not simply hedge against every possibility?
Magic does involve a good amount of sleight of hand, but it mostly relies on getting people to accept flawed premises. The most essential part of any given trick is the bit where you tell them what's going to happen: even as they reject it and try to bring skepticism to bear, they're often working off of (carefully placed) incorrect assumptions.
So they trust experts without even knowing what questions to ask, or how to assess evidence, or evaluate certainty, or when they should get more opinions.
Not unlike the Post Office convictions. Then there were the Roy Meadows convictions. Many others, and I am sure many other people who have not been able to prove their innocence.