The Truth About Science

Seeking truth within the COVID-19 whirlwind of opinion, anger, distress and self-appointed ‘experts’.

We’re all bloody scientists now. We’re listening to the scientists, reading the scientists, looking at graphs, charts, diagrams, animated visuals. We’re awash with data, each new piece is added to the last and... for what? We’ve evengot breakaway scientists, with Independent Sage.

We’re arguing down the virtual pub - which government has performed worst? Yours? Mine? Theirs? Which is the most hopeless, incompetent, wilfully negligent, criminal in their reaction to this pandemic? To date, it looks like we are ‘winning’ that shameful competition, but only time will tell. The range of public response to the UK’s (wider) handling is as extreme as ‘they’re doing the best they can’ to ‘hang the bloody lot of them.’ 

As is always the case, the truth is somewhere on a line between those extremes. Or it will be, eventually. Because until this is over, until we have a vaccine, know the intimate details of its working and the diverse workings and all its toxic little cousins, understand exactly how each of those variations attacks each specific, unique body, until the body count is finally in and the economic toll visible, we haven’t really got a clue. Not this week, this month, this year. Probably not even next year. History will tell us what we should have done, though the lens of 20:20 hindsight.

You and I don’t know anything, really. Not yet.

Of course the scientists know more than us lay-people, and some things they know for certain. They know if you’re already sick, immune-suppressed or very old, it might kill you. But that’s true of any virus. They know that if you get a large viral load, you’re more likely to die. Again, same as any virus. They know lots of very complicated things about the biological make-up and action of COVID-19. But, as they themselves admit, there is more they don’t know than they do. 

Put aside, for a few moments, all the obvious errors on which I think we all can agree; the apparent lack of preparation, poor speed of response, out-of-date PPE stockpiles, hopeless logistical infrastructure, dreadful top-heavy management and coal-face understaffing in the NHS. These are the result of political decisions (or lack of) and will be picked over forensically, blame attributed and denied by all sides in due course.

Beyond those practical issues, we are, as is now in common parlance, still following the science, albeit that our scientists seem to have disappeared from daily briefings. In reality, this means following a scientist, or body of like-minded scientists; their collective opinion as derived from their collective understanding of a global body of always diverse, often conflicting and ever-changing scientific opinion. Until we nail this thing, until we know it like we learned to know Polio or Measles or Ebola, that’s life. And death.

But which scientist are you following? Who is your scientist de jour? Is it the Swede Johan Giesecke, whose casually dismissive but authoritative view about the futility of lockdown clashes so fundamentally with Neil Ferguson, one of the architects of the UK response? Does the fact that Sweden is now starting to suffer greater deaths than neighbouring Norway, which locked down immediately and forcefully, and that Neil Ferguson’s modelling seemingly called the BSE and Swine flu epidemics catastrophically wrong, mean that they are both wrong on this too?

Does being wrong once, or right once, mean that the value and correctness of their judgement is forever fixed? Or are they flailing around between conjecture and refutation, their ideas battered to death by reality as played out in front of them?

Thomas Huxley, nearly two centuries ago, talked of ‘the great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.’ That’s where we are, being battered slowly and surely into line by facts, which lay waste to all the speculation, scare-mongering and guesswork.

Billions of Pounds, Dollars and Renminbi are being ploughed into studying this virus and finding a vaccine - the ultimate and only complete answer to our global nightmare. Underpinning this research is one basic question: what can we prove to be true? Every scientist, researcher and technician engaged in research is asking question after question, going down dead-ends and on wild goose chases, finding days, weeks or months of work telling them only that they’ve got nowhere? 

Except ‘nowhere’ is somewhere. ‘Nowhere’ is the place where truth isn’t. This ability to live with uncertainty, to accept failure as knowledge, to continue to ask questions, accept challenges to their thinking, is what makes scientists scientists. It’s a life of query, uncertainty and seeking for truth; the truth that will make this virus known to us and liveable with. 

But we, the general population, the consumers of their output as filtered through the government and media commentators, who last month were ‘experts’ on 5G or Brexit, want certainty, and are cross when this is not forthcoming. Social media (that trumpet of the hysterical, Twitter, especially), the leviathan mainstream media, with its foghorn Piers Morgan, are bellowing for facts and certainty where there is none. Sensible, deserved and necessary challenge is lost in maelstrom of click-bait, sound-bite righteous indignation, and political point scoring.

The damage being done to us individually, and as a nation, is greater than we know. All of our lives are now surrounded by uncertainty; how this national emergency is reported and discussed affects how we feel, think and act in every sphere of our personal and work or business lives. We need, more than ever before, to be able to sort fact from fiction, to hold back from premature judgement until the battle is over, to recognise failures, and work to rectify them, to hold faith that we will overcome and be the better for what we have learned. To remember that we are resilient and we can be trusted to act sensibly, despite being told otherwise.

Let’s be clear: we’re not going to get certainty. Not yet. All we can do is the basic stuff; be hygienic, behave with common sense, speak wisely or not at all. We will have to gently ease out of this somehow, or the collateral damage of the virus will be overshadowed by the legacy of the shutdown. We might have to do it over a very long time. 

Until the scientists can tell us the truth.