On June 8, I posted a website column entitled “Public Health Professionals Should Be Saying THIS about the Public's COVID-19 Risk Choices,” arguing against a double standard for mass events the profession approves of (the George Floyd protest marches) versus mass events it disapproves of (such as anti-lockdown demonstrations). That same day, Bryan Walsh of Axios sent me an email asking for follow-up comment. Bryan asked two questions, which I answered the next day. The resulting June 10 article by Bryan and Alison Snyder quoted several other people as well, and relied on my email for just one paragraph. This is what I sent him.
How should public health experts and epidemiologists be handling the debate around the protests? Simply stick to the health facts – that large public gatherings are going to pose some risk of transmission, whatever the cause of the gathering?
In recent weeks many public health experts and epidemiologists went out of their way to sound hostile to certain large public gatherings – from pool parties to anti-lockdown demonstrations. They didn’t just point out the risk of those events, both to participants and to the community at large. They berated the participants and claimed that innocent people would inevitably die as a result.
Then came the George Floyd protest marches. This time many of the same experts went out of their way in the opposite direction. They soft-pedaled what they had to say about COVID-19 risk. They emphasized that the virus doesn’t transmit much in outdoor settings – a point they had rarely made about the outdoor events of which they disapproved. They emphasized that racism is a public health issue – as if lockdown-induced economic deprivation were not also a public health issue. They seldom mentioned the danger that protest marchers could infect others who had chosen not to march. And even if we do see a spike in cases, some asserted, that should be blamed on racism itself, not on the anti-racism marchers.
I think the protest marches posed a real dilemma for many public health professionals. They genuinely approved of the marches, and felt considerable pressure to say so. As citizens, they had every right to express their approval. But they let their approval alter what they had to say about COVID-19 risk, conflating their opinions as citizens with their judgments as experts.
That clearly damaged the credibility of public health as a scientific enterprise that struggles to be politically neutral.
I think it also damaged the credibility of COVID-19 precautions. If you’re on the political right, you can tell yourself that public health professionals are hypocrites and ideologues. If you’re on the political left, you can tell yourself that even public health professionals agree that some things are more important than fighting the spread of the virus. Anyone looking for an out can choose to see the recent statements of public health professionals as reason enough to shrug off unpleasant precautions.
The country was already moving in the direction of shrugging off unpleasant precautions. Many in public health were looking for a way to say “not so fast.” Instead, they wound up abetting the shrug.
I am open to the argument that supporting the marches was worth all that and more – that an unexpected moment arose where it might just be possible to begin to redress a 400-year-old moral crisis and change our country for the better. Instead of “calling public health balls and strikes” with political neutrality, maybe in that moment public health professionals had a higher calling. Nonetheless, there will be a price to pay.
Is it possible that public dissatisfaction over what might appear to be double standards on these public gatherings could impact other areas of expert scientific advice in the policy sphere, such as climate change or other environmental issues?
Experts should always be careful not to trade on their expertise as a source of credibility for opinions that aren’t grounded in their expertise. There’s a legitimate gray area, where experts have reached certain scientific conclusions and then are tempted (or asked) to offer opinions on the policy implications of those conclusions. Policy isn’t their field of expertise, but it’s not such a stretch for a scientist to say, “If you think I’m right about the science, then here are three policy options I believe might help.”
Climate change policy is such a gray area. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be such a thing as “expert scientific advice in the policy sphere” (to use your phrase). Scientists would offer conclusions grounded in evidence and circumscribed by uncertainty estimates: “Here’s what we think is true and here’s how confident we are.” Policymakers would take it from there.
But in the real world, we often rely on scientists for policy advice. We do so especially in politically messy areas like climate change, presumably in the hope that scientists’ policy advice will be less politically biased than ordinary people’s policy preferences. This hope is undermined any time scientists are found to have conflated their scientific judgments with nonscientific opinions, rendering policy advice that is grounded at least partly in personal preferences masquerading as science.
The kerfuffle over what public health had to say about the George Floyd protest marches is one more brick in the edifice of mistrust regarding the political neutrality of scientific experts. Whether you think that’s a good effect or a bad effect depends on how much you think we should trust the political neutrality of scientific experts.
Copyright © 2020 by Peter M. Sandman
