Physician, heal thyself.
Outgoing CDC Director Rochelle Walensky departed with a warning that we should beware of politicized science and misinformation.
She should know.
In recent months, we’ve seen a lot of public-health folks quietly rowing back their once-apocalyptic COVID advice and asking for forgiveness for the mistakes they made.
Well, to make mistakes is human, and to forgive them is divine.
But it’s easier to forgive human mistakes that aren’t pronounced using the Voice of God.
And deliberate misrepresentations don’t count as mistakes. Those count as lies, because that’s what they are.
In the early days of COVID, Anthony Fauci told the public that masks didn’t work.
It turned out that wasn’t based on the science of masks and COVID (there wasn’t any) but rather on a desire to preserve mask supplies for health workers.
A laudable goal, perhaps, but still a lie. And when the lie was uncovered, it cost credibility.
The “masks don’t work” line was then followed almost immediately by an equally draconian pro-masking rule.
And this wasn’t based on science either (there still wasn’t any), but anyone who disagreed was accused of “spreading misinformation” and treated as an accomplice to the deaths of old people everywhere.
(Plus, as this was happening, then New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was actually killing grandmas by putting still-infectious COVID patients in New York nursing homes. He was made a hero of CNN, of course.)
Public-health officials then championed strict lockdowns, because letting people leave their homes was a deadly threat to public health.
It was so deadly that bicyclists, beach-walkers and even ocean paddleboarders were ticketed for posing a public danger.
Birthday parties were canceled, churches shut down, small businesses closed and neighborhood parks padlocked, all in the name of health and safety.
(Big Box stores stayed open, though, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom still hosted lavish, unmasked dinners at otherwise-closed French restaurants, but hey, rules are for the little people).
Then came the Black Lives Matter protests, and suddenly those same public health people who’d been closing parks told us it was OK for tens of thousands of people to march together in the streets, because, you see, “racism is a public-health problem.”
No, it isn’t.
And even if it were, nobody was relaxing the rules for marches about STDs or measles, which are public-health problems.
The truth was, when it came to a collision between public-health and liberal politics, liberal politics won.
That’s where the priorities were, despite calls to “follow the science.”
Lefty Glenn Greenwald afterward observed, “This was a pivotal moment in the pandemic’s history: For four months, the message was clear and unrelenting: Everyone must stay home.
“Those who leave — even to go to a deserted beach — are reckless sociopaths.
“It flipped overnight to endorse a mass-protest movement liberals liked.”
Follow the science, indeed.
Meanwhile, despite repeated denials from Fauci, it turned out that the United States did, in fact, fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Experts within the public-health community had suspected a lab release from the beginning, but the public was quickly told that any suspicions aimed at China were somehow racist, and such statements were censored on social media and ridiculed in the press.
That wasn’t about science but about politics, and about avoiding accountability.
Now emails obtained by congressional investigators shed more light on efforts to cover up such connections, and on the use of private email accounts by public-health people so as to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests.
Such behavior would violate federal law, but hey, laws are for the little people.
Then there was the successful effort by public-health “scientists” to pressure Pfizer into not releasing its COVID vaccine until after the 2020 election, so that President Donald Trump wouldn’t be able to take credit with voters.
It’s not a problem limited to COVID, but that’s enough for one column.
What we’ve seen repeatedly is the use of “science” as an excuse for bullying people into going along with leftist policies, when there’s not any actual science involved.
A statement isn’t “science” just because people who call themselves scientists make it.
If it’s not supported by data and replicable research, it’s just opinion. And, sometimes, just bullying.
Walensky is right that we need to beware of politicized science and misinformation.
It’s just too bad that so much of it has come from our own government and the people it funds.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
