The COVID-19 era began five years ago with the cancellation of some NBA and NHL games followed by the closures of schools, churches, and businesses. Then, stay-at-home orders and social-distancing rules hit us, followed by mask mandates and, later, vaccine mandates.
Of all the errors, follies, and misdeeds of this disastrous period, the most damaging and most morally deficient involved the mantra “follow the science.”
Barked by politicians, commentators, and bureaucrats, it was a terrifying demand when truly considered. It was not only a demand that citizens give up their rights, but it was also a demand that elected officials abdicate their responsibility to tend to the common good.
And our supposed leaders obeyed the command. Executives at all levels of government in every state and in both parties handed the keys of government over to single-minded infectious disease experts who cared not a whit for anything beyond viral spread.
Myopic experts disregarded student learning, human connection, employment, cancer treatments, family, community, and faith. But the myopic experts don’t deserve most of the blame. They were, one could argue, doing their job by giving their best guess as to how to fight a viral epidemic.
“If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life,” explained Francis Collins, who ran the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic. “It doesn’t matter what else happens.”
The people who outlawed church, closed schools, and removed basketball hoops from playgrounds had a broader mandate. They were supposed to balance the fight against the virus with other goods. Most of them didn’t even try, though.
They were overcome with fear, and so instead of leading, they decided to follow.
Shocking lockdowns
Before March 2020, nobody imagined that, in the United States of America, a governor would make it illegal for pastors to gather their flocks for prayer. Before the pandemic, no one ever considered that a county executive would declare it illegal for two families to get together for dinner.
Much of the country was put on house arrest without any debate and with no semblance of democratic decision-making. There was no roll-call vote in state legislatures, and certainly no floor vote. It would be easy to say that governors, mayors, and county executives acted as kings, but it’s hard to think of a king who presumed to control his subjects’ daily lives so completely.
Police in Greenville, Mississippi, shut down an in-car parking lot worship service at the Temple Baptist Church and issued $500 tickets to those who committed the offense of praying in their cars with the windows up. Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) created a snitch line by which citizens could call the police on neighbors who had their cousins over for Sunday dinner in violation of stay-at-home orders.
Where did this terrifying power come from? Didn’t the Bill of Rights protect basic freedoms such as assembly and worship? Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, asked Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) in April 2020 how he could defend arresting 15 Jewish people for worshipping in a synagogue.
Murphy’s response was telling: “That’s above my pay grade, Tucker. I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this,” Murphy said, explaining, “The science says people have to stay away from each other.”
“The science” had become an authority all to itself — an authority that not only nullified the Bill of Rights but also stripped Murphy of his own authority. This abdication of duty was standard fare in those years.
‘Let the professionals tell us’
Then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is perhaps the clearest villain of the COVID-19 days. He was also one of the proudest self-proclaimed science-followers.
“Follow the data, follow the science, let the professionals tell us when it’s safe to reopen,” Cuomo said in April 2020.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) sounded the same theme on the platform then known as Twitter. “When it comes to re-opening, SCIENCE — not politics — must be California’s guide,” he wrote.
Former President Joe Biden used the phrase, too. “We all know what we need to do to beat this virus. Tell the truth, follow the science.”
The mantra was used for years as an excuse to keep draconian policies in place. In February 2022, the head of Connecticut’s teachers union used the phrase to lobby for forcing schoolchildren to continue masking for seven hours a day. “We have remained among the safest states throughout this pandemic because elected leaders have heeded the call to ‘follow the science.’”
Take that literally, and she was scolding the governor, mayors, school superintendents, and principals: You had better not start leading now. You had better continue to be subservient to your advisers.
After Biden declared in 2023 that “COVID no longer controls our lives,” House Republicans introduced a bill to end the travel ban on unvaccinated foreigners. Nearly every Democrat voted no. The Democratic leadership’s argument was that Congress, the body charged by the Constitution with making laws, shouldn’t pass a law about who is allowed in the country.
“The decision to end vaccine requirements for global travelers should be made by public health experts,” the Democratic leadership wrote in a memorandum. That is, congressmen were declaring that Congress had no right to determine the laws about who is allowed in our country.
The media class mocked and attacked anyone expressing skepticism of the latest proclamation by public health officials. A favorite cartoon of the era pictured an airline passenger declaring, “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”
It’s useful to try and take this analogy literally. If this cartoon makes any sense, the “pilot” is the public health official, whether Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time, or the county health officer. But unlike a commercial pilot with many hours of flight time in a well-established industry, this pilot was trying something he had never done before, and which nobody had ever done before.
But like an airplane pilot, the public health officials had total control over the lives of the people, none of whom had ever chosen to get on these planes.
The argument is that just as democracy shouldn’t trump expertise in flying an airplane, of course democratically elected officials should, like good passengers, sit down, shut up, and follow the unelected experts.
Abdication
“The science” we were supposed to follow was always shifting and often wrong. Of course, the conclusions of science are supposed to shift always. The science that scientists are actively working on isn’t a fixed canon of “settled” issues but a constant process of discovery, confirmation, hypothesis, and questioning.
Also, during the pandemic, our scientists were often dishonest. Officials went out of their way to cover up the possible origins of the virus, they told “noble lies” left and right to scare us or lull us into submission, and they nakedly subordinated science to left-wing ideology.
Politicians, also, didn’t really hew to the science. The ones who trumpeted “THE SCIENCE” the most were just as likely to act according to what would help them politically. Most famously, politicians kept schools closed and masked long after they opened up the rest of society despite overwhelming evidence that children were the safest from the virus and less likely to spread it. This was done to please the teachers unions that hold incredible sway with the Democratic Party.
Imagine, though, a more capable, more honest, and less partisan scientific community. Also, imagine a new class of executives who, when they said they were “following the science,” were actually following the science.
That is, pretend that the self-image of Cuomo and Newsom were true.
“Following the science” would still be wholly inappropriate behavior for an elected executive. Of course, they should take into account the advice of the scientists. But simply obeying the epidemiologists would be rank abdication of the duty to govern.
Recall Cuomo’s wording on reopening: “Let the professionals tell us when it’s safe to reopen.” What he meant was, “Let the public health professionals tell us when we are allowed to reopen.”
But that’s not the job of public health professionals. That was the job of the governor and the legislature. The public health professionals’ job was to tell the elected leaders the public health risks of reopening — and of staying closed.
And back to Newsom’s words: “When it comes to re-opening, SCIENCE — not politics — must be California’s guide.” Newsom’s all-caps on the word “SCIENCE” evoke the biblical reverential capitalization of “LORD” or YHWH. Again, this is abdication. Politics, very literally, is supposed to decide, because if we grant that governments have the authority to close businesses and churches, certainly that authority rests with the elected officials.
Fauci, in fact, made exactly this argument in his own defense. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.”
This may sound like a weasel defense, and perhaps disingenuous because Fauci knew what effect his proclamations would have. But it’s also true.
Fauci’s partner in crime, Collins, made the argument even more fully. Here are his full comments:
“If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. It doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives.”
Collins’s words sound inhumane if you think of him as someone who makes public policy. But as Fauci’s self-defense suggested, people such as them aren’t supposed to make public policy, precisely because they are experts.
They are supposed to give expert advice to the people elected to make decisions. Collins and Fauci are not experts in learning loss. They know almost nothing about how it affects someone to be cut off from his neighbors. They know less than any school parent about how masks in the classroom affect speech development, classroom behavior, or emotional growth. They are clueless about the economy.
The president, the governors, the mayors, and the county executives have a duty to balance the very real concern about viral spread with all the other concerns. Human flourishing isn’t merely about avoiding viruses. It’s also about having friends, worshipping God, building community, and learning.
Science can’t address those things.
THE FALL OF FAUCI
“There is no such thing as a scientific ought,” Ludwig Von Mises wrote.
What ought to be done is mostly left up to the individual, families, and communities. To the extent the government needs to get involved, when there is a question of what collective action we ought to take, it’s crucial that government leaders listen to the experts. Then, they have a duty to follow not the experts, but prudence.