Covid-19: where are the scientific mavericks? | thearticle

_“The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.”_ _ — _ _Paul

Karl Feyerabend_ Feyerabend, one of the most influential philosophers of science of the 20th Century, surely had a point. When the virus gatecrashed the UK (and who knows when that was?) the

government turned not just to the contemporary religion of science, but the Establishment _Curia_: the SAGE committee. For several months now, at the daily theatre of the absurd, Ministers

have stood flanked by representatives of the scientific consensus. Dissenting voices, such as those of the Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, have been drowned out by the establishment

noise. Dominic Cummings, who invited job applications from “weirdoes and misfits”, defaulted to the grey conformist types when the going got tough. The career consultants. The professional

expert witnesses. So how did all that work out? I’d say: not brilliantly. It’s now become commonplace to say what seemed controversial back in March: that to commit to “following the

science” assumes that there is “a science” to follow. But how can this be the case when we are confronted with a new virus, the epidemiology and community-prevalence of which are matters of

dispute? And the investigation of which requires contributions from very many and quite different scientific disciplines? But the problem with the government’s exclusionary approach — its

insistence on listening to a specific group of scientists — is more fundamental than that. To decide what piece of scientific advice to follow is about more than weighing one theoretical

conclusion against another. As Feyerabend argues in his brilliant _Against Method _it is not even the case that there is a single scientific procedure (or set of procedures) which underwrite

those conclusions. Or if there is, he suggests, then that procedure is this: anything goes. Science is a variegated and messy collection of diffuse practices. It involves the cheeky

introduction of _ad hoc _theoretical adjustments, and sometimes downright trickery, to get the theory to “work“ (Feyerabend gives the example of “renormalisation” in quantum mechanics). It’s

not even clear, he argued, that we can come up with any defensible “principle of demarcation” which can determine what is and what is not a science in the first place. As for “following the

science”, he cites the example of Galileo to demonstrate that there are times when that is exactly what should _not_ happen: _“The church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to

reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and revisionism

can be legitimised solely for motives of political opportunism”._ _ _ Had Galileo signed up to the SAGE committee of his day then what he called “the book of nature” would have had to have

been corrected at some later point. Galileo was a maverick, and it is the mavericks, those who are not locked into the consensus of the day, who move the science along. Leibniz was a

librarian; Einstein was a patent clerk when he wrote four papers in one year, each of which should have qualified him for a Nobel Prize. In the current context the mavericks are those

academics who dissent from the lockdown orthodoxy and have, solely on that basis, not been integrated into the decision-making process. It’s about time they were. They may be wrong, but it

is churlish and intellectually irresponsible not to give them their voice. Viruses, it seems to me, are paradoxical things. They are trivial pieces of genetic code which nevertheless seem to

be nimbler than the scientists who are charged with hunting them down. This will be especially true if those scientists are hampered in their hunt by the creative constraints that become

inevitable when they are pressured by their political masters to offer up a consensus. The recently released SAGE committee minutes reveal that many of the conclusions leading up to lockdown

had been reached “unanimously”. That, right there, is the problem. Unanimity in science is not an indicator of truth. It is a sign of groupthink. And there is another problem. When

scientists are too close to government it follows that the government is too close to the scientists. Ministers have acquired the habit of seeing every problem the C-19 crisis throws up as a

scientific one. It has become trapped by a worldview which takes no account of those harms, spiritual and psychological, which cannot be put on a spreadsheet. In the middle of a crisis the

“epistemological anarchy” that Feyerabend favoured is impractical. But his central claims remain plausible. It is wrong for the state to become too close to scientists because scepticism

about the efficacy, scope and inviolability of science is healthy. And science, done properly, needs to be maximally inclusive. Meanwhile, the virus follows the same trajectory here as it

has in every other European country. It is impressively indifferent to those scientific measures intended to defeat it. It has played the scientists like a fiddle. Some of those maverick

scientists predicted that this would be the case. They were not listened to. They were not part of the club.