[D66] New Pathogen, Old Politics

[Antid Oto]

https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/alex-de-waal-new-pathogen-old-politics

New Pathogen, Old Politics

We should be wary of simplistic uses of history, but we can learn from 
the logic of social responses.

Alex de Waal

[...]
The clearest questions are political. What should the public demand of 
their governments? Through hard-learned experience, AIDS policymakers 
developed a mantra: “know your epidemic, act on its politics.” The 
motives for—and consequences of—public health measures have always gone 
far beyond controlling disease. Political interest trumps science—or, to 
be more precise, political interest legitimizes some scientific readings 
and not others. Pandemics are the occasion for political contests, and 
history suggests that facts and logic are tools for combat, not arbiters 
of the outcome.

Political interest legitimizes some scientific readings and not others. 
Pandemics are the occasion for political contests, and history suggests 
that facts and logic are tools for combat, not arbiters of the outcome.

While public health officials urge the public to suspend normal 
activities to flatten the curve of viral transmission, political leaders 
also urge us to suspend our critique so that they can be one step ahead 
of the outcry when it comes. Rarely in recent history has the 
bureaucratic, obedience-inducing mode of governance of the “deep state” 
become so widely esteemed across the political spectrum. It is precisely 
at such a moment, when scientific rationality is honored, that we need 
to be most astutely aware of the political uses to which such expertise 
is put. Looking back to Hamburg in 1892, we can readily discern what was 
science and what was superstition. We need our critical faculties on 
high alert to make those distinctions today.
[...]