you must be new here haha i swing bats at this hornet's nest like once a month. yeah i think the current state of covid communication sucks a lot. i mean the truth is that "follow the science" is always a disingenuous sentiment; Science doesn't speak, and scientists disagree with one another. and it's naïve to pretend majority consensus is a reliable mechanism to identify truth—anyone who has followed the covid aerosolisation about-face will recall that although linsey marr was not the first researcher to challenge medical orthodoxy on airborne disease transmission, even well into the covid pandemic the idea of aerosol transmission was marginalised by global health authorities because it was politically inconvenient, out of favour with powerful established academics, and reminiscent to some of pre-pasteurian miasma theories of disease. those who would "follow the science" were not presented with a convenient dichotomy between reasonable evidence-backed expert consensus and fringe peddlers of heterodoxy; to evaluate these positions required actually, yknow, reading and evaluating the arguments and evidence from multiple competing positions, and deciding which had the greater explanatory power. which is good epistemological advice only insofar as it's so obvious as to be trite.
fundamentally a huge driving force of this situation is the social, political, and institutional forces that make expert knowledge (a generally good thing) all too often synonymous with inaccessible knowledge. i don't mean inaccessibility caused by knowledge being specialised; obviously this is inevitable to some extent simply as a result of the fact that no one person will grasp the entirety of human knowledge. but the fact that knowledge is specialised, specific, highly technical, and so forth doesn't automatically mean, for example, that it has to be monetarily gatekept from all but a select few with the resources to persevere through a highly punishing, nepotistic, hegemonic university system; this is a political problem, and one that additionally has the effect of enabling and sheltering low-quality work (see: replication crisis) behind the opaque walls of university bureaucracy and the imprimateur of the credentials it grants. in lieu of an ability to actually engage with, read, or challenge much of the academic research being generated on any given topic, the lay public is supposed to rely on signs of reliability like possession of a degree, or institutional reputation. what we in fact see again and again, and with particularly high stakes in the case of something like a pandemic, is that these measures are instruments of class stratification and professional jockeying that don't inherently ensure quality information: MDs can and do peddle anti-vaxx lies and covid / long-covid denialism; the CDC and WHO can and do perpetrate bad and outdated scientific advice, like that masks are unnecessary and isolation periods can be shortened for convenience. many of these are just blatant cases of kowtowing to political pressure, which arises from the capitalist logic that counterposes disease prevention to economic growth.
this all leaves us in a position where it is, in fact, smart and correct to evaluate the information coming from 'official' and credentialled sources with scepticism. the problem is that in its place, we get information coming out of the same capitalist state-sponsored scientific institutions, and the same colonialist universities; the idea that some chucklefuck on twitter is telling you the secret truth just because they correctly identified that the government sucks is plainly absurd. where covid specifically is concerned, the liberalism of academic and scientific institutions is on display in numerous ways, including the idealist assumption, which many 'covid communicators' make, that public health policy is primarily a matter of swaying public opinion, and therefore that it is always morally imperative to form and propagate the most alarmist possible interpretation of any study or empirical observation. this is not an attitude that encourages thoughtful or measured evaluation of The Science (eg, study methodology), nor is it one that actually produces the kind of political change that would be required to protect the populace writ large from what is, indeed, a dangerous and still rampant virus. instead, this form of communication mostly winds up generating social media Engagement and screenshots of headlines of summaries of studies.
meanwhile, actual public health policy (which is by and large determined at the mercy of capitalist state interests, and which by and large shapes public opinion of what mitigation measures are 'reasonable', despite the CDC repeatedly pretending this works the other way round), remains on its trajectory toward lax, open exposure of anyone and everyone to each new strain of covid, perpetuating a society that is profoundly hostile to disabled people and careless with everyone's life and health. this fucking sucks. it sucked that we have treated the flu like this for years, and it sucks that we are now doing it with a virus that we are still relatively immunologically naïve to, and that produces, statistically, even more death and disability than the flu. and it sucks that the predominating explanations of this state of affairs from the 'cautious' emphasise not the structural forces that shape knowledge production under capitalism, but instead invoke a psychological narrative whereby individuals simply need to be sufficiently terrified into producing mass action.
