How to prevent another scientific great leap forward

COVID-19 introduced us to some novel and nonsensical concepts, not the least of which is “the speed of science.”

Before COVID, no one thought that science had velocity. Rather than proceeding at pace, science was a process that took time and was thorough.

But in her testimony to the EU parliament, Pfizer executive Janine Small explained Pfizer hadn’t tested the vaccine for stopping transmission because: “Did we know about stopping immunisation before it entered the market? No ... We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market. And from that point of view, we had to do everything at risk.”

The statement is pretty garbled, but I think a reasonable precis of it is that the threat was so bad that Pfizer was justified in taking risks and truncating procedures so they could bring their product to market before others.

Along with confusing commercial, safety, and scientific imperatives, it seems to be an example of the “precautionary principle” in action and how it is corrupting the scientific process.

The precautionary principle says that if the consequences of an event happening are possibly catastrophic, you are justified in taking all actions to stop that event before you have fully assessed either the risk or the probable size of the consequences.

It ignores proper analysis as well as any cost-benefit trade-offs and attempts to divert all resources to deal with the hypothesised risk.

We apply it to climate change, with the effects starting to manifest inexpensive and fragile electricity networks. And we applied it to COVID.

Thrown out the window

Before COVID, we had a universal pandemic plan which involved focused protection (looking after those who were most vulnerable and allowing the rest to look after themselves); no masks; no lockdowns; and no virus testing and tracing.

During COVID, all of those principles were abandoned. Why?

Well, it wasn’t because there was new scientific information. Rather it appears to be a panic borne from a coincidence of factors.

First, there was groupthink—China threw out the rule book first, brutally incarcerating its population, even welding doors shut to keep residents inside. Italy followed suit.

With a virus of unknown virility, these actions were socially persuasive.

Then there was politics.

The United States was in the run-up to an election. Former President Donald Trump was prone to a more liberal approach to internal restrictions and a more authoritarian approach to international ones. So he closed borders—which was construed as racist—and encouraged people to live life as best they could while he developed a vaccine, which was construed as madness.

This led to Democrats, from whom the U.S. and overseas media tend to take their cues, inveighing against border restrictions and in favour of lockdowns.

They were also casting doubts on vaccines, with Vice-President Kamala Harris saying she wouldn’t take a vaccine if President Trump told her to.

Added to this were models of the severity of COVID-19.

There was renowned epidemiologist John Ioannidis from Stanford University on the low end suggesting a need for more information and case fatality rates of somewhere between 0 and 1.31 percent depending on age and country.

At the high end, you had Neil Ferguson of Imperial College suggesting deaths of 200,000 in the UK without lockdowns and only 20,000 with lockdowns.

Mr. Ferguson has a career record of exaggeration, and as the pandemic progressed, the case fatality rate dropped so that it is now similar to flu.

Most of our governments chose to run with Mr. Ferguson. We have a bias towards fearing the worst, and politicians are disinclined to take risks in case they don’t pay off.

This combination of factors was the dry tinder of the precautionary principle providing the fuel load to “prove” that there was a problem so dangerous we had to focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.

So we did.

We paid the price

The original lockdown strategy was sold to us as “flattening the curve,” which was supposed to take two weeks or so.

After a month or more, it became evident that politicians were so risk averse they had decided to “eliminate” the virus, even though this had never been done with any virus before in history.

Once embarked on this strategy, they either had to admit failure or find a way of deflecting attention to something else, which is where vaccines came in. But we now know that the vaccines could not eliminate the virus, and as my opening paragraphs show, weren’t even designed to stop transmission.

After locking Australia down off and on for a year and spending somewhere around $800 billion, it is now obvious that the original focused protection strategy was the right one. Masks, lockdowns, mass vaccination, vaccine mandates, contact tracing and check-in apps achieved little but terrorise the community and weaken the economy.

There were some natural experiments where jurisdictions stuck with focused protection—Sweden was one.

In the United States, we have a good comparison between Florida, where after initial lockdowns, Governor Ron De Santis took a liberal approach, and California, where Governor Gavin Newsome took an authoritarian one.

Excess deaths are the best measure of the cost as they take into account not just COVID deaths but all deaths, whether caused by COVID or the COVID measures.

On this metric, Sweden comes out fairly close to its neighbours, as the graph below comparing it with Denmark illustrates.

On the same measure, a recent study in the Lancet said that Florida outperformed California significantly, adjusting for sociodemographic factors in the population.

Learn from the mistakes

How do we stop this from repeating itself, particularly as those responsible for this debacle seem to be keen to see the next pandemic arrive and are suggesting the same solutions?

The first thing should be to make the decision-making teams more diverse in terms of their expertise.

Many of the key Australian decision-makers appeared to be hospital administrators. Where were the health economists who understood economies can’t be run like hospitals and that there are cost-benefit trade-offs to be made?

A refinement on this would be to have “red and blue” teams, as used in the military and cyber security, where you have one team making the decisions with the other challenging them—an approach that institutionalises a devil’s advocate approach to lessen the dangers of group think.

There should also be a more nuanced interpretation of what a “state of emergency” constitutes, as it was used to lock down not only populations but debate: in parliaments, the medical professions, the media, and the community.

Science is not settled

Governance is only part of the picture. There is plenty of evidence that science has become corrupted by “the science,” which is a non-scientific adherence to an alleged consensus. It occurs in any area where science intersects with politics.

Even if there is a consensus, science is not consensus and is, in fact, full of examples of where the consensus was wrong.

Worse, we have trouble knowing what is correct.

John Ioannides is the author of a 2005 paper “Why most research findings are false,” which has been downloaded three million times—surely a record in academic publishing. It describes what is known as the “replicability crisis.”

It turns out that a huge number of even some of the most significant scientific studies cannot be reproduced, even by the person who originally did them.

This needs to be fixed. There are a number of points where this can be done.

One is to fix the publishing process. Peer review is a farce and is often used to stop novel information from being published. Researchers are rewarded for making discoveries, not disproving them.

Open publishing is one solution to the publishing problem, and just as company accounts are audited, there should be a career stream for scientists auditing the findings of others.

Another issue is that fraud is obviously a factor in some of these situations, but when was the last time a scientist was jailed or fined for taking money under false pretences?

Peter Ridd, the Australian physics professor whistleblower fired from James Cook University, believes we need an Office of Science Review to do quality assurance on science the government relies on to make decisions.

The pandemic also suffered from poor data quality. Standardising what dying of COVID, and any other disease means and having common open data standards should make keeping track of the next crisis easier and more timely.

Lastly, we need to encourage viewpoint diversity in society.

At the moment, we are running in the opposite direction with proposals to standardise pandemic policy through the WHO and the Australian government moving towards increased censorship through its “Misinformation and disinformation” Bill and breaking the therapeutic relationship between practitioner and patient via the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act.

If society is determined to ask for “speed” from science, then we need to consider how it can be done faster and with more efficiency and accuracy. We also need to ensure that governments adopt the correct scientific facts.