The Unnecessary Collision: How Not to Navigate a Global Pandemic

By Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen

How incredibly ironic. Despite the enormous resources expended by each country to protect its citizens and way of life, the Earth’s population was paralyzed. Not by nuclear war, terrorism or cyber-attacks, but by a new, tiny biological substance that cannot even live on its own. This tiny virus did not care what country, religion, economic sector, climate or ethnicity anyone belonged to. In a span of a few months, shut down the entire planet economically and behaviorally.

While the world is in the midst of a horrendous pandemic, America is in the midst of two. One of those, Covid-19, has moved with lightning speed. The other has been spreading through American culture for the past several years. It has now collided disastrously with the coronavirus. This second pandemic might best described as the anti-science pandemic. And, unless we roll it back, we will dramatically hinder our ability to control Covid and any more lethal virus in the future.

From denial about evolution, human-induced climate change, and the efficacy of vaccinations to conspiracy theories about Covid and the politicizing of wearing masks, anti-science has become an increasingly worrisome tendency in the public.

Anti-science now infects many of the leaders charged with guiding us through our worst health crisis in a century. Leaders are shunning science and technology when we need it most. In some cases, they’ve shunned rationality entirely—the President himself said, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases.” Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the coronavirus task force, has a long history of rejecting health-related science. He even declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that “we are winning the fight against the invisible enemy,” even as multiple states reported record increases in new cases.

One honorable exception has been Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious-disease expert in the US. He has refused to soft-pedal the seriousness of the Covid pandemic and has acknowledged the destructiveness of anti-science. “One of the problems we face in the United States is that, unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are — for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable — they just don’t believe science and they don’t believe authority,” he said. Anti-scientists believe that if the data does not convey the message desired, then just dismiss the data. As White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany put it on whether schools should reopen in the fall, “The science should not stand in the way.”

Unfortunately, the administration and a number of governors seem willing to sacrifice large numbers of lives because they see a bad economy threatening their political prospects. Several governors have now publically said that we should not depend on experts as they will only make us worry more and hinder our rate of re-opening society. Ironically, their failure to honor the science will only compound the economic disaster.

We need science and technology to save us. Government leaders are literally helpless without tools and techniques provided by scientists and engineers. These tools and techniques are obvious now: a capacity to develop rapid testing, swift contact tracing, , validated models for projecting disease spread and impact of interventions, new treatments to reduce the severity of the virus’s impact, a vaccine, and finally a massive manufacturing and systems engineering approach to deploy all of these fairly at enormous scale.

To succeed, scientists and technologists need political, financial and policy guidance that will facilitate the eventual deployment of the fruits of their labor to society. And, given the virus’s neutrality to whom it infects, these leaders need to insure all people regardless of race, religion, economic sector or country have access. At the same time, they should be aware that the burdens of the virus have fallen disproportionately on Black and Latinx people, a problem that epidemiologists and public health experts could usefully address.

Our leaders have a choice. They can rapidly provide resources and new funding to the scientific and technological sectors to create real weapons against the virus while simultaneously providing economic support to their citizens until science develops new tools. Or they can choose to send everyone back to work and thereby tacitly admit that from their perspective it is fine to watch people die who didn’t have to.

Ultimately, science and technology will bring us out of the Covid pandemic—either aided by, or in spite of, government leadership. Testing capacities will scale up. The automated contact tracing will greatly limit spread. New therapies will become available. And, with a bit of luck, a safe vaccine will emerge, completely wiping out the future impact of this particular virus.

For the long term, our leaders at every level of government need to reaffirm—in word and deed— the value of science and engineering, if we are to conquer our other pandemic.

Portions of this essay were published in “Business Insider.”