The slow descent of “Science!” As in “Trust the Science!”

Here’s a generous helping of a Wall Street Journal interview with science writer Matt Ridley that probes some of the changes brought about by the massive COVID-19 failure:

“Conformity,” Mr. Ridley says, “is the enemy of scientific progress, which depends on disagreement and challenge. Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts, as [the physicist Richard] Feynman put it.” Mr. Ridley reserves his bluntest criticism for “science as a profession,” which he says has become “rather off-puttingly arrogant and political, permeated by motivated reasoning and confirmation bias.” Increasing numbers of scientists “seem to fall prey to groupthink, and the process of peer-reviewing and publishing allows dogmatic gate-keeping to get in the way of new ideas and open-minded challenge.”

The World Health Organization is a particular offender: “We had a dozen Western scientists go to China in February and team up with a dozen Chinese scientists under the auspices of the WHO.” At a subsequent press conference they pronounced the lab-leak theory “extremely unlikely.” The organization also ignored Taiwanese cries for help with Covid-19 in January 2020. “The Taiwanese said, ‘We’re picking up signs that this is a human-to-human transmission that threatens a major epidemic. Please, will you investigate?’ And the WHO basically said, ‘You’re from Taiwan. We’re not allowed to talk to you.’ ”

He notes that WHO’s primary task is forestalling pandemics. Yet in 2015 it “put out a statement saying that the greatest threat to human health in the 21st century is climate change. Now that, to me, suggests an organization not focused on the day job.”

Tunku Varadarajan, “How Science Lost the Public’s Trust” at WSJ via Instapundit (July 23, 2021)

It has not gone unnoticed.

The “lab leak theory” is a well-evidenced event, but not popular with certain governments.

Real science will emerge from the ruins.

See also: Lab leak theory vindicated: What that means for fighting COVID-19. What was the U.S. government’s role in downplaying the lab leak theory?

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