Few times has science been so invoked in public debate as in the Covid-19 pandemic. Everywhere, scientists and laypeople are calling for it to be taken into account in political decisions. At the same time, the word “denier” has never been more used to refer to anti-vaccine activists, advocates of certain treatments and skeptics of social distancing measures.
The narrative seems consistent: these groups, after all, took positions contrary to those held by bodies such as the World Health Organization and most medical societies. And if “science does not have two sides”, as was defended at the CPI on Covid-19, the obvious reading is that they are not on the side of science. Which is a comfortable narrative, until the day you discover that the average anti-vaccine activist has read a lot more about vaccines than you have.
Do not believe? take a guy like Walter Chesnut, a digital marketer-turned-amateur vaccinologist who claims to do “sixty hours of research a week.” His Covid-19 hypotheses website is crammed with facts gleaned from scientific articles about the virus’s relationships with dozens of biological processes and obscure proteins. It can be difficult to vouch for the mental balance of someone who claims to be “one of the greatest medical geniuses of all time“. But clearly your problem doesn’t seem to be a lack of science.
Likewise, public advocates for the early treatment of Covid-19 in Brazil include scientists such as virologist Paolo Zanotto and physicians such as infectious disease specialist. Francisco Cardoso, who are aware of the literature on the subject and cite scientific studies all the time. It is reasonable to think that their opinions may be biased by their political positions – which are also obvious on the networks. But again, the issue is not lack of science.
And if you think it’s all the fault of political bias, explain the existence of someone like Filipe Rafaeli, a four-time Brazilian champion in aerial acrobatics and a leftist with a Che Guevara style, who since last year has been fighting a personal crusade in defense of hydroxychloroquine and other treatments. with articulated texts full of references, and who certainly read more on the subject than most of my scientist friends.
Does this mean they are right? Not necessarily, according to most experts. But if they went the opposite way, it was not for lack of available scientific evidence; on the contrary, the reasons for the divergence may be due to the excess of it.
Even the most absurd anti-vaccine narratives make abundant use of scientific facts. Sometimes they are just myths disguised as science, but not always: selectivity and freedom of interpretation are enough to build unorthodox opinions based on real data. It is what has been called alt-science: a troubled frontier where controversial evidence is watered down with biases and a certain dose of conspiracy theory to arrive at alternative conclusions, in a process wittily summarized in “Osmar Terra seal of freestyle data analysis“.
Epidemiologist Doug Altman once argued that “we need less science, better science, and science done for the right reasons.” Much of the research on Covid — or on any topic — falls short of achieving these goals. And with too much science, of poor quality, and pointing in all directions, there will always be a scientific article to confirm the opinion you already had.
The problem is particularly critical in basic research, where experiments on cells or rodents, whose reproducibility is already limited, are often exaggerated in medical relevance. With the profusion of hypotheses generated in test tubes, countless arguments can be raised that suggest that drug X works in disease Y, even if the chances are small that something will actually make it into clinical practice.
But the problem is not limited to basic research. Numerous meta-analyses show benefits of ivermectin in the treatment of patients with Covid-19 – even though many of them warn about the low quality of the evidence. After an unusual work of data scrutiny that detected a series of probable frauds (and which would never have been done had it not been for the polarization of the subject), the aggregate of clinical trials begins to suggest that the drug’s effect, if any, is small. ; still, the debate seems far from over.
Even before that, however, official recommendations had suspicious of positive evidence –and maybe they were right. The heuristic, however, is not always easy to explain, and involves an assessment of the quality of evidence that is hardly accessible to a layperson.
The idea that believing in science is trusting experts is not necessarily popular, as it goes against ideals dear to science itself. On the other hand, reading dozens of articles and challenging established knowledge runs counter to the romanticized archetype of the scientist — and it’s no wonder that owners of minority opinions about vaccines or early treatment love to hang out in Galileo’s company. The argument, of course, ignores that for every true Galileo there are thousands of freaks proving that the Earth is flat. But in the inability of academic science to raise the bar of published evidence, it can be difficult to distinguish between one thing and another.
With that, perhaps it is time to make it clear that what many so-called denialists deny is consensus, and not the scientific process itself. This, however, implies admitting that believing in science involves trusting the collective, and that founding myths of individuals defying dogma are the exception rather than the rule. More than that, it forces us to accept that, on most subjects, we don’t understand science any more than those who disagree with us — we simply choose to delegate our opinion to those who are more capable of judging it.
Making this explicit helps to see that discounting every dissenting voice as a denialist throws in the same bucket delusional conspiracyists and reasonable, albeit minority, opinions: not all consensus, after all, is consensual to the same extent. There is a universe between the degree of certainty of “the Earth is round” and that of “ivermectin should not be used in Covid-19”, with countless shades of gray in between.
And it is always good to remember that relying on consensus does not exempt us from risks: in some aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, such as the transmission of the virus by aerosols, the delay in reconsidering established ideas led to tragic misunderstandings on the part of health authorities. But for those who have the humility to recognize that we are not capable of understanding the vast majority of subjects in depth, believing in the experts is still usually a reasonable strategy to get more right than wrong.
Without these corrections, the label of “denier” runs the risk of stigmatizing curious people, who reach their conclusions by making use, even if in a clumsy way – and sometimes tragically – of scientific evidence. It not only annihilates dialogue, but actively fuels conspiracy narratives. For anyone who has read a dozen scientific studies saying that ivermectin works against SARS-Cov2, the indication of not using it “because the WHO does not recommend it” only reinforces the ideal that the scientific establishment is at the service of the globalist conspiracy.
With this, it is possible to save on the use of a label that has already become laughing stock among the recipient. As with “fascist,” if every individual who defies consensus is branded a “denier,” we have wasted an important word. And when we need it to describe those who really don’t give a damn about science — as is the case with many people in power today — we’ll find that it unfortunately doesn’t mean anything anymore.
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Olavo Amaral is a professor at the Institute of Medical Biochemistry Leopoldo de Meis at UFRJ and coordinator of the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative.
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