The Science of COVID

Spoiler alert: This essay contains an unpopular conclusion, and you may disagree.  It’s okay if you do, because you’ll probably be in the company of many of my colleagues who disagree with me too.  Today I’m going to talk about when we can trust science.  To do that, I’m going to pretend to be a scientist and a philosopher.  This is dangerous because, as I have said before, I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher.  Instead, I am a practitioner, applying science to the problems of diagnostic medicine.  As a practitioner, I must know when science is applicable and when it is not.  I know just enough about science and philosophy to be dangerous.

Our experience tells us to trust science, and the explosion of technology during our lifetimes tells us we can.  But science is a process, not a product.  Not everything labelled as science is science.  To understand the difference, let’s consider how science works.

The scientific method begins with a hypothesis.  A hypothesis is just an educated guess about some aspect of reality.  It is proposed by a scientist as a fact of the world, something that can be relied on to be always true within certain conditions.  If the conditions are true, the hypothesis can be used to predict the future and tell us about the past.  

Once formed, the hypothesis is communicated to other scientists, who test the hypothesis by experiment.  The objective of an experiment is not to prove the hypothesis true; rather, the objective of an experiment is to prove the hypothesis false.  If successfully proven false, the hypothesis is rejected.  This is the fate of most hypotheses.  The path of science is littered by the half-truths of discarded hypotheses.  On the other hand, if the hypothesis survives the challenges of repeated experimentation, it becomes elevated by the community of scientists to the status of theory, and its predictions become part of scientific knowledge.  This is a relatively rare phenomenon.  

The falsification objective of the scientific method is a commonly misunderstood aspect of the process, but it is fundamentally important.  It gives science its power over other means of understanding reality, but it also gives science its pace.  It takes time to test hypotheses.  The proof of a hypothesis can be shortened by increasing the number of simultaneous experiments, but only to a point.  Science, like fine wine, requires adequate aging.  

For all its power, the elevation of hypothesis to theory illustrates another weakness of the method: theories are created by scientists.  Scientists are people, and people make mistakes. Scientists have made many.  We can review examples of the most spectacular blunders of scientists later.  The point is that the mistakes of science are the mistakes of people, not fallacies in the method.

So why do we trust science?  Because, despite its flaws and weaknesses, science has increased our understanding of the world exponentially.  But can we be misled by science?  Of course we can, and we are most vulnerable when products labeled as science are not developed with strict adherence to the scientific method.

This brings us to the controversial part.  Most of everything we have learned and developed in the war against COVID-19, including the tests, the treatments, and the vaccines, should not be trusted as science.  In the middle of this emergency, there has not been enough time to fully study the virus and the disease by the scientific method.  Rather, what we have so far are merely hypotheses: the best guesses of the smartest and brightest people in the land.  To be sure, these hypotheses are our best hope in this fight against pandemic, but they should not be labeled science.  There has not been strict adherence to the scientific method.  So, what should we trust, what should we view skeptically, and how can we tell the difference?  We will address these questions next time.