«I have a colleague at Stanford named Michael Levitt, who’s an absolutely brilliant scientist. He won a Nobel Prize for his early work on protein folding and computational biology. He, early in the pandemic, was quite skeptical about the lockdowns. He did modeling from a different point of view and argued that the lockdowns were not the right approach. He also faced pressure within the university. He was uninvited for a scientific meeting in his field because of his ideas on pandemic management. That kind of pressure was so ubiquitous that it made it almost impossible for people who had reservations about the lockdowns to speak up. It reinforced the groupthink of the public health community, the thought, “Oh, everyone agrees with us. We should close schools. We should close businesses. We should impose vaccine mandates. We should adopt authoritarianism as a solution to a pandemic.” All of that was orthodox scientific public health groupthink. It was upheld by this omerta, this crushing of dissent.»
Jay Bhattacharya
Thinking back about Covid, the hard part was not watching my father die from the effects of a stroke in the hospital, wearing a mask, but at least being able to see him and stay with him. As painful as that was, it was natural and expected. It was watching science, and especially academics who should know better, fall into group think.
As Huxley once said:
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
Thomas Henry Huxley
and Covid led academics to commit intellectual suicide on a mass level. Uncritical faith in Big Pharma, in politicians or so-called health agencies which were under direct control of politicians (e.g., the RKI in Germany). That was hard to watch. And as bad as the death of scientific and critical thinking was, of intellectual humility, throwing out personal dignity and bodily autonomy (e.g., pressuring students and employees to get vaccinated) made it even worse.
While I do not think those who committed these atrocities will ever apologize for it, it is good to see that some discussion is starting about what went wrong. So the interview on American Thought Leaders: «Restoring Free Speech in Academia» with Jay Bhattacharya is worthwhile to listen to: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/dir-ddnwe-224a5895
Whether that will prevent such a development when the next «emergency» happens is an open question. I am not optimistic.
But it’s a start.