Since actually knowing anything about how science works doesn’t seem to be a requirement for pontificating about it in the media, I’m going to play at being an ophthalmologist. The patient is the press and the diagnosis is excellent: it has perfect 20/20 hindsight.
What’s more, there is no need to visit those money-grubbing opticians with their sinister conspiracy to force annual eye tests on us all. Perfect hindsight can be diagnosed at home: it is the inevitable consequence among lazy journalists when scientists are found to have had anything other than 20/20 foresight.
Since it’s now clear that the swine flu pandemic wasn’t a global catastrophe, certain portions of the commentariat are turning on the scientists whose words they hyped less than a year ago, and are now claiming that the whole thing was a scam.
Most people are happy that swine flu hasn’t killed us all. Some journalists, however, appear to see it as a good thing because it makes for an easy article to bash out in a few minutes before going down to the pub.
Make a few accusations of conflicts of interest, insinuate that the scientists knew all along that the pandemic was not going to be a big deal, but nevertheless claimed the contrary, drop in a few mentions of “experts” in scare-quotes and you have the beginnings of a good rant.
Of course, because you don’t really know anything about science and you have 1,200 words to write by lunchtime you’ll have to pad the whole thing out with irrelevant details – so sprinkle about a few mentions of times when expert predictions were too alarmist, like mad cow disease and the millennium bug, while conveniently avoiding cases where they were right, such as AIDS, asbestos and tobacco. Then say that spiv-like Western governments are now trying to flog off their surplus vaccine stocks to the third world. And voila, you have a column, and a good excuse to pop down to the King and Keys for a pint or three of lunch.
That swine flu was hyped up is not really in question – and that much was obvious right from the start (as I pointed out in these very pages on March 9 last year). But the real misunderstanding was not in the risk caused by swine flu, which was correctly and widely stated as being uncertain (but probably relatively low).
Rather, the problem was the widespread and infuriating assumption that scientific claims are definite rather than provisional, combined with a sensationalist tendency to quote the most dramatic projected death tolls rather than the most realistic. Experts may have more facts at their disposal and more training than members of the public, but that does not make them infallible. Scientists deal in predictions – educated guesses – not prophecy. We hear far too much talk of scientific “facts” and not nearly enough about scientific “hypotheses” – something for which scientists are partly to blame, but which the media should be far more responsible in reporting than it is.
So the suggestion that the overreaction to swine flu was to do with conspiracy and fear deliberately whipped up by scientists seems odd, partly because most of the scaremongering was from the media rather than the experts or the Government, and partly because official responses to the outbreak in this country were mostly quite sensible given what was known at the time.
But let’s run with it for a moment. What evidence is there that there was a conspiracy?
There was clearly some excessive language used and there is without doubt an unhappily cosy relationship between parts of the pharmaceutical industry and some leading scientists. But neither of those prove widespread malpractice.
Another way to look at it might be to carry out a thought-experiment: what would have happened during the swine flu outbreak if there were no conspiracy? We can then compare that with what actually happened and maybe draw some conclusions.
My guess is that if there had been no conspiracy, there would have been a good deal of initial confusion and uncertainty as unreliable reports of the disease came out. Then, as the virus spread and our knowledge of it firmed up, contingency plans for bird flu (remember that?) would be put into action. Common sense public health efforts to prevent transmission and contingency plans to mitigate the effect on the economy would have been put into place. Meanwhile, governments would have chivvied pharmaceutical companies to develop and bring to market a vaccine as quickly as possible. That would have been a responsible and sensible approach to follow.
Once the worst had passed, infection rates had fallen and it became clear the disease was not as serious as feared, you might expect Western governments to try to sell their vaccine stocks on to countries where swine flu was still widespread – perhaps in poorer regions with less developed health systems, such as North Africa, south-east Europe and parts of Asia.
Finally, if it became clear that the pandemic had been a bit of a damp squib and that not that many people died, we might expect contrarian newspaper columnists to start claiming that the whole thing was a scam and a conspiracy, and that we should never trust so-called experts ever again.
The eagle-eyed among you may notice that that is exactly what happened.
