On November 24, 2021, South Africa reported the discovery of a new coronavirus variant to the World Health Organization. The discovery was followed by a few days of uncertainty surrounding nomenclature — Mu was the most recently named variant of interest, so up next in the Greek alphabet was the letter Nu. But did Nu sound too similar to “new” for this new variant of concern? Was the following letter, Xi, too common of a surname? In ultimately answering “yes” to both of these questions, the WHO settled on Omicron — pronounced OH-muh-kraan — to breathe life into this new set of genetic mutations on SARS-CoV-2.
The identification of this variant set forth a chain reaction that, in theory, could have been an opportunity for governments and decision makers around the world to demonstrate that lessons had been learned from the past two years of managing the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, precisely the opposite occurred. Countries removed from those in Southern Africa responded with a series of travel bans, much to the chagrin of epidemiologists and other scientists in public health around the world because these porous bans, which still permit travel by citizens, in reality do nothing to respond to the fact that the virus is already circulating. Instead, these bans have only further plunged afflicted countries into crisis by blocking crucial resources and punishing them for alerting the world to the issue in the first place.
Within 10 days of the discovery, sequencing of test samples uncovered that Omicron had been circulating in the Netherlands before it was ever identified in South Africa, and the variant was identified in approximately 40 countries in the following two weeks. Yet, relatively performative travel bans remained in place for almost a month, with little and slow work by other countries to pool together resources to curb the spread of the variant in Southern Africa, which is currently being hit the hardest.
A common refrain in response to these seemingly nonsensical initiatives that do little to strike at the heart of the threat posed by COVID-19 is one that cites “evidence-based policymaking” as the solution to these ills, particularly in the United States. Yet, despite harkening more closely to the idea that there are lessons to be learned from how this pandemic has evolved, “evidence-based policymaking” is an inadequate, black-boxed response that will fail to change the course of such ills unless different questions are asked that uncover what is truly at stake — what lessons we learn, from whom, and about what? What goes into producing forms of evidence that are deemed relevant, and what are the politics of legitimizing such information? What conceptions of morality — or the “good” — inform such decisions, and how are they reinforced in the process? And, lastly, who are the “we’s” that have the power to make such decisions, and who is left out in the process?
Whose Evidence is it Anyway?
Pointing to evidence-based policymaking as the solution to our pandemic qualms — and future crises — fundamentally glosses over the fact that evidence alone does not determine action or solve a set of problems. It is the narrative we construct in deciding how to use any form of evidence — whether a set of statistics, anecdotes, or physical samples — that builds a path forward, and such decisions are inherently political because they are built on a set of values and power dynamics that are held in relief by certain social groups, but perhaps not others. More important than any piece of evidence itself, then, is how that evidence is constructed and then legitimized to exert the power it has over a segment of society.
These ideas are best understood in action. For example, both sides in the Harvard admissions discrimination case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, each hired their own economists as expert witnesses to testify whether the available admissions data provides proof of discimination. Each has used the same “evidence” to guide “policy,” and yet, predictably, they have come to opposite conclusions. If evidence were the answer to all of our decision-making qualms, this would not be the case. Rather, this anecdote demonstrates that the choices we make in interpreting evidence — ones that are rooted in certain normative conceptions of the admissions process and even the way in which the world is ordered at large — lie at the crux of the decision-making quandary. Such a scenario is not unusual — the same marshalling of contrasting expertise marked much of the debate around the impacts of tobacco on health and human activity on climate change. Thus, in seeking to understand how we learn from COVID-19, the answer cannot be to “follow the science” — instead, a better starting point may be to follow the politics.
The Politics of Science
The production of evidence in the first place is a political process, as are the factors that allow a certain body of evidence to be persuasive or important. The key to understanding this phenomenon is construing politics as not only a set of partisan dynamics; rather, any process relating to distributional questions of power, people, and decision-making falls under the purview of “politics.” Framed in this way, every piece of science that has been referenced or produced through this pandemic is political, both in the first-order questions of what work gets funded and published but also in the broader sense as it pertains to the use of science to make decisions at all.
For example, to prioritize the elderly and immunocompromised for vaccination in the United States is inherently political — the science that these demographic and social groups are more vulnerable to infection is only stabilized by the fact that there is an underlying social order that politically legitimizes, and moreover necessitates, the protection of the vulnerable. This is not to equate the politics of ignoring science to the politics of making decisions grounded in science — it is only to note that considering “evidence” alone is insufficient to answer questions of crisis. In short, science is not autonomous, nor is it self-sufficient; it is not a panacea, nor is it value-free. In fact, it is our values that give science any meaning at all, and thus tell us which lessons are worth learning, and how such lessons may be applied.
Science as Service
Given the degree to which the “lesson” of supposed “evidence-based policymaking” has been complicated, the question remains — how do we move forward given the trajectory of the pandemic, and what can we glean from these past two years to apply in the future in hopes of mitigating a prolonged crisis?
I cannot pretend to have any answers, nor do I think that any single person or group of people can or should either. But if I can offer anything specific to the pandemic, it would be to ponder what would happen if we think of “science” — whatever that may refer to — as a form of service. Maybe then, it will be clearer that it is crucial to reflect upon who is served, and who is not, with the policy decisions made in the name of science. With Omicron, perhaps in attempting to “serve” the American people, a travel ban has done a disservice to those in Southern Africa; yet has the United States not done a disservice to its own residents in not enabling greater vaccination in less affluent countries more effectively, thus fomenting the emergence of a potentially more severe variant with impacts that transcend borders?
And so, maybe the real lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic is to pay closer attention to people: to which people are included in that bucket of attention, what the implications are of slicing the pie of humanity in one way and not another, and how the people that decision-makers choose to care or not care about affects the types of “evidence” that are validated and marshalled. To have the humility to recognize that science alone will never have the answer — or that there is no one answer at all. It is only then that we can understand what we are missing, where we may be going astray, and what may come next.
Image by Martin Sanchez is licensed under the Unsplash license.
