Marc Fisher of the Washington Post writes in a recent article that the “Follow the Science” slogan advocated by the health experts during the pandemic has now become a political weapon.

Two years ago, when science writer Faye Flam launched a podcast to explore why so many Americans were drawn to misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, she settled on a name she figured would steer clear of politics: “Follow the Science.”

– From the Washington Post

According to the Post, now Flam reportedly cringes as she watches “people load up the phrase with political baggage. I agonize every day over whether to change the name of the podcast.”

David Leonhardt of the New York Times wrote recently that its the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose guidance about “follow the science” was not clear to the public.

“The misery of the Covid-19 pandemic — with its death, illness, isolation and frustration — has left many Americans desperate for clear guidance on how to live safely. People want to protect themselves, their family and their communities, especially the most medically vulnerable members of it. This instinct is both understandable and profoundly decent.”

– David Leonhardt in the New York Times

• ‘Follow the science’: As the third year of the pandemic begins, a simple slogan becomes a political weapon
• Follow the Science?

Mac Fisher argues that those who urge others to just “follow the science” generally claim to be ‘politically unbiased because they’re just pledging allegiance to the higher power of fact and neutral inquiry’.

So much is mixed up with science — risk and values and politics — the phrase can come off as sanctimonious, and the danger is that it says, ‘These are the facts,’ when it should say, ‘This is the situation as we understand it now and that understanding will keep changing.’

– Faye Flam told the Washington Post

Samantha Harris, a Philadelphia lawyer who formerly worked at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a conservative advocacy group, told the Post “Arguments over following the science extend beyond disagreements over how to analyze the results of studies. Rather, demands that the other side ‘follow the science‘ are often a complete rejection of another person’s cultural and political identity. ‘It’s not just people believing the scientific research that they agree with. It’s that in this extreme polarization we live with, we totally discredit ideas because of who holds them’ ”.

“I’m struggling as much as anyone else. Our job as informed citizens in the pandemic is to be like judges and synthesize information from both sides, but with the extreme polarization, nobody really trusts each other enough to know how to judge their information.”