A trope of contemporary social commentary is that "Science" has somehow become "Politicized," such that people no longer trust or believe what is presented as the scientific consensus on important social, political, and economic issues.
Many commentators worry that substantial public disagreement on the nature and significance of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of vaccines and mitigation measures such as lockdowns, border closures, masks, and social distancing will contribute to a decline in trust of scientists and even science itself.
Systematic misrepresentation of the scientific evidence on Covid-19 and its mitigation measures has been a central feature of news coverage and social media commentary for the last year and a half.
Press releases from scientific organizations and government agencies, news reports of scientific papers, and social media posts by prominent scientists continue to focus on statistics such as the number of positive test results without controlling for the number of tests administered, the characteristics of the tested population, and the cycle threshold for PCR tests; to present highly aggregated measures of infection and spread that obscure the enormously skewed distribution in severity by age and health status; and to ignore context that would allow for comparison across similar locations or among similar diseases over time.
The consensus of this pre-Covid literature is that masks, frequent hand-washing and hand-sanitizing, distancing, and the like had either very small effects or no effect on disease severity or spread. This was at the time that shops, restaurants, schools, and offices were beginning to require masks and social distancing, installing plastic barriers and HEPA filters, adding extra cleaning and sanitizing, and other interventions - presumably on the basis of hard, scientific evidence.
As schools around the world are hotly debating mask requirements, the fact that the most comprehensive experimental study to date found that masks have no effect on transmission is completely ignored - because few people know about this finding.
If scientists are concerned about a decrease in public confidence in their work, and the standing of scientific research more generally, they should look not at "Twitter trolls" but at the way scientists themselves have presented their findings and the magnitude and significance of their work.
https://mises.org/power-market/scientific-credibility-and-file-drawer-problem
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