A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #340 - Sciences and State: the example of Covid (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We are taking advantage of our review of the book "L'attestation" by T. 
Boulakia and N. Mariot to return to the Covid period. Beyond the 
confinement analyzed in this work, we have rarely suffered state 
authoritarianism. If we think it necessary to return to this period it 
is because even anarchists, and more broadly a whole part of the extreme 
left, justified certain measures which were imposed on us in the name of 
rationalism (confinement, mass vaccination, health,...): in order not to 
fall into conspiracy/irrationalism, we had to comply with the State's 
prescriptions justified by what scientists would have consensually 
recommended. The objective of this article is to return to the Covid 
pandemic to understand the political function that Science has played, 
to understand all the limits of scientific knowledge, to arm ourselves 
politically for future similar situations. We will end up discussing the 
relationship between scientists and society from a libertarian communist 
point of view.

Science and Covid
We refer to various works to complete this development[1]. In France, 
the decisions imposed by the government were based on the concept of 
nudge, that is to say measures imposed on the population to force us to 
make the "right choices" through constraints ( self-certification of 
exit during confinement, health pass, vaccination pass, etc.). To 
justify its decisions, the French government set up a Scientific Council 
whose members were chosen by co-optation and whose work was not made 
public. Generally speaking, this Scientific Council's role was 
essentially to ratify the decisions taken by the government, that is to 
say, to provide a pseudo-scientific justification for the measures 
decided independently of it. For example, on July 12, 2021, Macron 
imposed widespread vaccination based on an opinion from this Scientific 
Council... which in reality supported a proposal from McKinsey. The 
Scientific Council argued its opinion with an article which had not 
appeared in an academic journal and of which 25% of the authors were 
members of the same Scientific Council. This article developed a 
forecasting model integrating arbitrarily chosen parameters, 
contradicting what academic articles considered to be correct at the 
same time. Concretely, he sought to justify the widespread imposition of 
the vaccine. More generally, during the Covid crisis, all the data put 
forward to justify health policies were questionable. Not that they were 
all false or falsified, but they did not achieve consensus within the 
scientific community. No scientific study made it possible to consider, 
for example, severe confinement or massive vaccination measures, imposed 
as in France, as efficient compared to other less restrictive and less 
uniform approaches... apart from certain unreliable forecast 
epidemiological models.

Indeed, in epidemiology, forecast models are very fragile and rarely 
succeed in correctly predicting the future. Thus, from June 2020, a 
collective of scientific modelers warned in the journal Nature (academic 
journal considered the most important) about the weaknesses of the 
models and the risk of their uses for political purposes: "Mathematical 
models produce very uncertainties that predict future infections, 
hospitalizations and deaths under various scenarios. Rather than using 
models to inform their understanding, politicians often brandish them to 
support predetermined agendas"[2]. As summarized by Ioannidis, 
considered one of the best epidemiologists in the world, "Epidemic 
forecasting has a dubious record, and its failures have become more 
significant with COVID-19"[3]. However, during the Covid period, all the 
measures taken were based on such models. But criticism was disqualified 
and any calm and contradictory debate was prohibited. Not only did 
ordinary mortals not have the right to criticize the dominant discourse 
under penalty of being categorized as "conspiracy", but even scientists 
found themselves violently attacked or even ostracized for having 
developed it. . As B. Stiegler says: "In this atmosphere of propaganda 
and media fabrication of consent, we were going to leave the domain of 
scientific rationality and medical reasoning, to switch to moral 
reasoning of the Manichean type, specific to war communication ".

Health assessment of the imposed policy

The health crisis linked to Covid and the associated term pandemic, 
generated the idea that we could all be subjected to imminent danger of 
death in the same way while the population most at risk was the elderly: 
half of the death concerns people over 80 years old; before the age of 
60, the probability of dying from Covid was roughly equivalent to that 
of the flu (apart from people with comorbidities). Furthermore, if we 
take the WHO definition, "health is a state of complete physical, mental 
and social well-being and does not consist only of an absence of disease 
or infirmity", we realize takes into account that all the health policy 
imposed has not taken into account the psychological and social 
dimensions of health. However, integrating all these dimensions required 
proportioning health policy according to people and situations and 
refraining from considering each person as identical to others. By 
imposing the same restrictions (confinement, mask, etc.) and the same 
obligations (vaccines) on the entire population, in the name of 
"Science", health policy has been in complete contradiction with such a 
perspective.

Today we know that confinement was very problematic in terms of health 
(for sources see[1]). Confinement and its aftermath have sharply reduced 
screenings or diagnoses, particularly for cancers, with a predictable 
increase of 5% to 8% in the latter. The mental deterioration was 
significant: sleep problems, depressive or anxious state, suicidal 
thoughts, especially for the youngest - between 2020 and 2021, a 30% 
increase in suicide attempts and a doubling of visits to the emergency 
room for suicidal thoughts among 11-17 year olds. Family abuse has also 
increased enormously - a 50% increase in hospitalizations for physical 
violence against children under 5, particularly shaken baby syndrome; 
increase in violence against women in confined households. Also, we are 
entitled to consider that confinement was significantly more dangerous 
for children, even for women, than Covid. Furthermore, in France, a 
million additional people have been condemned to poverty following 
health measures (loss of work or income).

Furthermore, the vaccination policy implemented via the health pass and 
then the vaccination pass has led to two effects contrary to its 
objectives. The first is the increase in mistrust of vaccines. The 
second refers to the vaccination rate among people at risk. France 
showed one of the worst vaccination rates in Western Europe for those 
over 80, lower than those of countries that have not put in place 
coercive measures to force vaccination. This is a consequence of the 
necessity, among other things, of having to go through a website. In 
addition, the coercive measures favored the mass vaccination of people 
wanting to maintain their important social life (often those least at 
risk because they are younger). Conversely, this did not encourage 
vaccination of sections of the population at risk already excluded from 
these spaces of social life (elderly people, migrants, homeless people, 
etc.). In addition, we knew that vaccines had individual protection to 
prevent serious forms, but they did not prevent transmission and 
contamination. As a result, the benefit/risk for young people was widely 
discussed in the academic literature to the point where England refused 
to vaccinate them. The foundations of public health therefore required 
caution and certainly the non-massive vaccination of children apart from 
children with comorbidities. As a result, Delfraissy, as president of 
the National Ethics Consultative Committee, co-signed an opinion on June 
9, 2021 recommending against mass vaccination of minors. But a few days 
later, as president of the Scientific Council, this same Delfraissy 
validated the mass vaccination of minors in order to adhere to political 
decisions.

The political function of Science
This brief history of Covid refers to the political function of 
"Science" in today's world. The emergence of "Science" as a unified 
field dates back to the 19th century and is linked to the social, 
economic and political evolution associated with the development of 
capitalism[4]. What we call the modernist vision of science, which still 
dominates scientific production, is the conviction that "Science" 
allows, through its knowledge, to help collective progress which is 
driven by industrial development. driven by the capitalist economy. 
Thus, the political apparatus will use scientific work for its political 
aims and scientists will serve as experts to legitimize these choices. 
However, scientists obviously do not exist outside of a social framework 
which influences their theories and practices, and this is even more 
significant in scientific fields which concern humans. In all scientific 
fields there are controversies and critical discussions that are not or 
barely exposed in the public space because "Science" must produce 
unassailable knowledge in this public space. Anyone who expresses doubts 
will be considered as part of an asscientific/anti-progress/conspiracy 
vision. The health crisis was a permanent demonstration of this 
political function of science. We have suffered an authoritarian 
imposition by the State of measures justified by so-called scientific 
knowledge, which is nevertheless very fragile and absolutely not 
consensual. Ultimately, all the policies experienced during the health 
crisis must be understood not as a policy having only health objectives 
but as having above all political aims; teach us to submit to the 
arbitrariness of the State to the point of absurdity (like the 
imposition of a mask when walking outdoors).
We obviously defend another approach and another political function of 
scientific knowledge. We are materialists and rational, we do not 
consider all theories to be equivalent. Above all, we defend the idea 
that scientific knowledge should not be separated from the public space. 
Science is in itself only a way of producing knowledge and as soon as 
the subject of scientific work touches humans, we must integrate the 
human dimension into this knowledge, that is to say say integrating in 
addition to scientific knowledge the knowledge of the people concerned. 
We find in Conner's work "Popular History of Science"[5]this question of 
the monopolization of knowledge by scientists, stifling any claim to 
"popular" knowledge: "an effect of authority intervenes. Science has 
discovered, in a general way, how things are (this is what it tells us), 
how they must be, in the current state of things[...][serving 
to]guarantee authority culture of science. ". The example of the 
management of the AIDS epidemic a contrario, recalled by Stiegler in his 
works, shows the need for dialogue between scientists and people at risk 
to establish efficient protocols. During Covid, from the moment when 
health policy impacted all people, it was necessary to encourage debates 
in the public space. This meant defending the idea that we should not 
rely on the authoritarianism of the State but on the conscience of 
people and their collective self-organization. The role of scientists 
should have been to be able to bring to the population, in a 
contradictory manner, the more or less fragile or more or less 
consolidated knowledge resulting from scientific research. This debate 
should not be top-down, between knowing and ignorant, because scientists 
only have one side of knowledge. On the basis of such open and 
democratic debates, everyone could have understood the issues associated 
with the Covid health crisis. Proportionate measures, accepted and 
therefore driven by the majority, because they come from common 
knowledge, could have been put in place. Obviously, at first glance, 
ambient individualism would have partially thwarted an efficient 
collective approach, but it was the only way to learn to collectively 
adopt measures adapted to different situations, to learn to be conscious 
actors/actresses of our lives without the police being there to force us 
to take measures that are often completely absurd on a social and health 
level.

VR

Notes:
1. We can read about the political use of statistics, particularly 
during Covid: GUYON H. and NÔUS C., Stat wars, the dark side of the 
force of statistics, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024. On the 
policy carried out during the pandemic, we recommend these two short 
works: STIEGLER B., De la Démocratie en Pandémie, Gallimard, Paris, 
2021; STIEGLER B. and ALLA F., Public health year zero, Gallimard, 
Paris, 2022.
2. SALTELLI et al. , "Five ways to ensure that models serve society", 
Nature, no 7813, vol. 582, 2020, p. 482-484.
3. IOANNIDIS John, "How the Pandemic is Changing the Norms of Science", 
Tablet Magasine, 2021.
4. see the very interesting book by CARNINO G., The Invention of 
Science: The New Religion of the Industrial Age, Seuil, Paris, 2015.
5. CONNER C., Popular history of science, L'Echappée, 2011.

P.-S.
See also, in the same issue: "L'attestation", book by T. Boulakia and N. 
Mariot

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4174
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