Following the Science

A friend posted a meme that says, “follow the science,” and then goes off into a comment about how there is science that is skeptical of the public health orders and vaccine, and that anyone who bucks the prevailing wisdom around the pandemic is shunned when many of them are just “following the science.” I, of course, want to be sympathetic and feel that people should be skeptical but “following the science” is why I’m frustrated by so much of the response to those same orders and vaccines.

I’m not a scientist; I don’t look at the data, parse the statistics, even have more than a cursory understanding of the information that the mainstream media reports about how COVID operates or the vaccines work. I’m not particularly anti-authoritarian, but I also don’t just “follow the law” or other guidance from government officials. So, when the pandemic broke and my work sent me home, I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I also wasn’t able to argue differently. A lot of people weren’t in that position either and we found ourselves rethinking our jobs, how we navigated society, and how we interacted with the people in our own house who we now saw all the time. There was no escape and the things I liked to do for fun, namely hang out at bars and listen to live music, were gone.

So, when news broke that a vaccine was on the horizon, I read as much as I could about the safety of the vaccine and talked with my brother-in-law. He’s a doctor and just recently retired from being a county health officer in Colorado. He argued that the vaccines were safe, and we should take…