Politics. In the California dessert the most improbable of music festivals, Coachella, has made its longed-for return. Those kids the Woodstock generation tried to convince us were vectors for disease and hellbent on annihilating grandmas everywhere have shown up in celebratory mood to hear and see Billie Eilish, Yola, Japanese Breakfast and Conan Grey.
They are not wearing masks. Hell, they are barely wearing anything at all.
(For a better understanding of the way in which recklessness and spontaneity are the natural traveling companions of creativity and originality, I recommend Marcus Haney's No Cameras Allowed)
As the inevitable post-pandemic karmic rebalancing sends the purveyors of panic and their understudies, the scold-y New Victorians, into obscurity - or crowded hearing rooms depending on the mood of Congress - the country’s most traumatized generation is moving on.
Facebook is for old people, Twitter is boring and yes, even Instagram has become noxious for its ability to magnify and multiply every junior high mean girl on the globe and funnel them into your feed on reviving macramé.
It is no coincidence CNN+ lasted a month, or that Netflix is losing customers. Dinner and a lecture is no longer anyone’s idea of a good time. The Political Intrigue Show had a good run on nearly every network for a decade. Notwithstanding that durability, hardly anyone can explain Hillary Clinton’s emails or why Donald Trump was a Russian spy. Probably because it doesn’t matter. That show is getting cancelled too.
The era of politics as a team sport is spent – though certainly not over. In its place emerges an appreciation that understanding is a first-person activity, unfiltered by what my youngest son refers to as the “corporatist ghouls.” (Coachella, we must note, was founded in response to Pearl Jam’s dispute with Ticketmaster.)
Whether that is tossing aside the tsk-tsking of the public health apparatchiks to dance in the dessert or creating your own data visualizations of cloth mask efficacy, the next stage of American politics will be all about meeting the skepticism, and more than likely indifference, of an entire generation or more.
Policy. Overcoming the well-earned skepticism of the electorate means first and foremost a change in U.S. science policy. To replace the current status quo, new, more viable policy options must emerge
As the next year or so will make clear, the initial response to the spread of SARS-CoV-19 was first born from the fear among a small group of federally funded scientists that there was a possibility – though clearly not the only one – that some risky research may have gone awry in Wuhan China.
When the wrongheadedness of the China and WHO-endorsed lockdown policy became clear, accountability for the spread of Covid shifted to the mask-less, then the unvaccinated. Any effort, we now understand, to shift the focus and adopt more sustainable policies was suppressed or marginalized by a highly centralized and very powerful “scientific community” that still hopes to avoid too many serious questions.
The federal, and frequently state, pandemic policies have now come to rest in the public’s mind as a fuzzy understanding that they have been misled or, at a minimum, the scientific and medical establishment is grossly incompetent.
Neither of those two things will rest easy for long. For every Twitter ban that drives the platform deeper into irrelevance, the curious mind finds its way to a Substack or any number of alternative publications that have emerged in the last two years.
Unthinkable two years ago, scientists like Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff – two of the original signers of the Great Barrington Declaration – and others have taken off the kid gloves of professional deference and launched broadsides against the Big Science and its traveling companion, Big Pharma, via outlets like Reason Magazine and the newly launched Brownstone Institute.
Aside from their obvious common sense and refreshing restraint that observes the limits of science on making sound public health policy, these challengers to the Big Science status quo are offering not just policy alternatives. They are challenging the hegemony of NIH and the FDA.
It is the only way home to safe, sustainable and popularly embraced science policy but it will take years.
Power. What makes the emergence of a new public health posture highly likely – almost inevitable – is the frailty of the status quo. The conventional wisdom is that the generation born in the trough between the post-war generation and the millennials will have little impact on American life and culture.
That might have been true had these leaders of the establishment not made their swan song a screw-up of such epic proportions they have unwittingly recruited the “middle child” generation of Gen X to clean up the mess. Dr. Anthony Fauci, at 81, is old enough to be Jay Bhattacharya’s father.
As the new voices of science continue to make inroads, they find themselves in natural opposition to the forces that shaped and exploited the tragic Covid pandemic. Fortunately, like NFLX, TWTR and CNN, the forces of Big Science are also spent. The Good Science Project that launched in December seeks to fund high risk, high reward research something a bureaucracy like NIH cannot touch. Congress has already expressed an interest in funding research outside the top 25 centers. PFE is likely to face the wrath of its shareholders and its customers as their close relationship with the White House cannot overcome a rejection of their products.
If this all sounds a bit too libertarian for your taste, it might help to remember that the response to government's failed intrusion into American life is not ever going to be more government by either party. The era of "we know best" is quantifiably and objectively challenged by the costs of catastrophic health policy. What is "known" has held up even less well for anyone with a little curiosity and a spreadsheet.
Have a great rest of your weekend.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
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