https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/06/21/despite-vaccine-triumphs-sciences-performance-during-the-pandemic-has-been-decidedly-mixed
While Western labs hit a home run, the public health community made unforced errors, and China threw deadly bean balls.
For the health sciences, these are the best of times and the worst of times. The best have been dramatic achievements emerging from American and European labs. The worst have been lab practices in China and the secrecy surrounding them.
The powerful tools developed by Western scientists were consistently used to save lives, most dramatically with the development of vaccines that have succeeded in suppressing the pandemic in those places where their use has been widespread. The same tools, in the hands of Chinese virologists, were used to experiment with deadly pathogens. We don’t know if they were trying to develop biowarfare agents or tools to combat future pandemics, and we don’t know crucial information about the origins and early spread of the virus because Beijing is hiding it.
We do know the deadly toll. According to Johns Hopkins statistics, there have been 177 million known cases of COVID-19 worldwide and 3.8 million deaths. Beyond that is the devastating impact on mental health, schooling and economic activity worldwide.
A third group of scientists, public health specialists in the U.S., falls between the best and worst. Tasked with immense responsibility and under intense time pressure, they achieved mixed results, at best, in their primary task: protecting Americans’ health and safety.
As we emerge from our bunkers, people naturally want to assign responsibility for the high costs they incurred. Were all those costs necessary? Could we have done better? Who deserves blame—or praise? Some have piled that blame on “science,” when they really mean mistakes by public health officials. Those same officials, hoping to escape responsibility, have depicted themselves as the very embodiment of modern science and technical proficiency.