Science and COVID-19: How Do We Know What to Believe?
Is it safe for me to distribute Red Flag at a Black Lives Matter protest? Is it safe to get together with my extended family? Is it safe to send my kids to school? When a vaccine is available, should I take it?
The answers depend on many things. To draw conclusions from a particular set of facts, we need the best general information available.
Where does this information come from? Not from a religious text. Not from our wishes or hopes. It comes from collective practice. From analyzing experiences in the material world, using communist philosophy (dialectical materialism).
Covid-19 is new, so our best generalizations are tentative. We revise these “hypotheses” as new data becomes available. The tentative nature of the scientific process can be frustrating and terrifying at times like these. But it’s necessary.
New York City health care workers rally against racism, June 2020
Originally it seemed that the main thing was to wash our hands a lot and sanitize surfaces to avoid large virus-containing droplets. Now we know that the virus can spread through the air in tiny particles when we cough, sing or speak.
We know that people can spread the virus before they show symptoms, and even if they will never get sick. That’s how we know now that masks and physical distancing are important.
Once we (collectively) can explain most of our observations, we make predictions. We test them with experiments. If they go as expected, we have a theory.
A scientific theory is not a “what-if-maybe.” It is the best explanation we have. Of course, scientific theories are revised and sometimes replaced by better theories – based on more practice.
Who does this scientific work? Capitalist society delegates it to specialists – scientists. Generally, to scientific institutions like laboratories and research centers.
Like every capitalist enterprise, these institutions have a steep (and racist, sexist) hierarchy. “Manual” workers (like janitors and animal handlers) are at the bottom. “Mental” workers (administrators and senior scientists) are at the top. Technicians and office workers are in between.
This is a contradiction within capitalist science. Its process of getting better knowledge depends on the unity of theory and practice, “mental” and “manual” work. Yet its social relations of production divide them.
“One gets unique insights into disease when you actually physically interact with patients,” said leading US public health expert Anthony Fauci when he suited up to treat Ebola patients in 1974.
Capitalism’s elevation of “mental” labor encourages scientists to be arrogant. That can make it harder for them to communicate that their conclusions are always subject to new evidence. It encourages workers to associate scientists with capitalist bosses (which most are not) and distrust them.
Communist society will resolve the contradiction by eliminating the mental/manual division of labor. Many more people will help decide what to study and how, how to interpret and use the results. More will participate in scientific work. We’ll learn more and spread the knowledge among the masses.
Right now, our collectives need to find the best information about Covid-19 that we can. That mainly comes from organized science, not from talk-show hosts or Twitter or somebody’s second cousin or wishful thinking.
The bosses don’t make it easy for us to get that best information. The schools don’t prepare most of us to understand it easily. We have to fight for it. That’s part of our struggle to build a revolutionary communist movement.
Who Can We Trust?
“To beat [Covid-19],” said US politician Nancy Pelosi, “you have to believe in science, and you have to believe in governance.” Most of us rightly distrust capitalist government! Polls show that more people in the US (87%) trust medical scientists than trust religion (57%) or elected officials (35%).
That’s good, but still… Capitalism corrupts everything, including science.
Whole books have been written to tell just a small part of the history of racist science. For example, the US Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee in the 1930s-40s left Black men to suffer and die although penicillin treated syphilis effectively.
Private corporations now dominate US scientific research. The government isn’t far behind. It’s said that “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” Who can trust research coming from the tobacco or fossil-fuel industries, Monsanto, Big Pharma?
Capitalist science produces results – for capitalists. Workers don’t need nuclear weapons or chemical-dependent agriculture. Even when there are potential benefits for workers – such as life-saving medical technology—the masses often don’t get them.
Communists promise to liberate science from its capitalist chains. That can’t happen soon enough! But it starts today. Our party collectives, with co-workers, friends and family, must start learning to be scientists now.
Using dialectical materialism and practice, practice and more practice, we improve our understanding of society and how to transform it. And, collectively, we find and act on the best possible information about what’s safe and what’s necessary amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.
Communist Dialectical Science Versus Capitalist Profit-Driven Science
When capitalist revolutionaries destroyed the restraints of feudal society, it was science that beat the pathway to the brave new world. Now-a-days, when their world is neither new nor brave, they either attack or distort it.
The growing fascist wing attacks it with denial or religious fundamentalism. They reject what their eyes see – no global warming, no pollution, no vaccines, no masks! They build walls. They give out passports – a Covid 19 virus becomes Chinese!
The liberal wing, on the other hand, uses science without shame. It makes profits for a Microsoft or Huawei, a Monsanto or a Toyota. They see what is profitable but are as blind as a bat to what is not.
A 2017 government report showed the US, for example, was completely unprepared to tackle the outbreak of a new viral pandemic. It was not seen as a challenging new scientific field to be explored but as an unprofitable expense to be avoided. Liberal capitalists might scoff at giving passports to viruses, but they certainly know how to enter them into the accountant’s loss and profit columns. This is especially true when the anticipation of future profits makes their hearts beat faster. Passports are nothing; medical patents on cures and (private) intellectual property rights are everything.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) an estimated 37 million people remain infected with HIV-AIDS, yet only 14 million are being treated! Capitalist-controlled science, handcuffed by profits and property rights, doesn’t liberate the masse. It kills them.
While liberal and fascist wings of capitalism squabble over the applications of science, communists argue for a dialectical world view. Capitalist science invests millions of dollars examining the virus. Its mission is to develop a vaccine to save the world for Microsoft, Huawei, Monsanto and so on. The expert will examine the virus, understand it, neutralize it and manage the cure.
The communist scientist brings a dialectical vision to the pandemic. Covid 19 is not just a virus like no other. It is at the same time a virus like all others! The particular and the general are interlinked. Like malnutrition, infectious disease, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and most cancers, Covid-19 is directly linked to racism and sexism, exploitation and oppression, poverty and pollution.
Take social conditions off the table and the result is the biological determinism of modern medicine. The communist scientist knows that the greatest improvements in health come from raising living standards.
Although studies exist that acknowledge that, capitalist science will never invest billions of dollars into promoting that research. Leave a doctor’s office or clinic and you will be worrying about exercise or diet or whether the insurance will pay for the pills, but the chances are you will not have had a discussion about social inequality being the greatest cause of all illness.
Starting those discussions, raising the need for communist revolution and fighting for the health of the masses is the mission of ICWP. Join us!
—Comrade in Bay Area (USA)