Over these past 18+ months, I have found the pandemic to offer an interesting pedagogical opportunity, acting as a relatively good demonstration of how "religions" have been built, beliefs often repeated thousands of times over hundreds or thousands of years, in the process slowly becoming acknowledged as absolute truths. Similarly, I would suggest, the current public health "bible" is being written every day via various mantras constantly parroted by public health, governments and the media, its followers, all the while, becoming more and more militant, more and more extremist.
Sadly, unlike religion, we have yet to recognize that science should, at all cost, be protected from ideologies (and politicization). Few scientists or science journalists (and fewer laypeople--including, sadly, high school or college science teachers--still) actually ever recognize the value of history, sociology and philosophy of science, and therefore the value, and merit, of protecting truly democratic societies from science. Science should always be taught as but one view among many (and NEVER the one and only truth or reality) and just as it is generally understood that there should be separation of state and religious institutions, so should such separation exist between the state and science. Alas, that is far from being the case and worse still, few "enlightened" modern people will come to appreciate the importance of such a proposition (and entertaining the latter will usually come with you being tagged as a “science denier” or “anti-science”. Few, again, realizing that the last thing science needs is more cheerleaders, or that for science to truly evolve, it must be allowed to do so via constant criticism).
In its stead, we have mostly come to believe that scientists are to act as our new high priests, failing to understand that scientists, in reality, are no better off than most on these matters: they simply know more details. This should therefore presuppose that the public can and should participate if full democratization of science is truly the desirable end goal. Given that the public is, in effect, affected by these decisions, it should, as a concerned party, be allowed to participate in it fully. What we have now is a society led by a technocratic elite (very often composed of unelected individuals and entities) which has little to no skin in the game.
Vine DeLoria Jr., in “Red Earth, White Lies”, pertinently expressed that very sentiment:
“Any group that wishes to be regarded as the authority in a human society must not simply banish or discredit the views of their rivals, they must become the sole source of truth for that society and defend their status and the power to interpret against all comers by providing the best explanation of the data. As priests and politicians have discovered, it is even permissible to tell lies in order to maintain status, since the most fatal counterattack against entrenched authority will not be directed against their facts but against their status. As Americans, we have been trained to believe that science is infallible in the sense that, while science does not know everything, its processes of investigation and experimentation are the best available so that, given time and resources, the truth will eventually be discovered. This belief has degenerated into a strange form of religious belief because the technology that science provides us, best exemplified in the ‘instant replay’ in sports, encourages us to cede all critical faculties to science in exchange for creature comforts.
[…]
Institutionalization of science took many forms: the increasing tendency of people to look to scientists for reliable explanations about the world, the development of universities and colleges, sponsorship of scientific research by wealthy patrons and eventually the state. Most of all, however, it meant that scientists would come to act like priests and defer to doctrine and dogma when determining what truths would be admitted, how they would be phrased, and how scientists themselves would be protected from the questions of the mass of people whose lives were becoming increasingly dependent on them. In our society we have been trained to believe that scientists search for, examine, and articulate truths about the natural world and about ourselves. They don’t. But they do search for, take captive, and protect the social and economic status of scientists. As many lies are told to protect scientific doctrine as were ever told to protect ‘the church’.”
Now, if you wonder what the increasing extremism I alluded to above might look and sound like, I kindly invite you to listen to this Irish journalist.
No scientific facts. And abundance of ridiculing, caricaturing and infantilization of any divergent thinking. A healthy sprinkling of ad hominem arguments. And incessant calls to further "complicate the lives" of the so-called dissidents. Oh, and alo PLENTY of scapegoating (refer to Eisenstein, here, for more on this. "…[T]he heretics of our time: the anti-vaxxers. As a readily identifiable subpopulation, they are ideal candidates for scapegoating. [And] it matters little whether any of these pose a real threat to society"), without ever realizing the actual source of his so-called anger. Or that the "return to normality", or the ability to celebrate Christmas with loved ones, has nothing to do with vax rates.
Pay particular attention to the language he uses to describe his notion of what--and how--the other side thinks, and see if it might not resonate quite well if redirected at himself and his ilk.
"Because you can't debate somebody who believes in a religious belief, almost, a cult-like thing of, you know, well, ‘I'm just not going to get vaccinated’, I'm not going to listen to my doctor, I'm not going to listen to the overwhelming evidence and opinion of the world's leading scientists. You can't debate with them. At this stage, we're almost talking about hardcore cranks."