Science in the Real

Governmental reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic spanned a variety of attitudes, and policies were administrated with varying levels of effectiveness. Within the US and UK specifically, policy platforms encountered difficulties or a lack of consistent application. The central thrust of this work is to attempt to better explain how the scientific community and states should ideally support each other in times of crisis and exactly how we ought to inspect widely recognized "distrust" of science. By looking at both theory and case study, primarily via the COVID-19 crisis in the US, UK, and Austria, we see that respective cases of scientific practice being "politicized" and political decision-making being "scientized" are highly common. The former manifests through the forcing of science to act according to political timescales, especially in crises. This is shown through the regularly updating and rapidly developing state of scientific findings in the epidemiological modeling efforts of the US, UK, and Austria from March to July of 2020. Such findings were necessarily weak and needed regular updating, which is expected of scientific practice, but creates doubt when these materials are placed under political stresses. This same dynamic was used to explain confusion about the efficacy of masks. The reverse occurs when governmental policy is shielded with scientific language, and what ought to be political concerns get redirected to scientists who are being forced to legitimate policy instead of politicians. These respective oversteps can be damaging to the reputations of both political and scientific institutions, and they point us towards seeing distrust of science less as a lack of education in scientific matters and more so as doubt in institutions, no matter how scientific their messaging.