#scientific credibility

[timwrightt]

[newstfionline]

Alarmed by Ebola, Public Isn’t Calmed by ‘Experts Say’

By Richard Pérez-Peña, NY Times, Oct. 31, 2014

When public health leaders and government officials make the case against isolating more people returning from the Ebola hot zones in West Africa, or against imposing more travel restrictions from that region, time and again they cite science and experts. It isn’t working very well.

Polls show the overwhelming majority of Americans favor quarantine in cases like that of Kaci Hickox, the nurse who was held against her will in a Newark hospital on the orders of one governor and has fended off the efforts of another governor to sharply restrict her movements. Some prominent conservative commentators dismiss the assurances of scientists, Obama administration officials and the news media as unreliable, elitist blather.

Sean Hannity said on his radio show, “I’m not covering what the Centers for Disease Control says--I don’t trust them.” On his show, Rush Limbaugh talked sarcastically about “how we just have to trust the scientists of the world.”

When a doctor in New York was found to have Ebola, Michelle Malkin said on Twitter, “Now we get to watch smug NYC journos who were lecturing everyone else not to freak out about Ebola ... freak out about Ebola.” And when Democrats said Republican budget cuts were to blame for the lack of Ebola preparedness, the blogger Eric Erickson dismissed the way health research dollars are spent.

Such comments would find a ready audience even in a nation not dreading a lethal outbreak, and one reason is that the science of handling Ebola--what protective gear to wear, how to dispose of waste--has shifted.

Even defenders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the agency has hurt the case for trusting scientists, by making overly broad assurances early on, or changing guidelines on handling the disease, indicating that the earlier ones were not strict enough.

This comes on top of a broader mistrust of elites. “Skepticism about science and expertise and authority has a pretty big constituency out there,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. It is not enough for policy makers to be right on the science, he said; they must also find a way to reassure “people who are all too ready to interpret expert opinion as elitist and condescending.”

“I actually think it’s completely understandable that the public would have the reaction that they do, simply because this is uncharted water,” said Dr. Daniel J. Diekema, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Iowa’s medical school, and the president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

“When we issue statements, we tend to think all we have to do is go out and state the facts, but that’s not always enough, and we need to be sensitive to people’s fears,” he said.

Dr. Lynn R. Goldman, an epidemiologist and dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University, cited the newness of Ebola to Americans, adding, “It’s terribly lethal, it’s a dreaded thing, and that rightfully triggers a lot of concern.”

“We do have this thing coming down the pike that’s called an election, and there are people who try to use this in the context of an election,” she said. “I think there could be a change in tone after the election.”