Which skeptical views merit consideration? Which are denialism? Those questions haunted the Kennedy assassination and the early AIDS crisis, and they returned with COVID-19. As before, the gravity of the situation reduced tolerance for open-ended inquiry. “Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics’ willingness to question the experts,” the Washington Post’s Peter Jamison wrote. “But it can be disastrous in public health, which depends on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.”
The experts would require a lot of trust, because they were recommending astonishing measures. It was no small thing to issue stay-at-home orders, shut schools, close businesses, and mandate masks. But early reports from China, where authorities were physically sealing off apartment buildings, were encouraging about the efficacy of such tactics.
It was a moment of choice—did you trust experts or not?—and there was a clear partisan skew. The previous Democratic President, Obama, had been a Harvard-trained law professor who had used the word “smart” to justify his policies more than nine hundred times. The sitting Republican President, Trump, was a blunt businessman who had declined to nominate a science adviser for more than a year and a half.
For liberals, veneration of expertise became a shibboleth. The ubiquitous “In this house, we believe . . .” signs usually included “science is real” as an article of faith. There was something “deeply ironic” about formulating the support for science as a religious creed, Jacob Hale Russell and Dennis Patterson observe in “The Weaponization of Expertise” (M.I.T.). But this support veered toward dogma, and had a pope: Fauci, or St. Anthony Fauci, as votive candles bearing his likeness called him. “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci declared.
If there was an apostate, it was Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The “F” stands for Francis, as in St. Francis of Assisi, about whom Kennedy has written a children’s book. Kennedy admires St. Francis for choosing to live among people with leprosy. Since becoming a pariah himself, after his vaccine-safety crusade, Kennedy has warmed to other spurned beliefs, no matter their plausibility. He has publicly contemplated whether cellphones cause cancer, tainted tap water leads to “sexual dysphoria,” and the white trails behind airplanes contain toxic chemicals. Although claiming not to be a doubter himself, Kennedy devoted two chapters of one of his books to airing “legitimate queries” about whether H.I.V. causes AIDS.