Living in the US, every day I wish I'd suddenly wake up to a government which places a greater degree of importance on science and the protection and benevolence of the greatest amount of human lives, both in the US and in the rest of the world. But right now, seems like science will continue to take a backseat to US corporate economic interests.

Science is so muddled and confusing. I'm sure even the top doctors and biologists don't agree on how to handle the virus because one study says you x is more effective than y but another says the opposite. In addition most "science" is funded by done large corporations or by people with ulterior motives. Science is not the word of God; it's a craft that is extremely prone to error, and I personally don't want my gov placing any more value on it than it is right now.

The real world is muddled and confusing... science in its proper form observes that world, attempts to find the underlying facts and make our understanding of the muddled confusion clearer.

It takes a lot of observing, thinking, and testing to arrive at a decent picture of what wasn't known before.

> Science is not the word of God

No, and that's a good thing. Scientific progress depends on revising knowledge as more facts accumulate and point in different directions. Until there's enough information to illuminate things well, there are a lot of questions, missteps, etc.

I would want the government, private institutions, and every individual to lean MORE on actual science than they ever have, and to understand its benefits AND limitations, because that is how the world learns and improves.

I think when you take a look at the interaction between science and government throughout history you will largely find “science” has mislead humanity at most steps along the way. Thats not to say it is never useful, just that it is a form of information that should be used by our society with extreme caution.

But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing. With issues like pandemics science is more nessisary because it is a specific and specialzed issue not many people understand well, yet it is directly impacting most of our lives.

But if you look at the Amish people for example, you can live your entire life knowing almost nothing about science live a have a happy, healthy and meaningful existence. Generalizing that example more we can see that successful flourishing human civilizations have existed for all of our history and all of the probably had less than a percent of the scientific knowledge we have today, yet we are suffering from mostly tge same issues: suicide, racism, sadness, disfunctional governments, power struggles, etc.

You say that science is illuminating but I fail to see where science has truly made any part of the human expience more enlightened.

I would say as a first point of enlightenment, medicine. Many afflictions have been eliminated or mitigated.

> But fundamentally I disgree with your opinion that the real world is muddled and confusing.

I was illuminating the difference between the world around us being its complicated, partially unexplored self, and the GP saying that science is muddled and confusing, which it is, but to a lesser degree than the world it is developing from.

> you will largely find “science” has mislead humanity at most steps along the way

Your use of quotes there is the tell... many have purported to "know" "scientific" facts when their beliefs were nothing but beliefs. And most/many have been cast aside as our level of knowledge has progressed. And that is the true progress of science - learning more about the world and changing from guesses about reality to knowledge about reality.

People will always have their agendas and limitations, but the process of learning and understanding always surpasses each individuals' limitations and gives us better understanding. Even if it is "one funeral at a time".

^ This is how civilization will end.

If you disagree, you should at least articulate why.

It also assumes, contrary to gathered data, that immunity lasts more than 3 months. There are now several studies that point to a short-lived immunity after fighting off this virus.

So far, the community of virologists and immunologists are warning that there will be a 2nd wave, possibly a 3rd and 4th wave as well, of this virus. The reasons are manifold and not at-all to do with governmental response.

No matter a government's response this is a novel virus, hey whaddoyaknow that's even what we're calling it, and it acts in manners that other viruses do not. Human bodies react to this virus differently than they do to other viruses.

To claim that governments are to blame is being disingenuous at best, and an outright lie at the worst.

In case anyone reading this is like me and hadn't heard the 3 month immunity window news, here's an Ars article that does a pretty good job summarizing what it is and what it means: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/immunity-to-covid-19...

Trouble is the article misses a very important point: that's just antibody (B-cell mediated) immunity. There is also T-cell immunity, which is harder to quantify so it doesn't get much attention, but we can be quite sure that it plays important role because many people who recovered from COVID don't develop effective neutralising antibodies at all. To recover from a disease like this you have to develop an effective immune response, so if it's not antibodies, it has to be T-cell immunity. Moreover, even for antibody immunity it's not the whole story, because it's normal and expected for antibody count to decline with time — we have memory cells that ensure rapid production of the relevant antibody when the same antigene is presented.

It's basically the case of paying attention to something we can measure just because we can measure it.