There is such a thing as being unnecessarily and overly cautious, however. This sure seems like a good example of that.

Exactly. Precaution comes at a price. The question is whether the benefits of the precaution outweigh the costs. And that is an answer science cannot, and should not, answer. These days, it seems, many scientists are desperate to cloak their policy preferences in "science." That is precisely why there is presently so much distrust of scientists.

I never understood distrust, because scientists base their work on research that is extensively cited. Making conclusions that are not supported by evidence, e.g. "desperately cloaking" policy preferences, could jeopardize one's scientific career.

Many people seem to unrealistically demand scientific recommendations to be "guarantees." However, scientific conclusions are very precisely made best guesses, built on humanity's knowledge.

> I never understood distrust, because scientists base their work on research that is extensively cited.

It's good that the supply chain of science is traceable, but it doesn't guarantee truth by any means. Their are many non-scientific human endeavors that have traceability, take software development for instance.

I think the distrust comes from many fields having fairly obvious political trends, in particular social sciences. Another source of distrust is overextrapolation of science by authorities. For instance, science might say that certain drugs are harmful if abused, and politicians may use that to claim the war on drugs is based on science, which obviously is not true. Lastly, some fields struggle producing consistent and falsifiable results, such as economics and psychology.

The replication rate of Economics as a field is higher than replication rates for psychology, cancer research, pharmaceutical research, and many other fields. When was the last time you opened an econ journal?

0.1% of studies in the econ field are replication studies.

58% (quite high, higher than a lot of biology related field) are positive replications.

But! some of those use the same datasets, with different time bases, and most are narrow replication of high impact studies.

Also, economics now is not a singular field, and I'd bet gp was talking about macroeconomics. You could be more charitable.

Choosing the level of safety we enforce in society is inherently political.

There was a comment I saw the other day along the lines of "Science will tell you what the numbers are, but doesn't make a judgement of how big that number should be."

You can get a pretty good estimate of how many lives would be saved if we smoked less, or drank less, or did any number of other things, but ultimately that's an input into a public policy decision making system that doesn't have a provably right answer unless everyone involved agrees on what the desired outcome is.

Nobody is enforcing anything, either in the parent or the OP, so don't panic. Your comment seems inflammatory and irrelevant in this context, but I'm sure that's not your intent. You'll be ok, don't worry.

Safety becomes politics once acting in "unsafe" ways becomes illegal.