COVID-19 Confusion: The Public Mis-understanding of Science

By Muthukumar Elangovan

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. — Isaac Asimov

COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus culprit behind the current pandemic, has so far killed around five million people and affected hundreds of millions more all over the world. The pace at which science made vaccines possible for the virus is unprecedented. Given the fact that vaccines generally take years to get approved, the first vaccine for COVID-19 took less than a year. Although this is the first time that an mRNA vaccine has been approved for human use, the mRNA vaccine technology itself was being tested for many years to prevent other viruses. Amidst the current pandemic and huge global vaccination drive, discrediting science and scientists thrives, and social media very often facilitates the spreading of false or misleading information.

The public understanding of science and how it works is important in general and is particularly relevant in the context of the current pandemic. However, decades of discrediting science on a range of major issues from climate change and child vaccines to GM foods have created negative effects in the minds of the public. A major part of the mistrust of science is that the public is never involved with scientific methods and applications in solving or understanding scientific problems. For example, part of our team headed by Prof. Jun Young-soo (director of the Cell Logistics Research Center at GIST) studies how SARS-CoV-2 makes numerous tiny packets to produce copies of itself in those packets using host cellular machinery. In the lab, we make a hypothesis, and we test our hypothesis using scientific methods. Many times, our observations turn out to be contradictory to our initial hypothesis. Following this, we accept that our initial hypothesis was wrong (scientists are usually humble when they are wrong!) and test a new hypothesis based on our previous observations. If our observations are supportive of our hypothesis, we use different scientific methods to verify our observations before we publish our data. Hence, testing hypotheses, failures, errors, and changing methodologies are a part of the scientific process.

Now consider this: For nearly 1,500 years, Ptolemy’s view that Earth was at the center of the universe was widely believed until Nicolaus Copernicus in 1515 proposed the model that Earth, like Venus or Saturn, circled the Sun. Though the Copernican model was closer to reality, it was still far from perfect, as he incorrectly assumed the orbits of planets were circular. In 1605, Johannes Kepler, using Tycho’s data, announced that planets moved in ellipses with the Sun at one focal point. Galileo Galilei in 1610 made critical observations that demonstrated that Copernican’s “sun-centric” model was basically correct but not the part about circular orbits of the planets. The point is that science is a never-ending process of gathering data, testing the theory, and comparing it with existing theories either to confirm or correct it. Now imagine if centuries of science about planetary motion from Ptolemy’s era to the 17th century were squeezed into one or two years – then the public would be more likely to see the errors of science rather than how it is corrected, which is exactly what is happening now with science germane to COVID-19. Science is usually provided to the public through second- or third-hand information, hence, the level of transparency and the amount of information from the current COVID-19 research pave a way to label science as dubious. Probably because this is the first time the public has been able to watch science unfold, they see the errors and changing of hypotheses in real-time, whereas before people always used to see the end products.

The progress of science is built on failures, whether it is a space mission or understanding a virus, and it is the only tool in our possession to satisfy our thirst for knowledge. For example, when scientists change their stance on the importance of vaccine booster shots (or any of their previous claims), the public must realize that science now has more data that support the new claim. If society starts to understand and appreciate science, we will be more fascinated to see the intricacies of nature and the fact that we are all living on a small planet going around an average star, which itself is one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. What is more, we should remember that science has helped us to see even farther to appreciate the awe-inspiring fact that our galaxy is just one of two hundred billion galaxies!

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which are useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth. — Jules Verne

The Author
Muthukumar Elangovan is a molecular biologist at the Gwangju Insitute of Science and Technology (GIST). He’s a naturalist, loves reading non-fiction books, and writes poetry, short stories, and other topics in his blog.
Email: pentomuthu@gmail.com