The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recently revised its childhood immunization recommendations, reducing the number of recommended immunizations for all children from 17 down to 11, which is more in line with much of Europe.
I’m not here to say whether that was a good or bad idea, but I did find Gov. Whitmer’s reaction to the change fascinating. On X, she wrote: “Despite federal changes to the vaccine schedule, Michigan will continue trusting the experts and providing opportunities for Michiganders to keep their families safe. Immunizations will remain available because in Michigan we put science before politics.”
In the replies, people were critical of Whitmer for implying that the federal government was trying to make those vaccines removed from the vaccine schedule unavailable, which isn’t the case at all (in fact the CDC fact sheet specifically says that all the vaccines that had formerly been recommended “will still be available to anyone who wants them”). But that isn’t what I found noteworthy about her comment.
More fascinating was her implication that officials at the CDC are apparently no longer the experts! Contradicting guidance from the CDC is exactly the sort of thing that might have gotten your social media account banned during Covid. CDC experts were the gold standard, the definition of expertise, the ideal of “correct information.”
Should we now ban Whitmer’s X account for promoting misinformation? Or perhaps we should just acknowledge that free speech is always a sound policy, and that disagreement with state officials is permissible.
Furthermore, the members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee obviously qualify as experts, you can peruse the roster here if you’d like (everyone an MD or PhD in a relevant field). But to modern Democrats, an “expert” is someone who is properly credentialed and who promotes the positions presently desired by the party.
If you promote any other position, no matter how excellent your education, no matter how storied your history, you no longer count as “expert.”
Why not? Because, for modern progressives, the scientific expert is a sort of infallible priest whose judgments must not be questioned. Whitmer could have said, “The experts at the CDC are wrong in this case, so we are trusting our experts in-state instead.” Experts disagree with each other all the time and are wrong all the time (just about every modern consensus scientific paradigm was once a minority view that overcame opposition from the expert majority).
But Whitmer can’t say that, because her worldview needs scientific experts to be an infallible priestly class that doesn’t make mistakes. So what she has to do instead is, absurdly, claim that the highly credentialed people who shrunk the list of vaccine recommendations are not experts.
She also concludes with a claim that “we put science before politics.” The Democratic Party never actually puts science before politics; never. It does, however, frequently deploy “science” as something like a word of magical incantation. I hope this tactic is now reaching its expiration date. That isn’t how science works. Twentieth century physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk to the National Science Teachers Association in 1966 that is worth reading in full, but I’ll close by quoting one small section:
“As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
“When someone says, ‘Science teaches such and such,’ he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you might ask, ‘How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’
“It should not be ‘science has shown’ but ‘this experiment, this effect, has shown.’ And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.”
You hear Feynman’s appreciation of skepticism and his concern for precision in that statement. “Science” doesn’t say such-and-such, but some experiment may produce data that suggests a certain conclusion. And, once properly informed, you also have the right to judge those conclusions.
David Shane is a physicist who resides in East Lansing.
