I encourage great caution in getting over enthused about Sue Saw’s (“Question all levels of government on the pandemic,” March 11) letter regarding the pandemic, and the reinforcement of Dr. [Tom] DeMarco’s a week later [“We need herd immunity against brainwashing politicians”].
Both fail to meet the mark of clear analysis, even though the latter at least acknowledges that we have other crises to deal with.
Saw’s notion that we have “thousands of esteemed multidisciplinary scientific opinions” reveals a trap we must all get more conscious of. The acceptance that personal opinion is—in some way—as important as analysis by those trained in a difficult discipline gets us in trouble at every juncture. Indeed, to return to DeMarco’s letter, we are “playing Russian roulette” with such issues as climate stability precisely because we have come through, or are in, an era where everyone’s opinion is taken as valid as any others. Science is not political, history is full of examples where opinion trumped clear analysis, and each time humanity lost.
I doubt if there is even a handful of people in our corridor who can even understand the mathematics necessary to predict the outcomes of a pandemic, and not many more that understand that statistics indicate that Dr. DeMarco has “not lost a single patient to the disease” is irrelevant.
I think we are fortunate to have had some clear science—perhaps delivered too kindly—by [Provincial Health Officer] Dr. [Bonnie] Henry, and if we were to make comparisons to what happens in Alberta or south of the border, the politicians here have been neither “brainwashing” nor “fear-mongering.”
Al Whitney // Whistler
