The trouble with appeals to science is that anyone can make empirical observations. Like if you can still smell VOC's through a mask (e.g. farts), that is empi

The trouble with appeals to science is that anyone can make empirical observations. Like if you can still smell VOC's through a mask (e.g. farts), that is empirical data to cast some doubt about their efficacy against airborne droplets, and about how much economic harm or social restriction you're going to tolerate based on that. If you make these policies about science instead of authority, it's just another lie with a short half-life, and you're going to lose when it comes out. Trusting science on the mask and lockdown policy issue means rejecting the official policy direction. On mRNA therapies it means examining FDA approval and human trial results. Trusting science on curve flattening means rejecting that Ferguson epidemiological model used to justify lockdowns. So-called science should inform policy, but it is not a sound justification for it. To say that your political policies have the authority of "science," as though they were discovered truths is as sound as saying they were divinely revealed, because it comes down to trusting the people who are telling you that. A scientific policy is also necessarily not a democratic one, or one based in any policymaker accountability, because it is founded in the views of a few unaccountable initiates. When elected representatives forfeit their responsibility to un-elected experts and just do what they are told, they are renouncing their authority and giving it to people who don't get fired (or worse) for being wrong. The conflict is that policymakers have basically asked "what is the exception we can use to suspend all these legal constraints on us so that we can wield power to do what we think is the right thing for humanity?" and they have settled on a medical crisis. If only pandemic policy were based on science, we would be in much better shape, but it's based on leaders avoiding responsibility and blaming "science" for their unwillingness to produce democratic policy that preserves the foundations of their societies, arguably, because their agenda is to destabilize and un-moor them.