Covid-19 mistakes underscore the need for a Science Court

A new book [1] provides chapter and verse for the desperate need [2] for a truly impartial, independent way of assessing the relative merits of mainstream and dissenting views on matters of science, medicine, and public health.

The problem to be alleviated or mediated is that official institutions will invariably take the advice of what happens to be the contemporary majority “scientific” consensus and its spokespeople, the generally recognized experts — even when equally accomplished, distinguished, and expert individuals point to strong evidence that the majority consensus is perhaps wrong, and certainly without adequate evidentiary support.

The maverick experts are routinely dismissed, ignored, suppressed, denigrated, labeled “denialists”, compared to Flat Earth believers [3].

As it stands, there is simply no established way for society to be guided usefully as to the actual evidence, the state of certainty or validity of the various evidentiary claims. The judicial system is part of the official institutions which are at the mercy of the majority “scientific” consensus. Above all, under present circumstances most people never learn even that there is meaningful, scientifically respectable difference of opinion over such matters as masking and distancing to damp an epidemic, or about the causes of climate change, or quite a few other matters on which “everyone knows” things that may be quite wrong — say, what caused extinction of the dinosaurs [3, pp. 97-8]. The general public, the mass media, the social media, the policy makers are so reliant on “official” sources that wrong majority consensus in science can bring disastrous consequences, as with eugenic theory in the 20^th century [2].

Comments In reviews and blurbs of the new book [1] illustrate these points (with emphases added):

“experts became trapped by overconfidence and disdain for their critics, . . . rational discussion was subordinated to political agendas”—Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times columnist

“devastating exploration of social and political groupthink”—Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University

“public health authorities failed to follow the science, lied about conflicts of interest, besmirched the reputations and squelched the views of qualified dissenters, and eroded confidence in their own profession”— Morris P. Fiorina, editor of Who Governs? Emergency Powers in the Time of COVID

“institutional dysfunction in American government. . . . vital lessons . . . circumspection and the valuing of institutional dissent.”— Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University

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[1] Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee, In COVID's Wake: How Our Politics Failed, Princeton University Press, 2025

[2] “Needed: a specifically dedicated SCIENCE Court — Laws (and the legal system) should be compatible with the realities of nature”; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/needed-a-specifically-dedicated-science

[3] Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012