“This was not a reclamation that involved people like Anthony Fauci,” she went on to say. “It was a reclamation of ordinary Americans, men and women who wanted our nation to excel in science rather than weaponize it.”
Things got a bit strange. Moderators from the MAHA Institute asked questions about whether COVID vaccines could cause cancer and raised the possibility of a lab leak favorably. An audience member asked why alternative treatments aren’t being researched. A speaker who proudly announced that he and his family had never received a COVID vaccine was roundly applauded. Fifteen minutes of the afternoon were devoted to a novelist seeking funding for a satirical film about the pandemic that portrayed Anthony Fauci as an egomaniacal lightweight, vaccines as a sort of placebo, and Bhattacharya as the hero of the story.
The organizers also had some idea of who might give all of this a hostile review, as reporters from Nature and Science said they were denied entry.
In short, this was not an event you’d go to if you were interested in making serious improvements to the scientific method. But that’s exactly how Bhattacharya treated it, spending the afternoon not only justifying the changes he’s made within the NIH but also arguing that we’re in need of a second scientific revolution—and he’s just the guy to bring it about.
Here’s an extensive section of his introduction to the idea:
I want to launch the second scientific revolution.
Why this grandiose vision? The first scientific revolution you have… very broadly speaking, you had high ecclesiastical authority deciding what was true or false on physical, scientific reality. And the first scientific revolution basically took… the truth-making power out of the hands of high ecclesiastical authority for deciding physical truth. We can leave aside spiritual—that is a different thing—physical truth and put it in the hands of people with telescopes. It democratized science fundamentally, it took the hands of power to decide what’s true out of the hands of authority and put it in the hands of ridiculous geniuses and regular people.
The second scientific revolution, then, is very similar. The COVID crisis, if it was anything, was the crisis of high scientific authority geting to decide not just a scientific truth like “plexiglass is going to protect us from COVID” or something, but also essentially spiritual truth. How should we treat our neighbor? Well, we treat our neighbor as a mere biohazzard.
The second scientific revolution, then, is the replication revolution. Rather than using the metrics of how many papers are we publishing as a metric for success, instead, what we’ll look at as a metric for successful scientific idea is ‘do you have an idea where other people [who are] looking at the same idea tend to find the same thing as you?’ It is not just narrow replication of one paper or one idea. It’s a really broad science. It includes, for instance, reproduction. So if two scientists disagree, that often leads to constructive ways forward in science—deciding, well there some new ideas that may come out of that disagreement
That section, which came early in his first talk of the day, hit on themes that would resurface throughout the afternoon: These people are angry about how the pandemic was handled, they’re trying to use that anger to fuel fundamental change in how science is done in the US, and their plan for change has nearly nothing to do with the issues that made them angry in the first place. In view of this, laying everything out for the MAHA crowd actually does make sense. They’re a suddenly powerful political constituency that also wants to see fundamental change in the scientific establishment, and they are completely unbothered by any lack of intellectual coherence.