Why can’t public policy be based entirely on science?

One of the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic is how ill-prepared we were to deal with a crisis of this scale.

Naturally, politicians have promised to develop better strategies for the future, but so far these promises have not been realized.

Perhaps surprisingly, one exception comes from the province of Alberta. In January, the United Conservative Party (UCP) government established a blue ribbon panel of experts, chaired by Reform Party founder Preston Manning, to examine whether “lessons can be learned from Canada’s response to Covid-19 that will better prepare us” to advise cope with future crises in society.

As the UCP has since been re-elected and the Manning Commission is expected to release its final report soon, the government is likely to take its findings seriously.

A deeper look

Cynics may predict that Manning, as a lifelong conservative, will produce a report that will be nothing more than a justification of the UCP’s actions during the pandemic. But an early leak from the committee suggests it may need to take a deeper look at the way such policies are constructed.

This leak revealed that when Albertans were asked to suggest how the government should handle future health crises, they expressed strong support for increased reliance on medical and scientific knowledge and reduced dependence on the opinions of politicians.

These answers challenge the commission to engage in a debate that political scientists and economists have long engaged in: Can science tell us what the best public policies are? And the committee will likely soon discover that the answer is no.

The reason for this can be found in the area of ​​economics called public choice theory. He argues that any public policy decision can be divided into two components – factual and psychological – and states that science has little to say about the latter.

In the case of Covid-19, factual elements include information about how the disease is transmitted, its impact on those infected, and the impact of masks and vaccinations on infection rates.

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Read more: Lessons from COVID-19 for the next pandemic: We need better data on virus transmission in the workplace

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Psychological elements include social perceptions of harm from infection, willingness to accept risks of illness and death, and the cost of accepting restrictions on personal freedom.

The importance of this distinction is that while reliable, scientific information is often available about the actual elements of policy, the same cannot be said about the psychological elements.

How to measure emotional costs?

For example, while there is scientific evidence about how diseases are transmitted and the effectiveness of various treatments, there are no reliable methods to measure the emotional cost of a COVID-19 attack, the value of lives lost to the disease, or the impact on people when public health policies restrict personal freedoms.

In such cases, scientific knowledge can be helpful in determining the options available to society, but it cannot determine which of these options is necessarily best for different people in different circumstances.

For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, governments had to decide which groups would receive missing vaccines first. Seniors instead of young adults? Health care workers instead of police, teachers or supermarket workers?

“Science” had no answers to these questions that require value judgments. Instead, politicians were forced to make decisions based on social and psychological factors, neither of which could be actually measured.

Similarly, science has provided little psychological help for parents when deciding whether they should vaccinate their children against Covid-19. Medical experts could only say that vaccinations had both costs – albeit minimal ones – and benefits. It was then up to parents to compare the costs and benefits.

Low vaccination rate among children

In Alberta, a majority of parents decided that the psychological costs of vaccinations outweighed the evidence-based benefits measured by scientists. By April 2023, just 9.7% of parents of children aged one to four years had chosen to give their children at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, compared with over 80% of all other age groups.

This suggests that the Manning committee is unlikely to recommend that public policy be based solely on scientific evidence. Because science has no way of measuring psychological costs and benefits, it cannot answer questions such as: What level of quarantine will society accept in exchange for reducing health risks? How can the lives of seniors compare with those of frontline workers?

The only way the commission can meaningfully contribute to the debate on how public policy should be made is by directly tackling the question of how the psychological effects of policy can be measured.

This article was republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. If you find this interesting, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Written by: Christopher Bruce, University of Calgary.

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Christopher Bruce does not work for, consult with, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond his academic position.