The Best and the Brightest

....public health officials

The science is settled!

“Trust the experts — not the Internet.” So says this gloriously Soviet video from the Washington State Department of Health.

The current discourse about absolute, certain, unquestionable, unilateral and uniform expertise – the experts all say X, the Internet says Not X, and there are no experts on the Internet, ‘cause experts do not say Not X – is a sign of an American culture adrift from American history. We know in our bones, or knew in our bones until about March of 2020, that “experts” can be inexpert, willfully obtuse, and self-interested, and we’ve spent centuries paying full price for that knowledge. But one comparison leaps out at me every day, lately, in an endless string of echoes.

The journalist David Halberstam gave his now-famous book about the Vietnam War an ironic title: The Best and the Brightest. The title reflected the self-confident air of brilliance that wafted from — that was calculatedly wafted by — the highly credentialed government elites who ran that war. Ivy Leaguers, WASPs from old families, top men. The Power Elite, fully initiated. Chief among them was the Harvard Professor and Ford Motor Company executive Robert McNamara, a man of sterling academic credentials, who eventually left his post as secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to become president of the World Bank. McNamara was a centralizer and a systems man, pulling authority to his own office and guiding policy with data. He saw like a state, hard and often.

In academia and in journalism, a cottage industry has grown around the endless richness of the topic of Cold War expertise, in Vietnam and outside of it. One story in that literature is told over and over again, and only the names and places change.

Here’s one version, as DOD-hired anthropologists sent to Vietnam on a research trip reported their highly negative observations regarding the military’s Strategic Hamlet Program, an effort to control Vietnamese villages and deny their support to the Viet Cong. As the anthropologists Gerald Hickey and John Donnell delivered their critical findings at the Pentagon, the high-ranking official receiving their briefing “swung his heavy chair around and looked out the window, leaving us to talk to the back of his chair.” Then the DOD hired new experts to tell them that the Strategic Hamlet Program was working brilliantly. The experts said policy wasn’t working, so the government hired different experts to tell them that policy was working.

Trust the experts, listen to science — but for crying out loud don’t pay attention to the Great Barrington Declaration, which was signed by many of the world’s most distinguished epidemiologists. Wrong experts! Disregard!

Halberstam opens The Best and the Brightest with the same story about Vietnam expertise in another setting, describing a dinner in Saigon with US Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. Asked for his opinion on the war, Halberstam told Bunker that the US was winning the battles but losing the political conflict; he concluded that “the war was essentially a stalemate — but a stalemate which favored the other side, since eventually we would have to go home.” Bunker replied dismissively; he had, he said, “spoken with his generals — he named several of them — all fine men, and they had assured him that, contrary to what I said, everything was on schedule and there was an inevitability to the victory we sought.” Halberstam had that discussion in offices all over Saigon, and found it totally disconnected from the discussions he was having elsewhere in Vietnam:

It was the same old false optimism I had first witnessed there five years earlier as a young reporter for the Times, when the stakes were so much smaller. It reflected once again the immense difference between what people in the field thought was happening and what people in the Saigon command, responding to intense political pressure from Washington, wanted to think was happening.

Our data-driven COVID war, in which we listen to the experts but aggressively silence the wrong experts, is our public health Vietnam. It reflects what politicians wish to happen in the field of science, as when a governor orders that every child receive a COVID vaccine in order to attend school, but adds that the mandate will take effect after the FDA approves the vaccines for children. The political decree precedes the expert determination, but the political decree is dressed up in a demand that you trust science and listen to the experts — who have not yet approved the thing that the politician orders you to do.

Similarly, and incredibly, the Biden administration announces that it has bought 65 million doses of COVID vaccine for young children — which the administration will distribute as soon as the FDA approves the use of the thing that has already been bought. Apparently the science is settled, and it’s settled in the future. Imagine being FDA staff and knowing you’re being asked to consider the approval or disapproval of a product that your bosses have already bought by the tens of millions. What science are you trusting when you trust this?

This is why the director and deputy director of the FDA’s office that approves vaccines have resigned in protest, and it’s why they’re among the signatories of an open letter published in a British medical journal warning that the approval process for COVID vaccine boosters has been politicized. If you trust the experts, these are the experts.

Wishcasting isn’t science. Anthony Fauci is our Robert McNamara, Joe Biden is our Lyndon Johnson, and I make that comparison with apologies to Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson. It’s 1967, and the war is as good as won. The experts say so.