Nothingburgers Put Forward As Science
Really good piece by Tom Mullen at FEE (just as I'm going back through Kuhn for one of my two next books):

On a rare occasion where the largely useless national media confronted Fauci with a question about how Texas could be doing so well four weeks after abandoning all Covid restrictions, he had no answer. "Maybe they're doing more outside," he mused. Then, he went on recommending the same policies as if the question had never been posed.

Fauci wasn't alone. When White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Slavitt was asked why locked down and masked California and restriction-free Florida were having similar results in terms of Covid spread, he began his answer with perhaps the only honest words that have escaped a public health official's mouth: "There is so much of this virus that we think we understand, that we think we can predict, that is just a little bit beyond our explanation." But then, in literally the same breath, he said we do know masking and social distancing work.

Now, you don't have to be a trained journalist for the obvious follow-up question to occur to you: "No, Mr. Slavitt, the question I just posed to you suggests we don't know masking and social distancing work because we are seeing equivalent results in states that are and are not following those policies."

Of course, that follow-up was not put to Slavitt. And you really have to ask yourself why.

The Problem With Blindly Trusting "The Science"
The failure of scientists to be scientific is not a new phenomenon. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) dealt directly with the tendency of scientists to reject evidence that contradicts the prevailing theory or "paradigm."

"Part of the answer, as obvious as it is important," wrote Kuhn, a Harvard educated philosopher of science, "can be discovered by noting first what scientists never do when confronted by even severe and prolonged anomalies. Though they may begin to lose faith and then to consider alternatives, they do not renounce the paradigm that has led them into crisis."

...Kuhn's overall thesis challenged the prevailing understanding at the time that science proceeds in a linear fashion, with new discoveries incrementally adding to the accumulated knowledge that preceded them. Instead, argued Kuhn, science throughout history has featured a series of revolutions, where paradigms like the geocentric theory of the solar system or Newtonian physics collapsed under the weight of "anomalies" (evidence which contradicted the theory) and made way for new paradigms like the heliocentric theory of the solar system and Einsteinian physics.

There is much nuance in Kuhn's argument which his critics have tended to ignore, but one takeaway that we're seeing proved in real time is that these scientific revolutions are only revolutionary because of the tendency for scientists to cling to a theory regardless of evidence that refutes it. Kuhn argues that scientists will not abandon a disproven theory until a new theory is presented that they are convinced explains the evidence better than the old.

This New Normal paradigm can't collapse in the face of anomalies, no matter how numerous they are, because the anomalies are now simply ignored.

What makes the New Normal so strange is that a scientific revolution occurred with no anomalies. It was firmly established by a century of scientific research that suggested nonpharmaceutical interventions weren't effective in combating respiratory viruses. Indeed, Fauci himself initially repeated the established scientific consensus that lockdowns and mask mandates were not effective policy responses. He even discouraged people from voluntarily wearing masks.

Then, he and the rest of the government scientists did a complete about face. There was no new evidence that motivated this. They simply abandoned the prevailing scientific consensus based on a desire to do something - even though the scientific evidence before, during, and after the outbreak of Covid-19 said what they wanted to do wouldn't work. As a result, there is now a New Normal paradigm based on...nothing.