This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, October 24th, 2020.

I'm Keelb Brown.

As infections and hospitalizations increase dramatically in the United States and elsewhere,

what does it really mean to follow the science with respect to COVID-19?

What about the costs and trade-offs we accept along with lockdowns and other restrictions on behavior like education and employment.

Cato's Jeff Singer described some of the policy implications of COVID-19, science notwithstanding.

There is this ongoing fight about herd immunity, about lockdowns, about waiting for a vaccine.

Help us make sense of the recent developments in terms of what the World Health

Organization has said and the responses to it.

Okay, well first I'd like to start by saying we hear a lot of people, particularly

politicians say I follow the science and to me that tells me that they really

don't know what science is because science is really an act of discovery, it's in a constant state of change.

It involves differing opinions, different interpretations of the data.

In my science of medicine, I can go to a medical conference and we can discuss a complicated health situation, a complicated case.

And you could have a panel of five outstanding highly regarded really knowledgeable

scientists having five different opinions about what to do with that.

And so follow the science to a lot of politicians, I think, in this political era really

means follow the scientific opinions of the scientists that I happen to want to follow.

Because you could come up with different opinions, you know, on any

side of an argument.

So we hear a lot of people talking about asking, I've been asked, do you believe in herd immunity?

That's like asking me if I believe in gravity.

...