This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 2nd, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Even if we knew all of the risks associated with COVID-19, we don't,

science still wouldn't be able to tell us exactly how to behave.

Peter Van Doren, editor of Regulation magazine, argues in his new pandemics and policy

essay that public health officials should be totally clear in communicating what they know,

but also understand that science alone is not a replacement for individual decisions.

Your headline recommendation is for public, your head, all your recommendations are for public health officials,

but your headline recommendation for public health officials is that they should communicate and presumably honestly

that policy decisions by their very nature cannot be made solely on the

basis of scientific evidence they will always involve normative questions

and trade-offs of values.

So how do you write that into a regulation or a rule?

Don't know, can't.

I mean the problem is endogenously, the sorts of people that become public health officials like to tell people what to do.

I mean it's not, it's in the DNA of those who seek that role and I get that which is they have a value which is saving lives and all other things should give way.

And it turns out society is always,

it's full of people, all of whom have different values,

all of whom want other sets of values to give way and then we meet in the public square and have it out and that's often called political conflict and I mean this is it I'm amazed by the people who read the stuff I've written on science over the years

who find what I say that they've never heard of this before and yet in some sense it's what all

basic science classes should at least and did for me teach me about what science could and couldn't do but many people

seem to forget it along the way and and that's what the essay is about.

...