Doctors, epidemiologists, vaccine specialists… Scientists have taken a prominent place over the past two years in the media, but also in the daily life of the French. The overrepresentation of the word of scientists was expected in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was the occasion for an unprecedented “educational exercise” for these professionals in the medical world, underlines sociologist Michel Dubois.
Director of research at the CNRS, he co-directed a large survey, published last November, on the relationship of the French to science. As France moves towards a new lifting of restrictions against Covid, Michel Dubois returns for L’Express to the effects of the meteoric growth of scientific speech in our daily lives, and deciphers the impact of this incursion of specialists and researchers on mobilization for the climate and ecological transition.
L’Express: Since the beginning of the epidemic, science has imposed itself in an extraordinary way in our lives through epidemiology, questions related to immunity, vaccines and knowledge of the virus. This scientific word has taken up a lot of space in the media, but also in our daily lives… How was it received?
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Michael Dubois: Indeed, scientific speech benefited from very strong public exposure during the epidemic. Compared to the pre-pandemic period, the media coverage of certain disciplines such as epidemiology, infectiology, virology, but also genetics, was multiplied by almost eight, in particular during the first six months of the crisis. It’s spectacular, but ultimately quite logical given the magnitude of the uncertainties.
This scientific discourse has sometimes been chaotic, but it has also been useful in reinforcing the general public’s familiarity with biomedical research, and in particular the methodology of clinical trials. The French and science 2021 survey that I co-directed shows that today 2 out of 3 French people understand the logic of these trials. This result would no doubt have been quite different if the survey had been conducted before the crisis.
More generally, in terms of scientific culture, we must abandon the received idea that the French population is uneducated, disinterested, even hostile to the scientific community. Admittedly, the surveys conducted in France over the past fifty years show that familiarity with scientific culture must be consolidated, but these same surveys also show that interest in science and technology is both high and constant.
Michel Dubois is a sociologist, research director at the CNRS.
DR
We must therefore seize this interest in principle and make the renewal of forms of scientific mediation, as well as the public commitment of scientists, real priorities. With the crisis, some scientists have designed original initiatives in terms of scientific communication. It will be necessary to take stock of this period.
Hasn’t there also been an awareness that science is also subject to debate? What the epidemic has shown us is also that doctors and scientists were not all in agreement with each other. Could this have sometimes shattered the image of science as absolute truth?
Yes, and no doubt this is to be congratulated. After all, it is very rare for scientific research to start from consensus. Scientific consensus is the result of a process that is usually long, collective and controversial. The pandemic was able to act as a revelation for the general public: it made visible, in a very short time, the ability of scientists to oppose, as was the case for example with hydroxycholoroquine, but also to find around a certain number of advances, whether through the sharing of sequenced data, the production and dissemination of epidemiological models or of course the vaccines themselves – a spectacular success of international mobilization.
With hindsight, one of the lessons of this crisis is undoubtedly that scientists must learn to talk about their uncertainties. They must be able to communicate about what they know, but also about what they don’t know. And on that, there are probably a lot of things to improve.
Has there been an evolution in the perception of scientists and in the trust that can be placed in them? We talked a lot about conspiracy, anti-vaccine movements, these movements also criticize science…
The often spectacular nature of these critical mobilizations, overrepresented on social networks, tends to make us forget that for the vast majority of the population, there is no real distrust of science. We asked our respondents to tell us who they trusted “to tell the truth about the coronavirus”: between eight and nine out of ten French people say they trust scientists or doctors. It’s a plebiscite! In particular if we compare to the confidence score obtained for example by journalists or politicians (between three and four French people out of ten only).
On the other hand, what has clearly emerged during the crisis period is the question of scientific expertise and even more of the independence of experts. In France, as elsewhere, the government has chosen to rely on a certain number of committees whose objective was to establish a state of knowledge but also to define recommendations in terms of public action.
I was struck by the speed with which certain journalists but also certain citizens submitted the composition of these committees to the test of the Transparency Health database, a public database which lists the links of interest of health professionals. Even though the general public does not clearly differentiate between a link of interest and a conflict of interest, the fact that some experts are linked to industrial issues, or even claim these links without further explanation, may have fueled suspicion, the idea that there could be a sort of invisible hand — that of “Big Pharma” — which would more or less guide the major orientations of public health in France. All of this can drift towards a more or less strong form of conspiracy which some scientists have unfortunately sometimes chosen to feed in a rather cynical way. It is fortunate that the CNRS has finally taken up this question by creating a mission dedicated to scientific expertise.
The word of scientists on the climate has had, for a long time, little echo in the media, or in the political field, can this health crisis be the opportunity to make things happen?
We can hope so! Faced with the emergency, for some climate specialists the question now is to define the preferred mode of public intervention. We see more and more frequently young researchers, aware of the climate issue, claiming a militant voice, that is to say abandoning the idea of scientific neutrality, of hindsight, and finally, taking on the role of launcher of alert.
To tell the truth, the contrast is striking between, on the one hand, the weight given by the public authorities to the scientific word on Covid-19 and, on the other, the quite measured or relative attention granted to that on the weather. With the pandemic, the expert committees were able to exercise, indirectly and temporarily, an unprecedented social power, in particular during the period of the first confinement, from March to May 2020. A social power that they did not have never been able to perform at the same level, despite considerable efforts, in the event of the climate crisis.
No doubt the temporality specific to the climate crisis plays a role here: even if we perceive more and more clearly its effects on our daily life, there is something slow and insidious in climate change, there where on the contrary the pandemic has made a brutal irruption in our lives.
Does this mean that it is not possible to see a scientific word on the climate have an effect on public policies?
Fortunately, in Europe we are far from what the Trump administration was in the United States and its totally uninhibited relationship to ignorance! If we try to see the glass half full for the future, there are undoubtedly good lessons to be learned from the pandemic. After all, the Covid-19 crisis shows that a massive mobilization of the scientific community, when supported by public authorities, can have effects. It must therefore be made an invitation to action and mobilization.
Do you think it’s easier to get across the need for the vaccine and how it works than methods of reducing our emissions and the impact of emissions on global warming?
No, not necessarily. Our survey shows that seven out of ten French people consider the idea that “climate change is above all a problem of a natural cycle and has nothing to do with human activity” to be false. This is encouraging, and all the more encouraging since the youngest appear to be much more aware of these issues than their elders.
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On the other hand, if there is a principled interest among our respondents for medicine and research on living organisms, they are clearly unfamiliar with the latest advances in molecular biology, genetics or epigenetics, and we have seen that RNA vaccines have raised many questions. In short, there is no shortage of projects for all those interested in the dissemination of scientific culture and from this point of view the surveys devoted to the evolution of the public image of science have an important role to play.
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