By Anthony Rispo
In 2020, uncertainty was one of the strongest arguments for extraordinary public health intervention. Today, that same uncertainty is used to explain why officials got things wrong. Both claims can be true. But if uncertainty can justify government action, what does government then owe the public about what it does not know?
It’s difficult to appreciate what scientists face during a global pandemic. COVID-19 taught us we are never as ready as we think for the next catastrophe. Research scientists are forced to make inferences when time is short and evidence is incomplete.
Anthony Fauci’s recently released pandemic diary offers a real-time window into how those judgments were made. In March 2020, Fauci urged New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools, a decision that became harder to justify the longer schools remained closed.
People began noticing the difference between official risk assessments and what they saw in their own lives, and they began reasoning from accumulated experience: friends became infected and recovered; families compared outcomes; communities talked about who became seriously ill, who did not, and which precautions seemed worthwhile. At the same time, costs became harder to ignore: missed schooling, lost work, separation from family, and the loss of ordinary social life. These observations became meaningful inputs for layman judgments on danger, risk, and acceptable costs.
A common psychological mechanism called reactance took hold. Reactance is the tendency to resist when people believe their freedom to choose or act is being threatened, as many did when authorities maintained policies out-of-step with changing conditions. Coercion itself becomes an incentive to resist regardless of the underlying objective threat.
Maintaining broad restrictions therefore required more than repeating that the virus was dangerous. Authorities had to show that the intervention itself still made sense under changing conditions. But what happens when resistance is treated mainly as evidence of public ignorance?
Reactance is most salient when institutions interpret resistance as a sign of ignorance. If disagreement is assumed to come from “misinformation,” the natural response is to correct, suppress, or limit the reach of information judged to be false. But this collapses two very different disagreements into one. An objectively false claim is different from crafting a policy based on uncertain evidence or rejecting the social costs of that policy.
This leads to two distinct types of paternalism. The first prohibits action because authorities judge the risk unacceptable. The second manages what people may hear, question, or debate because authorities fear what they might do with that information. The problem begins when the goal shifts from explaining uncertainty to managing how the public responds to it. By trying to preserve confidence and compliance, authorities inadvertently deepen the distrust they were trying to prevent.
But uncertainty did not always cut against public health officials.
While school closures became harder to justify, COVID vaccination for pregnant women moved in the opposite direction. Miscarriage is already relatively common early in pregnancy, and COVID poses greater risks to pregnant women. Officials therefore had a reasonable basis to recommend vaccination even before extensive pregnancy specific data were available. In that case, acting before every question was answered was a risk benefit judgment that later evidence largely supported.
As vaccination expanded, reports of miscarriages after vaccination naturally drew attention. An early CDC study then became the center of a controversy over its denominator. Critics produced the striking claim that roughly 82 percent of women had miscarried, but that calculation counted only pregnancies that had already reached an outcome and excluded many that were still ongoing. Once those women could be followed properly, the estimated miscarriage rate fell within the expected background range. Later studies, including much larger datasets, likewise found no increased miscarriage risk among vaccinated women.
The recently released Fauci texts added fuel to the controversy because Fauci privately raised a concern about fever and immune activation during early pregnancy. But he also weighed that possibility against the known risks of COVID and noted that thousands of pregnant women had already been vaccinated without an apparent safety signal. The texts are therefore less a smoking gun than an example of appropriate scientific reasoning through uncertainty in real time.
Scientific humility has to work in both directions. It cannot mean treating every government recommendation with suspicion, any more than trusting science can mean treating every public health judgment as equally settled. Sometimes new evidence strengthens the case for an intervention, as it did with vaccination during pregnancy. Sometimes it weakens the case for continuing one, as with school closures. The obligation is the same in either direction: allow the evidence to change the level of confidence, and allow that change in confidence to alter the policy.
Public health officials will sometimes have to act before certainty is possible; that is unavoidable. But authorities should be able to say what they know, what they don’t, why they recommend action and the costs it will entail. A government that fails to update the public as evidence changes simply acts as a scolding nanny – and the public will never react kindly.
Anthony Rispo is a writer and independent researcher focused on social cognition, sociopolitical behavior, and the psychological processes shaping belief, identity, and civic life. He is a Columbia University psychology graduate and a Young Voices contributor
