A well-known Italian writer in a recent interview, moreover dedicated to his literary works, lets slip a sentence that reveals what is the illusion of part of public opinion about science and scientific research. Referring to the epidemic plague that devastated Europe in the 1300s, she says:
“… And I was also struck by the illusion of science, the fact that it proceeds by trial and error. There was a doctor at the time who understood the causes of the plague and how to isolate the disease: but it was only one voice among a thousand, and it remained unheard. The same happened with us in 2020, when a chorus of conflicting opinions arouse, and everyone had their say. History repeats itself.” (from: Interview to Melania Mazzucco, published on line on www.sololibri.net/intervista-melania-gaia-mazzucco-viaggio-opere-maggiori-scrittrici-italiane-contemporanee.html).”
Let’s leave aside the idea that someone really understood the cause of the plague, which was impossible at the time due to the lack of the necessary technologies needed to document the existence of bacteria (and viruses), observed for the first time around the middle of the seventeenth century by Antoni van Leeuwehoek with a first rudimentary microscope. Certainly, however, even then it was clear that the contagion was transmitted by contact with infected people and basically the idea of isolation was already present in an empirical way, just think of Boccaccio’s Decameron, when a group of young people isolates himself in the countryside to escape the plague.
But let’s come to the most controversial point of the interview, at least in my opinion: scientists make attempts. Well, that’s it. Instead of attempts or guesses, I would call them hypotheses. Science proceeds by hypotheses based on the examination of the available experimental data, and verify these hypotheses, first in the laboratory and then, if this check gives a positive result, on laboratory animals and finally on people.
What Mazzucco complains about the Covid, “everyone had their say”, I guess it’s not about the scientific literature (scientific articles are published in journals after passing a peer review process, so they do not express opinions, but data and their interpretations), but the newspaper and television interviews of scientists and commentators (and the interpretations of these opinions often given by journalists or by newspaper headlines). These opinions are not the responsibility of science, but of individuals. On the other hand, since we do not live in a totalitarian regime, we cannot prevent scientists and non-scientists to express their opinions. Even the flat earth theory has its proponents (amplified by media), but that’s not science’s fault.
Speaking of the fact that nothing has changed since then, let’s get down to the numbers. It is estimated that the Black Death pandemic of the mid-1300s killed between 20 and 25 million people, a third of the Europe population at that time (Wikipedia, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peste_nera). Of course that’s a rough estimate, both in terms of the actual number of victims, and in terms of the actual number of inhabitants in Europe at the time. In any case, one third means about 33% of direct victims of the plague. As for the Covid pandemic, the official figures as of today are estimated as 6.34 million deaths attributed to Covid in the world, which, considering about 8 billion inhabitants, corresponds to 0.079% of victims. Let’s imagine that this number is underestimated, even if the victims were double we would be around 0.15%. And consider in any case that we are not just talking about deaths from Covid, but more generally of elderly people very often affected by other pathologies, where the virus was present. Of course, Covid is much less serious than the plague, but keep in mind that Yersinia pestis is a gram-negative bacterium still existing (sporadic appearances of the bacterium are reported in sub-saharian Africa and Madagascar), but it doesn’t cause any epidemic because in the meantime science has discovered antibiotics (along with many other drugs, and vaccines).
Perhaps the idea that nothing has changed since the fourteenth century is a little excessive.
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