It’s not just on Ebola that good science must prevail

Nay-sayers are all too quick to decry scientific findings if they don’t agree with their own cracked views

Kaci Hickox, an American nurse who treated Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, and then defied a quarantine order after returning home to Maine. Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP

Nick Cohen

Kaci Hickox embodies all the American values conservatives say they admire. She’s tough – you don’t volunteer to leave New England to stem the spread of Ebola in Sierra Leone unless you have courage. She’s a rugged individualist, filled with the pioneering spirit, who makes her own way, without waiting for the say-so of “big government”. No tax-dollar funded politician or bureaucrat is going to lock her up in the land of the free.

She knows, as every doctor knows, that Ebola is only transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids of a “symptomatic” person – that is a carrier who has developed or gone beyond the early symptoms offevers and fatigue. Hickox has no symptoms and sees no reason to undergo house arrest to please an over-mighty state.

You’d have thought that American Republicans would applaud her. Instead, they want “big government” to bring her into line. The right-wing media negates their own selfish philosophy and condemn her as “self-centred, self-entitled”. Paul LePage, Maine’s loud-mouthed, know-nothing blubberball of a governor, threatens to place her under effective house arrest.

There’s an election on, as you may have guessed. About 80% of Americans believe, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that US citizens returning from West Africa should be quarantined. Paranoia is running riot. Parents in Oklahoma demanded that the authorities quarantine a teacher who went to Rwanda, which is nowhere near West Africa. A Connecticut school banned a child because she went to Nigeria, which has been declared free of the virus.

Most seriously, Louisiana politicians have wrecked a conference on tropical diseases due to begin today in New Orleans. Its embarrassed organisers told those doctors who have been to West Africa within the past 21 days – that is, those doctors who are most likely to know what should be done – to stay away or be quarantined. “We see no utility in you travelling to New Orleans to simply be confined to your room,” their sheepish email read.

Assorted wackos from religious apologists to postmodern relativists rage against the oppressive ideology of “scientism”. They say its arrogant disciples insist that only truths that stand the test of the scientific method can be believed. They force their doctrines, which cranks always insist are no more “true” than the doctrines of alternative health/religion/intelligent design/Holocaust denial (delete where applicable) on the rest of society, allowing no dissent. One only has to look at the Ebola panic to see the falsity of the myth of the imperial scientist. It cannot restrain a hysterical public and the seedy politicians who egg them on. Neither cares that if Ebola is to be stopped thousands more men and women with the courage of Hickox must go to West Africa, and they may well be deterred if puffed-up demagogues boom they are selfish rather than selfless and try to lock them up to placate popular prejudice.

Ah, I hear you say, the hysterics in question are American hysterics, from a land famed for its stupidity. The patriot in me would like to believe the British will behave better after our first Ebola death. But, let’s face it, many among us will not. Ukip knows as well as the Tea Party the electoral advantages of noisily proclaimed ignorance. I do not expect it to welcome home men and women who have been trying to save the lives of black Africans, nor after his pathetic capitulation to the far right do I expect David Cameron to make a stand.

Perhaps he will prove me wrong, but as of last week we have a debased prime minister who would rather leave refugees to drown in the Mediterranean than challenge extremists. His record on fighting irrational prejudice is just as dismal as his record on immigration. Older readers will remember that Cameron once presented himself as a moderate, modern conservative. When he fought for the leadership, hecalled for “alternative ways, including the possibility of legalisation and regulation, to tackle the global drugs dilemma”. A decade on, he still knows the alternatives work. He still knows prohibition feeds organised crime. Someone must have told him that Portugal saw a 50% drop in drug addiction after it decriminalised drug use. And his own Home Office certainly told him that harsh punishments have no effect

But the British prime minister is such a fool that he ignores evidence that inconveniences him and such a coward he condemns liberals for advocating the policies he once advocated in the vain hope of placating a right that will always hate him. We should show a little humility before we allow ourselves to feel superior to “stupid” America.

Amid all the bombast of last week, the scientific journal Nature and the campaign group Sense About Science awarded the annual John Maddox prize to writers who challenge superstition. The joint winners confronted beliefs that are as prevalent in Britain as America: that vaccination causes autism, that homeopathic medicines work, that manmade climate change does not exist and that adding fluoride to the water supply is a threat to health. (I didn’t know it until the prize jury told me but Sinn Féin is leading a vigorous anti-fluoride campaign in Dublin – well, I suppose it’s progress for the IRA to go from blowing off peoples’ heads to merely rotting their teeth.)

David Robert Grimes, one of the winners, said that, contrary to the myth of the scientific bully, most of his colleagues wanted to keep out of public debate, presumably because they did not wish to receive the threats of violence fanatics and quacks have directed at him. If we are to improve public policy in areas as diverse as the fight against Ebola to the treatment of drug addicts, they need to be a braver, and more willing to tell the public, which so often funds their research, what they have learned.

Grimes makes a useful distinction. Most people just want more information and scientists should be prepared to make their case clearly and concisely. Then there are the rest – Ukip, the Tea Party, governors of Maine, Sinn Féin, David Cameron, climate change deniers – who will block out any evidence that contradicts their beliefs. They confirm the truth of Paul Simon’s line: “All lies and jest, still the man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

They can’t be convinced. They just have to be fought.