The government’s advice often turns out to be wrong. That is an added argument for not giving the government the power to enforce its advice through mandatory regulations. (“Added” to the fundamental argument based the right to free choice.)
[In May 2021 Nicholas Wade, the author of the review quoted below, showed enormous courage in being one of the first few to risk cancelation by presenting a cogent case that Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab.]
(p. C9) Rachel Carson rightly complained in “Silent Spring” that farmers were sloshing far too many harmful pesticides into the environment. But she took aim at the wrong one. DDT, a mild and enormously effective pesticide, helped rid the United States of malaria and its benefits, if more discriminately pursued, could have outweighed its costs.
The overstrict verdict against DDT is an instance of the harms that can ensue when scientific evidence is ignored. This and other cases described by Paul A. Offit in “Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong” raise provocative questions about the reasons that science is misused in modern society.
. . .
Another case of medical advice based on insufficient data is that of dietary fat. As Dr. Offit tells the story, in the 1970s the government advised cutting down on fat consumption. In the 1980s the message changed. Unsaturated fats were good; only saturated fats were bad: Eat margarine, not butter. But then it turned out that unsaturated fats came in two forms, known to chemists as “cis” and “trans,” and that “trans fats” were appallingly active promoters of heart disease. Margarine and hydrogenated vegetable cooking oils, whose use had been encouraged, were rich in trans fats. After 40 years of seriously incorrect advice, trans fats were mostly eliminated from the American diet only in 2012.
. . .
Besides his overconfidence in the checking mechanisms of science, Dr. Offit goes too easy on the motives of those who abuse science. Environmentalists, for instance, are interested in achieving political results, not in distracting scientific caveats and uncertainties, which they do their best to suppress. It is their propensity to take everything to excess that leads to obscurantist positions, such as irrational fear of genetically modified crops.
For the full review see:
Nicholas Wade. “A Little Knowledge.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 8, 2017 [sic]): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review was updated April 7, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)
The book under review is:
Offit, Paul A. Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2017.