Nice to see a typically long LRB review of Latour’s last two books, but Harding makes a bit of a blunder here, perhaps due to his not having been party to decades of STS discourse:

There was a hint in We Have Never Been Modern that science found it hard to converse with the rest of society. If so, whose fault was that? Not Latour’s, surely: he had tried to make the procedures of the hard sciences intelligible to scientists themselves and to the rest of us, though he worried that he could have done more to stand up for the accuracy of scientific facts (he had been misread too often as a science sceptic). But you couldn’t blame science either. Thirty years on from We Have Never Been Modern, Latour and the ‘scientific community’ were faced with an onslaught of social media tribes who saw Covid vaccines – and immunology in general – as experiments at their expense. Climate change denial prepared the ground for this.

Actually you could blame science, and probably should. Latour had too much respect for the subjects of his anthropological investigations to point the finger quite so sternly as perhaps he should have… though if I recall the early chapters of Facing Gaia correctly, he makes the point fairly plainly that the refusal of scientists to acknowledge the political nature of their work was perhaps the most crucial enabler of climate denial attacks. Other researchers in STS, not quite so kindly as Oncle Bruno, have also noted that the no-politics-in-science pose was cemented and strengthened by the willingness of science during the latter half of the C20th to act as a supposedly objective and neutral external endorser of distinctly political policy decisions, for which it was amply rewarded with grants and prestige. Indeed, it was only when climate science started producing results which conflicted with policy decisions already committed to—e.g. continued fossil fuel exploitation—that things started to get fractious.

So it is not at all right to say that “climate change denial prepared the ground” for vaccine resistance; one might say that climate denial provides precedent for it, but what “prepared the ground” in both cases was a stubborn reliance—in the face of contrary evidence now decades old, predating both of these controversies—on the information deficit model* of science communication, and a refusal to admit that scientific truths are highly labile things, especially during unfolding crises characterised by blizzards of new evidence colliding with the glacially slow process of academic knowledge production.

To observe that communication regarding Covid was for the most part terribly handled is almost banal by this point, whether one is talking about governmental or scientific channels—though the extent to which those two channels were in many cases quite purposefully positioned as to be inseparable, and as such shoddily papering over both the very real uncertainties on the scientific side and the unspoken econo-political priorities on the governmental side, makes the distinction almost moot.

Which is to say, again, that it’s not at all that climate denial laid a road for vaccine hesitancy, but rather that the harnessing of science as a vindicating veneer to be laid atop political goals—which, though they might not be able to phrase it using quite those terms, is quite obvious to a large number of ordinary people without any scientific training whatsoever—dug a pit-trap for both science and politics, neither of which adequately learned a lesson from falling into it during the heyday of climate denial, and almost certainly haven’t adequately learned it from Covid either.

[ * — As I remarked to a colleague earlier this week, in an entirely different context: the death-grip clinging of politics to the information deficit model likely has a lot to do with that model being the foundational operational principle of public relations, another field of endeavour whose border with politics has become so fuzzy as to be effectively non-existent by this point. ]