Just when I thought my Medium feed was getting shallow, this article pops up.

Between the Wired article and this article, this is a fascinating story. On one hand, we can admire how the science eventually found us a better way to fight this illness. On the other hand, the articles still show far too much "politics" in science, which leads to poor decisions. Those decisions then cascade into distrust for science, which then means less public support for "collective actions."

Scientists are in a tenuous societal position. There really isn't a free market to determine an appropriate salary. Then for every scientist, there is probably at least one other highly educated person who wants to be a scientist but the positions are not there. In other words, scientists can be easily replaced at any time. They kind of to go with the flow to retain their position. That's how we get something like the 5-micron rule, whose origins were lost in research long ago--and no one dared challenge.

Unfortunately, I don't have a solution for this situation. Maybe we should be thankful the opportunity was there to challenged established norms.