Science to the rescue -- an elaboration

In my previous post on the testing of certain drugs as possible treatments for covid-19, I said:

Ignore what the politicians and political commentators say about this.  That's just background noise.  If there is to be any chance of mitigating the disaster now looming over the world, it is science, and only science, that will provide it.

This could use some elaboration to make the point clearer.

It's not just that most politicians and political commentators are completely unqualified to evaluate a scientific hypothesis, such as the potential of a medical treatment which is still undergoing testing.  The more important point is that they tend to slant whatever they are discussing to make it fit whatever their preferred narrative is.  This tendency is not confined to those on the right.  If Trump describes something as a hopeful development, for example, there is a tendency of commentators on the left to try to downplay and discredit it, because that fits their preferred narrative that Trump is usually wrong.  Now, Trump is usually wrong, but he's also the supreme example of a person who is unqualified to evaluate a scientific hypothesis.  His assertions about the potential efficacy of an untested medical treatment simply tell us nothing about it, one way or the other.

Science is unique among human strategies for analyzing reality in that it assumes that all humans, specifically including scientists, have biases which can distort their interpretation of their data.  Because of this assumption, it includes rigorous methods for filtering such biases out of its analyses.  The double-blinded controlled experiment (of which clinical trials for new medical treatments are an example) is probably the most effective such filtering method possible.  Repeatability -- the requirement that an experiment must be described in enough detail that other scientists can independently run a similar experiment and see whether they get the same results -- is another.

It is this diligence in filtering out human bias that has enabled science, and only science, to give us a rigorously accurate picture of reality, including accurate knowledge of which treatments for illness are effective and which are not -- unlike religion, folk wisdom, anecdotes, ideology, tradition, and what have you.

At this point, we do not know whether losartan or hydroxychloroquine will prove effective against covid-19.  There's some evidence that losartan blocks the process by which the virus attaches itself to cells and attacks them -- but we don't know yet whether this will actually work inside living humans to protect them from infection.  In testing in France, 75% of patients given hydroxychloroquine became virus-free after a few days -- but the tests were not double-blinded and the number of test subjects was too small to be conclusive.  Only by rigorous clinical trials can we find out for sure.

It doesn't matter what Trump says about these drugs, and it doesn't matter what other politicians and pundits say about them.  The only thing that matters is the outcome of the clinical trials.

That's what I mean when I say that if there is any hope of beating covid-19, only science can provide it.  Because only the process and methods of science can give us the truth about what works and what does not.