Dr. Ashish Jha says ‘we have to remind people what the scientific process is and how it works with all of its flaws and self-correcting mechanisms.’

The Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, Dr. Ashish Jha, recently appeared on GBH’s Boston Public Radio with Jim Braude and Margery Eagen, where he was asked about the troubling atmosphere of skepticism surrounding science and expertise. Dr. Jha shared his perspective on how doubt in the scientific process has been weaponized and emphasized the importance of re-educating and re-engaging the public to rebuild trust. 

Dr. Ashish Jha: There is no question that there is a lot of questioning of science. By the way. I think questioning of science and questioning of expertise is totally reasonable. What has happened is people have weaponized doubts and the scientific process to go against the scientists. What we do about it, though, is, interesting. Way I have thought about the vaccine stuff. For instance, you know, growing up in the public health world, vaccines were just a given, like it was a tiny proportion that questioned them, and we all knew.

And then, of course, the older generation that saw polio didn’t really question these things. The way I look at it is we’re in a period of time where we have to re educate people about these things again. We have to remind people what the scientific process is and how it works with all of its flaws and all of its self-correcting mechanisms.

We have just gotten to a point where we assume that people are just going to trust us, and when that trust is lost, you have to reengage with people, understand what’s feeling that distrust, and you have to reengage, and you have to educate.”

Jim Braude: Who does the reeducating and re-engagement?

Dr. Ashish Jha: Well, all of us have to, actually, I would say, but certainly those of us in public health, and that begins by learning how to reach across the breadth of the American society. We talked about churches earlier. I, you know, I run a public health school in Rhode Island, pretty blue state, I tell my students, I tell my faculty, we are not training public health leaders to go work in blue states only. We need to have them work in purple states. We need to have them work in red states. We need to train people on how to engage the American people much more broadly.

CS Media Lab

The CS Media Lab is a Boston-anchored civic science news collective with local, national and global coverage on TV, digital print, and radio through CivicSciTV, CivicSciTimes, and CivicSciRadio. Programs include Questions of the Day, Changemakers, QuickTake, Consider This Next, Stories in Science, Sai Resident Collective and more.

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