My Take | Scientific expertise is one authority we still need to respect
- Rather than attacking Professor Yuen Kwok-yung, a world authority on coronaviruses, we should be thankful we still have his dedicated public service
People, not unreasonably, distrust politicians. Unfortunately, we also live in an age where any claim to authority can be questioned and undermined, including scientific expertise. What the Covid-19 pandemic has shown is that the world still needs experts to survive.
Many governments around the world may have been inept in their dealings with the threat, months in the making. But they would have been much worse off if they had not listened to the advice of experts.
It was a team of epidemiologists at Imperial College London using sophisticated computer models to convince British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that so-called herd immunity and mitigation tactics could needlessly cost hundreds of thousands of deaths in the UK.
Back in Hong Kong, we should be thankful that we have one of the world’s great authorities on the family of coronaviruses – responsible for both the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak in 2003 and the current pandemic – advising our rather slow and reactive government.
Without Professor Yuen Kwok-yung, things could be much worse.
Yet, the infectious diseases specialist at the University of Hong Kong has been under attack by some “blue ribbon” online influencers and media pundits for co-writing a newspaper op-ed about the pandemic. He has apologised publicly for the article.