#herdimmunity Anyone remember Lysenko? Who thought ideology could determine biology? Good thing that couldn't possibly happen under capitalism.

@wbtd A bit of stretch. Lysenko devastated Soviet biology, agriculture and genetics for 2 decades and decimated Soviet scientific community (Vavilov).

The current UK policy doesn't reject science, but science doesn't make risk analysis and policy decisions for you - it just provides you with facts to base them on. The UK government made a risk-based decision that is definitely driven by economy but is not unscientific in the way Lysenko did.

@kravietz If your model of research funding is competitive rather than co-operative, and your model of research production is extractive—UK universities now manages themselves explicitly as factories to extract research knowledge and teaching income from lecturers and professors—then yes, actually, you have already made huge decisions about what society is, who are valid persons, what kinds of knowledge can be allowed into public discussion, and how humans should be treated. Those invisible assumptions create specific "research outcomes" that validate the initial assumptions, like this rubbish #herdimmunity claim.

Read anything in the past 40 years of STS studies. Scientific research is not politically neutral, but to claim that it is neutral is a cornerstone of extractive capitalism. That does *not*, by the way, mean that scientific research is paralysed and unable to produce good research; see Sarah Harding's _Objectivity and Diversity_ for a good exposition of one model for how plural socially embedded scientifc research programmes that acknowledge differences of power, entitlement, culture, gender and so forth produce *better* science.

@wbtd

> does *not*, by the way, mean that scientific research is paralysed

That what I was just going to point out - various biases and flaws of scientific processes in different countries are well known.

I could talk for hours about how science if broken in Poland and Russia, but none of these actually prevents them from doing *some* good science.

These biases and flaws just prevent them from realizing their full potential but this is far away from how it worked in USSR.