I warned about the overreach in the name of 'science' years before COVID. Been putting it in quotes or blurting out SCIENCE! for a long time. The current abuses have been foreseen. That is because 'science' is not 'science' at all. A distinction is made between 'hard' and 'soft' sciences, but the latter barely qualifies--in the old sense we learned in high school. All that stuff about repeatibility, falsification, etc, etc, its out the window with much of what passes as 'science' today.

This is manifested in our various medical 'studies,' as one example. But you can't repeat a study on the effectiveness of a vaccine. Not really. You can't go back to your original sample, from its initial conditions, and run it back forward. The dead do not come back so you can have another go and see if this time you get the same results. To 'test' the study results, you can crunch their numbers yourself or get a new sample--which will consist of an entirely new population.

This is nowhere near like testing the temperature at which water boils. They are categorically different things. And that's my point. They are CATEGORICALLY different things. Water boiling is science, 'studies' are something else. They are not useless, per se. I'm just saying they aren't 'science.'

The confusion lies in the fact that because they think they are proceeding methodologically and using math, and perhaps the subject matter is 'stuff' (rather than people), this is what makes it 'science.' (This is the best spin; the worst spin is that they are totalitarians who call whatever they do 'science' so that they can justify their impositions on the masses and feel good about themselves.... its a religion of self-worship.)

More than 10 years ago I had an atheist agree that the methodological approach and statistics were hallmarks of 'science.' Then I pointed out you can be methodological when it comes to the study of the Bible... its called systematic theology... and one could, if they wanted, derive statistics... thus by his definition I was a scientist. Naturally he objected, moving the goalposts immediately: the sure sign of unscience if ever there was one.

We are paying for this immolation of the concept of 'science' as we speak. People who would chafe at imposing their morality on a whole population have no qualms about doing so if the 'science' dictates it.

So much for "You can't get an ought from an is."