Scapegoat Science: How Governments Used COVID-19 Advisory Boards to Dodge Blame
"Did scientific advisory boards during the pandemic serve as genuine guides, or were they strategic tools for governments seeking to avoid accountability?"
The COVID-19 pandemic thrust science into the spotlight, with governments worldwide relying on expert advice to navigate unprecedented challenges. Yet, a closer look reveals a curious trend: many governments opted to create new, ad hoc scientific advisory bodies (ahSABs) instead of utilizing existing public health infrastructure. This raises a critical question: Were these ahSABs genuinely intended to guide policy, or did they serve a more strategic purpose?
New research suggests a potentially unsettling answer. According to a study encompassing the US, UK, Sweden, Italy, Poland, and Uganda, these ad hoc advisory bodies may have functioned as 'bespoke scapegoats,' shielding governments from blame when unpopular policies were enacted or when outcomes fell short of expectations. The research delves into the composition, function, and impact of these boards, revealing a pattern of strategic blame-shifting.
This article examines the findings of this revealing research, exploring how governments may have used scientific advisory boards to manage public perception and avoid accountability during a time of crisis. We'll explore the characteristics that made these boards attractive targets for blame, the implications for public trust, and the potential reforms needed to ensure scientific advice truly serves the public interest.
The Blame Game at Scale
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments established or expanded scientific advisory boards to guide public-health decisions, yet rigorous, comparable statistics on how often these panels were used to deflect blame remain scarce. Early reporting and academic discussion suggest the practice was widespread, but systematic data on advisory-board influence, membership turnover, and political attribution of outcomes is still limited. Available evidence points to advisory bodies being publicly credited when policies were accepted and quietly bypassed or blamed when measures failed. Without comprehensive cross-country tallies, the true scale of advisory boards as blame-absorption devices is difficult to quantify.
How Advisory Panels Are Studied
Research on pandemic advisory boards typically relies on the established methods of policy analysis, such as documentary review, interviews with officials and scientists, and case studies of individual countries. These methods help trace how recommendations were formulated and how governments presented them to the public. They carry notable limitations, however, including selective availability of records, officials' incentives to present their own conduct favorably, and difficulty isolating a panel's influence from other political factors. Consequently, conclusions about blame-shifting often rest on interpretation rather than hard measurement.
From Early Guideposts to Modern Panels
Scientific advisory bodies of the kind used during COVID-19 have deep historical roots, evolving from earlier consultative committees convened during past epidemics and public-health emergencies. These earlier episodes established conventions such as expert deliberation, evidence-based recommendation, and public reporting that later panels inherited. Modern high-profile examples, including those assembled during the COVID-19 pandemic, built directly on those foundations. Whether they actually shielded governments from accountability, or simply served as communication channels, remains a subject of ongoing scholarly debate.
Why Create a Scapegoat? The Dilemma of Governing During Crisis
When faced with large-scale, prolonged crises, governments face a significant dilemma. Citizens expect decisive action, but acting in the face of uncertainty carries inherent risks. If policies fail or prove unpopular, governments risk public backlash. In these situations, experts can provide a convenient 'escape hatch.' By delegating responsibility to scientific advisors, governments can deflect blame, claiming they were simply following the best available advice.
- Compact and Identifiable: ahSABs are typically small, well-defined groups, making them easy to recognize and hold accountable.
- Created at Will: Unlike established institutions, ahSABs can be formed and disbanded as needed, allowing governments to replace them with more compliant bodies if necessary.
- Controlled Mandate and Membership: Governments can carefully select members and define the scope of an ahSAB, ensuring its advice aligns with pre-determined policy goals.
- External Authority: ahSABs can be presented as independent authorities, lending legitimacy to government actions, even if the advice is strategically crafted.
The Science the Boards Were Meant to Carry
The scientific method, as characterized by recent reference literature, is an empirical approach to acquiring knowledge through careful observation, rigorous skepticism, hypothesis testing, and experimental validation, and science is defined as a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable explanations about nature and society. This method has characterized science since at least the 17th century, with the acceptance that cognitive assumptions can distort the interpretation of observation. Widely cited outlets describe science as a process for explaining how advances change our understanding of the world and shape our lives. Dictionaries likewise define "scientific" as relating to or exhibiting the methods or principles of science, underscoring that the label carries a claim to rigor and reliability.
When the Shield Dulls
Critics argue that advisory boards have not always functioned as neutral conveyors of science, and that governments have sometimes selected members, publicized findings selectively, or rejected inconvenient recommendations. Reports of panels being marginalized, replaced, or pressured when their advice conflicted with political imperatives appear throughout the pandemic period, though such claims vary by country and are hard to verify systematically. Where advisory processes were seen to fail, publics often grew skeptical of both the governments and the science they invoked. The degree to which these failures reflect genuine scientific error rather than political interference remains contested and under-documented.
The Weight of the Word
Cambridge Dictionary defines "scientific" as "relating to science, or using the organized methods of science," and secondarily as "careful and using a system," illustrating how the term carries both disciplinary and methodical connotations. Governments invoking scientific advice draw on this dual meaning, presenting advisory panels as both expert-driven and systematically careful. Yet the dictionary's framing also implies a standard, and panels judged insufficiently careful or systematic could lose the credibility the label confers. This reliance on a word whose meaning is partly reputational helps explain both the power and the fragility of governments' appeals to science during the pandemic.
Policy Implications: Reforming Scientific Advice
The research findings carry significant policy implications for the design and use of scientific advisory boards. To mitigate the risk of ahSABs being used for blame-shifting, the study authors suggest greater democratic scrutiny of their appointment, mandate, and composition. Explicit regulations or norms are needed to ensure objectivity and prevent governments from using these bodies to merely rubber-stamp pre-determined policies.
Reading the Record
Commentators broadly agree that the COVID-19 pandemic blurred the line between evidence-based governance and blame management, but expert interpretations of specific cases diverge considerably. Some see advisory boards as a defensible means of communicating technical uncertainty, while others regard them as instruments for distributing political risk. Because the underlying evidence is largely qualitative and country-specific, no settled scholarly synthesis has emerged. Analysts generally urge caution before attributing intent to governments based on public documents and official statements alone.
What Comes After
Looking ahead, researchers expect more systematic study of advisory boards using now-developing datasets on membership, recommendations, and outcomes across countries. Comparative and longitudinal designs may eventually clarify when panels genuinely shape policy and when they serve primarily symbolic or blame-absorbing functions. New analysis techniques in text and legislative data could offer firmer footing than earlier case studies. Any such progress will depend on sustained transparency from governments about how expert advice is solicited, weighed, and disclosed.
Structural Tensions in Governance
The use of advisory boards sits within broader systemic challenges of democratic accountability, expert authority, and crisis communication that transcend any single pandemic. Governments operate under conflicting pressures to act quickly, appear decisive, and remain answerable to voters, while scientific advice is often uncertain, contested, or evolving. These structural tensions make it difficult to determine whether failures reflect deliberate blame-shifting or the unavoidable messiness of crisis governance. Reforms such as clearer mandates and stronger disclosure rules are widely discussed, though their feasibility and effectiveness remain unproven.
Beyond the Panels
Behind the institutional story of advisory boards are the scientists, officials, and ordinary citizens whose lives were shaped by pandemic decisions labeled scientific. The framing of policy as evidence-driven can give legitimacy to measures that impose real costs on individuals and communities, for better or worse. For the officials and experts involved, the pressure of public scrutiny could be intense, and careers and reputations sometimes rose or fell on how decisions were attributed. The long-term human consequences of these dynamics are difficult to isolate but remain central to assessing whether advisory boards served the public or the politicians who convened them.