How Many Paradigm Shifts Should We Expect with COVID-19?

From American Thinker.com (Aug. 2):

Thomas Kuhn, a renowned philosopher of science, suggested in his 1962 work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that scientific progress advances through a series of revolutionary cycles.  In each cycle, a dominant scientific model ("Normal Science") is widely accepted by consensus within the scientific community.  Anomalies that contradict the model may emerge, causing the model to "drift" away from scientific consensus.  When new observations severely contradict the existing model, the model undergoes a "crisis," leading to the emergence of new models ("model revolution").  A "paradigm shift" then occurs in which a competing model becomes dominant, and the cycle repeats over time.

The philosopher Imre Lakatos provided an important critique of the Kuhn Cycle in his 1970 paper "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes."  Lakatos described scientific progress as a series of competing research programs that each had a "hard core" of scientific theories that cannot be undermined.  As anomalous observations are made that threaten core theories, a "protective belt" of hypotheses is developed to accommodate new observations while preserving the core theories.  Ultimately, a dominant research program may be superseded by a competing research program that produces greater scientific progress.

The dangers of blind trust in scientific consensus and the relevance of scientific philosophy have become increasingly obvious during the public health failures surrounding COVID-19.  Indeed, we have witnessed several examples of a Kuhn Cycle in just the past few months!  The clearest and most alarming example is the so-called "lab leak theory," which opines that COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Following the worldwide spread of COVID-19, the scientific community acted quickly to suppress any suggestion that COVID-19 emerged from a lab.  In fact, a March 7, 2020 letter was published "to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," signed by 27 public health researchers. [read more]