Science and politics: Can you fix science by doing much less of it?

 Today's NYT has a long opinion piece about (my former Stanford colleague) Jay  Bhattacharya in his role as the new head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  I found it confusing and confused. But the last two paragraphs made some sense.

Jay Bhattacharya Wants to Fix Science.  Is He in Over His Head?  
By Ari Schulman 

Here are the two concluding paragraphs:

"The mRNA vaccine decision was the clearest test case yet of how his idealism will go once released into the wild. In The Washington Post, he acknowledges that the Covid vaccines saved millions of lives without known safety problems. He notes unanswered questions, around dosing and side effects. But when push came to shove, his response to these questions was not, let’s answer them with science, as he told me, but: Shut the science down. It turns out that the power of science to solve problems has limits after all.

"The problem with Dr. Bhattacharya is not that he’s cynical, as his critics say. It’s that his theory is naïve about power, and so could easily become a mouthpiece for it. America’s golden age of innovation, backed by levels of public investment that make us the envy of the world, has been nice while it’s lasted. If we want to keep it going, this moment may call less for a fresh infusion of reason than some new animating spirit, not a new Galileo but a new Robert Moses, Carl Sagan, or J. Robert Oppenheimer. Let us hope that Jay Bhattacharya still has it in him. The country needs it."