“Follow the science” has become one of the woke mantras I feel the need to rail against. Quite simply, unless you’re a scientist doing science, scientific advice is there to be taken into account, not followed.
It doesn’t help that we have a particularly crap crop of politicians in governance at the moment, but it is their job to make difficult complex ethical, pragmatic, here-and-now decisions with many different consequences over multiple timescales and levels of society.
This is not science.
The problem we need to fix is democratic governance – trust, integrity, resources, etc – not replace it with science which is at best 20:2o hindsight and at worst a mass of conflicting data of dubious relevance requiring informed interpretation.