As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19. I believed that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence, and scientific expertise. I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines, and boosters. A students adjusts her facemask at St. Joseph Catholic School in La Puente, California on November 16, 2020, where pre-kindergarten to Second Grade students in need of special services returned to the classroom today for in-person instruction. - The campus is the second Catholic school in Los Angeles County to receive a waiver approval to reopen as the coronavirus pandemic rages on. The US surpassed 11 million coronavirus cases Sunday, adding one million new cases in less than a week, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.©&nbsp;Frederic J. BROWN / AFP Accommodation in TakayamaAd expedia.com I was wrong.&nbsp;We&nbsp;in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives. I can see now that the scientific community from the&nbsp;CDC&nbsp;to the&nbsp;WHO&nbsp;to the&nbsp;FDA&nbsp;and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including&nbsp;on natural&nbsp;vs. artificial immunity,&nbsp;school closures&nbsp;and disease transmission,&nbsp;aerosol spread,&nbsp;mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness&nbsp;and&nbsp;safety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes&nbsp;at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day. But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths. What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be—indeed, our preferences&nbsp;were—very different from many of the people that we serve. We created policy based on&nbsp;our&nbsp;preferences, then justified it using data. And then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil. We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and "they" responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting. <p data-t="{" n":"bluelinks"}"="" class="" style="MARGlN: 0px 0px 16px; color: rgb(43, 43, 43); font-fa