Zeynep Tufekci says in the New York Times today that "delays, falsehoods and misrepresentations" from government scientists have eroded public trust in expert advice:
Remember the rule that we should all stay at least six feet apart? “It sort of just appeared,” Fauci said during a preliminary interview for the subcommittee hearing, adding that he “was not aware of any studies” that supported it. Remember the insistence that the virus was primarily spread by droplets that quickly fell to the floor? During his recent public hearing, he acknowledged that to the contrary, the virus is airborne.
As for the repeated assertion that Covid originated in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, not in an infectious diseases laboratory there, N.I.H. officials were privately expressing alarm over that lab’s lax biosafety practices and risky research. In his public testimony, Fauci conceded that even now there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of Covid-19’s origins.
This is very misleading. Fauci didn't say that social distancing recommendations popped up out of nowhere, only that we might have been wrong about 6 feet vs. 3 feet. Nor is there any reason to suggest scientists lied about airborne transmission. They just turned out to be wrong. They changed their recommendations quickly when new data became available. Finally, both evidence at the time and evidence now points strongly toward a natural origin for the COVID virus.
Elsewhere, Tufekci mentions the infamous mask debate. Early in the pandemic officials suggested that (a) widespread mask wearing wasn't essential and (b) masks should be reserved for health care workers. This was confusing and somewhat disingenuous, but not nearly as much as it's made out to be. At the time—early March of 2020—COVID was quite limited in the US and officials very reasonably thought masks were only useful for people who were near sick patients. It was only in late March that asymptomatic transmission became clear, which meant universal masking made sense since there was no way of telling if you were near a sick person.
Likewise, the CDC never recommended that parks and playgrounds be shut. That came mostly from local officials who were responding on their own to studies showing how long the virus could survive on outdoor surfaces.
This gets to the biggest problem with the idea that "scientists" misled us. Which scientists? If you search your memory, you'll recall that the chaotic early days of the pandemic were full of new studies and new advice on a seemingly hourly basis. Governors were holding daily briefings. Fresh research findings were released constantly. Television doctors all had their own views. And panic was everywhere. Local officials reacted to all this, and they all reacted differently. There's no way this could have been reined in.
Beyond all this, going after scientists misses the real source of COVID misinformation: Donald Trump and his MAGA allies. They're the ones who pushed the lab leak theory from the start based on no credible evidence. Trump was the one who went on national TV and said he wasn't going to wear a mask. He's also the one who mused about ivermectin and injections of disinfectant. It's conservatives who have spread vaccine conspiracy theories and it's conservatives who started the anti-mask jihad. It was red states that killed thousands of their own residents by cutting back on mitigation efforts because "COVID is no worse than the flu." It was conservatives who insisted that banning large indoor gatherings was an attack on religion because the bans included churches.
Chaos and differences of opinion are inevitable when you combine a sudden crisis with a commitment to free speech. People can say whatever they want—and they do. But the biggest source of the misinformation this promotes comes from politics, not science.
"Nor is there any reason to suggest scientists lied about airborne transmission. They just turned out to be wrong."
I remember this very, very, very well. I remember
1. when the recommendation went out
2. when we learned that it was based on science done in the 1930s
3. when scientists like a mechanical engineer at MIT started bringing their research to bear, and in short order showed that no, even for other pathogens, a cough could spread particles as far as 20ft
4. and it turned out that the research in #2 had failed to find all this, b/c it was using 1930s technology (who knew?) and hence couldn't see such tiny particles
5. and so pretty quickly researchers were able to demonstrate COVID particles being spread by droplets
6. And then there was that key case of the chior practice in Washington State, where the pattern of infection showed clearly that something other than droplet dispersal was at work.
Sure, it took time for the consensus to change from "it's droplets" to "it's airborne". Too long. But that's just the way science works: it takes time to convince people. The old saying "funeral by funeral, science marches on" isn't there for shits and giggles.
l remember sometime in summer 2020 thinking "this is such a stellar, crystal-clear demonstration of the scientific method at work -- of how a pre-existing scientific consensus can be shattered by new information and new methods, and how it is neither instant nor perfect, but like every other human process"
I just read the CDC report (well their web based report). Those choir members had a two and half hour practice with large group practice with some spacing (members sat in their assigned seats but not all the members of the choir were present) and then broke into two smaller groups were they sat on benches less than a foot from each other. There were two practices seven days apart. The first practice had 78 people and the second 61. No body reported symptoms prior to the first, one reported symptoms prior to the second and still attended (most likely the index). No masks were worn, there was close contact for extended periods of time with a large group of people in an enclosed space. Unfortunately two died from these practices.
I am unsure how droplet transmission does not figure into these incidents when clearly it did.
Droplets would still clearly be worse doses, even if you discount the theory as a general respiratory transmission method.
Like duh, right?
Out here in California I didn't even know anyone believed the droplet theory even applied. It just seemed so antithetical to how we know respiration and ventilation worked.
And we were watching the reports of spread by symptomless from breathless reporting in China in January, but it was hard to know what - some were saying it was eyeballs hence the stupid face shields.
"And we were watching the reports of spread by symptomless from breathless reporting in China in January" The biggest mistake by anyone in the world with respect to covid was the US outright rejecting the chinese warnings about asymptomatic spread (and actively working to get the rest of the world to reject that warning) until the Germans confirmed it with a single case. Racism really does kill the racists. Face shields were to stop airborne spread, had nothing to do with eyeballs.
"and so pretty quickly researchers were able to demonstrate COVID particles being spread by droplets" Actualy that took half a year, and after thousands of experiments failed to demonstrate it because the standard way of taking an air sample killed he virus. The covid virus (in fact all viruses) turns out to be delicate. (Remember an R0 of 2 which means highly infectious) means that with no one immune from previous infections, the average infected person infects two other people, generally both members of their own household and no one they come into contact with casually.
Best info here on viral origin (theories) here:
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-1121/
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-995/
https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-876/
1. If you want serious info, don't go to videos.
2. Any statement about the beginning of the pandemic that is as unqualified as "the Huanan market was the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic" is obvious propaganda.
3. Huanan market was almost certainly the earliest known superspreader event, but that certainly does not tell us how the virus got there. Workers at WIV almost certainly went there themselves or had close contacts who did so. It was a huge place and a central point for fresh food sales.
For a counterpoint see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
My OPINION is that COVID was most likely caused by a lab leak of either a naturally occurring virus or an artificially enhanced virus created most likely by serial passage (which would explain why the infection mechanism is not one that would likely have been genetically engineered into a virus at the time).
I lived many years in China and had very passing contact with the wild animal trade. A virus from western Guangzhou or Guangxi (where the bat caves are) travelling via the animal trade and popping up in Wuhan which is the home of WIV, China's pre-eminent center for the study of bat viruses but not a place with high demand for exotic meats, unlike Guangzhou and Guangxi which have high demand and much more trade of such animals but no centers for studying bat viruses is highly unlikely. It is possible, but if it did happen by chance then the CCP should sue God for unfair treatment.
On the other hand, lab leaks have happened frequently, WIV had bat samples from the caves where the virus's closest natural relatives have been found, the people in the US Government who took the lead in claiming natural origin were those whose fingerprints were all over the US cooperation with WIV including on prohibitied gain of function research, and the fact that some of the principal people in this process were actively hiding their communications from FOI searches strongly indicates that they were hiding misconduct.
Unlike TWIV I am not
LOL. Man on internet is expert on all the things. Or so he assures us.
The number of online virus experts in the US is truly incredible. INCREDIBLE.
Notice you say it's propaganda without, I dunno, evidence?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_mainland_China
And your only citation is an opinion piece.
Why should we take advice from the guy who last month was defending a convicted murderer for running a car into a crowded crosswalk and then shooting the people he threatened?
Sorry, you lost me after My OPINION is . . .
Ah... well, the difference between me and TWIV is that I am honest.
No one, except possible some people in the Chinese government (which includes WIV) knows if COVID originated at WIV or not. Anyone who claims to KNOW ie lying.
We can all have opinions based on the facts that are known. So, any honest statement on this beging "I think" or "My opinion is" and then gives the opinion and the basis for that.
Your opinion will be given the consideration it deserves.
This appears to be a new and unfamiliar use of the word "honest."
Smarter trolls, please.
"or an artificially enhanced virus" Every expert in coronavirus science says there is no chance it was artificially enhanced. And that while it might have been a lab escape, it probably wasn't. How does you scientific knowledge about virology stack up against the experts? "lab leaks have happened frequently," That's not true. They have happened rarely. And precisely zero have led to uncontained outbreak of disease prior to this one if that is what happened. US cooperation with WIV including on prohibitied gain of function research," Gain of functon esarch was never prohibited, government funding ofgain offunction research was temporarily suspended. None of theUS government funding for the wuhan lab was for gain of function research.
Re: "A virus from western Guangzhou or Guangxi (where the bat caves are) travelling via the animal trade and popping up in Wuhan which is the home of WIV, China's pre-eminent center for the study of bat viruses but not a place with high demand for exotic meats, unlike Guangzhou and Guangxi which have high demand and much more trade of such animals but no centers for studying bat viruses is highly unlikely."
If you're going to use such unwieldy and barely comprehensible sentence structure, the least you could do is include the required comma before "is highly unlikely" to give it a fighting chance at readability, not to mention punctuational correctness.
This, by the astronomer Ethan Siegel, is the best piece I've read on the virus's origin:
No, gain of function research did not cause COVID-19
The viral genome reveals a recombinant ancestry, which is all but certainly natural.
Looking at your article I immediately see obviously false claims.
Falsehood: "the specific proposal to create a virus with the defining features of SARS-CoV-2 was rejected, and that research was never conducted."
Obviously, we do not know what research was conducted at WIV. We only know what research the Chinese government chose to release. The most you can say is that the US never funded such research. However, the US did fund such research. See https://nypost.com/2024/05/16/us-news/nih-director-admits-taxpayers-funded-gain-of-function-research-in-wuhan-four-years-after-covid-pandemic-began/. If you do not trust the NY Post you can watch the video of NIH Deputy Director Tabak admit this to Congress here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxGN8el7MA4&ab_channel=ForbesBreakingNews
Falsehood: "And the fifth point is very misleading: most pandemics never have the “progenitor animal host” that caused the spillover identified, so the fact that this hasn’t occurred for SARS-CoV-2 is expected, not evidence that it didn’t have a natural origin."
SARS, MERS, AIDS, and Monkeypox have all had their progenitor animal hosts identified (see for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3234451/). Are there any other recent zoonotic pandemics to look at?
More opinion pieces cited by the guy who last month was defending a convicted murderer?
Let me get this straight... the unedited video of the testimony of NIH Deputy Director Tabak and a scientific paper on the zoonotic orgin of HIV are opinion?
"“It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research,” " why publish links that prove you are a liar?
SARS, MERS, AIDS, and Monkeypox have all had their progenitor animal hosts identified" Almost none of those viruses have had their progenerator animals hosts identified with more specifity/accuracy than covid 19. Covid-19 has been found to be from a specific species of fruit bat in china. Mers has been tracked to chinese bats, no type let alone specific species likely via dromedary camel.
Aids has had multiple animals identified as it's progenerator, but none with more definitiveness that what has been achieved with covid- 19, we identified HIV1 as chimpanzees and also maybe gorillas while HIV2 as West African Sooty mangabeys.
For SARS, MERS and AIDS we have close relatives of these viruses identified as endemic to particular populations of wild animals and a pretty complete evolutionary tree.
For COVID there is a big jump from the closest known virus found in animals to the first COVID viruse identified in China.
It's not politics, either --it's blithering psychotics.
I believe these bs claims are spread like others Kevin mentioned awhile back. They normally wouldn't make page 4 in any major news outlet, but Fox News gives the guy a one hour prime time interview, and replays same for a week.
Foreign propaganda machines and online trolls have nothing on us 🙁
Please, do not forget that the Press figured prominently is this erosion.
The short short version of the article seems to be that public health officials should get every statement and recommendation perfect, just like Zeynep Tufekci did. There is no explanation of why errors were made, how to improve pandemic decision making, and how best to respond when information is only startling to emerge. Just be perfect like Zeynep Tufekci or you will lose trust.
Thanks Kevin and @bsmith,
I found that article deeply frustrating. I don't think the scientific community is above criticism or the like, but people are going to make mistakes and some people will be right early. Good on Tufekci for some early correctness but they did not have the receipts for this article of any mistakes. And trying to just be perfect will further degrade the ablity to communicate under uncertainty.
Just be perfect like Zeynep Tufekci or you will lose trust.
Back in the day—say, 3.5 years ago—when I was obsessively reading everything I could my hands on about covid—my impression was that Tufekci was something of a voice of sanity.
And yet based on this excerpt provided by Kevin, it seems she's been affected by right-wing ref working. Sad.
Agreed. She seems to to have rolled over pretty quickly. I assume that shes writing to her audience in the executive suite at the NYT.
And let's not also forget that the reason the politics were as effective as they were is that a huge chunk of the American population -- primarily Republicans, and certainly led and encouraged by Republican politicians -- are a bunch of whiny children who aren't gonna be told what to do by a bunch of know-it-all smarty-pants and are quite willing to (1) endanger themselves and their friends and family by their foolish, childish behavior and (2) even when confronted with clear evidence, including but not limited to materially higher death rates in red states, deny both the evidence and their behavior.
Republicans are mostly children, plus some adults who go along with the children because something something tax cuts something immigrant Obamaphones, led by -- appropriately enough -- a greedy racist man-child. And they might yet win.
Remember these are the folks that revel in live action "Active Shooter" scenarios at schools where their children are props as corpses and then become apoplectic if a mask is worn in their vicinity.
No big surprise here. That republicans don’t believe facts is a redundant thought. They are republicans and the only thing they believe in is money. Anything that gets in the way of accumulating it is bad whether it’s a pandemic killing a million or regulations assuring safety and quality.. Any way to overcharge or scam out of it is fine if you are on the receiving end. It’s capitalism.
COVID was quite limited in the US and officials very reasonably thought masks were only useful for people who were near sick patients
They also not unreasonably feared widespread masking in those early days might have triggered a false sense of security and undermined social distancing efforts. I think they were on firm ground given the fact that, in those early days, a large percentage of masks would have been fairly ineffective bandanas and pieces of cloth.
In any event Fauci and the CDC updated their guidance on masking in April—fully three months before WHO did so.
For those wanting to see some pundit history, one can start at https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/page/154/?page=999 and work their way forward via the "Prev" button.
It was also unclear if you were infected, and the only way to force infected people to mask was mask policies!
" Early in the pandemic officials suggested that (a) widespread mask wearing wasn't essential " The CDC and Fauci in the first three months of the pandemic always said the existing science doesn't indicate that masks work. Which was the truth, the whole truth an nothing but the truth. And then new studies definitely proved masking worked in the 4th month and the CDC changed its position.
Well, we had an infinite supply of masks and other supplies at the time....
Trump kept trying to zero out pandemic response and CDC in his budget. Our stockpile of goods was dry rotting, and Republicans didn't want to spend money on things they would never need, so....
Monday morning quarterbacking....
One of the first things we learned during the pandemic is that Trump let over 50% of the goods in the strategic reserve pass their use by date with doing nothing to replace them.
I find it fascinating that from not quite 1970 through 2000 there was greater trust in the scientific community among Republicans than Democrats. Still, interesting as that "relative to" chart is, just how did the overall trust fair? Did Democrats' trust hold steady? Wane less than Republicans'? Grow?
For answers to these and other fascinating slices of the data, I suspect one can start at: https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/trends?category=Politics&measure=consci
Science is fine as long as it doesn't conflict with my religion:
https://www.salon.com/2024/06/09/what-a-fool-believes-donald-and-americas-bogus-respect-for-faith/
Assumes people stay in one party forever. It’s far more likely that educated people always believed in science, because they’re educated. And educated people used to be Republicans in 1970s-1990s and then educated people started fleeing the Republican Party in 2000. So it’s likely the composition of educated-to-uneducated in both parties changed, not that anyone in particular became more or less trusting in science. (This has happened before on other issues, most notably how the Republican Party went from being the defenders of racial equality in the early 1900s to the dismantlers of racial equality by the late 1900s.)
"And educated people used to be Republicans in 1970s-1990s" During this period the republican party was dominated by people who said evolution was a fake theory. Educated people have always had problems with the dominant faction in the republican party.
Define politics. Never mind, I'll do it.
Politics is the way a large interdependent group of people resolve their within-group dilemmas via the "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" principle. Political malpractice is committed by people within the group who figure out how to benefit in the short term at the group's expense.
It’s not politics that killed trust in experts. It’s political malpractice.
Politics is the process through which society's resources are allocated.
Politics is any settling of differences in society that doesn’t result in violence. (When violence happens as part of this settling of differences, it’s called civil war if entirely domestic and just general war if it’s between 2 or more countries.)
Back in 2022 I put together a list of the expert predictions that were wrong about COVID on TwiXter with the hashtag #IsOurExpertsLearning (Thank you GW Bush for the inspiration for that hashtag). I also put together a shorter list of experts (who I named) whose predictions were correct with the #ExpertsWhoWereRight hashtag...
Here are the wrong predictions...
1. "COVID is not an airborne virus." And handwashing was recommended.
2. "Masks don't work."
3. "NPIs don't work in general."
4. "Coronaviruses mutate slowly" (with the correllary that there will only be one wave.)
5. "Convalescent Immunity will be durable"
6. "Herd immunity has happened" (with the first wave)
7. "Herd immunity will happen when x percent of population is infected and seroprevalent"
8. "Herd immunity will happen at higher X with this variant."
9. "It's dangerous to go outdoors (even with masks was the later addendum)"
10. "Sea spray can infect us. Don't go near the Ocean!" This was a good one, because it was an expert in E. coli bacteria who seemed to think that SARS2 could muliply like E. Coli in nutrient-rich Ocean environments. The LA Times did a front page story with her quotes, and all the CA coastal counties closed down their shores because they were worried about the SARS2 virions in sea spray.
11. "Mass transit is safe." Policy makes stopped saying this only after CDC reversed its guidance on masks 3—or was it 4—months into the pandemic.
12. "Go about your business normally." And this went out the window when NYC peeps started dying in droves.
13. "Kids don't catch/transmit/get ill from/die from COVID"
14. And its corollary: "Schools are not a vector for COVID." People are still trying to take that hill!
15. "Vaccine efficacy against disease is durable." This later notched down to efficacy preventing serious illness and death (which is OK by me).
16. "The virus is becoming more lethal."
17. With corollary: "Mutation x will make this strain more lethal."
18. "Variant shows faster growth in vitro. It will be the next wave!"—but wave doesn't materialize. Rinse, wash, repeat.
19. "You can't catch COVID from pets."—then reduced to you can't catch COVID from dogs.
20. "SARS2 is seasonal." The same waves infect the southern hemisphere during Winter as they do the northern hemisphere's summer.
21. "Everyone is going to get Omicron." No, everyone didn't catch Omicron. Not even close.
22. "There's no evidence that NPIs worked."
23. "COVID is causing hepatic failure in kids."
24. "Lockdowns are creating an epidemic of suicides."
25. "Our T cells are dying."
26. "Long COVID will create a mass disabling event." Social Security disability aplications suggest it hasn't happened yet.
Here are the people whose predictions were correct...
1. The very 1st responders deserve our praise. The late Dr Li Wenliang, 李文亮, who died of COVID, was the first to alert the Chinese CDC that a SARS-like virus that was killing people in Wuhan (late Dec 2019). Dr Li was roughed up and reprimanded by the local MPS for raising "false alarms" but was later exonerated. He died treating his patients. He was posthumously awarded May Fourth Medal the Chinese Gov, and his family received a formal apology.
2. Dr. Zhang Jixian (I don't have the proper characters of her name, sorry) may deserve the honor for first alerting authorities to the danger of a unknown SARS-like virus, though. People are arguing vehemently whether it was Li or Zhang, Zhange started putting the puzzle together when she noticed how contagious the virus was, and she alerted her hosp admin on 27 Dec — who then relayed it to Chinese CDC.
3. I'm still unclear which Chinese research team isolated and sequenced the SARS2 virus. Was it done at WIV, but announced by the IVDC Beijing, or was it done a team at the IVDC? If anyone can enlighten me, I'd appreciate it! Either way they deserve praise! Anyway the virus was sequenced by 10 Jan 2020 and shared with world in a few days.
4. In the US, my hero is Dr Sarah Cody of the Santa Clara County (California) Health Department. She paid careful attention to what was happening in China, and she listened to the recommendations of the Chinese National Public Health Commission (on masking and social distancing). She and the other SF Bay Area health officers along with Seattle area health officers got us wearing makeshift masks and locked down 1st week of March 2020. Dr Fauci in an interview said she was "overreacting"(!)
5. Then people started dropping like flies in NYC & East Coast while SF Area and Seattle only saw slow uptick in cases & deaths. 3 weeks difference between when NPIs were imposed in NYC and SF, but it made all the difference. Cody saved 10,000s of lives in California.
6. I don't know if there were heroes who bucked the consensus wisdom of the time in EU, UK or the rest of world. If so, I'd like to hear about them.
7. Linsey Marr and Lidia Morawska. Both of them aerosol experts, and they deserve much praise because on 3 April 2020, in a call with WHO they tried to convince them that SARS2 was airborne. WHO didn't listen & CDC followed WHO guidance. Boo WHO!
8 Another scientist who got it right was Jon Yewdell from the NIH. While the GBD fools were still clucking about herd immunity, Yewdell pointed out that herd immunity wasn't in the cards for SARS2 and that durable immunity was probably a pipe dream (due to the way the virus infected people). But the CDC and experts started hyping durable immunity. Yewdell's warnings were ignored. Took another ~year b4 waning nAbs proved Dr Yewdell was right. People could get reinfected (although T cells and B cells seem to be doing a good job at preventing serious illness and death).
9. Also a shout out to Tulio de Oliveira, the Dir of CERI in South Africa. Oliveira was continually providing reality checks about the transmissibility and virulence of variants (especially Omicron) to the rest of virology/epi community. I was shocked by how many bluecheck experts dismissed de Oliviera's data (which was always damn good!). Was it because he was from Africa? He's also been a steadfast advocate of vax equality. Go, Tulio!
·
Of course, science is based on the iterative correction of mistaken theories. My peev against many experts pontificating in the media is they state their opinions as certain but never retract them when disproved. You can't correct your course if you don't admit you're wrong.
Certainly some claims that failed may've been honest interpretations of the data—but, geez, there were also a lot of wild claims that stirred the public up. And where are these experts saying, "I was wrong," Even saying, "The data no longer supports that claim," would be OK.
Noted, you don't cite anyone who said any of those things.
And Dr Li thought you got COVID through the eyes, He was a nut.
Shout out to Nobel Laureate Micheal Levitt, who predicted there would be no more than 10 COVID-related deaths in Israel. In reality, he was off by about two logs.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/nobel-laureate-israel-will-have-no-more-than-ten-coronavirus-deaths-621407
The next generation is going to be so excited to sign up for public health jobs, with people like qx49 keeping track of every mistake they make and trashing them for it. The best and brightest love having self-trained experts like qx49 hectoring them every day for trying to do their jobs to the best of their human ability.
This. The recent covid post-mortem coverage (looking at you, nytimes) and commentary has been depressingly stupid and geared towards justifying idiotic anti-expertise leanings among non-experts.
The takeaways from the covid pandemic should be increased funding for early-stage disease discovery, sequencing, and vaccine production, increased investment in stockpiling and rapid manufacture of masks and other emergency equipment, and investment in designing and upgrading HVAC systems to clear out pathogens.
On that last point, I had hoped/wondered if a global respiratory pandemic that killed millions and cost humanity trillions of dollars might spur on a revolution in how we design air systems in buildings to dramatically cut down on _all_ respiratory infections, much like the revolution in the late 19th century in water systems designs that ended chronic population-level dysentery.
Ah well. Maybe in the next universe, humanity will be a bit smarter.
""Go about your business normally."" This was probably the correct advice at the time it was given and there were only 100 known infections in the US.
""The virus is becoming more lethal."" Again, true at the time given since the disease did become more deadly for the first year and a half of mutations.
"The late Dr Li Wenliang, 李文亮, who died of COVID, was the first to alert the Chinese CDC that a SARS-like virus that was killing people in Wuhan "
The chinese were fully aware and had a major effort to figure out what was happening at the time of Li's warning. And his warning was that it was SARS, not a new virus so his advice would have killed people.
"People are arguing vehemently whether it was Li or Zhang" It absolutely wan't Li. Li's warning came the very day before china alerted the WHO and made the outbreak official.
Good news, everyone!
COP29 climate hosts say they'll keep expanding fossil fuels,
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-cop29-climate-hosts-theyll-fossil.html
Because that's worked so well every other time they tried it!
No, the CDC definitely fucked it up at the very beginning, as did the rest of the surveillance apparatus.
The ILI data was showing a late season surge in Influenza; the data was right there, if anyone bothered to look at it.
But politics was another layer of fuck up.
The CDC was fucked from the get-go when Trump laid off the pandemic preparedness teams the year before the pandemic.
The CDC was screwed mostly because Trump's first director didn't want and refused to do the job and his 2nd director was a SOP to right wing evangelists selected solely for causing 100s of thousands of unnecessary AIDS deaths.
They tried. Humans can fail, you know. Until infallible computers are put in charge of the CDC, the CDC will continue to make mistakes during crises.
Personally, I don’t expect infallibility from the CDC or any other public health official. I merely expect their motives to be good intentioned and their decisions to be the best they can come up with under stress and limited information. And as far as I can tell, there are very few public health officials who don’t meet my more realistic, less perfectionistic expectations. (That asshole in FL that Desantis installed is one.)
The first director was certainly one. The 2nd director might have been well intentioned but had a track record of killing hundreds of thousands through gross incompetence. So his incompetence should have been a surprise to no one.
I don't know how much it would matter if the CDC got everything right. People were pretty good at making stuff up, and didn't really need much "science" to make up scary scenarios. Most of those scenarios involved one of two things 1) strangers are scary or 2) activities I don't care about are scary. Of course, activities an individual cared about were always considered safer!
The one thing that always bothered me about the pandemic response was the push to fly everyone home quickly, cramming thousands of people into airports for many hours at a time. That was a giant super-spreader event, making sure covid went all over the country. Whether you believed in droplet or aerosol transmission at that time, that was a dumb choice.
A policy choice by the Trump administration.
Right -- he banned flights from China, but opened the floodgates to anyone arriving via Europe. So that's what everyone did. I remember a NYC area reporter at the time looking at the thousands of maskless people queueing at customs at JFK going "this is insane."
If you want competent responses from elected leadership, you should elect competent leaders. Far too many Americans wanted more tax cuts, discrimination and/or conservative judges, so they voted for that instead of competency… and the chickens came home to roost in 2020.
It's worth reminding the public that Trump was so incompetent at managing covid that he very nearly got himself killed; it was only the intervention of the very best drugs (and steriods!) and treatment medical science had to offer that kept him from kicking the bucket while having his lungs pumped full of oxygen.
I think far too many people have forgotten how fundamentally weird and unsettling the Trump admin was, and Trump's near-fatal brush with the pandemic is just one example. The galling kremlinology we had to apply to the admin's statements about where Trump was and how he was doing; the stupid staged photos of Trump in the hospital furrowing his brow over what were obviously blank sheets of paper; the asinine attempt by Trump to triumphantly open his shirt on the whitehouse balcony Clark Kent style to claim that he was a fucking superman, etc.
That is the political dilemma of the moment: Most voters are casual, superficial consumers of political news, and most of them have completely forgotten how weirdly inept, silly, and downright foolish Trump and his administration were. And the fuckup of their last great challenge put all that on stark display. But they've forgotten. How in the world do we remind them?
Not denying chinese proof that asymptomatic spread was occurring til confirmed based on a single case from the Germans would have delayed spread and saved untold number of lives. Getting test kits to hospitals as fast as many third world nations (combined with the first) would have prevented the US from being an epicenter for worldwide transmission. Outside of the US and Italy, the first half dozen other early infected nations were able to kill the disease.
There were people who claimed that there were microchips in the vaccine. They claimed it made them magnetic. And I know this because the media spread this nonsense relentlessly. It not possible to be too cynical about the motivations. Giving crazy people a platform to spread crazy is good business. So that’s what they did.
I don’t use the Facebook or the Xitter so the only way I could hear these stories is from conventional mainstream media. Or maybe I heard it here?
Yes, at least one video of some woman demonstrating how her key stuck to her because of the vaccine making her magnetic. A brass key.
Besides, as everyone knows magnets don't work if they get wet.
Brass keys and austenitic stainless steel spoons are both nonmagnetic. Does seem like they stick to stupid though. Not to mention all the idiots yelling about graphene in the vacines.
The NYTimes Opinion pages seems to be desperate to rewrite history. I guess they need Herr Trump reelected to boost their circulation or something.
During the outbreak of COVID, I was traveling in SE Asia, where it was being taken very seriously with the limited resources available to less, err, wealthy countries. On returning to the US, it was completely shocking to see the absolute lack of any awareness of the impending pandemic. A friend had to report for jury duty a couple of days after our return. A few days later, the great shut down was initiated.
Tufekci should be ashamed of carrying water for the crazies. Here's a person who shouldn't be allowed in the nice restaurants for a while.
Politics doesn't allow for changing your opinion based on new data. That's called flip flopping and it is the worst thing a politician can possibly do.
You should, rather, take a vigorous and unchanging stand and demand that nature is so too doing what you tell her.