The Experts Were Wrong on COVID
Hubris has set back the cause of science.
Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson asks, “Why Are We Still Arguing About Masks?”
In the past few weeks, the conventional wisdom about COVID seems to have been upended.
Early in the pandemic, several mainstream news outlets dismissed theories that COVID came from a Chinese lab. But recently The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that the Department of Energy reversed its prior judgment by announcing that the coronavirus probably did emerge from a laboratory. The FBI shares that assessment.
What’s more, for the past three years, many scientists and writers—including me!—have reported that masks are effective at reducing the transmission of COVID. But last month, the lead author of a comprehensive analysis of masks boldly and unequivocally asserted that “there’s no evidence that many of these things make any difference.”
I’ve seen those reports, of course, and haven’t bothered to blog about them because the questions simply aren’t that interesting at this point. Whether the virus had its origins in a lab or a wet market is largely irrelevant*; nobody serious is asserting that the release was intentional or disputing that it came from China. Mask mandates largely are a thing of the past and it’s rather intuitive that wearing a mask is better than not when there’s a deadly pandemic going around and there’s no vaccine.
That settles things: The elites got everything perfectly backwards; the lab-leak conspiracy theory was true, and the mask mandates were a fraud!
Well, not quite. The deeper you dig into the details of each case, the murkier the story becomes. In fact, the deeper you dig, the more you realize that murkiness is the story.
That’s science for you! We had a novel virus that was spreading like wildfire and policymakers had to make big decisions. Naturally, they (mostly) relied on public health professionals who had to make educated guesses in real time based on extremely limited information, updating as they learned.
Start with the lab-leak hypothesis. Three years ago, many journalists and scientists rushed to condemn a theory that deserved a fair and open trial. But let’s not replace one nutty take (The lab-leak theory is racist) with another (We know for sure that COVID came from a lab). Although the Department of Energy and the FBI say the virus likely emerged from a lab rather than a wet market, four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council have come to the other conclusion: that COVID likely started with natural exposure to an infected animal. By this count, the lab-leak theory is still an underdog, trailing 5–2 among government institutions. Adding to the confusion is the fact that none of the agencies reached their conclusion with much conviction, even with access to untold stacks of top-secret information. As my colleague Dan Engber pointed out, “Only one [assessment], from the FBI, was made with ‘moderate’ confidence; the rest are rated ‘low,’ as in, Hmm, we’re not so sure.”
In an ecosystem of doubt and paranoia, spooky factoids breed. Have you read about those sick researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology back in November 2019? Have you read the response to the response to the rumor about an earlier alleged biosafety breach at WIV? Bro, can you even spell “furin cleavage site”? Tantalizing leads, all. But they add up to a tug-of-war between a clever hunch and an educated guesstimate.
The frustrating truth is that we’ll probably never know for sure how the pandemic started. China’s refusal to grant access to global investigators is sketchy, but we don’t know what they’re trying to protect or conceal.
But here’s where Thompson and I differ: the experts really, really screwed this one up. The essence of professionalism is knowing what you don’t know and being humble and transparent about that fact. They utterly failed in that regard.
I was never a lab leak guy. The wet market hypothesis seemed to be the prevailing one among those who study these things for a living and there’s quite a bit of precedent for viruses starting in Asian wet markets. I’m never going to be mad at professionals running with the best available evidence and making decisions on that basis. Information certainly is seldom possible.
What I do get mad at is arrogance. “Our best guess right now is that the virus originated in a wet market. There’s no reason to believe it was created in a lab” is a perfectly reasonable starting posture. But that’s not what we got. We got ridicule of opposing views, almost from the outset.
The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),1 and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens. This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine13 and by the scientific communities they represent. Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.
Charles Calisher, et. al, “Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19,” The Lancet, February 19, 2020
It didn’t help, of course, that the most prominent faces of the lab leak theory were then-President Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton. That made it easier to dismiss the theory—as I did myself mentally, if not in writing—as anti-Chinese xenophobia and anti-science fearmongering. My longtime former employer, The Atlantic Council, condemned the latter for “infodemic” in a March 2020 post from its Digital Forensic Research Lab.
The World Health Organization (WHO) describes the spread of damaging online information as an infodemic, a false information virus that spreads faster than a real virus does. Disinformation, misinformation, and incomplete information can spread via influencers and media amplification far more quickly than a virus can spread from one person to another. With over 208,000 Twitter followers and over 159,000 Facebook followers, as well as being a frequent guest on cable television where he made this claim, Cotton has the ability to spread his ideas to hundreds of thousands of people, who in turn spread the ideas further.
The theory that the virus started in the Wuhan lab has been picked up primarily by fringe sites and social media pages dedicated to conspiracy theories and further amplified by people with large public profiles online, such as Cotton. Cotton, who has fought to curb China’s relationship with the United States since being elected to the Senate in 2015, has been criticized for playing fast and loose with facts about the novel coronavirus. Even Fox News referred to Cotton’s unverified claims as “startling.” As an influential and outspoken public figure, his statements on the origin of the novel coronavirus hold weight, and his verified status on Twitter lends him a degree of authority that the average user might not have. The DFRLab tracked the origin of the conspiracy theory to see where the theory originated, where it spread, and which groups or individuals amplified the narrative.
And, yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it was Cotton, not the experts condemning him for fearmongering, who was measured and reasonable. Here’s a Twitter thread from February 16, 2020, condensed into paragraph format:
Let me debunk the debunkers.
@paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus:
1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market)
2. Good science, bad safety (e.g., they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred).
3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach).
4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in).
Again, none of these are ‘theories’ and certainly not ‘conspiracy theories.’ They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence.”
I’m not at all a fan of Cotton. But that’s a much more sober analysis of the known facts than we were given by the reflexive scientific consensus. And, three years later, it holds up astonishingly well. If anything, 1 and 2 are now tied, with 2 gaining.
Three months later, Dr. Anthony Fauci was still dismissing it as not worth even entertaining and the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy was calling suggestions of lab origins “provocative conspiracy theories.”
Back to Thompson:
[S]peaking of civilians continually screaming at one another, let’s talk about masks.
The review by Cochrane, a London-based health-research organization, looked at 78 studies in total, including 18 trials focused solely on mask use. Their stated objective was simple: “to assess the effectiveness of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of acute respiratory viruses.” In short, do masks work? The authors concluded that they don’t. “There is just no evidence that [masks] make any difference, full stop,” a co-author, Tom Jefferson, said.
Sounds definitive. So I called several sources whom I’ve found to be honest and informed on the issue of masks in the past three years. Jason Abaluck is a Yale professor who ran a massive, multimillion-dollar study on community masking in Bangladesh. Possibly the most comprehensive masking study ever undertaken, it found that community-wide mask wearing provided excellent protection, especially for older Bangladeshis. “The press coverage” of the Cochrane review “has drawn completely the wrong conclusions,” he told me. Jose-Luis Jimenez, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the transmission of airborne diseases like COVID, is one of the country’s most cited researchers on the nature of aerosols. “I think it’s scientific garbage,” he said of the review.
Abaluck, Jimenez, and other like-minded researchers have an extensive list of grievances with the Cochrane paper. One criticism is that some of the most convincing evidence for masks from laboratory and real-world studies was left out of the review. The best reasons to believe that masks “make a difference” as a product, Jimenez said, are that (1) COVID is an airborne disease that spreads through aerosolized droplets, and (2) lab experiments find that high-quality face masks block more than 90 percent of aerosolized spray. Meanwhile, observational studies during the pandemic did find that masking had a positive effect. For example, a 2020 study comparing the timing of new mask mandates across Germany found that face masks reduced the spread of infection by about half.
But most important, the researchers identify a mismatch between what Cochrane set out to discover and what the studies in its meta-analysis actually examined. Cochrane looked at randomized control trials, where, in many cases, researchers split a population in two, gave one half a bunch of masks and information about proper masking, then came back a few months later to see if the intervention group was any healthier. For the most part, Abaluck and Jimenez said, these studies don’t really ask the question Do masks work? Instead, they ask: When you hand out masks and information to an intervention group without much enforcement, does it make them healthier? That’s a subtle but important difference, because the frustrating truth is that, without encouragement and social norms, people tend not to wear face coverings properly.
In one famous Danish study, which concluded that urging people to wear surgical masks failed to reduce infections, fewer than half of the people in the masking group said they fully “wore the mask as recommended.” In a 2022 study that distributed masks in Uganda, more than 97 percent of participants reached by phone said they “always or sometimes” wore masks. But at the end of the study, researchers concluded that just 1.1 percent of people they observed “were seen wearing masks correctly”—88 times less than the phone survey. Another study from Kenya found that participants were roughly eight times more likely to report mask usage than to actually wear them.
See how complicated this is? Many people who claim to wear masks actually don’t. Many people who do wear masks wear them improperly. The questions Do masks work? and Does merely asking people to wear masks do much? are not interchangeable.
Here, I think we have a very different situation than we did with the lab leak theory. The science was more or less right from the start; the public policy was not.
There’s next to no question that good masks, particularly N-95 respirators and less so hospital-quality surgical masks, worn properly and consistently, are effective at stopping the spread of coronaviruses. There’s a reason healthcare professionals continue to wear them.
As detailed here and elsewhere ad nauseum, American public health professionals** did us a series of disservices in this regard. First, they flat out lied to us and told us masks were not useful for ordinary citizens in order to prevent a run on them to ensure that first responders had them. Then, they told us that we should wear masks but encouraged us to wear hand-crafted ones made out of cloth—again, in order to preserve the supply of more effective masks for those who needed them most. Far, far too late in the pandemic—long after the supplies of N-95s and KN-94s, and certainly surgical masks, was plentiful—they told us we should go ahead and get the good ones.
The question of mask mandates, though, is an entirely different one. That’s not a question of science but one of human behavior. The chances of getting infected with COVID if you wear a quality respirator (N-95 or KN-94) properly and consistently are extremely low. But, for a variety of reasons—including denialism from politicians and other influential figures—there was both an ideological resistance to wearing masks and a natural human reaction to discomfort that meant a lot of people weren’t wearing their masks properly or consistently. Or they were intentionally wearing ineffective masks as an act of rebellion.
And that’s to say nothing of performative policies wherein people were required to wear masks to enter, say, a restaurant or movie theater but then allowed to take them off while eating their meals or munching their popcorn and sipping their gallon-sized soda.
This is a beautiful summation of the science-policy nexus on the issue:
“Poor-quality masks, worn poorly, work poorly, and high-quality masks, worn properly, work well,” Jimenez offered as a summation of the evidence. For that reason, I think it is reasonable to say that mask mandates probably reduce COVID in settings where high-quality masks exist and social norms of mask wearing can be maintained. Abaluck’s Bangladesh study achieved a roughly 30-percentage-point increase in community-level mask wearing by not only distributing free masks but also telling people how to wear them, modeling effective face-covering, and encouraging people out and about to put their masks on. By contrast, as even Abaluck acknowledged, “if Alabama tomorrow mandated mask wearing, it would do nothing.”
Quite.
As for Thompson,
Meanwhile, we—you, me, governments—have to make discrete and sometimes irreversible decisions within these clouds of uncertainty. I’m trying to navigate that uncertainty myself, reaching provisional conclusions as I constantly reassess the evidence.
- I share the Department of Energy’s assessment, even though I don’t have access to its information. I think the lab leak is probable, by the slimmest of margins, and have also reconciled myself to the fact that I’ll never know for sure. I think the government should proceed as if the lab leak is 100 percent true and push for global gain-of-function limitations that reduce the likelihood of future catastrophic lab leaks.
- I’m going to keep wearing N95 masks in public indoor spaces during periods of elevated COVID transmission. I think that my neighborhood, in Washington, D.C., would benefit from an indoor mask mandate during high-transmission periods, even as I suspect that many unenforced mask-mandate policies around the world don’t do much, because of poor adherence and no enforcement.
I don’t have a strong opinion on the origins of COVID but nonetheless agree with Thompson that increased measures to ensure lab safety are prudent.
I disagree with Thompson on mask mandates. While I thought they were prudent in 2020, being better than nothing even absent full compliance, I believe that, in an era of freely available vaccinations, people should be free to make their own risk assessments. Four doses and one mild COVID infection in, I’m living my life pretty much as I did pre-COVID, with the minor exception that I’m much less interested in going to the movies.
As to the larger questions, I think Thompson gets it right here:
The lab-leak and mask debates touch on a broader theme, which is the relationship between science and modern media. In a fragmented and contentious media environment, scientific communication is a mess. An abundance of crappy or confusing research gives audiences access to an armory of factoids, from which they can construct and defend any narrative they choose. For every position, there is an ostensible expert, an apparent paper, and an alleged smoking gun. Thus, the internet tends to serve as an infinity store for pop-up conspiracy theorists.
My advice in navigating this mess is: Do not trust people who, in their handling of complex questions with imperfect data, manufacture simplistic answers with perfect confidence. Instead, trust people who allow for complexity and uncertainty. Trust people who change their mind when the evidence changes. Trust people who, when they say “Believe the science!” put their trust in science, with a small-s, which is the dynamic reevaluation of complicated truths, rather than SCIENCE, in weird caps-lock font, which has come to mean the faith that for every random political position, there exists an official-looking study to permanently justify it. I wish the field of epidemiology was made up of immutable laws as settled as the roundness of the Earth and the power of gravity. It’s not. Its priors are vulnerable to reevaluation. If you want to stay right in this space, you have to be curious enough to potentially prove yourself wrong. You have to keep paying attention. For better or worse, that’s science.
It should be noted that small-s science did exactly that. Even though politics and the media environment made it much harder—no decent scientist wanted to give Trump, Cotton, and their ilk ammunition—hypothesis testing continued. Despite the emphatic ridicule in early- and mid-2020, the lab leak theory was in fact being treated as scientifically legitimate by mid-2021. Studies about the effectiveness of various types of masks and the effectiveness of mask mandates in various localities continued to be conducted, published, and dissected.
And, of course, multiple vaccines were produced in record time. Their effectiveness was less than first advertised but they’ve nonetheless gone a long way toward making the pandemic endemic and getting most of us back to something resembling normalcy. That we’ll likely have to get annual boosters is a pretty small price to pay for that.
The information environment, alas, is an obstacle to solving so many of our problems. We have the blessing of carrying around essentially all the information in all the world’s libraries around with us, instantly accessible essentially free of charge, all the time. Theoretically, that should make us smarter than any generation of human beings who ever lived. Instead, it has upended Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous dictum, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Nowadays, everyone has not only their own facts but their own expert studies backing them up.
_________________
*[UPDATE: Stanford public health professor Keith Humphreys rightly chides me for calling the question “irrelevant,” noting “finding out how a virus entered the population always matters because it’s how they figure out how to stop future outbreaks.” Absolutely. I should have simply said that it doesn’t matter all that much in terms of whether average citizens such as me know the answer.]
**I’ll note, for the 1000th time or so, that President Trump, many other Republican officials, and various media figures bear a greater share of the responsibility for poor decisions and poor compliance with sound medical advice than do the experts in question. But this is a post about expert behavior.
Actually, the “vaccines” were first only shown to reduce the severity of COVID in the elderly. Media outlets like CNN and social media got on a bandwagon that “vaccine” meant immunity and “can’t spread” without evidence or information from even the CDC. What was disheartening was when Fauci and others in the official chain started pushing the same ideas, or at least not pushing back when the talking head made the assertion.
I’m not sure the underlying reports and data at CDC ever supported the “vaccines” actually giving immunity, stopping getting COVID or transmission, even as the experts stated or let remain unchallenged such assertions.
1) The Lab Leak Theory was quashed enthusiastically because the American people could not be trusted. My Chinese daughter was already taking shit daily at her work from people like @JKB. Given the gun-toting, shoot-first brainlessness of the American people, I’m okay with them knocking down a theory that would have done nothing to alter the spread of the disease.
2) Good masks, worn properly, would have saved many more lives. We should have stockpiles, and we should have the industrial capacity to crank out a few hundred million masks, FFS.
3) The vaccines did what vaccines often do: they turned ‘I’m gonna die!’ into, ‘I feel kinda off today.’ I had vaccinated Covid and honestly, without the tests, I’d have thought I had a mild cold. My wife, who has asthma, barely exhibited any symptoms.
The Experts Were Right.
This post would be hilarious if it weren’t so dangerous. It’s basically bother-siderism metastasizing into an ideology: both-sidesing for the sake of both-sidesing.
The lab leak theory remains a crazy racist theory. The fact the Department of Energy and the FBI are backing it is not evidence that it deserved a fairer hearing but a demonstration of the frightening degree to which a crazy racist movement has managed to infiltrate our government. Likewise the failure of masking is not demonstration of the failure of masking policy, but a demonstration of our collective failure as citizens to protect our own communities.
But to point these out would imply a need to change our society, and if there’s one thing Dr. Joyner hates, it’s changing our society. So we get a wall of drivel, arguing that up is down and black is white.
In the world of Joynerism, it is not the fault of an extremist political movement deliberately trying to mislead on the source of the virus to distract from their failure to respond to it; it is the fault of the scientists for publicly disagreeing with the extremists.
In the world of Joynerism, it is not the fault of an extremist political movement deliberately trying to undermine public health through sabotage of necessary initiatives; it is the fault of the scientist for trying to coordinate a response to the pandemic.
And why? So Dr. Joyner can go on pretending everything is fine and there’s no need for him to do anything. It’s just people squabbling over nothing and he’s safe just ignoring the whole thing as noise.
He’s safe in his apathy and his beloved status quo.
After all…
The Experts Were Wrong.
Regarding the lab leak theory:
They absolutely didn’t. The above statement is a prime example of hindsight bias.
This, of course, is only part of it.
Would you seriously entertain the notion that there is an invisible unicorn flying above your house?
After all, you don’t (and cannot) know for certain it isn’t there. Shouldn’t you be humble and transparent about that fact?
Or should we add to your description of epistemological professionalism the notion that the unlikelier the claim, the stronger our evidence should be?
And where is the evidence of the lab leak theory? Did the FBI and the Department of Energy ever publish their evidence? (They didn’t.) And when did they publish their assessments? That was months or years after the fact!
The wet market hypothesis was always (and remains for now) the likelier explanation. This is indisputable.
To treat the lab leak hypothesis as anything more than a mere theoretical possibility in the context of the public debate at the time would have been counterproductive and irresponsible.
I mean, theoretically Covid-19 could have been released by the US in China to make that country look bad. Should we seriously discuss that possibility in the absence of any positive evidence? We can’t know that it didn’t happen!
The experts were right and the lab leak theory was in the actual reality that we were living in at the time with very few exceptions racist as fuck.
@Stormy Dragon:
No, it is not a crazy racist theory to suggest that a lab in Wuhan accidentally released a virus. It was always one of the possible answers. Crazy racists liked the theory, but that doesn’t make the theory racist. And it certainly does not suggest the US government is infiltrated with anti-Asian racists.
And the rest of the rant about Joyner is just dumb. You are way off-base here.
@drj:
Because their “evidence” was just copy-pasting from the equally laughable Senate GOP report.
@Michael Reynolds:
It was racist because it was a theory based on no evidence other than racial (or perhaps political) prejudice.
In 28 days this would be a very appropriate post. But since it isn’t April Fool’s Day, let’s call it what it is – nonsense. If it weren’t for the experts how many people in the US would have died? Almost certainly upwards of 3 million. But since the experts were wrong about some things there were mistakes on both sides. Let’s just forget the other side had people who were knowingly spreading dangerous misinformation that specifically contradicted factual data. This post is a textbook example of both sidesism.
The funny thing is that the experts were pretty much on the level the entire time. The guidance was pretty clear on how to prevent the spread of Covid. That’s why in NYC the death rate plummeted once people basically shut down their lives.
I think a lot of Americans turned Covid immediately into a consumer experience, where everything should have been like the brochure promised. But there was brochure. In March 2020 society did a 180 and the normal status quo did not matter. If you lived in this world of Amazon Prime and getting the right info as always, you were going to feel stiffed because that wasn’t you paid for on the trip you thought you bought.
@Stormy Dragon:
This reaction might make sense if this were the first ever OTB post you’d ever read. But I was railing against Trump and company disregarding the experts from essentially Day 1. And I was for flattening the curve, social distancing, masking, vaccinating—and vaccine passports—pretty much as soon as those ideas began circulating.
@senyordave:
I don’t know how many ways I could have couched this post: I laud the experts for the many, many things they got right. I chide them for hubris and shouting down those with contrary theories in cases where they should have been humble about the state of their knowledge. As I noted multiple times in this very post, I never get mad at experts for being wrong when making hard decisions with limited knowledge. I do get mad at them for arrogance in the face of limited knowledge.
Stop it, James!
This kind of post is objectively on the side of the lab-leakers, the anti-maskers, the anti-evolutionists, and all the other anti-sciencers.
What is it about the conservative approach that necessitates the undermining of expertise?
I don’t have time to debunk all the garbage in the OP. I’ll just say that a) Little, if any, of what you’re claiming is “wrong” is as wrong as you think it is; 2) The political approach by Trump and his lackeys was far more influential than any public health information, which they rejected unless it aligned with their desire to ignore the pandemic; and 3) Please, please get more educated on science and how it works. It’s not a compilation of facts graven in stone that one consults like an oracle.
Anyhow, here’s a contribution from (gasp!) a real scientist who’s worked with both science and intelligence.
Lab-Leak Intelligence Reports Aren’t Scientific Conclusions
What really happened here? The DoE, who have little or no relevant expertise, (why does DoE even have an official opinion?) changed their assessment from probably wet market to with “low confidence” “may” have been a lab leak. Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ then said “Lab Leak Most Likely Origin”. And then the RW went off on Dr. Fauci did it in the Chinese lab with a lead pipe. And the elites been lyin’ all along about everything.
Science is not a “cause”. It only appears to be a cause because FOX/GOP keeps attacking it and then people have to defend aspects of it. We all knew FOX lies. Now Dominion has proven it. The question is whether the supposedly liberal MSM will stop pretending FOX is legit journalism, stop amplifying their stories, and stop going down their rabbit holes. Stop with the well maybe Tom (Lando’) Cotton had some small point. Stop debating trivia in an effort to appear fair and reasonable. Ignore the chum he threw in the water and attack Rupert’s boat.
I do get mad at them for arrogance in the face of limited knowledge.
We all lived through the same Covid, and personally, I don’t recall ever feeling that any expert saying anything was acting out of arrogance. The venom which emerged in March 2020 was remedial and insane and based on a conspiratorial reading of a global pandemic in which there was no conspiracy. Seen through that lens, yes, everyone was being arrogant and crushing dissent or whatever, instead of trying to figure out what to do next.
@Cheryl Rofer:
The whole point of the post is that, by loudly ridiculing those who dared question the initial proclamations are a bunch of anti-science morons—even though some decidedly were just that—they set back the cause considerably. I have been throughout the pandemic—and remain!—a “Trust the Science” guy. But too many public health professionals were grandstanding instead of doing science which, almost by definition, doesn’t reach firm conclusions quickly. And they have, for the indefinite future, made “Trust the Science” a punchline.
For the hundredth time, I’m perfectly happy with scientists doing Bayesian updates. It’s what I expect. That’s not what was happening here.
I’m not sure I’ve ever quoted poetry on here before:
I don’t think meant to compliment “the best” with this, but in this case, it is a compliment. “I don’t know” is often the best answer.
I think you need to remember what really happened. The original claims were that the virus was deliberately created as a weapon by China. That is why you got this.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
So it is possible that a virus of natural origin was leaked from the lab, but there has never been any evidence that the virus was designed. The claims that there were sites on the virus not found in nature have all been found in nature. To date the statistical studies suggest market origination and all of our larger pandemics have had a zoonotic origin, but in many cases have taken longer than 10 years to find. So it is possible this could be a first, it was bound to happen, but so far unless DOE and the FBI have info they arent telling us, history favors zoonotic origins. (What’s with he FBI anyway? Dont they know they work for liberals so they should oppose the lab leak theory?)
On masks there were mistakes made, but not so much in the science as in how they were handled. The intent was probably well meant, but telling people masks dont do much in order to preserve them for health care workers was a bad idea. It undercut future messaging. That said, we do know from lab studies that masks work and in hospital settings where compliance to appropriate usage is externally enforced they have been shown to work. What we are mostly testing in studies is compliance with mask usage. Using them when appropriate and also correctly. Not totally unsurprising we weren’t that good at compliance. However, its still useful for people on an individual basis to know that they work if they want to use them, but at this point with the variants so much more contagious you should use an N 95.
On the vaccines we also need to remember that against the initial variants the vaccines were effective both at preventing disease spread and severe disease. While they are much less effective against current variants at disease prevention they are still highly effective against severe disease.
Steve
Hmmm. No good reason to follow this thread. Better to continue having a life.
@James Joyner: You are not a “trust the science” guy, as evidenced by your many posts whining about the inconvenience of a piece of fabric on your face, ignoring the benefit of helping to control the spread of a deadly virus.
Nor is it scientific (or even logical) to excoriate public health professionals for what they did, when the Republican Party and its allies continue to loudly advocate avoiding vaccination and horse paste as a cure.
Leading with “The experts were wrong” is what those people do.
Is it normal for DOE intelligence assessments to be made public?
Why was this leaked to WSJ? Someone with an agenda?
@charon:
It was also leaked to the NYTimes.
Cochrane is the new Wakefield.
You can watch the video of Rebeca Watson’s review of what is, in effect, an exercise in fudging data, or read the transcript.
@Sleeping Dog:
Second.
@James Joyner:
This isn’t true. But a lot of the pronouncements here are false, rooted in the right’s usual whiny, paranoid victim-complex distortion field. It is not true that the antimask, antivaxx, “COVID is a Chinese bioweapon” crowd was “shouted down.” In fact, they’ve never, ever shut up. Not true that public health experts “loudly” ridicule those who “dare question” them as “anti-science morons” — on the whole, they’ve been quite professional, polite, and patient in their explanations (including in response to my own skeptical questions), despite facing vicious, nasty attacks and even death threats.
At any rate, I guess I see why some of these experts have recently resigned, much like many election workers. It can’t feel good to be trashed, smeared, attacked and lied about for trying to do your job and help people. But, as demonstrated by this shockingly headline and, uh less than thorough analysis, Americans are a mediocre, selfish, and frequently stupid people. Even ones who should know better.
@drj:
No theory was based on evidence. We did not have, and still don’t have, a convincing case for the wet market theory. There was an array of possibilities, some embraced by racists, but that does not make the theory false, merely unproven. Right now all the theories are unproven. Just because a racist says the sky is blue that does not make the sky green.
@CSK:
Politicized science. Thus, given the current nature of the GOP, religionized “science” too.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think the first cluster of cases in Wuhan were contact traced back to the wet market, and the virus was found throughout samples collected there after the initial outbreak. It’s circumstantial evidence, but not proof, obviously.
@Michael Reynolds:
“I refuse to be convinced by the ample evidence that’s been presented by the actual experts, therefore the actual experts have no convincing case. Checkmate scientists!”
This is not about politics and it’s not about faith, and it’s not about ‘team mask’ vs, ‘team cough.’ It’s about science. The fact is that we do not have conclusive evidence as to the genesis of Covid. When the evidence changes, change your mind. It’s not science to insist that you were right all along regardless of new information.
It was not racist to question whether the Chinese Communist Party might deploy a bio-weapon. This is a government actively carrying out a genocide. There just wasn’t any evidence.
It was not racist to question whether it was a simple lab error, covered up by the CCP, accidents do happen, and the CCP does lie. There just wasn’t any evidence.
It was also not racist to suggest that it may have been a wet-market transmission. It may have been well-intentioned to insist that this had to be the answer, but there remains insufficient evidence.
The other day we had a discussion on the question of doubt. Cultivate doubt on this, because the case is not open and shut. It won’t be resolved until and unless the CCP allows independent, outsider investigation inside China. So we are not likely ever to get a final answer.
@Stormy Dragon:
Has an independent team been allowed into China to investigate thoroughly? Have western journalists been allowed untrammeled interviews with Chinese scientists? And could said scientists be relied on to answer truthfully? What is the basis of your absolute confidence?
Thanks for the updates, which I think greatly clarify your position. First, of course if they had a leak the Wuhan lab should tighten their procedures and share what happened with other labs. In fact, I think professor Humphries is overreacting by criticizing you for not explicitly saying something that goes without saying.
But your second update really gets to the heart of the dispute in comments.
Exactly, it’s Trump and FOX/GOP by about a 100:1. Classic bothsides. I think most of us here respect your opinions and appreciate your openness and integrity. I can’t speak for anyone else, but this post leaves me puzzled and disappointed. Yes, this is a post about expert behavior. Why? In the history of COVID there are heroes and villains, and it seems to me you’re going to a lot of effort to attack the heroes. And for what? Imperfect PR?
I sometimes question Kevin Drum over his excessive efforts to bend over backwards to seem reasonable. Is that what’s going on?
Snopes has a good write-up. Really!
@gVOR08: “Chide” probably overstated Humphreys comment. But only his tweet is an update. The ** was originally * and in the original post.
I honestly don’t know how it’s possible for anyone vaguely familiar with OTB to read this post as a defense of Trump and company. But they look better by default because of how the debate was handled. They look ‘right’ and the experts wrong because of the latter’s hubris.
@gVOR08:
It’s like being given a choice between a plate of filet mignon and a bowl of shit with glass shards mixed in and complaining the filet isn’t done enough.
Even if it’s true the filet isn’t done enough–and I think James does bring up some valid concerns–it’s still a comparison that isn’t really valid in this context. If we’re going to engage in some introspective critique of how the experts acted and conveyed their messages, and we should because that’s a big part of what science should be doing, we should separate it from the bad faith arguments the anti-science and anti-expertise people are engaging in. I think in this post James allows the latter a bit too much influence, even if that wasn’t his intent.
Is it just me or does the lead author of the “comprehensive study” give off a nutcase vibe?
He doesn’t trust journalists, but he is willing to state unequivocally that masks have no effect even though reading the paper clearly shows the shortcomings of the approach taken and the studies analyzed.
When the paper was released, I immediately read through it and concluded that the people claiming it showed masking doesn’t reduce spread were lazy or deliberately misleading about its conclusions.
But now that the lead author has made his views known, it seems clear that he authored a paper that is more suited as an op-ed rather than an actual paper. This is exactly the type of thing that scientific procedures are followed to avoid. Perhaps Cochrane saw that as well. How dare they edit him?
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m not saying the theory is false, I’m saying the theory was racist.
“The black guy did it” may be factually true, but it’s still racist if there is no other “evidence” than that the guy isn’t white.
@James Joyner: @gVOR08:
What am I missing? Who is Humphrey?
@Michael Reynolds:
For you, about science. For others, not so much.
@Cheryl Rofer: “Lab leak intelligence reports aren’t scientific conclusions”…
A thousand times, YES! Any intelligence report that’s claims a reasonable degree of certainly for a lab leak is currently straying well outside of what the facts and science on the ground can support. The best, and most reasonable conclusion is “don’t know”
Exactly. And barring regime change in China, we probably never will. Which is fine because it doesn’t change how we deal with it. It’s a scientific and diplomatic issue which has no impact on whether you should wear a mask or get the shot.
@Cheryl Rofer:
Did we all read/skim the same post?
There was a lot of “the experts were wrong” followed by “the experts were wrong about being wrong”…
I don’t think a bit of whimsy and tongue-in-cheek firm proclamations are particularly effective rhetorical devices in a post about subtle interpretations of data on subjects where there has been a lot of misinformation.
Either a bunch of people, like yourself and Mr. Dragon, missed these flourishes, or I have invented them out of nothing.
@gVOR08:
Because the expert behavior undermined the future power of experts. Every post, especially two years into the Biden presidency, doesn’t have to be about Trump.
@Mikey:
But you really can’t separate them. Let’s leave aside Trump, because he was just paroting whatever he heard on Fox and Friends on a given day. All manner of people—many of who weren’t Trumpers or even Republicans—were arguing that a lab leak was a plausible theory and were lampooned as racists and idiots. Even though I wasn’t touting the theory—indeed, I was still skeptical well after it started becoming respectable, precisely because Trump and company were pushing it—I think it’s worth examining the process that made the experts so belligerent in their denial of the theory.
@Kurtz: Update/footnote in the OP.
@DK: There have been claims of people connected to the lab being sick with covid-like symptoms shortly before the wet market cases.
There’s also a fucking shit ton of misinformation out there, pushed by people with an agenda, so I don’t think we will ever be able to sort out truth from fiction.
Similar to the situation with Bill Clinton — the dude is a bit sleazy* and he might have done some financial crime somewhere or raped a child or whatever, but with all the complete bullshit that has been thrown at him, there’s no way to tell what is real and there’s a strong presumption of it being bullshit.
——
*: I’ve never understood why people claim he is a great speaker or knows how to connect with people. Dude always made my skin crawl.
Just on the basis of the title, I can’t take this seriously. “The experts” are not a monolithic block. It’s hard to see it as much beyond clickbait and/or disinformation.
@James Joyner:
I think the process is really clear: a bunch of white nationalists and neonazis began using the theory to promote vile hatred, and steer people into further genuinely crazy theories, and pretty much every expert said “not today Nazis.”
Promoting information in a world filled with disinformation is difficult, and leads to distortions. And good lord it gets infinitely harder if there are subtleties that will be misinterpreted by clearly bad faith actors.
“Lab leak theory” is shorthand for a bunch of different scenarios, including (but not limited to):
– virus found in nature was accidentally released during collection
– virus found in nature was accidentally released directly from lab
– virus was modified with gain of function research, accidentally released
– Chinese bio weapon was accidentally released
– the joint Chinese/Fauci developed bio weapon was deliberately released to control the world and corrupt our precious bodily fluids.
When the possibility of the first or second is being promoted as evidence of one of the last two, it stifles communication. And when it’s being promoted by Nazis (or sparkling white nationalists), that makes it harder.
@Michael Reynolds:
I don’t really understand how the wet-market theory is less prone to racist shitholes using it to harass people than the lab leak theory.
“These people eat bats and weird animals bats have shit upon” seems like a pretty ripe starting point for all sorts of racist comments and abuse. I feel queasy having written it, and I’m pretty sure that what I wrote is accurate (fecal matter transmission is a part of the wet-market theory).
(Pangolins and civets might not like being categorized as weird, and I offer my sincere apologies if any pangolins or civets feel offended)
@anjin-san: Yes, the title is unfortunate and probably set people up for a piece pandering to the wackos.
James, did you write this to fill an uneventful Saturday? 🙂
@Michael Reynolds: “It was not racist to question whether the Chinese Communist Party might deploy a bio-weapon. This is a government actively carrying out a genocide. There just wasn’t any evidence.”
By that reasoning, it’s also not racist to suggest it was created by Jews to wipe out Christians. There just isn’t any evidence.
@James Joyner:
So a majority of “experts” — public health officials, epidemiologists, NHI and
CDC, etc — belligerently lampooned those who said the lab leak theory was plausible were “racists and idiots”?
I understand conservative victim-complex paranoia causes y’all to lie slot, but this is Grade A bullshit. “The experts” did no such thing.
@Sleeping Dog: True. But most of the time, I’m obsessive about reading all the comments in a thread. I may have to put Covid in the same category as I have put 2nd Amendment and just skip this type of post altogether.
@gVOR08:
Some of the national labs that operate under the DoE umbrella do biological/environmental systems analysis, including the spread of bacteria and viruses.
@Michael Reynolds:
They aren’t going to deploy a bio-weapon on their own soil without developing treatments and/or vaccine first. It might not be racist to conclude that happened, but it sure is stupid (and probably at least a little racist).
And it would be a pretty bad bioweapon. 1-2% fatality, skewed older? Too contagious to be contained to the enemy?
Unfortunately for America, Donld Trump was the president when the Covid pandemic took hold. It was unfortunate because after a few brief moments Trump decided to treat the pandemic as a political problem. It became a state-by-state free-for-all.
Covid was a test and right now I think that we, collectively, failed.
@Gustopher:
The accidental leak is the Motte in a motte-and-bailey strategy for people who really believe the deliberate bioweapon attack conspiracy theory
All pandemic viruses have originated in the wild and the burden to show otherwise is on the lab-leakers. So far there is no compelling evidence that that’s what happened -Chinese obfuscation evidence is evidence of Chinese obfuscation. The reality is that we all know the truth and people simply are following their politics- it’s a new conspiracy theory to follow down the well. As to masks, they would have work better if it wasn’t for the politicalization of the matter. Can’t blame scientists on this one. Look Republicans have tried to politicize diseases for a long time, Ebola being the most recent example. When Covid bit them in the ass, they try to cover, lie, rationalize, etc. Sadly, the one lesson that could have real life impact, that diseases don’t follow politics, didn’t get through.
Using “probably” without including that the DOE assessment was “with low confidence” was a lie of omission on Derek Thompson’s part.
I had thought better of him.
What’s particularly annoying about the lab-leak ‘theory’ is that it’s all about spring 2020, and how we couldn’t express ourselves properly by just randomly speculating online.
Overall, I suspect most scientists intuitively doubted that Covid leaked from a lab. Intuition isn’t science, so they couldn’t say that directly. But everything has proved them right. If you believe there’s weight to the lab leak theory you at least have to deal with the current evidence linking the spread to the wet market. I mean, if you think it came from lab, you have to address concrete things. But nobody bothers. They just go back, like a primal scene of trauma, to spring of 2020 and the experts and Fauci, and maybe add to the mix the advice about the Floyd protests and masking just to really get the white idiot id spinning in circles chasing its own tail.
An important point here that you and Thompson are missing: the study cited on masks is hot garbage. or at least the takes on it are. The study had 78 studies but only six were during COVID and only two of masks themselves, the stronger of which concluded that masks worked. The conclusions of the paper were, bizarrely, that no conclusion could be drawn. But now the lead author is going on TV and saying masks are proven not to work and no one is bothering the read to paper to figure out that THIS IS NOT WHAT IT SAYS.
The weight of evidence is still on masks as en effective deterrent.
I’m waiting for Andy to chime in, since he’s an established liar on this subject, but James, the most charitable interpretation of this is that you’re lying to yourself about who you are and what you believe.
Yes, government and expert messaging was inconsistent and largely incompetent in the face of a public that was already racing towards a boiling point after a nearly-complete term of Trump. But your clickbait headlines do not describe your article. Are you really that desperate for a piece of the attention economy that you choose to be dangerously dishonest, against your own purported position?
Voters don’t vote based on issues; they vote based on party. People don’t comprehend based on article bodies; they comprehend based on headlines. That’s the point of headlines. I don’t know if you’re lying to your readers or to yourself, but you’re lying to someone. And, unlike journalists in the newsroom, you can’t even blame this on editors.
Early on, I read about virus load. The probability of getting infected is dependent on the concentration of virus particles you are exposed to times the exposure time. Simple math that makes sense. Wearing a mask reduces exposure and wearing a good mask correctly does it better. That is all I have to know, and along with being vaccinated with boosters, it seems to be working for me, having had exactly one cold since spring of 2020 despite taking a few flights and spending a lot of time with students . Note I am in my 70s and did quarantine before being fully vaccinated.
So how much do I care about lab vs wet market? Not much. How bothered am I about how partisan politics jumped right into this health crisis? Quite a bit. But where I live, if I am the only person wearing a mask in a store, school or airplane, nobody so much as raises an eyebrow. I’m just an old guy taking precautions.
I will note, once again, that having the lab leak theory recast as plausible at this point in time has a geopolitical/PR value for the US.
The fact that prevalence of influenza was very low during the 2020-2021 flu season is strong evidence that social measures work with respiratory viruses.
@Gustopher:
No shit. But these are the geniuses who decided to fly balloons over Montana. Obviously the odds that it was a bioweapon are small. Small, not zero. The accidental lab leak has a higher probability. Maybe 20%? Pick a number.
To repeat: we don’t know, we probably never will know, and that’s how life is. How in the hell this managed to turn into rival teams with otherwise intelligent people on my side of the aisle insisting that it is 100% wet market when they absolutely don’t know that, I don’t understand.
Wait for the fucking science, and if the science never gives us a final answer, guess what? That’s how science works. Science done properly gives us the best available answer. I gather (in my decidedly non-STEM way) that the JWST has caused some reconsideration among cosmologists and their ilk. We are un-knowing things we thought we knew. That’s what makes science fascinating and exciting.
If you say you believe in science then you must believe in doubt. The entire enterprise rests on doubt. People who have no doubts make no discoveries.
All science is provisional – Something we should always keep in mind. OTOH, barring blackouts, when I flip the switch, the lights go on. Science works pretty damn well. The endless drivel about “$cientists” over the last few years is both depressing and a signpost of a society in decline.
This is worth a look:
Putin’s Long War Against American Science
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/science/putin-russia-disinformation-health-coronavirus.html
This is such a dumb conversation. Nothing coming out of the US ‘Intelligence’ agencies have demonstrated anything that makes a lab leak more likely. I doubt that they have to talent or resources to make that conclusion. Now experts in evolutionary biology, who actually do have evidence would still be our best source for the likelihood of the genesis of the virus: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162845/what-does-the-science-say-about-the-origin-of-the-sars-cov-2-pandemic