Cheap Shot: Scientific American's Recent Article on COVID-19

"What we have seen with the lab-leak controversy is experts responding to this state of affairs not with the kind of humility the situation calls for, but by forcing consensus to create the appearance of certitude in order to preserve their social and political authority. The misrepresentation of the state of our knowledge regarding Covid’s origins was therefore not simply a misstep or institutional failure. It was a perversion of the norms that scientific institutions and experts are supposed to uphold."  -- M. Anthony Mills, article in The New Atlantis

The COVID-19 pandemic began spreading worldwide early in the year 2020, after originating in Wuhan, China, the site of two major virus labs. In February 2020 a letter appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet entitled "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19." The statement denounced as "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories" suspicions that "COVID-19 does not have a natural origin."  It stated the following:

"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."

The authors suggested that "conjecture" on this topic should be repressed for the sake of "unity," stating, "We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture." 

The Daily Mail quotes a scholar of COVID-19 origins (Jamie Metzl) as speaking very unfavorably about the February 2020 Lancet letter orchestrated by Daszak:

"Jamie Metzl, who sits on the World Health Organization's advisory committee on human genome editing and is a former Bill Clinton administration staffer, said Dr Daszak's letter was a 'form of thuggery'. He said: ‘The Lancet letter was scientific propaganda and a form of thuggery and intimidation. By labelling anyone with different views a conspiracy theorist, the Lancet letter was the worst form of bullying in full contravention of the scientific method.' "

Metzl was using a little hyperbole, as no literal thuggery (no literal physical violence) was involved, and mere words are never "the worst form of bullying," which is physical violence. It is rather hard to judge exactly how much of an effect the February 2020 Lancet letter had. But it did rather seem in early 2020 that the letter had "worked like a charm" to tell scientists that no heresy was allowed from the prevailing view on this topic.  Throughout that year scientists acted as if they were thinking, "We got the memo: it is a taboo to question the purely natural origin of COVID-19." 

But in the year 2021, things started to change. Article after article in the mainstream press began to treat respectfully the lab leak hypothesis as an alternate theory of COVID-19 origins. An example is the article here in the widely-read science review site Inference. In the press around the middle of 2021 we heard quite a few scientists say that in retrospect it was a mistake to brand those in favor of the lab leak hypothesis as "conspiracy theorists." The lab leak hypothesis is  mainly a theory of human error and human overconfidence, not a theory of some sinister conspiracy.  Quite a few scientists said something along the lines that going forward, there should be a calm scientific debate about the alternate ideas of a purely natural origin of COVID-19 and a laboratory-related origin, without people mudslinging those who took either of the positions. 

But mainstream scientists have been very bad about living up to such pledges. Soon after we heard such pledges, mainstream scientists returned to their bad old ways, and resumed techniques of stereotyping, smearing and weaponized psychology against those advancing the lab leak hypothesis. 

The latest example is an absurdly ad hominem article published in Scientific American.  The article has three authors: 

• a virologist who tries to make a case for the purely natural origin of COVID-19 (one that withholds a crucial piece of evidence);
• a climate scientist who is there so that a senseless comparison can be made between global warming denialists and those who are skeptical about whether COVID-19 had a purely natural origin;
• a cognitive scientist who seems to be the chief instigator in an application of weaponized psychology, which is when ad hominem psychology verbiage is used for the sake of "poison-the-well" defamation of someone who holds some opinion you do not share or made some observation you do not want to accept.

The article has the absurd title "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth." The claim is not at all true.  The hypothesis that COVID-19 may have arisen from a lab accident has not done anything to make it harder for any scientist to seek the truth. 

The article repeatedly tries to draw illegimate associations between those who favor the lab leak hypothesis and various unrelated parties who the authors regard as unsavory. Specifically:

(1) The article again and again unfairly tries to paint supporters of the lab leak hypothesis as conspiracy theorists.  You need not believe in any conspiracy theory to think that COVID-19 may have arisen from a lab leak when overconfident scientists were not as careful as they should have been. A theory of human error and overconfidence is not a conspiracy theory.  

(2) By having a photo showing people opposing vaccine mandates, the article tries to link people opposing vaccine mandates and those who think COVID-19 may have originated when some lab leak occurred. These are two different unrelated opinions. 

(3) Most ridiculously, the article tries to link those disbelieving in man-made global warming with those supporting the lab leak hypothesis. Those two opinions have no connection, and in one sense are rather the opposite. A global warming denialist is often saying "it's all just natural, not man-caused" about global warming, while a lab leak theorist may typically say "it's not all just natural, it was man-caused" about COVID-19.  

Climate scientists do not enhance their credibilty when they author or co-author ad hominem attacks trying to smear people who have some opinion which has nothing to do with the climate, by making extremely strained and implausible comparisons between such people and global warming denialists, like someone trying to say parapsychology lab researcher professors are like tarot-card fortune tellers, or like someone trying to suggest critics of gene splicing research are like flat earth believers.  To the contrary, when climate scientists become involved in that type of unfair mudslinging,  such scientists may diminish their own credibility.  

Discussing the intelligence review of the lab leak hypothesis made by government agencies, the Scientific American article resorts to some deplorable information withholding. The article tells us only this:

"The so-called lab-leak hypothesis gained sufficient rhetorical and political force that President Joe Biden instructed the U.S. intelligence services to investigate it. Although the interagency intelligence report update, declassified in October 2021, dismissed several popular laboratory-origin claims—including that the virus was a bioweapon and that the Chinese government knew about the virus before the pandemic—it was unable to unequivocally resolve the origin question."

The report in question (which you can read here)  stated the following, using "IC elements" to mean government agencies such as the FBI and the CIA involved with intelligence analysis:

"Four IC elements and the National Intelligence Council assess with low confidence that the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus—a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2. These analysts give weight to China’s officials’ lack of foreknowledge, the numerous vectors for natural exposure, and other factors.  One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

So the result was: no conclusion on COVID-19 origins were made  with high confidence, and the only conclusion made with medium confidence was a conclusion in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. What we needed from the recent Scientific American article on COVID-19 origins was a mention of the fact that is most relevant to discussing COVID-19 origins: that the only US intelligence agency to conclude with medium or higher confidence on this topic concluded with medium confidence that COVID-19 probably came from a lab leak. Instead of telling us this most relevant fact,  Scientific American has given us a fantasy: that the hypothesis of a lab leak is making it harder for scientists to seek truth. 

A page from the assessment on COVID-19 origins

Unfair stereotyping of opponents is one of the eight classic symptoms of groupthink. The authors of the recent Scientific American article seem like examples of what are called mindguards. In the context of groupthink, mindguards are people who try to prevent some group from being exposed to data or opinions that conflict with its prevalent opinion about something.  Besides stereotyping of opponents, the predominant tactic of mindguards is to suppress any mention of relevant facts or observations conflicting with the group's viewpoint. 

Scientific American has turned into such an "ideology shop" that by now a good principle is: never believe anything merely because you read it in a headline in Scientific American, unless you get confirmation from some other credible source. 

In the New York Times yesterday there was an opinion article with the headline "How Millions of Lives Might Have Been Saved from COVID-19." The article suggests that the entire global COVID-19 pandemic could have been prevented if there had not been a very early coverup conspiracy to suppress news about the politically embarrassing reality of the spread of a novel disease (one of many reasons it makes no sense to speak as if conspiracies never occur). Without naming any names of the bumbling officials guilty of the bungled US response to COVID-19, we get some startling comparisons between competent responses in small countries and incompetent responses in the US. For example, we are told that Taiwan has suffered only 853 COVID-19 deaths, and that "if the United States had suffered a similar death rate, we would have lost about 12,000 people, instead of nearly a million." We are told that South Korea had fewer than1000 COVID-19 deaths in 2020, and that if the US had responded as effectively, it would have lost only about 7000 in the year 2020, instead of losing more than 375,000 in that year. Thus far the COVID-19 deaths of the United States are about 400 times greater than in the attack at Pearl Harbor, but quite a few comparable to Admiral Kimmel have yet to be fired.