Future and Cosmos: "The Scientist" Magazine Poorly Advised the Public in the Early Months of COVID-19

In the post here and the post here I documented how leading health agencies such as the WHO, the CDC and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases made crucial blunders during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar blunders were committed by the mainstream science press. In the post here I documented how the leading online science publication Quanta Magazine failed to properly alert the public on how to protect itself during the crucial early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this post I will discuss how another leading online science publication (The Scientist at www.the-scientist.com) failed to properly advise the public in the crucial early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

People in the USA only began to hear about coronavirus (also called COVID-19) early in the year 2020. The first few months of the year 2020 were a critical period during which the "evil genie" of COVID-19 might have been pretty much kept in its bottle if the public had been well-advised, and the right steps had been taken. Thanks to the excellent tagging system at The Scientist site, it is possible to see exactly how The Scientist covered COVID-19 in the early months of the pandemic. You can use links like this to find all the articles the magazine published on COVID-19.

https://www.the-scientist.com/tag/coronavirus

https://www.the-scientist.com/tag/COVID-19

Then you just use the pagination links at the bottom right to navigate back to the stories that appeared on COVID-19 in the first half of 2020. The two links above give almost identical results after about February 1, 2020, when almost all stories on COVID-19 in The Scientist had tags of both "coronavirus" and "COVID-19."

The January 2020 stories COVID-19 stories in The Scientist are below:

None of these stories did much of anything to alert the US public to the danger that COVID-19 would spread massively in the United States. Below are the COVID-19 stories that The Scientist had in the first half of February 2020:

None of these stories did much of anything to alert the US public to the growing peril of COVID-19. The first article had a headline giving the inaccurate impression that there were drugs that could cure COVID-19, at a time in which no such drugs existed. The last article was one that attempted to argue that COVID-19 was not all that much to worry about. The February 14, 2020 article was written by a professor of biology (Loike) who rather seemed to be raising hopes that COVID-19 would soon abate or that effective anti-viral treatments would soon be available for COVID-19. No such treatments appeared in the first half of 2020 (although by now they exist). The professor stated the following:

" Several reports have even presented data of potentially effective anti-viral treatments for this coronavirus. It is still too early to assess some encouraging news from China that indicates that the spread of this pathogen is abating in provinces other than Hubei, where it originated—a sign that the quarantine efforts in China may be working. People should be more concerned about the flu epidemic that typically kills between 10,000 and 50,000 people in the US each year."

The same gigantic blunder was made by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who told us about the same time that COVID-19 was not nearly as big a threat as the flu. In a February 17, 2020 interview with USA Today, Fauci said that the risk from coronavirus (COVID-19) in the USA was "minuscule." In the next 2.5 years COVID-19 would kill about a million people in the United States, more than twenty times the annual death toll from the flu. Professor Loike then stated this: "At this point in time, the CDC does not recommend wearing masks such as the N95 respirator type to avoid catching the virus, so people should not worry if stores have sold out." This advice of the CDC (repeated in February 2020 and March 2020 by Anthony Fauci in TV interviews) was foolish and disastrous. The CDC recanted such advice about April 3, 2020, when it started telling healthy people to wear masks in crowds. If the CDC and people such as Fauci had given the right advice early in the pandemic (such as advice to wear face masks until a vaccine was available), most of the million US COVID-19 deaths would probably have been prevented. In the first three months of 2020, it was as if the US press and science establishment had basically appointed Anthony Fauci as a kind of "pope of COVID-19," and the priesthood of professors dared not defy this "pope."

Here are the articles about COVID-19 that The Scientist had in the second half of February 2020:

None of these stories did much of anything to alert the US public to the growing peril of COVID-19. The "How COVID-19 Is Spread" article discouraged people from wearing face masks by saying, "The CDC only recommends these masks for people who are already infected with SARS-CoV-2." It made no sense for the article to parrot such ruinous advice, because the article had discussed how scientists did not know whether the COVID-19 virus was airborne. At a critical time when many lives would have been saved if the editors and writers at The Scientist had challenged authority rather than kneeling to it, we merely had a parroting of the CDC's ruinous advice, which the CDC recanted a few weeks later. The article "As Global Coronavirus Cases Climb, More Areas on Lockdown" mentioned only countries outside of the US, without mentioning any cases in the US, and without mentioning the US or any of its cities.

Here are the articles about COVID-19 that The Scientist had in the first half of March 2020:

None of these stories did much of anything to properly advise the US public about how to protect themselves from the growing peril of COVID-19. By this time the hospitals in New York City were starting to fill up with COVID-19 patients. The subways were spreading COVID-19 very efficiently, in subway cars where people were not wearing masks. But we still had no advice from The Scientist suggesting that healthy people wear masks.

Here are the articles about COVID-19 that The Scientist had in the second half of March 2020:

During these two weeks, COVID-19 was spreading like wildfire in places like New York City, which would have thousands of deaths by the end of March, 2020. The public desperately needed publications like The Scientist to properly advise it. But The Scientist was asleep at the wheel. We still had no article from The Scientist telling healthy people to wear face masks. This was long before there were any vaccines for COVID-19, at a time when wearing masks was of the utmost importance to prevent the spread of the disease.

It wasn't as if The Scientist was afraid at this time to be advising the public. In one of the articles above (Opinion: Stop Private Speculation in COVID-19 Research) The Scientist said "In our view, five policy actions are urgent," and listed five recommendations. But none of the recommendations were what the public needed to be advised at this time. The five recommendations were largely about how scientists could better profit from the pandemic. Among the "urgent" policy actions recommended were that "it is necessary to establish a system of public rewards for all researchers who share their knowledge, even partial, in the battle against the virus." That was bad advice, the type of advice that might have encouraged a COVID-19 researcher to withhold his findings if he was not paid for them. It would have been better for the The Scientist to have said: it is the moral duty of all researchers to share their findings about COVID-19, regardless of rewards they receive.

Finally on April 3, 2020 there was a huge change in what disease control authorities were teaching about preventing COVID-19. On that day the CDC suddenly began advising us that it was very important for healthy people to wear masks to protect themselves from COVID-19. The CDC reversed and recanted the disastrous advice it had been giving throughout February 2020 and March 2020, that people did not need to wear face masks unless they had already been infected by COVID-19.

But The Scientist had a disastrous failure in this regard. None of its articles before April 3, 2020 advised healthy people to wear masks to protect themselves from the COVID-19 pandemic which was spiraling out of control in March, 2020. Moreover, once the CDC announced its reversal about face masks on April 3, 2020 (by suddenly telling us we should all be wearing face masks when we go out in public), The Scientist failed to publicize this extremely important announcement. The Scientist should have immediately issued an article with a headline like this:

We Goofed So Bad! Please Start Wearing Face Masks to Stop COVID-19!

But no such article appeared. Here are the articles about COVID-19 that The Scientist published in the first two weeks of April, 2020:

It would be rather hard to imagine a more pathetic failure to advise the public than the failure of The Scientist during these crucial months of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the months when the CDC was issuing ruinous advice telling people only to wear face masks if they were sick (February 2020 and March 2020), The Scientist failed to produce any articles challenging such bad advice. Then when the CDC completely reversed its position and started telling people that they needed to wear face masks even if they were not sick (on April 3, 2020), The Scientist apparently failed to even have an article bringing to its readers this incredibly important announcement. The Scientist acted rather as if it had some skeleton in its closet that it wanted to hide: that it had failed to properly advise the public during the crucial early months of a pandemic.

For the rest of April, 2020 and in May 2020 and in June 2020 there were no helpful articles in The Scientist primarily written to advise the public on how to prevent being infected by COVID-19. When the World Health Organization on June 6, 2020 made a very important announcement reversing its previous ruinous advice by telling healthy people to start wearing face masks to prevent COVID-19, there seems to have been no article in The Scientist covering this very important announcement.

What went on at The Scientist during the first half of 2020 was not some rare fluke in which scientists acted in an uncharacteristic manner. To the contrary, the failure of The Scientist and so many scientists during this period was a textbook example of problems that have for very long plagued scientific academia, and continue to be a gigantic blight on the community of scientists. The problems are things such as groupthink, herding behavior, intellectual cowardice, lack of scholarly independence, and a tendency of scientific authorities to meekly kowtow to belief traditions, rather than independently judging matters based solely on facts, logic, observations, morality and mathematics.

The sociological situation in scientific academia is illustrated by the schematic diagram below. Each layer believes as the layers above it believes, leaving some tiny group at the top (consisting of professors at the most well-known universities) largely controlling what millions believe.

This situation is pathological and intellectually disastrous. Every scientist should be judging truth based on facts, observations, logic and mathematics, rather than just meekly parroting the opinions of other scientists. When some tiny group controls how everyone believes, there will be all too large a chance of the propagation of untrue beliefs and bad advice, in a sociological process that has been described as herding behavior, "follow the leader" and groupthink.

In the case of the early pandemic, we saw an even more dysfunctional situation. The situation is described by the diagram below, which is a slight modification of the diagram above. In this version the difference is that there are very tiny little boards or committees at agencies such as the CDC or the WHO, represented by the tiny little red mark at the very top. Instead of independently giving advice based on facts, observations, logic and math, all of the layers are dancing to the tune played by some tiny little committees or boards at the CDC or the WHO.

The tendencies of science authorities to "follow the herd" and to kneel to authority (rather than exercising independent judgment) was a gigantic disaster that helped to lead to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. If science authorities had acted properly, giving the right advice during the first months of 2020, more than half a million lives could have been saved. There was nothing the least bit inevitable about losing a million American lives by COVID-19 infection. An article in the New York Times was entitled "How Millions of Lives Might Have Been Saved from COVID-19." We read 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 than 1000 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.

The world continues to suffer enormously because of groupthink and "follow the herd" tendencies in scientific academia, in which professors act like guardians of belief traditions rather than independent judges of truth. Innumerable millions are miseducated into believing irrational ideas that are in conflict with a horde of facts and human observations. Detailing fully the damage that has been done by scientist authoritarianism would require a very long additional essay that would mention things such as (1) the incalculable mental harm and physical risk that occurred because of the construction of atomic bombs and utterly unnecessary hydrogen bombs that put the very survival of civilization at risk; and (2) the incalculable moral and mental harm arising from evidence-ignoring materialist misrepresentations of the essential nature of humans, ideas deriving from boastful socially constructed achievement legends.

Thankfully the COVID-19 death toll was kept from being twice as bad, mainly by the work of brave health care workers, ordinary people who took precautionary measures, and a large body of research scientists and other workers who worked to develop COVID-19 vaccines.

There used to be a documentary television show called Seconds From Disaster. In each episode there would be a description of how some disaster occurred. I recall one episode that taught an important lesson. It seems that a pilot had mistakenly taken off a jetliner in the wrong direction, ignoring the sun in front of him which indicated he was flying in the wrong direction. As a result of the error, the jet crashed and many people died. A review board came to the conclusion that the co-pilot must have suspected the error, but probably avoided telling the pilot about his error, on the grounds that a co-pilot would be "out of line" to be suggesting his superior was guilty of an obvious error.

In this jet crash case, meekly kneeling to authority led to the death of only dozens of people. The timid kneeling to authority that went on during the early months of COVID-19 helped lead to the unnecessary death of most of a million people in the United States from COVID-19, most of whom would probably have lived if authorities had taught properly from the beginning. Our science authorities have not learned the incredibly important lesson of this affair: that well-informed people should bravely stick their necks out and issue independent judgments and advice based on facts, logic, observations, morality and evidence, rather than just meekly "following the herd" and assuming that people above them in some pyramid of prestige have got things right. There are 101 reasons (sociological, cultural, financial and psychological) why people at the top of some pyramid of prestige may be teaching things that are dead wrong.

2 comments:

RobertJuly 24, 2022 at 5:11 PM
As with AIDS, the Wuhan Virus was politicized from the very beginning. Concerning AIDS, public health measures were violated, for fear of a "gay" backlash. Ironically, massive numbers of homosexuals died as a result. Concerning the Wuhan Virus, political factions maneuvered to gain what advantage they could, fixing blame, blocking aid sent by the "wrong" political party, silencing (and vilifying) expert epidemiologists who held the "wrong" political views, etc. The end result has been a dramatic diminution of public trust in our major institutions. That in itself will cost many lives in the future.

Saturday, July 23, 2022

"The Scientist" Magazine Poorly Advised the Public in the Early Months of COVID-19

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