Much that is valuable in Kulldorff's recent editorial for Spiked
(Below, some personal commentary.)
“This increased pressure may seem counterintuitive, but it is not. Had we been wrong, our scientific colleagues might have taken pity on us and the media would have gone back to ignoring us. Being correct means that we embarrassed some immensely powerful people in politics, journalism, big tech and science. They are never going to forgive us.”
If you want to ignore me entirely and go read his very generous, level-headed editorial, please feel free and I forgive you. If you hang around I’ll make some comments of my own. Kulldorff is an infectious-disease epidemiologist with Harvard Medical School who came to prominence over the last year by being an advocate for a “focused protection” strategy response to COVID that protected those at risk (generally the aged) while leaving the rest to live a normal life. Although he is, in my observations of him, a pretty centrist guy, I also think he has been somewhat “radicalized” by seeing first the abysmal public health response in much of the Western world (his own Sweden excepted), and then perhaps even more so by the censorship of anyone who dared to think otherwise (in fact his own Twitter account is still locked as I write this).
And now, a little bit of commentary from myself.
The largely ignored low risk to the young
Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.
COVID-19 was and is a somewhat worse-than-usual disease… but how fortunate we were that it actually isn’t for children and many other young people. Early in COVID I remember wondering how our society would respond to a disease that had such a gigantic difference in risk based on age. I would not have guessed, at the time, that the answer would be “by treating literally everyone like an at-risk eighty year old”. I would not have predicted that I would be teaching my college classes online for over a year. (Yes, older and otherwise at-risk individuals sometimes take college classes, and I would not have been surprised if we enhanced our number of online offerings for those who wanted them. But only online for everyone?)
I remember writing, in the summer of 2020, that how we handled K-12 in the Fall would show whether or not we had entirely lost our minds. Again, even at the time, I would not have predicted that the answer for many children was going to be “no school at all for many months”. (There is a lesson here that, if you think, if our society or an institution takes even one step in a certain direction, it isn’t going to know when to stop, then that is actually an excellent argument for not even taking one step. See “mask your toddler!” for another excellent example.)
More information doesn’t necessarily make you smarter
Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.
I appreciate him saying that. When the internet was young, some people thought we were about to enter Star Trek world - an infinity of human information available at anyone’s fingertips! Utopia would surely follow. Well it didn’t happen. When it comes to COVID-19, we had literally millennia of data from humans responding to viruses available to guide our response… and we acted like no one had ever seen a virus before. We violated in gross measure pandemic plans written in a calmer moment for exactly this contingency. We produced, with all of our knowledge, one of the worst public health responses in all of human history. Anybody still believe in the inevitability of human progress?
There are factors in modern life and in the particular moment that made the response worse (it probably is true that the US response, which then drove much of the world response, was worse because it was an election year and many of the people making the decisions were primarily concerned with gaming things to the benefit of their party, for example). Always-on media and social media is a new thing and wants to keep you in a constant state of hyperventilation. But worst of all, I think, was the groupthink problem which was exacerbated by instant global communication. I’ve said this before, but I think if you locked public health people in a closet in February of 2020, gave them all the information and data over the next few months that they wanted but didn’t let them talk to anyone else, 95% of them would never have proposed the response they later ended up defending. In fact many of them probably would have proposed something like what Kulldorff proposed. There also would have been a much greater inclination to actually stick to the pre-2020 plans. Instead they became defenders of a sort of elite-driven and often politically-driven, and disastrous, response.
Just ignore any data that would invalidate your theory
Speaking of an NEJM article about the consequences of school reopenings in July 2020 that entirely ignored information from Sweden, which kept schools open for the under-15 without masks, distancing, or physical barriers, and without a single child death or enhanced risk to teachers:
Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.
As someone who has looked a lot at the comparative data posted by good folks like @ianmsc, I have been amazed by how successfully leaders in more-restricted jurisdictions have been able to claim '“can’t do that, not safe!” when people in less-restricted jurisdictions had been doing the supposedly not-safe thing for months without ill effect. Of course the mainstream media deserves a tremendous amount of the blame here. They are the people best positioned to actually ask these questions of leaders, “how can this be unsafe in Ontario but they’re actually doing it, and so much more, in Florida?”. They don’t ask those questions. Like literally, they’ve had a year to do it, they don’t ask those questions. They don’t care. I do think the GOP should take this up and create some sort of formal mechanism to permit people like @ianmsc to ask serious questions and compel leaders to respond to them. Because legacy media isn’t doing its job.
Of course the other thing that might be pointed out is that, in the case of NEJM, it wasn’t journalists ignoring contrary data, it was scientists ignoring contrary data. Do we all realize now that scientists are people too who have plenty of motivations in their life more important to them than “what does the data say?”. This is one reason you don’t want to be ruled by the experts, and you also don’t want to be ruled by the mob. And you should feel free to seriously question anyone, no matter how many letters they have after their name.
Criticism isn’t about winning the debate
Also, I did not take the journalistic and academic attacks personally, however vile – and most came from people I had never even heard of before. The attacks were not primarily addressed at us anyhow. We had already spoken out and would continue to do so. Their main purpose was to discourage other scientists from speaking out.
Just worth remembering that this is often the way our public discourse works. The point is not to win the debate against person who made claim X. The point is to make sure everyone else who also believes X sees what is happening to person and keeps their mouth shut. Happens all the time.
Yet another great post, David. A couple things...
1. The GOP is less than useless. Their intended purpose is to lose nobly and to siphon off most of the resistance into approved and controlled channels. It really needs to be burned to the ground and its fields sown with salt. We will have to create new institutions.
2. What do we do with our non-governmental institutional leaders who made consistently poor, safe decisions for over a year and who doubled-down when they were confronted. How do we continue to have full respect for them when they capitulated to the state at every turn, naively accepted the official story, and even engaged in gas-lighting of people who tried to present alternative views? I'm eager to forgive and chalk it up to...something...but I don't see any who are even close to admitting they were tragically wrong.
"The point is not to win the debate against person who made claim X. The point is to make sure everyone else who also believes X sees what is happening to person and keeps their mouth shut."
The ability to generate a consensus ("scientific" or otherwise) is greatly simplified the insecurities of younger professionals who see themselves in a state of tight competition for a limited set of positions at elite institutions.
Often a high-end figure targeted for censure/censorship is able to survive the assault in some adaptive way (finding a new platform, new job, etc), but in a way that so obviously depends on having a well-established reputation that it is simply unavailable to someone in an earlier stage of career development or with a less prestigious affiliation. "The Harvard guy was almost-canceled" doesn't translate to "and therefore cancel culture isn't a threat". It translates to "anyone who isn't a Harvard guy has no standing to question the consensus".