Zeynep Tufekci: evaluation

Transcript context

…If that’s a fundamental mistake we made back then, what’s a fundamental mistake we’re making now? What are the political economy roots of that mistake? I think one fundamental mistake we’re still making right now is letting this be Republican versus Democrat, China versus not China, instead of a fundamental problem of biosafety. It’s a little bit like nuclear weapons and nuclear physics and nuclear reactors. They can be really powerful and useful. They might be very crucial for fighting climate change with the new kinds of energy you can use. But if you don’t have it as a safe thing, if you have questions about its safety, people are not going to want to use it. Countries are going to say, “No, not in my backyard.” We see this. I think Germany recently essentially stopped. It’s not going to have any nuclear reactors. That’s partly because of Chernobyl. It scared the living lights out of people, and for good reason. I think the fundamental mistake we’re making is not treating this like a biosafety crisis because we had one pandemic in 1977 that was indeed triggered because of a vaccine trial gone wrong. That was essentially covered up at the time, too. The scientists knew that it had to involve something like a vaccine trial, but you got almost no public discussion of it till 2008, almost 30 years later, partly because the scientists were thinking now’s not the time to create a suspicion around vaccines or any of that. In 1977, you’re at the height of the smallpox campaign. Then we have this one, which is unclear. If we have one more incident of any kind, it’s just going to be horrific, both for our research project and what we can do with it. I think what ended up happening is that there’s a few people who keep getting quoted in media who are, actually, a small number of vocal people. There’s a climate still where you can’t have a sensible conversation. That means that it’s gotten Republicans versus Democrats, or crazy scenarios versus a sensible oversight and investigation. I don’t think that’s good because our medical technology is really powerful. It’s got all these great things. Look at our vaccines. If you have a really powerful technology and a really powerful science, you have to figure out, does this power come with risks? It’s very similar to nuclear physics, I think, in that way. If you don’t figure out the risks and the downside, it’s going to come bite you anyway without you knowing it. Even if this one had nothing to do with the lab, it would have been a good time to say, just the fact that we can’t be sure should make us act and make sure that we never find ourselves in this position again. What can we do to make mainstream media less risk-averse? If you think back to last March, Dr. Fauci — he’s criticizing masks, right? He’s even telling people it’s fine to go ahead and take your cruise. You’re editor of the New York Times. Should you just come out and contradict the nation’s leading public health authority when we’re relying on that same person to correct some possibly larger mistakes of President Trump? What’s the right role for the media in this? And how do we align their incentives in a superior way? Because we screwed it up, didn’t we?…

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