Zeynep Tufekci: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think two things happened. One of them is the easiest one because it’s quite easy to see in other things too, which is, at the initial phase of the pandemic, with the Trump administration — to put it politely — bungling the response, and also occasionally adding overt racism to its bungling, there was a great reaction to anything they suggested that looked like they were just trying to deflect blame. In fact, people have forgotten about it, but President Trump went through a period during which he denied the pandemic was a big deal and praised China’s president for a couple of months before it had exploded in the United States. But when it came to the United States with its full exponential force, he switched to saying, “Well, it was China’s fault.” I think that created a big backlash among not just the scientists, but the public, because it really did seem like deflecting the blame in many ways. Plus, the attendant racism and calling the virus various racist names didn’t help the situation. That’s, I think, the one that’s most obvious. The second one that’s not as obvious to people is that the world of virology is not that big. The Chinese lab in question, the Wuhan Institute of Virology — and there are a couple of other labs in Wuhan — they’re very much part of the scientific establishment globally. I know there’s been some speculations about the whole bioweapons thing. I have never been very interested in that because, if you’re going to do an actual bioweapon, a coronavirus is not your proper pathogen. The kind of scientists who work on coronaviruses are genuine, normal scientists most of the time and deeply, deeply embedded with the Western scientific establishment, especially since SARS — the other near miss we had in 2003 that didn’t become a pandemic because of a lot of reasons — had created a lot of interest. So, you had this double whammy there, once there was the Trump angle. But there was also this defensiveness around both the field because you’re asking a field . . . I’m an academic, and if somebody came to me and said, “Would you like to think about the fact that your field may have inadvertently, perhaps, even in the mildest potential case, sparked something that killed millions of people?” Of course, defensiveness is very human in that. People sometimes see China versus US, but as I said, in reality, these scientific establishments that we’re talking about in this particular case is very, very much integrated with the Western scientific establishment, publishing in Nature, Science — all those big things. So I think there was a desire to protect their colleagues, which once again, these are human. Plus, if a lab incident of some sort or a field incident of some sort could be implicated, that really would bring the push for much more strict regulation on the kind of research we do. I’m talking about even the more benign scenarios. Somebody screwed something up. They might not even have known about it. bring the push for much more strict regulation on the kind of research we do. I’m talking about even the more benign scenarios. Somebody screwed something up. They might not even have known about it. For example, there’ve been a lot of calls for moving the high-risk pathogen labs outside of cities, outside of populated places. When I floated that with a couple of leading virologists, they were really aghast at the idea. They thought, “Well, how are we going to hire people if you put us in the middle of nowhere? Nobody wants to work there.” As an academic who also likes to choose where she works, I sympathize with that, but that’s a big conflict of interest. The very field who has been quoted most in this is the most conflicted field because they both have colleagues and vested interest. The people you don’t hear from a lot are the biosafety people, who are the actual experts in this. It’s them we should have been speaking to, or people who are perhaps independent in some ways from all of this. As the defensiveness grew, it became really hard, from what I heard from a lot of people in the field, to say, if you thought it was a viable thing, it should be investigated. You didn’t even have to believe what had happened because there’s so much obfuscation. You don’t really know what happened because the people who are loud were in relatively powerful and gatekeeping positions. Do you really want to — in the middle of a pandemic — do you want to go to work on the pandemic stuff and do your work and get future grants? Or do you want to raise your hand and say, “Yes, my field needs more regulation, [laughs] and perhaps some investigation into whether our research practices were implicated in something so horrendous”? That’s not going to make you very popular with your colleagues. I think that’s how it was set up. The turning point, probably — probably not as visible to people outside — is the WHO investigation. I wrote a New York Times article about the origins of COVID. I didn’t really go into the WHO investigation. It is a debacle. It’s going to go in history books into how bad it is. It is essentially just typing up what the Chinese officials told them, almost uncritically. I realize they were limited in what they could do because, in the origins investigation, you can’t do it if the Chinese government isn’t cooperating, but it wasn’t that. That would have been an understandable limitation. The WHO report we got was almost a PR exercise in how it phrased things, what it was certain about, how it repeated assertions, what it didn’t question. It could have done things like, “Well, we’ve been told this, but we couldn’t verify. ” Or it could have questioned the few things in the report. But the final report — written after the scientists had left the country, too — in my view was disgraceful that it was allowed to go out like that, instead of saying, “You know what, we can’t really do a great investigation. ritten after the scientists had left the country, too — in my view was disgraceful that it was allowed to go out like that, instead of saying, “You know what, we can’t really do a great investigation. Here’s the limitations.” I think that really got a lot of scientists who had been just waiting and thinking this is not that big of a deal, in terms of the actual pandemic to worry about, to think, “You know what, if we do this and let this be what’s going to stand for science, it’s just going to actually damage science because letting that kind of report appear as the voice of science, and if we do find something out, or — as we do at the moment — we keep finding cover-up from the Chinese side, which is not at all reflected in what’s going on in that report, it makes science itself look bad.” That’s how we got to the March letter in the scientific journal Science, where 18 very prominent people signed something saying, “You know what? We need an actual investigation, whatever it can do. The report was too certain, and both hypotheses are viable.” I will say, the way they think about it would be that the existing evidence base, such as it is, is very limited and full of contradictions and a huge cover-up. It’s compatible with almost everything. Almost anything you can imagine, the existing evidence base is compatible with. You can think what’s more likely or less likely, based on your own personal preferences, but there’s no evidence base to rule anything out almost. I think that’s the turning point.…

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