16 ms·

Let's hear scientists with different Covid-19 views, not attack them

258 points by apsec112 7y ago

lbeltrame 7y ago
This is pretty much a problem in public communication in Italy. There are some notable figures that (even if they are right) act in total disregard of deontological ethics, and make disparaging comments on other colleagues. As the article notes, it is not a matter of agreeing but of treating other people in the scientific field with respect. Also, some of those opinions may be wrong or just partially wrong, but we don't see that many mea culpa, if any.
- cm2187 7y ago
  I agree (though I am not aware of the Italian controversies), but it’s worth acknowledging that in the case of a pandemic, scientific opinions drive policy, and policy may have dramatic consequences, including the loss of lives. So it is understandable that conversations get heated, vs disagreeing about a pure academic topic. I am less worried about the heat than about deplatforming, ie suppressing the dissenting opinion.
  - lbeltrame 7y ago
    I don't mind heated discussions, I mean, I had some on lab meetings over what people could consider obscure details. I find however not professionally appropriate to shame what are essentially your colleagues on social media. These controversies are pretty local: they tend to flare up every now and then because most of these people are regularly invited (in presence or via video call) to TV shows.
- nradov 7y ago
  Italy actually filed criminal charges against several scientists for making inaccurate predictions about an earthquake. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/seven-year-legal-saga-ends-italian-official-cleared-manslaughter-earthquake-trial https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/seven-year-legal-sag...
- downerending 7y ago
  If you were wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics
throwaway0a5e 7y ago
The public response to COVID-19 made the transition from a scientific topic to a subject of politics/religion about a month ago. While I appreciate the author's sentiment I can't help but feel the authors' are pissing into a hurricane. At this point the course this thing is gonna run seems to be out of the control of scientists, academics and honest debate.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  You can still hold other scientists and policy makers to a higher standard.
- bottled_poe 7y ago
  An individual is smart. People are stupid. Collective thinking is just too hard. We’re all guilty of it.
  - clairity 7y ago
    or how about a crowd is wise but a herd is not?
natvert 7y ago
The fact that this article exists, and needs to exist, worries me more than any virus or lockdown. What, if anything, is more necessary to a free society than the free expression and debate of ideas? This of course requires a literate and critical interpretation of the facts and data by all, but I digress. This is science.
- downerending 7y ago
  Meh. This trend was in full force long before the virus showed up.
- rdiddly 7y ago
  Yeah you can pretty much transplant this sentence to any public forum: At the same time, we are concerned by a chilling attitude among some [people], who are wrongly ascribing legitimate disagreements about [issues] to ignorance or to questionable political or other motivations.
- jhayward 7y ago
  > What, if anything, is more necessary to a free society than the free expression and debate of ideas? The commons must be protected from bad actors, and bad faith whose purpose is to use the openness of society against itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
  - nostromo 7y ago
    To imply that John Ioannidis is a bad actor is ridiculous.
    - jhayward 7y ago
      It is a plausible explanation for his recent actions. And, in fact, his recent actions require us to re-visit his past investigations and expose with the assumption of good faith suspended.
maallooc 7y ago
Imagine being forced to remove this article, the server provider cuts off service, and your domain banned because these kind of articles have violated terms of services. That's happening on YouTube now.
- happytoexplain 7y ago
  I usually find that if you have to make an analogy for any reason other than explaining something technically complex, your position is probably faulty. E.g. in this case, I'd call this a false equivalence. Rather than making an analogy, you should explain directly why YouTube's policy is immoral or dangerous, rather than indirectly pointing at some other scenario, which will always differ in many relevant and irrelevant ways by the simple nature of it being a different scenario. It needlessly complicates the conversation.
  - oh_come_on 7y ago
    “Ackshually...”
  - maallooc 7y ago
    Your video gets deleted, your channel gets a warning or a ban. Seems equivalent to what YouTube is doing to youtubers that posts information inconsistent with WHO.
    - jstewartmobile 7y ago
      The masks are coming off!
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      > Seems equivalent to what YouTube is doing to youtubers that posts information inconsistent with WHO. Absolutely nothing? Unless you post misinformation, in which case, it will be left up but demonetized. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en Where did you get the deletion and ban nonsense from?
baddox 7y ago
> Scientists who express different views on Covid-19 should be heard It's interesting to phrase this as "views." I'd prefer to see all relevant data.
- philosopher1234 7y ago
  It seems like interpretations (views) of data from seasoned professionals who are much more familiar with the context than the general public are also valuable
- mataug 7y ago
  My guess is that views here translates to hypothesis. Sometimes Scientists could have a gut feeling, and this may not have data to back it up. I think its still important to talk about it, while acknowledging that we're discussing a hypothesis, and not a proven fact.
- dnautics 7y ago
  You're out of luck, the data are still relatively sparse, (understandably) collected under duress, and (understandably) without controls. Just about anything predictive (and many descriptive things too) any reputable scientist says will be slightly better than informed speculation. The ethically sound scientists will disclose the level of caution their suggestions for policy entail, and there will be plenty of very talented scientists who will raise a furor on the grounds that the layperson cannot be trusted to take socially responsible action without an exaggerated threat over their heads.
whatever1 7y ago
Should we had taken more seriously the Stanford University Faculty when they were suggesting back in March in WSJ [1] 0.01% mortality rates while the ERs were full and we could not source masks and ventilators? The mortality rate in NY has been found by random testing more than 0.5%, or more than 50 times higher from what the Stanford Snake Oil Salesmen were predicting by looking at NBA (yes really) mortality rates. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464?fbclid=IwAR2gGQh5iIhMGkKFNS714x0Wvq486_D0ViDc4uVVtgjKmVAOitPZQ8qbY48 https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as...
- dang 7y ago
  > Stanford Snake Oil Salesmen If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
  - Gibbon1 7y ago
    I like how you bagged on him for telling the truth.
    - dang 7y ago
      If you possess the truth, it's even more important not to use it as a weapon, because doing so will only alienate the readers who possess less truth than you do. No one is convinced by name-calling or other outright attack, and truth is too precious to be burned this way. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20truth%20discred&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
      - asdf21 7y ago
        >will only alienate >No one is convinced Those are some pretty broad generalizations! I've certainly been convinced on various topics by people who were correct and also rude about it. Do you think laywers and police are always nice when trying to get to the truth? Have you ever seen the movie Erin Brockovich, or read about the events that inspired it? Would she have had the same results while being polite the entire time? Rude comments may break forum rules, sure. But I'm not sure sweeping generalizations about efficacy, such as the above, are needed.
rdxm 7y ago
<rant> Is anyone really surprised? Current culture world-wide is built on 15 second attention span idiocy and social media bs. Want to see this go away? Remove FB/Insta/Twitter from the planet, along with the entire mainstream media, all of which have business models based on the aforementioned idiocy as well as non-stop conflict generation. When you are done with that task go purge every sitting legislative body on the planet which in general are bought and paid for by those same special interests. Then you'd have a clean slate to build on for intelligent dialog and meaningful efforts related to not just Covid 19, but many other pressing global concerns...</rant>
foxfired 7y ago
The problem is that the word science has been robbed of its meaning. Or the meaning didn't scale well. Every side of the so-called debate throws it left and right, now which science do you believe in? As if belief is part of the equations. And the other issue is that there are no debates. You send a tweet, and tag WHO or some authoritative figure and then we have to believe it. Those who don't believe it are not following the science. Edit: Science is supposed to evolve as new data comes in. Today, we stop at the first sensational news. When a fact is updated or retracted, it doesn't make the news.
- RhysU 7y ago
  > As if belief is part of the equations. In the data starved regime, belief indeed does enter the equations in the form of a Bayesian prior. Agreed that new data should update the results.
- orwin 7y ago
  You can't rob a word of its meaning. If it encompass to much, you can create a new one or be more precise. Anyway, i think the point of this article is that people that are not scientists themselves can debate with each other, but should avoid perturbing (i'd say polluting even) the scientific debate, whether its by disparaging an adversarial opinion or but elevating a scientits too high (see what has happened with the pr Raoult cult in France). This is too much noise and scientist are people too.
cm2187 7y ago
Fortunately on hackernews we have downvoting and flagging for dealing with opposite views!
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  And we have showdead to be able to hear those voices anyway.
gbjw 7y ago
Part of the problem with the reporting on death rates and, to a lesser extent, many of the tests and treatments of COVID-19, is the almost nonexistent emphasis on uncertainty quantification. A view might only be ‘different’ in the sense that the mode of the belief is shifted significantly, which is to be expected if existing beliefs are quite diffuse (i.e., uncertain).
- exmadscientist 7y ago
  Former actual scientist here. This! This, exactly! This, a million times over! If I could teach people one scientific concept to help us get through this, it wouldn't be immunology or epidemiology. It would be an understanding of uncertainty, where it comes from, what it means, and how to handle it.
  - sjg007 7y ago
    Do you actually understand uncertainty?
    - exmadscientist 7y ago
      I've, uh, spent significant portions of my life trying to understand just how well we know some particular measured values. And that's not counting the coursework. So, yeah, I'm going to set myself up for a fall here by saying I've got a pretty decent professional understanding of the topic.
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    The funny thing is that they actually do this -- they show that based on their measurements of the assay's specificity, the confidence interval for the number of true positives includes zero. That means, even discounting all of the other biases, their study cannot provide a lower bound for the number of infections, which was the whole point of the study. They then proceed to ignore this and use a point estimate for their further calculations. The right thing to have done would have been to test the assay further, or move the study to an area where there was higher positivity and they could get a more reliable signal.
olivermarks 7y ago
This point from the article is really important IMO 'Scientific consensus is important, but it isn’t uncommon when some of the most important voices turn out to be those of independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted. That’s not an argument for prematurely accepting his contestable views, but it is a sound argument for keeping him, and others like him, at the table' In a free society information and ideas should flow freely, not be banned and originators punished as happens in closed societies. It is alarming the level of vitriol and blind adherence to 'the scientific method' aka accepted establishment viewpoint in some cases, particularly online. For all the endless proselytizing about 'innovation' there are some remarkably closed minded people around, enabled and amplified by social networks
- missedthecue 7y ago
  I'm not in the academic sciences but when my uncle published his thesis in a journal for his physics PhD, he got literal hate mail in his mailbox for going against the old-guard with his conclusions. It completely blew my mind that his peers who worked in the sciences got so wound that they sent hate mail to him. I think he still has the letters all these decades later. I learned second hand that apparently a lot of scientific acedemia is like that. Crazy.
  - imcoconut 7y ago
    Thanks for sharing this. I've heard many stories like that of your uncle from professional researchers in science, economics, and other fields. This is something that people who have no experience in professional academia and science often do not understand. In my experience a lot of people assume that because science and related disciplines are rational endeavors that the institutions and culture compassing them must also be rational, empirical, purely evidence-based, etc. Reality can be almost comically, and sometimes tragically, the opposite.
    - asdff 7y ago
      It's like finance or law or any other field with some hothead cutthroat personalities in powerful positions. Where there is perceived power there is an attraction to people who feed off of power alone. Egos are a plenty and often cruel to others trying for the same goals. Lots of people are hypercompetitive rather than collaborative, and see any peer as an adversary or challenger rather than leaning into synergy. This kind of stuff would happen at conferences too, a couple notable cases of screaming matches from the audience to the presenter have happened. Sometimes vindictive professors will go to a rival professors's grad student's talk and just grill the poor kid, asking them impossible questions and being hypercritical. Usually the grad student's own professor has to step in and try to deflect the assholes line of questioning. Sometimes the professors are even in the same department. It's a total cringe moment for the rest of the audience, and is definitely a phenomenon that is slowly growing out of the field as professors retire. Take a look at the comment section of this blog to see it first hand: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perform-a-differential-expression-analysis-or-science/ https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perf...
jaaron 7y ago
Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data: "I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error." "I’m serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t think they authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups. They’re the kind of screw-ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don’t look too carefully at what you might have done wrong." source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...
- thepope 7y ago
  Do you have any idea how stupid most people are? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/media/File:IQ_distribution.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/media/F... Think about where you fall on that graph and then realize how many people are dumber and a lot dumber than you. But it doesn't end there. Some people are sheltered their entire lives so there is a lot they don't understand. Some people are mostly one dimensional so they don understand a lot. Some people have huge egos so they don't understand a lot. Some people have unreasonable biases and agendas that warp their otherwise rational mind into being ridiculous. Some people are so overburdened they can't do anything but work and never have a second to think for themselves. The powers that be PUMP shit into our heads all day long. lol, how many people even passed Calculus let alone could do anything with it now. And you're asking these people to look at the data? Get real. Get real! These people are not influenced by data. Plus people value different things. Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? It's more selfish boomer behavior. I'm sorry but it's not worth the cost of another one or two Iraq wars to save the few people it does infect. It kills less than a percent of the people it infects. It's not like this thing kills 1/3 or even a 1/10th of the population. We are just pissing away money to protect a few boomers. They are pile driving our generation into poverty. End the quarantine. Very few people understand anything at all about statistics other than what can be gleaned from basic arithmetic. You're asking too much of people. You don't influence people with facts. Sorry this reply is all over the place.
notacoward 7y ago
My worry with pieces like this is that they're meant to encourage intellectual diversity in scientific discourse, but some people will undoubtedly try to use them as "teach the controversy!" to justify any kind of crazy non-scientific idea. How do we teach people to draw that line? Or is that a lost cause?
- ayakura 7y ago
  > How do we teach people to draw that line By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0] It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines. [0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    This makes us susceptible to what's essentially a Gish gallop, though. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop, for those unfamiliar.) It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.
    - taneq 7y ago
      Also worth noting that false claims need not be malicious to serve as a DOS attack. An army of untrained ‘researchers’ drawing improbable conclusions from randomly combined snippets of scientific papers can generate a huge amount of pseudoscientific ‘sourced-looking’ ideas. Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.
- ravitation 7y ago
  Well, one issue, is that this article (and many like it) only address controversy, and not whether a given controversy is warranted by evidence. I think it's important in discussing intellectual diversity to emphasize that going against established thought requires compelling evidence, usually rightfully so. It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.
kgarten 7y ago
Scientist should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards. The article seems to defend an article and opinion that sees economic consequences are more dangerous than human lives lost to COVID-19. In terms of scientific discourse, this sounds fishy to me. We don‘t know so much about the virus: long term effects etc. If a scientist argues against saving human lives now, because of a man made economic systems inability to cope with the crisis might kill more people later, I say don‘t hear him, criticize him based on an ethical discourse. Save the lives now and adjust the system so people don‘t need to die.
- gbjw 7y ago
  You are assuming that a particular course of action: (1) is guaranteed to be the best way to save lives and (2) only has ramifications which we have the ability to ‘adjust’. Many scientists may disagree with you on both accounts. I don’t see why they are not holding themselves to the highest ethical standards.
  - kgarten 7y ago
    In hypotheticals I would agree with you. Yet, at the time of the writing of that article, the data from several countries regarding COVID 19 were in, and we have an indication on what metrics work to limit deaths. We also see what we could have done to prevent and outbreak, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan seemed to be extremely prepared. Germany followed the virologist, epidemiologist consensus (and is going now off track to open businesses again ... a lot of scientist believe too early). We will see in the long run which approaches worked and which didn’t. Yet, calling for an opening of businesses (because we cannot be sure about the death rate), when none of the successful countries did that, is ethically dubious to me.
thepope 7y ago
HA, Good luck. I suggested that maybe we should consider ending the quarantine for the sake of the economy and my post was instantly flagged. Society gonna do what society gonna do.
- happytoexplain 7y ago
  That's fairly self-pitying and simple. Is it impossible that your post, intrinsically, had enough recklessness and/or low enough value that meeting the flagging threshold was within the realm of reasonableness? It can happen even when the thought in your head is more rational, since expressing subtlety in the fast-and-short forum context is difficult.
ravitation 7y ago
Scientists who "express different views" are listened to, when they have convincing data to support those "views." Ioannidis is the only real example provided in the article, and his opinion piece (and the related Stanford study) was criticized, not because he's an iconoclast, but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy). Not only that, but then, instead of engaging with the scientific community, his "expertise" was co-opted by the conservative media and its agenda.
- nogabebop23 7y ago
  >> but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy). is this not exactly what the original article cautions against? if it's bad science (which should be debatable) it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately.
  - bsder 7y ago
    > it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately. The problem is that if, as a scientist, I know that people are likely to convert my findings into policy, then I have an extra duty to be especially diligent and extra thorough so that my findings are valid. Ioannidis knew exactly what he was doing when he put this pile of garbage out there. The fact that it was shoddy methodology means that he should get ESPECIALLY torched for it as an object lesson to other "scientists".
  - ravitation 7y ago
    Uh, no. First, the original article is actually about the exact opposite. It says nothing about attacking an opinion based on its merit, it talks about attacking an opinion based on dogma. When I say it's bad science, I'm saying it's bad science because of glaring problems with its methodology; I thought that was obvious (the term "bad science" being fairly common). Second, I'm talking about the social policy argued for in Ioannidis' opinion piece. Social policy absolutely does not just directly follow the science; they are very different things and absolutely should be discussed separately. I find it a bit absurd to think that science inherently dictates a certain social policy.
nardi 7y ago
That’s why we believe that the bar to stifling or ignoring academics who are willing to debate their alternative positions in public and in good faith must be very high. But the "good faith" part is precisely the problem. Though it is difficult to discern good faith from bad, those who argue in bad faith destroy the system entirely, and we need some kind of defense against them.
rflrob 7y ago
Reading the tweet thread linked under "personal attacks and general disparaging comments" (https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1253822258692284416 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1253822258692284416), I see much more a criticism of poor science journalism in the WSJ than the poor science in the article itself (aside from one swipe as a "methodological piece of shit"). I'm all for rigorous debate of different scientific ideas, but the WSJ Opinion page is not where people should be marshaling allies to their scientific ideas that are regarded as tenuous by the majority of the community.
Ensorceled 7y ago
Part of the problem is that there are some Doctors and Scientists participating with agendas. Take cloth masks, there are doctors who say it helps and doctors who say it doesn't help much. Some the doctors who said it doesn't help were genuine. But some of the doctors were saying it doesn't help were lying because they assumed people wouldn't social distance if they wore a mask, believing the increased risk due to not wearing masks was not worth what they believed would be a big decrease in social distancing. Some of the doctors were are saying they didn't help, were lying to preserve masks for health care professionals (including lying about n95 masks). It's hard not to feel like attacking some one you believe is deliberately putting many lives at risk to forward a political or personal agenda.
- benmmurphy 7y ago
  I've also heard it claimed that masks not helping was pushed because there was no peer reviewed randomized trials that showed that masks helped therefore the official advice was there is no evidence that masks helped. Of course there is no randomized trial evidence on the effectiveness of social distancing on long term reduction in mortality due to corona virus but different ideas have to hurdle different levels of evidence. This idea of different levels of evidence actually makes sense because some things have potentially high payoffs and very likely low costs. For example wearing masks would appear to fall into this bucket. This comes back into reasoning under uncertainty that someone else brought up in the thread. The medical community has had problems in the past because bad medical interventions typically impose high costs on patients so if they have little positive benefit then it can easily become a net-negative situation. So then you have a culture where anything that hasn't gone through an RCT with multiple confirming studies doesn't exist as an intervention.
egberts1 7y ago
We can see how Seattle and Tokyo kept their SARS-CoV-2 case load very low by listening to their own scientists; New York City and Austin, not so much.
- asdf21 7y ago
  Or it just spread on the West Coast much earlier... which is why Gavin Newsom is autopsying bodies of people who died in Dec and Jan, after it turned out there was confirmed community spread in the Bay Area in late January resulting in a Santa Clara county death in Early Feb..
- Cyclone_ 7y ago
  In what ways did Austin not listen to their own scientists? I was there during part of this and they had a fairly early response, I believe SXSW was one of the first major events to be cancelled in the US. They were also pretty quick about limiting the size of gatherings.
swayvil 7y ago
Right now we are being propagandized with an intensity never seen before. I have yet to see a single person in my neighborhood suffer from this virus in any noticeable way. What I do see is propaganda, marketing and social engineering. A massive campaign. On Reddit I see a Coronavirus subreddit that has become an almost supernaturally airtight echo-chamber. I see the moderator of that reddit. Some anonymous fellow who was handed control over the subreddit for no apparent reason. Who is using an account he obviously bought 3 months ago. Shutting down any discussion that begins to stray from the official narrative. I see the usual propaganda buttons being pushed. Tribalism and fear. This smells like a dang fish factory.
- asdf21 7y ago
  There's a reason... to wreck the economy so Trump won't be re-elected.
  - Aperocky 7y ago
    Economies are wrecked worldwide. Trump shouldn't be elected because he thinks injecting disinfectant into your lungs to do a cleasing 'should be looked into' while maintaining that 'I am a person with a good you know what'.
    - asdf21 7y ago
      Would you say they are wrecked because of the virus, or because of government shutdowns that were based on a fatality rate that may turn out to be wildly incorrect? How many fatalities do you think will occur due to the wrecked economy in the next few years?
- fiblye 7y ago
  I don't think your neighborhood and a couple random people on reddit of all places offer a full glimpse of the world at large, especially considering the disease has hotspots with high infection rates while other people are mostly avoiding those places. Conversely, I've never had influenza in my life, and I don't recall seeing anyone close to me ever actively suffering from a bad case influenza. I still believe it exists and people who got hit hard by it are probably at home.
tensor 7y ago
The example this article uses doesn't help drive the point. Ioannidis was heard, and the majority of the attacks on him came from outside the scientific community. Within the community science played out how it's supposed to. The paper was looked at critically and flaws in it's data uncovered and thus correctly discredited. Meanwhile, his hypothesis is still held by many prominent figures outside of the scientific community. So it's very hard to claim this is an example of valid ideas being at all squashed. Worse, in this case we have hard evidence of some pretty catastrophic results from this virus. So trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example. We already have situations that are bad enough to warrant extreme counter measures.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Lots of things about the Ioannidis paper. A) This was published as a research paper but how much of a research paper was it? As mentioned, it selectively and fairly shallowly looked at some data (the Diamond Princess) while wholly ignoring other data (South Korea) without even providing a strong justification for its choices. It was more like "an essay with scholarly footnotes". B) This article wasn't simply offered to scientific community. You can find a huge swath of mainstream media reports describing this paper and another large number of popular articles with by Ioannidis himself defending the positions he staked out in his article. This was essentially a media campaign. C). The particular position Ioannidis staked out was just one of a series of positions one can find staked by a variety of figures, some real scientists, some right wing ideologues, some somewhat in between. Again, if you look, a well financed media campaign. Below is a series of link I've cobbled together I've cobbled together as documentation of this: The American Institute for Economic Research (libertarian/right wing think tank) give it's of "significant" article: https://www.aier.org/article/vital-information-that-is-falling-through-the-cracks/ https://www.aier.org/article/vital-information-that-is-falli... Essentially a web of articles united by the need to avoid undue action on the virus (IE, not cost money). A nice article describing the similarity of Covid-denial and Climate-change-denial: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-doubters-follow-climate-denial-playbook/ https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d... An article on the effort to spin the Santa Clara tests befor e they were even release: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-circulating-california-2019-bunk.html https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-circulating... What's on with Ioannidis: https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-rate-critics/ https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-... Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, another Stanford Connected "minimizer" https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-corona... A summary of several related minimizers, with a similar program: https://arcdigital.media/what-the-federalist-doesnt-get-about-the-importance-of-life-1833c714f08f https://arcdigital.media/what-the-federalist-doesnt-get-abou... Aljazeera gives a broader discussion, why real scientist would do this: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-herd-immunity-eugenics-market-200414104531234.html https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-herd-i...
ggm 7y ago
The SAGE committee in Whitehall is permitting Dominic Cumming not only to listen in to the scientists and demographers and economists: he is joining in. Thus, the mis-apprehension of science leaks out, into official acts.
- benmmurphy 7y ago
  It will be interesting to see what policy influence Cummings has had. A media outlet earlier had claimed Cummings pushed for no lockdown. So seeing we had a lockdown that would appear to show that he doesn't have much influence. Though, it might be that Cummings opinion on what to do changed as he received more information and he ended up supporting the lockdown. Or it could be that the media misreported the situation.
yters 7y ago
Just graphing death rate data that Google provides shows weird trends. https://mindmatters.ai/2020/04/why-does-covid-19-target-the-northern-hemisphere/ https://mindmatters.ai/2020/04/why-does-covid-19-target-the-...
dayvid 7y ago
Is there a resource for up-to-date reviewed papers on COVID? Like a Reddit group with community members from relevant backgrounds or something? Because it gets hard for me to keep up on what’s bs or factual, and many people pushing articles usually have political motivations.
- throwaway1777 7y ago
  r/covid19 is pretty good unlike the much larger and more political r/coronavirus.
  - dayvid 7y ago
    Gotcha thanks. I also found r/medicine. Lots of doctors and ER professionals weighing in on the news with personal experience from their hospitals.
- fspeech 7y ago
  DHS has a Master Question List for Covid-19 https://www.dhs.gov/publication/st-master-question-list-covid-19 https://www.dhs.gov/publication/st-master-question-list-covi... that is actually very good, with a long list of published references. It is also updated weekly so it is quite up-to-date.
freetime2 7y ago
I think the researchers behind the Santa Clara study should be applauded for going out and gathering data. While the methodology may have been flawed, I think that having a small amount of flawed data is better than having no data. My hope is that the public controversy of this study spurs more and better serological studies in the future. I don't agree with the premise that scientists should be silenced or suffer personal attacks for putting out controversial or even flat out "bad" science. I think we have seen that approach backfire, and lead to distrust of expert opinions and traditional news sources. Instead I think that we should be focusing on improving scientific literacy in the general population, and electing leaders who surround themselves with and take advice from competent scientists. And if people in certain countries, districts, etc. are not interested in doing so... well... they are certainly free to vote however they see fit and live with the results of that decision.
- not2b 7y ago
  The main criticism is that they came to a conclusion that was completely unsupported by the evidence. They made an error you'd flunk a first-year statistics student for: ignoring the effect of false positives. They then politicized their bad conclusion by doing a media blitz. This is especially dangerous when the conclusion you are prematurely coming to is something that a lot of people really want to believe. When their report first came out, it gave me hope. I live in Santa Clara County; what they were saying would lead to a very low death rate -- unless you allow for as few as 1% false positives, and then you realize that the numbers they report could also arise if no one had any antibodies. They shouldn't be silenced, but they should be criticized, and criticized intensely, for a botch a first-year grad student shouldn't make.
  - rurban 7y ago
    So you are denying the evidence also? Look at the global absolute data, which does support this study. The IFR is around 0.3, in some countries much lower 0.03, in some countries at around 1%. The absolute number of deaths are much lower than in a normal flu season. 200.000 this year, with a normal year being at the 250.000-500.000 range. Without vaccination and without proper treatment plans (which turned out flat wrong) So some newer studies try to find out why and how this disease is so weak. Affected countries, like Belgium, Spain, NL, England, US like to know why their rates are higher. It's not the measures, it's not the weak ICU infrastructure. it's something else. Like age group, seniors living seperately of with the families, diabetes, obesity, air pollution, or other co-morbidities. Currently the numbers are not too troubling, but still would make an interesting study.
eric_b 7y ago
I've followed the virus from the very beginning. About six weeks ago the media decided blanket lockdowns were the only reasonable solution. Flatten the curve became the mantra, dozens of models showing millions of dead in every country were trotted out as evidence and justification for draconian shutdowns. Any scientist that had a differing viewpoint was a monster who didn't value human life. Any public health official who suggested maybe just the most vulnerable be isolated was met with scorn and a heap of emotional but illogical arguments. Look up David Katz [1]. Only Fox News would let him talk until Bill Maher put him on. He's eminently sensible, and he was silenced by the media. Blanket lockdown (that is, all ages locked down) for this virus has never made sense in Western democracies. China did it because they could, and they have a command economy and a willing populace. The UK knew it didn't make sense from day one, but caved to public pressure. Sweden is still going strong, thank God, as they will be the country that shows the rest of the world how to live with, and ultimately beat, this disease. Norway just let the youngest kids go back to school, smartly, to increase herd immunity with less personal impact. It will be clear in several more months that the Sweden strategy is the only way to minimize total harm and navigate this crisis. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lze-rMYLf2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lze-rMYLf2E [Edit]: Good job HN participants. Way to prove the story correct.
- vmception 7y ago
  Are there any ways to get into Sweden right now? Considering Midsommar I heard their border was closed, but I think the exceptions make the rule, if there are any
  - tapland 7y ago
    Be a citizen or permanent resident, or have important business in the country. Midsommar is celebrated on the countryside with the family. Get IKEA delivery of foods (available in some US locations), boil a ton of small potatoes and get some wormwood(Swedish:malört) spiced vodka.
    - vmception 7y ago
      I can create a business rationale. But wanna stay a while.
drummer 7y ago
Yeah videos of doctors and scietists who don't follow the official line are being censored on YouTube. This one is the latest, highly recommend watching to the end. https://archive.org/details/full-press-conference-dr-dan-erickson-dr-artin-massihi https://archive.org/details/full-press-conference-dr-dan-eri...
pbreit 7y ago
Good luck. Anyone even slightly out of the mainstream will get shamed into oblivion. Just look at the 2 Bakersfield doctors this week.
- rlp 7y ago
  But those doctors clearly don't have a good grasp of basic statistics. You cannot extrapolate cases for a whole state based on test results from a non-random sampling of people. They are making a basic error and claiming to be experts, that deserves some shaming in my book.
  - pbreit 7y ago
    Everyone seems to be doing that from NYC data. IHME_UW has been making massive errors and no one seems to mind.
    - rlp 7y ago
      No, they aren't. That's why those two were called out. Not sure how IHME's mistakes come in to play here. If they are making mistakes, they should be called out as well.
briandear 7y ago
Let’s apply this to climate change as well.
- garg 7y ago
  The first line of the article is >When major decisions must be made amid high scientific uncertainty, as is the case with Covid-19, we can’t afford to silence or demonize professional colleagues with heterodox views. How much scientific uncertainty actually exists when it comes to climate change and its causes?
  - tlb 7y ago
    A lot! There's no serious debate that it's happening and the main cause is human burning of fossil fuels, but numerical estimates of future temperature change have wide error bars and estimates of ecosystem damage are all fairly speculative since they depend on species not being able to adapt (which they may or may not.) The debate has been poisoned by deniers pointing to any uncertainty as evidence of it all being fake. The intellectually honest approach is to consider the expected costs across all likely outcomes, and spend money on mitigations accordingly.
lagilogi 7y ago
That is not how science advents, not currently. Collaboration takes a backseat in science when your name, reputation, career prospects are in the line. If you advance an argument that lack proper and vigorous proof, I have no reason to hear you. I will however tear your work to pieces. As many pieces as I can, so I can ride that train as long as I can. That's how science advents currently. Otherwise all of us academics would be building our work on top of each others' collaboratively and productively. Minorities and women would not have been shunned out; graduate slave labor, and adjunct faculty would have been unthinkable.
cfv 7y ago
Yeah... About that... I mean... no. When the possible death of thousands upon thousands of people is on the line, your proposal better be ironclad and well equipped to stand many lines of attack if you want it to be taken seriously. "Hey maybe let's not do the one massively researched thing that we've done since times of the plague because there's not enough data" is neither of those things. Open dialogue in science needs to take place in the forums already in place, not on clickbaity money-starved legacy media. EDIT: Dear rando downvoters, please instead of lurking help foster debate by stating why in your opinion untestable indefensible claims should be allowed to pass as science in the name of "open dialogue".
deleted 7y ago
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kgarten 7y ago
Interestingly also other scientists seem to suffer from this phenomenon: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/virologist-christian-drosten-germany-coronavirus-expert-interview https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/virologist-chr...
notechback 7y ago
Let's look at climate science: there was a study that 99% of researchers on the topic are convinced it's real, 1% have some doubts. Should we give the 1% a voice? Yes Should we consider the view of the 1% as equal to the 99%? No. Here's what happens when someone vocally has a dissenting view: they get press coverage, both neutral and from agenda-driven perspectives. There is exactly one country (the US, maybe two if you count Australia) where a majority of those in decision making positions believe or act as if they believe that climate change is not real. They justify this by quoting the 1% and ignoring the 99%. As such then the 1% are causing significant harm to the planet (assuming that the majority view is correct). The same in a more vivid way is true for covid: those dissenting voices (eg the French doctor Trump ended up quoting) get a lot of coverage no matter how sound the science proposed by those dissenters is (or in this case unsound - a study on the medicine he recommended had to be ended due to heavy health impacts of the medicine). These dissenters and rapidly published papers have led to deaths. No doubt, no questions, people have died due to those perspectives being pushed into the mainstream discussions. So should they be heard by peers and their views be discussed? Yes. Should they get press coverage, blog their viewpoints out there, etc, even if it leads to thousands of deaths (or destruction of the planet)? I don't think so. This is a role for media to filter (rather than blare everything into the ether), but also a self-constraint that any serious scientist should impose upon themselves. The public is not able to decide which old guy with a professor/Dr in front of his name is the one to trust.
woodandsteel 7y ago
The article makes some good points. Much is not yet known about the pandemic, and we should listen carefully to alternative views. The article ends by saying the problem is that the issue has been politicized, which is quite correct. But author should have said this started when Trump and a large portion of the conservative media claimed that the whole thing was a hoax, that the scientists knew the coronavirus is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu, but decided, thousands of them, to lie to the public so as to undermine the US economy and prevent Trump from being re-elected in November.

258 points by apsec112 7y ago

This is pretty much a problem in public communication in Italy. There are some notable figures that (even if they are right) act in total disregard of deontological ethics, and make disparaging comments on other colleagues. As the article notes, it is not a matter of agreeing but of treating other people in the scientific field with respect. Also, some of those opinions may be wrong or just partially wrong, but we don't see that many mea culpa, if any.

cm2187 7y ago
I agree (though I am not aware of the Italian controversies), but it’s worth acknowledging that in the case of a pandemic, scientific opinions drive policy, and policy may have dramatic consequences, including the loss of lives. So it is understandable that conversations get heated, vs disagreeing about a pure academic topic. I am less worried about the heat than about deplatforming, ie suppressing the dissenting opinion.
- lbeltrame 7y ago
  I don't mind heated discussions, I mean, I had some on lab meetings over what people could consider obscure details. I find however not professionally appropriate to shame what are essentially your colleagues on social media. These controversies are pretty local: they tend to flare up every now and then because most of these people are regularly invited (in presence or via video call) to TV shows.
nradov 7y ago
Italy actually filed criminal charges against several scientists for making inaccurate predictions about an earthquake. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/seven-year-legal-saga-ends-italian-official-cleared-manslaughter-earthquake-trial https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/seven-year-legal-sag...
downerending 7y ago
If you were wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics

throwaway0a5e 7y ago

The public response to COVID-19 made the transition from a scientific topic to a subject of politics/religion about a month ago. While I appreciate the author's sentiment I can't help but feel the authors' are pissing into a hurricane. At this point the course this thing is gonna run seems to be out of the control of scientists, academics and honest debate.

jessriedel 7y ago
You can still hold other scientists and policy makers to a higher standard.
bottled_poe 7y ago
An individual is smart. People are stupid. Collective thinking is just too hard. We’re all guilty of it.
- clairity 7y ago
  or how about a crowd is wise but a herd is not?

natvert 7y ago

The fact that this article exists, and needs to exist, worries me more than any virus or lockdown. What, if anything, is more necessary to a free society than the free expression and debate of ideas? This of course requires a literate and critical interpretation of the facts and data by all, but I digress. This is science.

downerending 7y ago
Meh. This trend was in full force long before the virus showed up.
rdiddly 7y ago
Yeah you can pretty much transplant this sentence to any public forum: At the same time, we are concerned by a chilling attitude among some [people], who are wrongly ascribing legitimate disagreements about [issues] to ignorance or to questionable political or other motivations.
jhayward 7y ago
> What, if anything, is more necessary to a free society than the free expression and debate of ideas? The commons must be protected from bad actors, and bad faith whose purpose is to use the openness of society against itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- nostromo 7y ago
  To imply that John Ioannidis is a bad actor is ridiculous.
  - jhayward 7y ago
    It is a plausible explanation for his recent actions. And, in fact, his recent actions require us to re-visit his past investigations and expose with the assumption of good faith suspended.

maallooc 7y ago

Imagine being forced to remove this article, the server provider cuts off service, and your domain banned because these kind of articles have violated terms of services. That's happening on YouTube now.

happytoexplain 7y ago
I usually find that if you have to make an analogy for any reason other than explaining something technically complex, your position is probably faulty. E.g. in this case, I'd call this a false equivalence. Rather than making an analogy, you should explain directly why YouTube's policy is immoral or dangerous, rather than indirectly pointing at some other scenario, which will always differ in many relevant and irrelevant ways by the simple nature of it being a different scenario. It needlessly complicates the conversation.
- oh_come_on 7y ago
  “Ackshually...”
- maallooc 7y ago
  Your video gets deleted, your channel gets a warning or a ban. Seems equivalent to what YouTube is doing to youtubers that posts information inconsistent with WHO.
  - jstewartmobile 7y ago
    The masks are coming off!
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > Seems equivalent to what YouTube is doing to youtubers that posts information inconsistent with WHO. Absolutely nothing? Unless you post misinformation, in which case, it will be left up but demonetized. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9803260?hl=en Where did you get the deletion and ban nonsense from?

baddox 7y ago

> Scientists who express different views on Covid-19 should be heard It's interesting to phrase this as "views." I'd prefer to see all relevant data.

philosopher1234 7y ago
It seems like interpretations (views) of data from seasoned professionals who are much more familiar with the context than the general public are also valuable
mataug 7y ago
My guess is that views here translates to hypothesis. Sometimes Scientists could have a gut feeling, and this may not have data to back it up. I think its still important to talk about it, while acknowledging that we're discussing a hypothesis, and not a proven fact.
dnautics 7y ago
You're out of luck, the data are still relatively sparse, (understandably) collected under duress, and (understandably) without controls. Just about anything predictive (and many descriptive things too) any reputable scientist says will be slightly better than informed speculation. The ethically sound scientists will disclose the level of caution their suggestions for policy entail, and there will be plenty of very talented scientists who will raise a furor on the grounds that the layperson cannot be trusted to take socially responsible action without an exaggerated threat over their heads.

whatever1 7y ago

Should we had taken more seriously the Stanford University Faculty when they were suggesting back in March in WSJ [1] 0.01% mortality rates while the ERs were full and we could not source masks and ventilators? The mortality rate in NY has been found by random testing more than 0.5%, or more than 50 times higher from what the Stanford Snake Oil Salesmen were predicting by looking at NBA (yes really) mortality rates. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464?fbclid=IwAR2gGQh5iIhMGkKFNS714x0Wvq486_D0ViDc4uVVtgjKmVAOitPZQ8qbY48 https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as...

dang 7y ago
> Stanford Snake Oil Salesmen If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I like how you bagged on him for telling the truth.
  - dang 7y ago
    If you possess the truth, it's even more important not to use it as a weapon, because doing so will only alienate the readers who possess less truth than you do. No one is convinced by name-calling or other outright attack, and truth is too precious to be burned this way. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20truth%20discred&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - asdf21 7y ago
      >will only alienate >No one is convinced Those are some pretty broad generalizations! I've certainly been convinced on various topics by people who were correct and also rude about it. Do you think laywers and police are always nice when trying to get to the truth? Have you ever seen the movie Erin Brockovich, or read about the events that inspired it? Would she have had the same results while being polite the entire time? Rude comments may break forum rules, sure. But I'm not sure sweeping generalizations about efficacy, such as the above, are needed.

rdxm 7y ago

<rant> Is anyone really surprised? Current culture world-wide is built on 15 second attention span idiocy and social media bs. Want to see this go away? Remove FB/Insta/Twitter from the planet, along with the entire mainstream media, all of which have business models based on the aforementioned idiocy as well as non-stop conflict generation. When you are done with that task go purge every sitting legislative body on the planet which in general are bought and paid for by those same special interests. Then you'd have a clean slate to build on for intelligent dialog and meaningful efforts related to not just Covid 19, but many other pressing global concerns...</rant>

foxfired 7y ago

The problem is that the word science has been robbed of its meaning. Or the meaning didn't scale well. Every side of the so-called debate throws it left and right, now which science do you believe in? As if belief is part of the equations. And the other issue is that there are no debates. You send a tweet, and tag WHO or some authoritative figure and then we have to believe it. Those who don't believe it are not following the science. Edit: Science is supposed to evolve as new data comes in. Today, we stop at the first sensational news. When a fact is updated or retracted, it doesn't make the news.

RhysU 7y ago
> As if belief is part of the equations. In the data starved regime, belief indeed does enter the equations in the form of a Bayesian prior. Agreed that new data should update the results.
orwin 7y ago
You can't rob a word of its meaning. If it encompass to much, you can create a new one or be more precise. Anyway, i think the point of this article is that people that are not scientists themselves can debate with each other, but should avoid perturbing (i'd say polluting even) the scientific debate, whether its by disparaging an adversarial opinion or but elevating a scientits too high (see what has happened with the pr Raoult cult in France). This is too much noise and scientist are people too.

cm2187 7y ago

Fortunately on hackernews we have downvoting and flagging for dealing with opposite views!

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
And we have showdead to be able to hear those voices anyway.

gbjw 7y ago

Part of the problem with the reporting on death rates and, to a lesser extent, many of the tests and treatments of COVID-19, is the almost nonexistent emphasis on uncertainty quantification. A view might only be ‘different’ in the sense that the mode of the belief is shifted significantly, which is to be expected if existing beliefs are quite diffuse (i.e., uncertain).

exmadscientist 7y ago
Former actual scientist here. This! This, exactly! This, a million times over! If I could teach people one scientific concept to help us get through this, it wouldn't be immunology or epidemiology. It would be an understanding of uncertainty, where it comes from, what it means, and how to handle it.
- sjg007 7y ago
  Do you actually understand uncertainty?
  - exmadscientist 7y ago
    I've, uh, spent significant portions of my life trying to understand just how well we know some particular measured values. And that's not counting the coursework. So, yeah, I'm going to set myself up for a fall here by saying I've got a pretty decent professional understanding of the topic.
- cameldrv 7y ago
  The funny thing is that they actually do this -- they show that based on their measurements of the assay's specificity, the confidence interval for the number of true positives includes zero. That means, even discounting all of the other biases, their study cannot provide a lower bound for the number of infections, which was the whole point of the study. They then proceed to ignore this and use a point estimate for their further calculations. The right thing to have done would have been to test the assay further, or move the study to an area where there was higher positivity and they could get a more reliable signal.

olivermarks 7y ago

This point from the article is really important IMO 'Scientific consensus is important, but it isn’t uncommon when some of the most important voices turn out to be those of independent thinkers, like John Ioannidis, whose views were initially doubted. That’s not an argument for prematurely accepting his contestable views, but it is a sound argument for keeping him, and others like him, at the table' In a free society information and ideas should flow freely, not be banned and originators punished as happens in closed societies. It is alarming the level of vitriol and blind adherence to 'the scientific method' aka accepted establishment viewpoint in some cases, particularly online. For all the endless proselytizing about 'innovation' there are some remarkably closed minded people around, enabled and amplified by social networks

missedthecue 7y ago
I'm not in the academic sciences but when my uncle published his thesis in a journal for his physics PhD, he got literal hate mail in his mailbox for going against the old-guard with his conclusions. It completely blew my mind that his peers who worked in the sciences got so wound that they sent hate mail to him. I think he still has the letters all these decades later. I learned second hand that apparently a lot of scientific acedemia is like that. Crazy.
- imcoconut 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I've heard many stories like that of your uncle from professional researchers in science, economics, and other fields. This is something that people who have no experience in professional academia and science often do not understand. In my experience a lot of people assume that because science and related disciplines are rational endeavors that the institutions and culture compassing them must also be rational, empirical, purely evidence-based, etc. Reality can be almost comically, and sometimes tragically, the opposite.
  - asdff 7y ago
    It's like finance or law or any other field with some hothead cutthroat personalities in powerful positions. Where there is perceived power there is an attraction to people who feed off of power alone. Egos are a plenty and often cruel to others trying for the same goals. Lots of people are hypercompetitive rather than collaborative, and see any peer as an adversary or challenger rather than leaning into synergy. This kind of stuff would happen at conferences too, a couple notable cases of screaming matches from the audience to the presenter have happened. Sometimes vindictive professors will go to a rival professors's grad student's talk and just grill the poor kid, asking them impossible questions and being hypercritical. Usually the grad student's own professor has to step in and try to deflect the assholes line of questioning. Sometimes the professors are even in the same department. It's a total cringe moment for the rest of the audience, and is definitely a phenomenon that is slowly growing out of the field as professors retire. Take a look at the comment section of this blog to see it first hand: https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perform-a-differential-expression-analysis-or-science/ https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/how-not-to-perf...

jaaron 7y ago

Views still need to be backed by solid data and in this case, the Stanford study the article is highlight has a number of issues with its data: "I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time and effort discussing this paper whose main selling point was some numbers that were essentially the product of a statistical error." "I’m serious about the apology. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t think they authors need to apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screw-ups. They’re the kind of screw-ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don’t look too carefully at what you might have done wrong." source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaws-in-stanford-study-of-coronavirus-prevalence/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...

thepope 7y ago
Do you have any idea how stupid most people are? Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/media/File:IQ_distribution.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#/media/F... Think about where you fall on that graph and then realize how many people are dumber and a lot dumber than you. But it doesn't end there. Some people are sheltered their entire lives so there is a lot they don't understand. Some people are mostly one dimensional so they don understand a lot. Some people have huge egos so they don't understand a lot. Some people have unreasonable biases and agendas that warp their otherwise rational mind into being ridiculous. Some people are so overburdened they can't do anything but work and never have a second to think for themselves. The powers that be PUMP shit into our heads all day long. lol, how many people even passed Calculus let alone could do anything with it now. And you're asking these people to look at the data? Get real. Get real! These people are not influenced by data. Plus people value different things. Do you realize how much this quarantine is costing us? It's more selfish boomer behavior. I'm sorry but it's not worth the cost of another one or two Iraq wars to save the few people it does infect. It kills less than a percent of the people it infects. It's not like this thing kills 1/3 or even a 1/10th of the population. We are just pissing away money to protect a few boomers. They are pile driving our generation into poverty. End the quarantine. Very few people understand anything at all about statistics other than what can be gleaned from basic arithmetic. You're asking too much of people. You don't influence people with facts. Sorry this reply is all over the place.

notacoward 7y ago

My worry with pieces like this is that they're meant to encourage intellectual diversity in scientific discourse, but some people will undoubtedly try to use them as "teach the controversy!" to justify any kind of crazy non-scientific idea. How do we teach people to draw that line? Or is that a lost cause?

ayakura 7y ago
> How do we teach people to draw that line By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0] It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines. [0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  This makes us susceptible to what's essentially a Gish gallop, though. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop, for those unfamiliar.) It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Also worth noting that false claims need not be malicious to serve as a DOS attack. An army of untrained ‘researchers’ drawing improbable conclusions from randomly combined snippets of scientific papers can generate a huge amount of pseudoscientific ‘sourced-looking’ ideas. Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.
ravitation 7y ago
Well, one issue, is that this article (and many like it) only address controversy, and not whether a given controversy is warranted by evidence. I think it's important in discussing intellectual diversity to emphasize that going against established thought requires compelling evidence, usually rightfully so. It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.

kgarten 7y ago

Scientist should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards. The article seems to defend an article and opinion that sees economic consequences are more dangerous than human lives lost to COVID-19. In terms of scientific discourse, this sounds fishy to me. We don‘t know so much about the virus: long term effects etc. If a scientist argues against saving human lives now, because of a man made economic systems inability to cope with the crisis might kill more people later, I say don‘t hear him, criticize him based on an ethical discourse. Save the lives now and adjust the system so people don‘t need to die.

gbjw 7y ago
You are assuming that a particular course of action: (1) is guaranteed to be the best way to save lives and (2) only has ramifications which we have the ability to ‘adjust’. Many scientists may disagree with you on both accounts. I don’t see why they are not holding themselves to the highest ethical standards.
- kgarten 7y ago
  In hypotheticals I would agree with you. Yet, at the time of the writing of that article, the data from several countries regarding COVID 19 were in, and we have an indication on what metrics work to limit deaths. We also see what we could have done to prevent and outbreak, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan seemed to be extremely prepared. Germany followed the virologist, epidemiologist consensus (and is going now off track to open businesses again ... a lot of scientist believe too early). We will see in the long run which approaches worked and which didn’t. Yet, calling for an opening of businesses (because we cannot be sure about the death rate), when none of the successful countries did that, is ethically dubious to me.

thepope 7y ago

HA, Good luck. I suggested that maybe we should consider ending the quarantine for the sake of the economy and my post was instantly flagged. Society gonna do what society gonna do.

happytoexplain 7y ago
That's fairly self-pitying and simple. Is it impossible that your post, intrinsically, had enough recklessness and/or low enough value that meeting the flagging threshold was within the realm of reasonableness? It can happen even when the thought in your head is more rational, since expressing subtlety in the fast-and-short forum context is difficult.

ravitation 7y ago

Scientists who "express different views" are listened to, when they have convincing data to support those "views." Ioannidis is the only real example provided in the article, and his opinion piece (and the related Stanford study) was criticized, not because he's an iconoclast, but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy). Not only that, but then, instead of engaging with the scientific community, his "expertise" was co-opted by the conservative media and its agenda.

nogabebop23 7y ago
>> but because it was bad science (and especially bad policy). is this not exactly what the original article cautions against? if it's bad science (which should be debatable) it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately.
- bsder 7y ago
  > it's value as policy follows directly and doesn't need to be stated or discussed seperately. The problem is that if, as a scientist, I know that people are likely to convert my findings into policy, then I have an extra duty to be especially diligent and extra thorough so that my findings are valid. Ioannidis knew exactly what he was doing when he put this pile of garbage out there. The fact that it was shoddy methodology means that he should get ESPECIALLY torched for it as an object lesson to other "scientists".
- ravitation 7y ago
  Uh, no. First, the original article is actually about the exact opposite. It says nothing about attacking an opinion based on its merit, it talks about attacking an opinion based on dogma. When I say it's bad science, I'm saying it's bad science because of glaring problems with its methodology; I thought that was obvious (the term "bad science" being fairly common). Second, I'm talking about the social policy argued for in Ioannidis' opinion piece. Social policy absolutely does not just directly follow the science; they are very different things and absolutely should be discussed separately. I find it a bit absurd to think that science inherently dictates a certain social policy.

nardi 7y ago

That’s why we believe that the bar to stifling or ignoring academics who are willing to debate their alternative positions in public and in good faith must be very high. But the "good faith" part is precisely the problem. Though it is difficult to discern good faith from bad, those who argue in bad faith destroy the system entirely, and we need some kind of defense against them.

rflrob 7y ago

Reading the tweet thread linked under "personal attacks and general disparaging comments" (https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1253822258692284416 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1253822258692284416), I see much more a criticism of poor science journalism in the WSJ than the poor science in the article itself (aside from one swipe as a "methodological piece of shit"). I'm all for rigorous debate of different scientific ideas, but the WSJ Opinion page is not where people should be marshaling allies to their scientific ideas that are regarded as tenuous by the majority of the community.

Ensorceled 7y ago

Part of the problem is that there are some Doctors and Scientists participating with agendas. Take cloth masks, there are doctors who say it helps and doctors who say it doesn't help much. Some the doctors who said it doesn't help were genuine. But some of the doctors were saying it doesn't help were lying because they assumed people wouldn't social distance if they wore a mask, believing the increased risk due to not wearing masks was not worth what they believed would be a big decrease in social distancing. Some of the doctors were are saying they didn't help, were lying to preserve masks for health care professionals (including lying about n95 masks). It's hard not to feel like attacking some one you believe is deliberately putting many lives at risk to forward a political or personal agenda.

benmmurphy 7y ago
I've also heard it claimed that masks not helping was pushed because there was no peer reviewed randomized trials that showed that masks helped therefore the official advice was there is no evidence that masks helped. Of course there is no randomized trial evidence on the effectiveness of social distancing on long term reduction in mortality due to corona virus but different ideas have to hurdle different levels of evidence. This idea of different levels of evidence actually makes sense because some things have potentially high payoffs and very likely low costs. For example wearing masks would appear to fall into this bucket. This comes back into reasoning under uncertainty that someone else brought up in the thread. The medical community has had problems in the past because bad medical interventions typically impose high costs on patients so if they have little positive benefit then it can easily become a net-negative situation. So then you have a culture where anything that hasn't gone through an RCT with multiple confirming studies doesn't exist as an intervention.

egberts1 7y ago

We can see how Seattle and Tokyo kept their SARS-CoV-2 case load very low by listening to their own scientists; New York City and Austin, not so much.

asdf21 7y ago
Or it just spread on the West Coast much earlier... which is why Gavin Newsom is autopsying bodies of people who died in Dec and Jan, after it turned out there was confirmed community spread in the Bay Area in late January resulting in a Santa Clara county death in Early Feb..
Cyclone_ 7y ago
In what ways did Austin not listen to their own scientists? I was there during part of this and they had a fairly early response, I believe SXSW was one of the first major events to be cancelled in the US. They were also pretty quick about limiting the size of gatherings.

swayvil 7y ago

Right now we are being propagandized with an intensity never seen before. I have yet to see a single person in my neighborhood suffer from this virus in any noticeable way. What I do see is propaganda, marketing and social engineering. A massive campaign. On Reddit I see a Coronavirus subreddit that has become an almost supernaturally airtight echo-chamber. I see the moderator of that reddit. Some anonymous fellow who was handed control over the subreddit for no apparent reason. Who is using an account he obviously bought 3 months ago. Shutting down any discussion that begins to stray from the official narrative. I see the usual propaganda buttons being pushed. Tribalism and fear. This smells like a dang fish factory.

asdf21 7y ago
There's a reason... to wreck the economy so Trump won't be re-elected.
- Aperocky 7y ago
  Economies are wrecked worldwide. Trump shouldn't be elected because he thinks injecting disinfectant into your lungs to do a cleasing 'should be looked into' while maintaining that 'I am a person with a good you know what'.
  - asdf21 7y ago
    Would you say they are wrecked because of the virus, or because of government shutdowns that were based on a fatality rate that may turn out to be wildly incorrect? How many fatalities do you think will occur due to the wrecked economy in the next few years?
fiblye 7y ago
I don't think your neighborhood and a couple random people on reddit of all places offer a full glimpse of the world at large, especially considering the disease has hotspots with high infection rates while other people are mostly avoiding those places. Conversely, I've never had influenza in my life, and I don't recall seeing anyone close to me ever actively suffering from a bad case influenza. I still believe it exists and people who got hit hard by it are probably at home.

tensor 7y ago

The example this article uses doesn't help drive the point. Ioannidis was heard, and the majority of the attacks on him came from outside the scientific community. Within the community science played out how it's supposed to. The paper was looked at critically and flaws in it's data uncovered and thus correctly discredited. Meanwhile, his hypothesis is still held by many prominent figures outside of the scientific community. So it's very hard to claim this is an example of valid ideas being at all squashed. Worse, in this case we have hard evidence of some pretty catastrophic results from this virus. So trying to argue that the overall outcome isn't going to be so bad is proven false by counter example. We already have situations that are bad enough to warrant extreme counter measures.

joe_the_user 7y ago
Lots of things about the Ioannidis paper. A) This was published as a research paper but how much of a research paper was it? As mentioned, it selectively and fairly shallowly looked at some data (the Diamond Princess) while wholly ignoring other data (South Korea) without even providing a strong justification for its choices. It was more like "an essay with scholarly footnotes". B) This article wasn't simply offered to scientific community. You can find a huge swath of mainstream media reports describing this paper and another large number of popular articles with by Ioannidis himself defending the positions he staked out in his article. This was essentially a media campaign. C). The particular position Ioannidis staked out was just one of a series of positions one can find staked by a variety of figures, some real scientists, some right wing ideologues, some somewhat in between. Again, if you look, a well financed media campaign. Below is a series of link I've cobbled together I've cobbled together as documentation of this: The American Institute for Economic Research (libertarian/right wing think tank) give it's of "significant" article: https://www.aier.org/article/vital-information-that-is-falling-through-the-cracks/ https://www.aier.org/article/vital-information-that-is-falli... Essentially a web of articles united by the need to avoid undue action on the virus (IE, not cost money). A nice article describing the similarity of Covid-denial and Climate-change-denial: https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-doubters-follow-climate-denial-playbook/ https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-d... An article on the effort to spin the Santa Clara tests befor e they were even release: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-circulating-california-2019-bunk.html https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-circulating... What's on with Ioannidis: https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-rate-critics/ https://undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-... Richard A. Epstein of the Hoover Institution, another Stanford Connected "minimizer" https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-corona... A summary of several related minimizers, with a similar program: https://arcdigital.media/what-the-federalist-doesnt-get-about-the-importance-of-life-1833c714f08f https://arcdigital.media/what-the-federalist-doesnt-get-abou... Aljazeera gives a broader discussion, why real scientist would do this: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-herd-immunity-eugenics-market-200414104531234.html https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/coronavirus-herd-i...

ggm 7y ago

The SAGE committee in Whitehall is permitting Dominic Cumming not only to listen in to the scientists and demographers and economists: he is joining in. Thus, the mis-apprehension of science leaks out, into official acts.

benmmurphy 7y ago
It will be interesting to see what policy influence Cummings has had. A media outlet earlier had claimed Cummings pushed for no lockdown. So seeing we had a lockdown that would appear to show that he doesn't have much influence. Though, it might be that Cummings opinion on what to do changed as he received more information and he ended up supporting the lockdown. Or it could be that the media misreported the situation.

yters 7y ago

Just graphing death rate data that Google provides shows weird trends. https://mindmatters.ai/2020/04/why-does-covid-19-target-the-northern-hemisphere/ https://mindmatters.ai/2020/04/why-does-covid-19-target-the-...

dayvid 7y ago

Is there a resource for up-to-date reviewed papers on COVID? Like a Reddit group with community members from relevant backgrounds or something? Because it gets hard for me to keep up on what’s bs or factual, and many people pushing articles usually have political motivations.

throwaway1777 7y ago
r/covid19 is pretty good unlike the much larger and more political r/coronavirus.
- dayvid 7y ago
  Gotcha thanks. I also found r/medicine. Lots of doctors and ER professionals weighing in on the news with personal experience from their hospitals.
fspeech 7y ago
DHS has a Master Question List for Covid-19 https://www.dhs.gov/publication/st-master-question-list-covid-19 https://www.dhs.gov/publication/st-master-question-list-covi... that is actually very good, with a long list of published references. It is also updated weekly so it is quite up-to-date.

freetime2 7y ago

I think the researchers behind the Santa Clara study should be applauded for going out and gathering data. While the methodology may have been flawed, I think that having a small amount of flawed data is better than having no data. My hope is that the public controversy of this study spurs more and better serological studies in the future. I don't agree with the premise that scientists should be silenced or suffer personal attacks for putting out controversial or even flat out "bad" science. I think we have seen that approach backfire, and lead to distrust of expert opinions and traditional news sources. Instead I think that we should be focusing on improving scientific literacy in the general population, and electing leaders who surround themselves with and take advice from competent scientists. And if people in certain countries, districts, etc. are not interested in doing so... well... they are certainly free to vote however they see fit and live with the results of that decision.

not2b 7y ago
The main criticism is that they came to a conclusion that was completely unsupported by the evidence. They made an error you'd flunk a first-year statistics student for: ignoring the effect of false positives. They then politicized their bad conclusion by doing a media blitz. This is especially dangerous when the conclusion you are prematurely coming to is something that a lot of people really want to believe. When their report first came out, it gave me hope. I live in Santa Clara County; what they were saying would lead to a very low death rate -- unless you allow for as few as 1% false positives, and then you realize that the numbers they report could also arise if no one had any antibodies. They shouldn't be silenced, but they should be criticized, and criticized intensely, for a botch a first-year grad student shouldn't make.
- rurban 7y ago
  So you are denying the evidence also? Look at the global absolute data, which does support this study. The IFR is around 0.3, in some countries much lower 0.03, in some countries at around 1%. The absolute number of deaths are much lower than in a normal flu season. 200.000 this year, with a normal year being at the 250.000-500.000 range. Without vaccination and without proper treatment plans (which turned out flat wrong) So some newer studies try to find out why and how this disease is so weak. Affected countries, like Belgium, Spain, NL, England, US like to know why their rates are higher. It's not the measures, it's not the weak ICU infrastructure. it's something else. Like age group, seniors living seperately of with the families, diabetes, obesity, air pollution, or other co-morbidities. Currently the numbers are not too troubling, but still would make an interesting study.

eric_b 7y ago

I've followed the virus from the very beginning. About six weeks ago the media decided blanket lockdowns were the only reasonable solution. Flatten the curve became the mantra, dozens of models showing millions of dead in every country were trotted out as evidence and justification for draconian shutdowns. Any scientist that had a differing viewpoint was a monster who didn't value human life. Any public health official who suggested maybe just the most vulnerable be isolated was met with scorn and a heap of emotional but illogical arguments. Look up David Katz [1]. Only Fox News would let him talk until Bill Maher put him on. He's eminently sensible, and he was silenced by the media. Blanket lockdown (that is, all ages locked down) for this virus has never made sense in Western democracies. China did it because they could, and they have a command economy and a willing populace. The UK knew it didn't make sense from day one, but caved to public pressure. Sweden is still going strong, thank God, as they will be the country that shows the rest of the world how to live with, and ultimately beat, this disease. Norway just let the youngest kids go back to school, smartly, to increase herd immunity with less personal impact. It will be clear in several more months that the Sweden strategy is the only way to minimize total harm and navigate this crisis. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lze-rMYLf2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lze-rMYLf2E [Edit]: Good job HN participants. Way to prove the story correct.

vmception 7y ago
Are there any ways to get into Sweden right now? Considering Midsommar I heard their border was closed, but I think the exceptions make the rule, if there are any
- tapland 7y ago
  Be a citizen or permanent resident, or have important business in the country. Midsommar is celebrated on the countryside with the family. Get IKEA delivery of foods (available in some US locations), boil a ton of small potatoes and get some wormwood(Swedish:malört) spiced vodka.
  - vmception 7y ago
    I can create a business rationale. But wanna stay a while.

drummer 7y ago

Yeah videos of doctors and scietists who don't follow the official line are being censored on YouTube. This one is the latest, highly recommend watching to the end. https://archive.org/details/full-press-conference-dr-dan-erickson-dr-artin-massihi https://archive.org/details/full-press-conference-dr-dan-eri...

pbreit 7y ago

Good luck. Anyone even slightly out of the mainstream will get shamed into oblivion. Just look at the 2 Bakersfield doctors this week.

rlp 7y ago
But those doctors clearly don't have a good grasp of basic statistics. You cannot extrapolate cases for a whole state based on test results from a non-random sampling of people. They are making a basic error and claiming to be experts, that deserves some shaming in my book.
- pbreit 7y ago
  Everyone seems to be doing that from NYC data. IHME_UW has been making massive errors and no one seems to mind.
  - rlp 7y ago
    No, they aren't. That's why those two were called out. Not sure how IHME's mistakes come in to play here. If they are making mistakes, they should be called out as well.

briandear 7y ago

Let’s apply this to climate change as well.

garg 7y ago
The first line of the article is >When major decisions must be made amid high scientific uncertainty, as is the case with Covid-19, we can’t afford to silence or demonize professional colleagues with heterodox views. How much scientific uncertainty actually exists when it comes to climate change and its causes?
- tlb 7y ago
  A lot! There's no serious debate that it's happening and the main cause is human burning of fossil fuels, but numerical estimates of future temperature change have wide error bars and estimates of ecosystem damage are all fairly speculative since they depend on species not being able to adapt (which they may or may not.) The debate has been poisoned by deniers pointing to any uncertainty as evidence of it all being fake. The intellectually honest approach is to consider the expected costs across all likely outcomes, and spend money on mitigations accordingly.

lagilogi 7y ago

That is not how science advents, not currently. Collaboration takes a backseat in science when your name, reputation, career prospects are in the line. If you advance an argument that lack proper and vigorous proof, I have no reason to hear you. I will however tear your work to pieces. As many pieces as I can, so I can ride that train as long as I can. That's how science advents currently. Otherwise all of us academics would be building our work on top of each others' collaboratively and productively. Minorities and women would not have been shunned out; graduate slave labor, and adjunct faculty would have been unthinkable.

cfv 7y ago

Yeah... About that... I mean... no. When the possible death of thousands upon thousands of people is on the line, your proposal better be ironclad and well equipped to stand many lines of attack if you want it to be taken seriously. "Hey maybe let's not do the one massively researched thing that we've done since times of the plague because there's not enough data" is neither of those things. Open dialogue in science needs to take place in the forums already in place, not on clickbaity money-starved legacy media. EDIT: Dear rando downvoters, please instead of lurking help foster debate by stating why in your opinion untestable indefensible claims should be allowed to pass as science in the name of "open dialogue".

deleted 7y ago

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kgarten 7y ago

Interestingly also other scientists seem to suffer from this phenomenon: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/virologist-christian-drosten-germany-coronavirus-expert-interview https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/26/virologist-chr...

notechback 7y ago

Let's look at climate science: there was a study that 99% of researchers on the topic are convinced it's real, 1% have some doubts. Should we give the 1% a voice? Yes Should we consider the view of the 1% as equal to the 99%? No. Here's what happens when someone vocally has a dissenting view: they get press coverage, both neutral and from agenda-driven perspectives. There is exactly one country (the US, maybe two if you count Australia) where a majority of those in decision making positions believe or act as if they believe that climate change is not real. They justify this by quoting the 1% and ignoring the 99%. As such then the 1% are causing significant harm to the planet (assuming that the majority view is correct). The same in a more vivid way is true for covid: those dissenting voices (eg the French doctor Trump ended up quoting) get a lot of coverage no matter how sound the science proposed by those dissenters is (or in this case unsound - a study on the medicine he recommended had to be ended due to heavy health impacts of the medicine). These dissenters and rapidly published papers have led to deaths. No doubt, no questions, people have died due to those perspectives being pushed into the mainstream discussions. So should they be heard by peers and their views be discussed? Yes. Should they get press coverage, blog their viewpoints out there, etc, even if it leads to thousands of deaths (or destruction of the planet)? I don't think so. This is a role for media to filter (rather than blare everything into the ether), but also a self-constraint that any serious scientist should impose upon themselves. The public is not able to decide which old guy with a professor/Dr in front of his name is the one to trust.

woodandsteel 7y ago

The article makes some good points. Much is not yet known about the pandemic, and we should listen carefully to alternative views. The article ends by saying the problem is that the issue has been politicized, which is quite correct. But author should have said this started when Trump and a large portion of the conservative media claimed that the whole thing was a hoax, that the scientists knew the coronavirus is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu, but decided, thousands of them, to lie to the public so as to undermine the US economy and prevent Trump from being re-elected in November.