The Truth is Out There

Because it's harder than ever to discern fact from fiction means we have to work harder. Don't give up! 

Definitely not an example of Art Deco.

I once dated a guy I thought was absolutely brilliant. He seemed to know everything about every topic. He could answer and explain every question I had under the sun, and I had a lot because it was all long before the internet. 

But one day we went to an art gallery. He explained the style and history of each piece of artwork fluidly and confidently. Unfortunately for our relationship, I had spent four years studying art, and I knew that almost everything he said was just plain wrong. I gently corrected a few things, styles off by centuries, descriptions of depictions with no basis in scholarly discussion, but I let most things go. 

When we left the gallery he paid me a particularly arrogant compliment I'll never forget: "It's so nice to finally go to a gallery with someone who knows something about art so I don't have to teach them everything." 

Meanwhile, in my head, I was thinking backwards through all the many things he had "taught" me over the prior few months, trying to undo any damage the likely misinformation might have caused. 

And it got me thinking about Covid and the media. For most of my life I looked at media interpretation of events with a critical eye, but took most facts and sources at face value. I mean, I've been reading Chomsky since Manufactured Consent first hit the scene in 1988. I actually showed the three-hour long documentary on it to my class of 17-year-olds, and they all sat with rapt attention!! (That was also before the internet.) While I followed and agreed with most of Chomsky's claims around media bias, one foot was still in the camp that believes at least the facts presented must be true, right?? Distorted is different than just made up. Surely the big news outlets (distinct from "yellow journalism") aren't making things up!

Now, with Covid, I've bypassed the media and immersed myself directly in studies and articles straight from the highly ranked journals, also checking out their method and analysis. Some studies might have a great method, but the analysis is wonky. And I looked for opposing papers to see which are stronger and which align with other studies with similarly strong results and analysis, later on just following people who had been accurate about earlier predictions to save time. These facts are crystal clear to me:

SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus that can have horrific effects on the body of all types of people: young, old, sedentary, or athletic. It mutates too quickly for herd immunity to develop or for vaccines to last more than a few months. It's still killing people, including children, and overall many times more than traffic collisions. It's a vascular disease that stays in the body, able to attack any organ or system much later on, like polio did. It can destroy the immune system the way AIDS does. It can bind neurons together in useless clumps to create symptoms of dementia in teenagers, or attack their heart or kidneys or pancreas. Long Covid will be the result of at least 10% of infections, which increases the number affected continuously the more we allow it to spread. The variants are getting better at evading the brief protections vaccines offer. Well-fitting good quality masks (N95s or better) work well to stop transmission, but not nearly as well as if everyone wears one. Cleaning the air inside public buildings worldwide is as necessary now as cleaning the water was in 1850s England (and in many places still today).

Meanwhile, the mainstream media makes claims that lead the public to believe this virus can't actually do much harm to little ones, and it's largely gone anyway, so don't worry too much. And it's still just a cold even when symptoms are nothing like a cold. Here's the latest bullshit spin:

'Long Cold' has a 'Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia' feel to it!

It's nutty because, even if it were true that the months-long illness that's got you trapped in bed isn't Covid and is just a cold -- it's not (more here), but just imagine it were -- then wouldn't you still want to encourage people to wear a mask also to avoid that?? No matter what you call it, being sick for months at a time with no end in sight - for many, with no end at all - should make people consider wearing masks. You'd think so, anyway, but the media just keeps bombarding us with reasons to give them up. 

The NYTimes recently posted an interview with Michael Mina who insists that once people are infected enough, this will be like any other virus. He says we need little kids to get infected and/or vaccinated over and over, and then they'll build immunity to it. Except, as far as I understand - and I'm open to correction -  THAT'S NOT HOW THIS WORKS! Here's a doc of links to studies showing that we won't develop immunity to a virus that mutates so quickly by getting it repeatedly. It was a year ago when epidemiologist Dr. Colin Furness explained that the immune system is not a muscle. Imagine a NYTimes article promoting taking no precautions around HIV as if kids just need to get it enough times to be immune. Mina says the worst is behind us, but this is what things look like near me in a graph that compares before and after the change in narrative around Covid's existence and potential harm. Pay attention to the area under the line, not the line itself. Those are all people:

We've plateaued, but at a very high rate staying near the original wave that sent us into lockdown. 

That graph only goes to February, so here's what it looks like since then. We had a nice dip for a while, but we're right back up to that plateau level. That seems to be our set-point. 

Mina's got tons of academic credentials, but so does Furness. So how do medical health professionals disagree on some basic of this disease? Affiliations? Making money somehow? Preventing panic that could cripple the economy? Culling the population? Who knows. 

Arijit Chakravarty explained today how, even in top ranked journals, the minimizing narrative took precedence over more rigorous studies: 

"In September 2020, we submitted a manuscript to Science predicting rapid evolution of neutralizing antibody evasion. They sat on it for a month before issuing a desk rejection. Of course, this was the same journal that published papers making wild assertions about T cells and vaccinal immunity during that period. Also in the fall of 2020, we submitted a manuscript predicting that a vaccine-only strategy would lead to repeated waves of disease and pushing for non-pharmaceutical interventions (such as indoor air quality and testing) to be used in conjunction. Our modeling paper painted a grim view of endemicity following vaccine rollout - many millions of cases per year and a new leading cause of death. Again, desk-rejected by the name-brand journals. Concurrently, Science published this paper on the topic. This widely-cited paper, deeply influential in many countries, used egregiously flawed assumptions to arrive at egregiously flawed conclusions. It predicted SARS-CoV-2 would transition to 'childhood sniffles' in a matter of a few years, with (maybe) no need for mass vaccination. 

But the funniest story was yet to come. In the spring of 2021, Lauren Ancel Meyers, a UT Austin epidemiologist, and I co-led a study showing that the metrics that the CDC was using to argue that in-school transmission was not happening were themselves flawed. At the time, the CDC was publishing a while slew of paper to 'show' that schools were safe. Like this one (led by Tracy Beth Høeg) showing (a) no in-school transmission, and (b) similar rates of transmission in schools and communities. We used modeling to demonstrate that (a) voluntary contact tracing as used in the US was only capable fo detecting 1-2% of transmission events, and (b) schools and community levels of disease would be the same 'even if' schools were driving transmission. The metrics were broken. Absence of evidence - with metrics that wouldn't find a problem even if it existed - was being offered as evidence of absence. Of course, we now know schools are a hotbed of transmission and children are often responsible for bringing it into the house. 

That manuscript that we wrote must hold the record for most desk rejections ever! We had seven, across a wide range of high- and mid-ranked journals, some within an hour or two of submission. It was never published. From that point on, we went the straight-to-TV route and submitted everythingn to open access journals like PLOS One, BMC Public Health, and Scientific Reports. There the process has been fair and reviews have been reasonable (sometimes resulting in a day or two of work). The time lag between submission and acceptance for theses kinds of papers has still been very long, often six months or more. Journals have struggled to find reviewers for many of our papers, as they have swum against the tide of 'expert' opinion at each point in time. 

The weird pro-minimization island of scientific journals is plain to see at a broader level. Science and Nature published only 'good news' papers on SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 and 2021; nearly all of these have aged exceptionally poorly (and been heavily cited!). These papers have created an echo chamber effect within the community, where scientists working on teh problem often see things through rose-colored glasses. The perception is that warnings about negative outcomes are fearmongering and sunny prognostications are good science. 

Of course, the virus doesn't care.

We've published all along with an eye to how our predictions would hold up to reality. Scientists who work on these problems would do well to remember: today's Nature paper with a bunch of media attention could be tomorrow's embarrassment. The fight is not over. Those who are still doing good science on this topic (and there are many!) have accepted that the top journals don't want to hear about it. The eyes of history are upon us; the scientific record cannot be edited or redacted after publication!"

It's as if even these top journals just don't want to be a bummer. 

The effect: from what I'm seeing, people, especially in their 20s and 30s want to enjoy the next 20-30 years, so they're not going to mask, and they're going to keep socializing and going to concerts and crowded venues, and they don't understand that they won't have 20-30 years to enjoy. The more they dig in their heels with the notion that they can only enjoy life without a mask on, the shorter that pleasure-seeking type of life will be.  

I know I can't picture my early 20s of clubs and bar hopping and house parties that featured spontaneous amorous adventures as being nearly as much fun with masks on. That type of pleasure-seeking is impossible to do safely now. We were crabby about condoms even in the height of news about AIDS mid-80s, and I think most of us didn't use them, preferring to take our chances. We were born to be wild and all. So I get that behaviour for that age group when libido is in charge and the prefrontal cortex is still in development. It sucks to have anything put a damper on fun. 

It really sucks that we'll lose so many bright young minds to this. 

And I have far less sympathy for people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s still living that devil-may-care lifestyle. Being careless people at that age is not something to celebrate.   

You'd think teens and young adults would wear masks everywhere but the parties at least, though. Wear a mask to class and work so that you can party on the weekend!! Wouldn't it be the absolute worst to get sick from flippin' Norbert in chemistry class on a Wednesday and then miss the big event on Saturday because you can't stop shitting yourself?? Diarrhea's a symptom of the most recent variant - it is SO not a cold! 

But another horrible side effect of the rampant misinformation about Covid in the mainstream media and in top-ranked journals: now I'm wondering about every fact I ever believed from a news source. 

The truth is out there, but it's really hard to find it these days.