Thread by @Ayjchan

To expand on a point in my recent @StatedClearly interview:

"Science cannot be embodied by one person or even a group of people... It’s not something where a pandemic happens and only virologists can have the answer."

A prime example is #COVIDisAirborne science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

@StatedClearly That SARS-CoV-2 spreads through the air is perhaps one of the top 3 most important facts that needed & still needs to be acknowledged to limit covid spread.

It would've saved potentially millions of lives if this simple fact had been clearly explained to the world in early 2020.

Yet, it took until August 2021, more than a year and a half post-covid for a review on this topic to be published in a prominent scientific journal.

Of the 7 authors, only 1 is a virologist. The majority are aerosol or bioengineering experts.
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

I think it is worth a deeper examination to understand why it took global health authorities so long to acknowledge such a simple fact about the virus - so that in the future, we don't make the same mistakes.

Top epidemiologists & virologists insisted most transmission occurs through close contact, that there wasn't evidence of airborne transmission.

It took till April 2021 for non-virologists to put forward compelling points supporting #COVIDisAirborne
thelancet.com/article/S0140-…

In May 2021, @zeynep one of the authors of the #COVIDisAirborne papers wrote in @nytimes about the challenges of getting this basic fact through to health authorities and ensuring that it had impact on their public health policy.
nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opi…

@zeynep @nytimes "A member of the W.H.O. committees that craft infection prevention and control guidance.. knew the stakes made it harder to overcome the resistance."

Examining #COVIDIsAirborne “will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”

"Many of the experts [WHO] enlisted to form the Covid-19 I.P.C. Guidance Development Group were hospital-focused.. specialized in antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections that can spread wildly in health care facilities when medical personnel fail to regularly wash their hands."

On top of having to counter the group-think occurring among the experts enlisted by @WHO who focused on hand washing, those saying that #COVIDIsAirborne had to face "a higher standard of proof for theories that challenge conventional wisdom than for those that support it."

@WHO In short, at the beginning of a crisis, there are a handful of experts whose judgment and public verdicts are taken almost at face value, and it is exceedingly difficult to challenge them afterwards even as evidence accumulates in opposition to their stance.

@WHO In the future, to prevent similar tragedies from occurring, expertise should be drawn from various fields and from experts who don't have a history of working with each other, i.e., not from the same circles, not co-authors or colleagues, not in the same institution or country.

When you tap into experts who believe they and friends "represent science" or are the only people qualified to pass judgment on a novel pathogen, this results in a dangerous echo chamber where public expression of disagreement among experts is disincentivized.