Thread by @tgof137

A new article by Zeynep claims that scientists lost the public's trust, enabling covid conspiracy theories to form.

I think it's a bad take, and it's mostly missing the story.
archive.is/UZSwC

I can't entirely disagree, because I've previously written similar things about people losing trust in the news.

But I know people who've fallen for conspiracy theories and this is just never the reason

When I ask why they're afraid of vaccines, it's never, "I used to listen to scientists but I lost trust"

It's more like:
"I saw a Youtube video"
"I heard a podcast"
"I read it on Substack"

I don't think that scientists lost public trust in science.

I think podcasters, politicians, pandemic grifters, and journalists damaged it.

It's easy to see that "trust in science" has become heavily politicized by just looking at the numbers.

Democrats' levels of trust are only slightly below the pre-pandemic level, Republicans have dropped far below that:
pewresearch.org/science/2023/1…

That doesn't look like a nation losing trust in science because of inconsistent public health statements.

That looks like one party convincing their base that scientists are wrong.

That's an ongoing process, as GOP politicians continue to drag scientists before congress to smear their reputations.

The weird part is that someone at the NYT is now piling on -- criticizing scientists but simultaneously saying the scientists are to blame for any criticism directed their way.

"Look what you made me do" is a favorite phrase of gaslighters and narcissists.

Zeynep starts her article by talking about how smart she was early in the pandemic, by expecting that covid would be big and then telling people that masks work.

Those are good calls, but some of this looks like revisionist history. Here's what she actually wrote in February:

That sure sounds like someone that's worried about hand washing and droplet transmission, not advocating for masks or worried about aerosols.

I also made some reasonably good predictions at the beginning of the pandemic:

But those things were pretty obvious:
A novel virus growing exponentially is bad.
Breathing in less of that virus is good.

I also remember that the truth about other things was not obvious.

Is covid transmitted on surfaces?

That wasn't clear, at first.

I washed my groceries for the first few months of the pandemic.

Do you need a mask outdoors or not?

I basically never wore one outside.

But I stepped aside on trails, to be polite, when people passed by.

And I was worried about large outdoor crowds spreading covid at protests and political rallies.

I remember reading about an early patient in Italy catching covid while running a race.

I remember articles like this one:
medium.com/@jurgenthoelen…

If the science wasn't clear, on all of these questions, I think it's hardly fair to fault the scientists for not giving clear answers.

Perhaps public health authorities and journalists could have done a better job at communicating this stuff.

But it's going to involve guesses.

Obviously there's no "exactly 6 feet" rule for covid transmission.

But any reasonable person hears that and just thinks "avoid crowding".

They don't walk around with a 6 foot ruler.

It was also never clear what the best strategy was, for controlling covid.

It's clear that the US had very little plan.

But that was also a political problem, not a scientific problem.

I wasn't sure about covid origins, in 2020.

I actually fell for the lab leak theory.

I was never 100% convinced by it, but for a while I thought it was 50/50, and I sometimes said that lab leak is more likely.

I didn't think that because of something Daszak or Fauci said.

I didn't read Proximal Origins in 2020.

I first learned about lab leak from a podcast: Yuri Deigin on Bret Weinstein's show.

At the time, I didn't understand enough about virology to know why they were wrong.

I wasn't "mislead by scientists".

I barely even heard from the scientists.

I heard about lab leak on lots of podcasts.

I didn't know about "This week in virology".

Some scientists were active on Twitter but their views never made it into my echo chamber.

The few zoonosis articles I read were confusing... the pandemic was started by a bat? or a pangolin? But the market sold neither?

I didn't find a good discussion about plausible intermediate host animals, or understand how most pandemics start via intermediates, not from bats.

So, part of the problem is that I was ignorant and following bad sources.

Part of the problem might have been a lack of good science journalism.

And part of the problem is that scientists have to wait for facts, they can't just make things up.

The most convincing papers arguing for a natural origin of covid weren't even published until 2022.

In the time it took for scientists to confirm how covid started, conspiracy theorists had already had 2 years to make up their own theories and spread them online.

So, why is lab leak a popular opinion, today?

I don't think it's because "scientists lost the public trust".

I can think of at least 4 better reasons than that.

Reason #1:

lab leak was always a popular opinion.

As of May 2020, 49% of Americans already believed that covid came from a lab.


I don't think you can blame any kind of "backlash against scientists" at that early stage. today.yougov.com/politics/artic…

This is normal human behavior.

There are lab leak theories for every new disease.

HIV had at least 4 different theories for "how it was caused by science"

There was even a lab leak theory for lyme disease.

It's also normal for people to blame a pandemic on their political opponents.

Just as most people in the US blame a Chinese lab, most people in China blame a US lab.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Conspiracy theories in Russia and Iran also blamed the pandemic on the US:
atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/upl…

Reason #2:

Some people endorse every conspiracy theory, even contradictory ones.

While 60+% of Americans think covid came from a lab, you can hardly say they all support a "lab leak" -- the majority of those people also claim the virus was deliberately released!

In a 2020 poll, 25% of people said that the pandemic was "intentionally planned by powerful people", with rates much higher among less educated groups:
pewresearch.org/short-reads/20…

Lots of Americans don't believe in evolution.

40% think that man was created by God in his current form, another 40% believe in some more limited version of creationism.

Must be easy to sell that crowd on a lab creation theory, and hard to explain to them how viruses evolve.

Regardless of what scientists said, you were always going to have something like 40% support for a theory saying that covid is unnatural.

The only surprising part is that we're sitting at more like 60% today, with a lot of educated people supporting the idea.

Reason #3:
Lab leak has been pushed by right wing politicians and activists.

In January, 2020, lab leak was already being pushed by Steve Bannon and Miles Guo.
archive.ph/6TdBe

They got a "whistleblower scientist" to go on Fox News and say that Covid is a bioweapon:

Lab leak didn't really become mainstream until 2021.

We can see exactly when that happened, in Google search trends. It was around May 23rd:

What happened at that time?

Someone at the Wall Street Journal wrote about "3 researchers getting sick at the Wuhan institute of virology".

But that information was just made up by a guy in Trump's state department!

medium.com/p/8e0d13a0c1b5

And the WSJ reporter just happens to be the guy who first said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

That Yuri Deigin/Bret Weinstein podcast that I first heard?

Here are some of the politicians that planned Brexit, talking about getting Yuri on that show.

https://x.com/mikeydoubled/status/1710047640245702948

Reason #4:

Lab leak stories sell, stories about zoonosis do not.

The zoonosis story is just incredibly boring. Someone sold an infected animal at a wet market, just like with SARS.

The details aren't going to change much, over time.

After 2 years we realized that animals probably infected 2 people, at the wet market.

After 3 years, we found some DNA evidence suggesting which animal it might have been.

The lab leak story is exciting. It's got intrigue. There are claims about lying scientists and covered up crimes.

There's an endless stream of FOIA'ed emails, which can be creatively misquoted.

It gives people someone to blame.

There's always more room for reporting because the details keep changing -- the lab leak theorists keep making up different versions of the theory.

Any reporter that wants to get a few clicks can repeat the latest version of the lab leak story.

They don't have to do any fact checking or investigative journalism -- they can just quote DRASTIC or some made up claims from the Trump administration.

And many journalists are lazy enough that they'll do just that.

So, where do you look for truth in a world where social media fragments reality, fiction is more entertaining than fact, and most reporters suck at their jobs?

It's hard.

For me it's an ongoing process to curate a list of people who do good work and don't lie.

Some reporters have written great articles on covid origins, or have done honest investigative journalism in China.

Off the top of my head, I'd recommend Michael Standaert, Jane Qiu, Dake Kang, and Jon Cohen.

Quillette wrote a great article:


I think that might be because Quillette has a history of reporting on controversial issues, not pandering to an audience.quillette.com/2023/08/19/the…

Astral Codex Ten wrote a great article summarizing the lab leak debate:


I think Scott Alexander is just kind of autistic and writes what's true, not what people want to hear.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-…

Philipp Markolin has written a good summary of some of the science:
substack.com/home/post/p-14…

Markolin and Sam Gregson did a series of interviews with many of the scientists studying covid origins:
youtube.com/c/BadBoyofScie…

But, more than anything, if you want to understand science, I'd recommend following scientists, reading their papers, and seeing what they think, rather than relying on reporters as gatekeepers.