The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post science reporter Joel Achenbach and copied to both his national and executive editors. It was also copied to a number of scientists and institutional leaders quoted by Achenbach in a front-page story that tried a bit too hard to defend the reluctance of the scientific “consensus” to acknowledge the obvious possibility that diabolically murderous, lying and thieving China may have incompetently or by design loosed the Covid-19 pandemic and all its devastation on the world. Those copied experts included: National Academy of Sciences president Marcia McNutt, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, the University of Iowa’s Stanley Perlman, the University of Pennsylvania’s Susan Weiss, Columbia University’s W. Ian Lipkin, Stanford University’s David Relman, Tulane University’s Robert Garry Jr. and science journalist Donald McNeil Jr. It should be noted that Dr. McNutt of the NAS replied graciously, sharing some storm data and her mutual belief that we should “keep politics out of science.”
Dear Joel,
Not that savvy Washington Post readers are fooled by the obfuscation. But to be clear: To the extent that virologists and scientists more broadly face suspicions these days, as you write in paragraph 8 of Monday’s A1 piece, it’s not because they’ve proved themselves human and made good-faith lab mistakes or even questionable decisions about proceeding with inherently dangerous research in the first place [“Scientists still battling over coronavirus’s origin story,” June 21]. It’s because far too many of them have let themselves become tools of the speech-suppressing Stalinist left and, for the sake of keeping the government grant money flowing, have sacrificed much of their profession’s integrity on the altar of “consensus.”
Until recently, science since its earliest days had never been about consensus. It’s been about reasoned hypotheses and rigorous, repeatable, transparent testing to prove or disprove them — at least until more knowledge and new hypotheses are developed.
But the wagon-circling Lancet letter signed by the University of Iowa’s Dr. Stanley Perlman and 26 other Trump-loathing, establishment-courting colleagues in February 2020 had nothing to do with the scientific method because few if any of its signatories had any firsthand knowledge of what actually happened at the opaque Wuhan lab or had access to genetic information about the particular strain in question. And rather than write a more sober, open-minded letter that effectively counseled a “Whoa, whoa, whoa there” approach, “let’s relax and wait till we have more information before we draw panicked, perhaps prejudiced conclusions,” they instead jumped to their own prejudiced conclusions that were arguably as unscientific as any Trump had made before or since.
A similarly obsequious consensus, based on absurdly complex, butterfly’s wings-eschewing computer models that the U.N. climate panel itself admits (deep in the bowels of footnotes) become marginally less reliable with each new layer of algorithms, has also grown up around the assertion that “climate change” is now driving a spike in “extreme weather events.” Except that anyone who takes a little time to look into actual historical data and read a few old newspaper clippings on microfiche from, say, Galveston early last century, quickly learns that this assertion, too, is nonsense, as are a number of fashionable others.
So if scientists want to win back the public’s trust, they’ll have to behave in a trustworthy manner. They can’t behave like hyper-partisans unless they want their integrity and credibility to erode as quickly as have those of Post journalists and their colleagues at the New York Times, NPR, CNN and elsewhere, to name just a few of today’s shameless ax-grinders.
Meanwhile, there’s no denying that credible if always debatable covid-origin musings by Stanford’s Dr. David Relman and others had been systematically suppressed by both legacy and social media because they contradicted the anti-Trump orthodoxy and suggested the Wuhan virus that’s killed millions is not purely from nature but in fact may have been manipulated by humans in a manner consistent with gain-of-function research. Which doesn’t mean anyone necessarily acted criminally or even “sinisterly,” to use your word.
But it does mean there is and always will be a whole heckuva lot that we puny, imperfect, often egotistical human beings may never figure out about our world and the universe(s) around it. And when we pretend to know more than we do, or when we deliberately tell lies for what we convince ourselves is the public’s own good (see the delusional Tony “I Am Science” Fauci), then we rightly come under suspicion and should change our ways.
Getting back to the scientific method’s basics of transparently debating hypotheses with openly shared research and data would be a good first step if scientists truly wish to rebuild a public consensus about their credibility. Journalists might take the same approach, but hardened realists like me aren’t holding our breath and will gladly settle for a restoration of true science.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.
