“By September 2021, the scientists and staffers at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had gathered enough data to know that the trees in its green-tree reservoirs — a type of hardwood wetland ecosystem — were dying. At Hurricane Lake, a wildlife management area of 17,000 acres, the level of severe illness and death in the timber population was up to 42 percent, especially for certain species of oak, according to a 2014 forest-health assessment. The future of another green-tree reservoir, Bayou Meto, more than 33,000 acres, would look the same if they didn’t act quickly.
There were a lot of reasons the trees were dying, but it was also partly the commission’s fault. Long ago, the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and their tributaries would have flooded the bayous naturally, filling bottomland forests during the winter months when the trees were dormant and allowing new saplings to grow after the waters receded in the spring. Widespread European settlement and agriculture largely halted the natural flooding, but in the 1950s, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission began buying bottomland forests for preservation, which it then flooded with a system of levees and other tools.
This made the forests an ideal winter stop for ducks to eat and rest on their annual migration south. Arkansas is a magnet for duck hunters, and the state has issued more than 100,000 permits for duck hunters from Arkansas and out of state for every year since 2014. But it turned out the commission was flooding the reservoirs too early and at levels too high, which was damaging the trees. The ducks that arrive in Arkansas especially love eating the acorns from a certain species of oak — and those oaks are now dying.
Austin Booth, director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, knew that convincing the state’s duck hunters and businesses that there was a serious problem would be tricky. Part of the solution the commission planned to propose to save the trees involved delaying the annual fall flooding, which could mean less habitat for the ducks, fewer ducks stopping in the area and more duck hunters crowded into smaller spaces fighting over targets.
And all the duck hunters would have their own ideas about who to blame for the problem and what the solution should be.
Last September, Booth gave a brief speech that was streamed live on YouTube, outlining the problem. He announced a series of public meetings to begin in the following months. Booth told me that when he began to plan those meetings, he thought of all the government meetings and town halls he’d attended after years working in politics. “I wanted to ratchet down some of the intensity that happens when a government official stands up on a stage and talks down to people,” he said.
Instead, he decided the meetings would be dinners where the Game and Fish staff would eat alongside the people they sought to convince. “I just believe there’s a human component to sitting down and having a meal with someone,” he said. At those dinners, he’d give a brief introduction, then invite people to ask questions of the staff as they ate and mingled.
At the end of the dinners, Booth said he’d stand up again and ask, “Is there anyone that’s going to walk through that door tonight without their questions answered or comments taken for the record, or with their concerns ignored?” No one, he said, came forward. The four dinners were attended by between 50 and 100 people, according to Booth, but those attendees then spread the word, dampening criticism of the new management system.
What’s interesting about this dinner program is that it began during the COVID-19 pandemic, which also required effective science communication to convince the public to accept changes, major and minor, to their lives. Even before this pandemic, there’s been a long history of resistance to public health measures and new vaccines, and many researchers suspected that could likely be the case with COVID-19 as well. The social scientists who study these issues might have counseled an approach like that employed by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, using local messengers who had relationships with the communities in question and who could communicate in less intimidating ways.
But the U.S. did not do that with COVID-19. Instead, rapidly changing information came from only a few sources, usually at the national level and seemingly without much strategy. And as such, many places have seen widespread resistance to public health interventions, like wearing masks and getting the vaccine.”
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“not every issue manifests locally, with local experts able to gather people for friendly dinners. Regarding climate change, Fisher says in her work now she is finding that people are often spurred to action only when the environmental damage becomes an extreme personal risk to them and their family, and when it is seen as preventable. Part of the problem with mitigating COVID-19, she said, was that many people didn’t see the virus as a personal risk — they thought they themselves would be OK, even if so many other people were dying.”
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“the danger of anti-intellectualism becoming more entwined with partisanship is that these attitudes then become more entrenched and harder to overcome. And that will become true on both sides, as each group believes they have the best sources of information — a phenomenon he called epistemic hubris. It’s damaging public debate.
The problems we’ve seen with COVID-19 are also spreading to new groups of people and to other issues. Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, researches the social science of climate change, and she’s found that people are more likely to seek out sources that confirm what they already believe. “We see that scientific information is very, very clearly cherry-picked,” she said. Increasingly, she sees people looking for information that already supports their worldview, and that’s happening on the right and left. For her, this includes policymakers who have a role to play in solving issues like climate change.
“The medical science priesthood has a long history of treating outside-the-box thinkers harshly. Toward the end of the 18th century, Britain’s Royal Society refused to publish Edward Jenner’s discovery that inoculating people with material from cowpox pustules—a technique he called “vaccination,” from the Latin word for cow, vacca—prevented them from getting the corresponding human disease, smallpox. Jenner’s medical colleagues considered this idea dangerous; one member of the Royal College of Physicians even suggested that the technique could make people resemble cows.
At the time, many physicians were making a good living by performing variolation, which aimed to prevent smallpox by infecting patients with pus from people with mild cases. Some saw vaccination as a threat to their income. Thankfully, members of Parliament liked Jenner’s idea and appropriated money for him to open a vaccination clinic in London. By the early 1800s, American doctors had adopted the technique. In 1805, Napoleon ordered smallpox vaccination for all of his troops.
Half a century later, the prestigious Vienna General Hospital fired Ignaz Semmelweis from its faculty because he required his medical students and junior physicians to wash their hands before examining obstetrical patients. Semmelweis connected puerperal sepsis—a.k.a. “childbed fever,” then a common cause of postnatal death—to unclean hands. Ten years after Semmelweis returned to his native Budapest, he published The Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever. The medical establishment rained so much vitriol on him that it drove him insane. (Or so the story goes: Some think, in retrospect, that Semmelweis suffered from bipolar disorder.) He died in an asylum in 1865 at the age of 47.
The “germ theory” anticipated by Semmelweis did not take hold until the late 1880s. That helps explain why, in 1854, the public health establishment rebuffed the physician John Snow after he traced a London cholera epidemic to a water pump on Broad Street. Snow correctly suspected that water from the pump carried a pathogen that caused cholera.
Public health officials clung instead to the theory that the disease was carried by a miasma, or “bad air.” The British medical journal The Lancet published a brutal critique of Snow’s theory, and the General Board of Health determined that his idea was “scientifically unsound.” But after another outbreak of cholera in 1866, the public health establishment acknowledged the truth of Snow’s explanation. The incident validated the 19th century classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer’s warning that the public health establishment had come to represent entrenched political interests, distorting science and prolonging the cholera problem. “There is an evident inclination on the part of the medical profession to get itself organized after the fashion of the clericy,” he wrote in 1851’s Social Statics. “Surgeons and physicians are vigorously striving to erect a medical establishment akin to our religious one. Little do the public at large know how actively professional publications are agitating for state-appointed overseers of the public health.””
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“It may be true that, as American science fiction and fantasy writer Theodore Sturgeon said, “90 percent of everything is crap.” But the remaining 10 percent can be important. Health care professionals who see only the costs of their patients’ self-guided journeys through the medical literature tend to view this phenomenon as a threat to the scientific order, fueling a backlash. Their reaction risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
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“Openness to unconventional ideas has its limits. We don’t take flat-earthers seriously. Nor should we lend credence to outlandish claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause infertility, implant people with microchips, or change their DNA. There are not enough hours in the day to fully address every question or hypothesis. But a little tolerance and respect for outsiders can go a long way. If those habits become the new norm, people will be more likely to see rejection of challenges to the conventional wisdom as the objective assessment of specialists rather than the defensive reaction of self-interested elites. Science should be a profession, not a priesthood.”
“Each year at America’s egg hatcheries, as many as 300 million male chicks are gruesomely killed — usually by being ground up alive or gassed — since they can’t lay eggs and have been bred to be too small to be worth the effort of raising for meat. Researchers around the world are using transgenic engineering and gene-editing tools in an attempt to solve this chicken and egg dilemma.”
“Any system that is powerful and accurate enough to identify drugs that are safe for humans is inherently a system that will also be good at identifying drugs that are incredibly dangerous for humans.”
“Sound enters our ears, light enters our eyes, chemicals splash up in our nose and mouth, and mechanical forces graze our skin. It’s up to our brains to make sense of what it all means and create a seamless conscious experience of the world.
Illusions teach us that our reality isn’t a direct real-time feed coming from our ears, eyes, skin, and the rest of our bodies. Instead, what we experience is our brain’s best guess.
Sometimes, when the information coming in to our sensory organs is confusing, our brains have to edit parts out. Other times, our brains have to fill in some gaps with outright guesses. Our reality, ultimately, is constructed by our brains, built from our imperfect senses, and informed by our past experiences.”
“Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has faced a backlash since Politico reported earlier this week that he indirectly funds and wields unusually heavy influence over an important White House office tasked with advising President Joe Biden’s administration on technical and scientific issues.
The ethical concerns surrounding this news are glaring: A tech billionaire with an obvious personal interest in shaping government tech policy is giving money to an independent government agency devoted to tech and science, albeit through his private philanthropic foundation.
The real scandal, however, is that a government office needed philanthropic aid to fund its work in the first place, creating an ethical quandary over potential conflicts of interest.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is responsible for advising the president on a vital and wide breadth of public policy — whether it’s “a people’s Bill of Rights for automated technologies” or the gargantuan effort of preparing for future pandemics. It also has a meager $5 million annual budget — which means it has to get creative to do its work.
“The use of staff from other federal agencies and the armed services, universities, and philanthropically funded nonprofits dates back five presidential administrations — but President Biden was the first to elevate the office to Cabinet level,” an OSTP spokesperson said in a statement to Recode.
According to the office, among the 127 people who currently work there, only 25 are OSTP employees. The remaining are a mix of temporary appointees from other federal agencies, as well as people from universities, science organizations, or fellowships that may be funded by philanthropy.”
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“Both OSTP and Schmidt Futures maintain that their connection has been misconstrued as nefarious; they say this sort of partnership is par for the course.
In a statement, Schmidt Futures highlighted how the OSTP has been “chronically underfunded,” and said that it was proud to be among the “leading organizations” providing funding to OSTP. In other words, Schmidt Futures makes clear that it isn’t the only private organization to charitably provide much-needed monetary support to government agencies.”
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““Outsiders are not subject to government ethics rules or the government’s transparency requirements,” Shaub continued. “They may put their own interests before the American people, and we have no way of knowing how that changes outcomes.”
It’s one thing for the public and private sectors to coordinate on and contribute to a project — it’s another when a government office accepts money from philanthropy that creates potential ethical conflicts. That signals a systematic underfunding of the public sector that all but guarantees some dependence on private interests, and accepting such money creates a problematic trade-off.
Speculating on the true motive behind Schmidt’s involvement in OSTP is almost beside the point. It seems inevitable that the money quietly flowing from him and his foundation to the office would apply pressure that favors Schmidt’s personal and business interests.”
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“Government is expected to be fairly transparent and accountable to the public, while the philanthropy world is often opaque and subject to the whims of private, ultra-wealthy individuals”
“Way back in May 2020, three researchers at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) published an op-ed in Nature arguing that with respect to developing universal coronavirus vaccines “the time to start is now.” As it turns out, the time to start for the NIAID was 15 months later when the agency got around to awarding three academic institutions a little over $36 million to research pan-coronavirus vaccines in September 2021.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed could serve as a much better model for incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to greatly speed up the development and deployment of the candidate pan-coronavirus vaccines on which some are currently working. In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, two immunologists point out that the global cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is an estimated $16 trillion, compared to the cost of developing a typical vaccine at $1 billion. They note that even a $10 billion vaccine is minuscule compared with the pandemic’s toll.
Among the promising pan-coronavirus candidate vaccines are the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research’s spike ferritin nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine; Osivax’s nucleocapsid vaccine targeting a protein widely prevalent among coronaviruses that is unlikely to mutate; and Inovio’s DNA vaccine encoding variant sequences of the spike proteins the virus uses to invade cells.”
“In two February preprint papers, first reported by the New York Times, researchers traced the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the pathogen that causes Covid-19, in 2019 in Wuhan. One study looked at initial infections at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where the first cases were detected. The other examined the genomes of the earliest strains of the virus. Around the same time, researchers from the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published their own findings from virus samples they collected from animals and the environment around the market in early 2020.
In addition to seafood, vendors at the market sold live animals, including those collected from remote wilderness areas.
Together, the studies connect the dots of transmission at the epicenter of the pandemic, observing that the virus likely made the leap from animals to humans more than once. “Once you understand that there were infected animals in the market, then multiple spillovers are not just a possibility, they’re what you would expect at that point,” Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University and a co-author on both papers, told Vox.
The studies’ conclusions contradict some early reports that the Huanan market was not the original locus of Covid-19. The results also echo how scientists think the first SARS virus spread to humans in 2002. According to Garry, they make the possibility that the outbreak began with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology much less plausible.”
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“while researchers have narrowed down the location in the market where the outbreak likely began and have identified several potential animal hosts, they still haven’t found the specific animals that were infected. And though scientists have found several related viruses in the wild, they haven’t found one yet that they think could have directly spawned SARS-CoV-2.”
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“it may not be possible to find out since the specific infected animals were likely culled. “You’d have to be a time traveler or something like that to go back and see,” Garry said.”
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“The lab leak hypothesis holds that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a facility roughly eight miles from the Huanan market. Proponents of the theory point to several factors. Researchers there were known to be studying bat coronaviruses. Specifically, they documented a bat coronavirus called RaTG13. Discovered in 2013, it has a genetic sequence with 96 percent overlap with SARS-CoV-2.
Scientists at the Wuhan Institute were also conducting experiments under lower safety conditions than most scientists would recommend for respiratory viruses. Some researchers argue that the types of experiments they were conducting constitute gain of function, where a virus is engineered to become more infectious.
Circumstantially, pathogens have escaped from Chinese laboratories before. And the Chinese government’s actions have added to the suspicions. They may have covered up the extent of the original outbreak, and international investigators have complained that the Chinese government still has not been fully transparent with what happened during the early days of the outbreak.
However, there appears to be no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology had an actual isolated sample of SARS-CoV-2, nor did they have any live ancestor to the virus, including RaTG13. They only recorded the genetic sequence.
The latest studies show also that the earliest clusters of the virus were concentrated in a specific area of the Huanan market. If the virus were introduced by a person from outside the market, environmental samples testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 would likely have been spread out more through the building.
In addition, the fact that two distinct lineages emerged in the early outbreak would require that someone from the lab would have had to introduce two different versions of the virus to the lab on two separate occasions.
“The simplest explanation is that infected animals infected people,” Garry said. “You have to go through quite a bit of mental gymnastics to go ‘it came from the lab to the market,’ and you have to believe that happened twice.””
“Laboratory studies indicate that masks, especially N95 respirators, can help reduce virus transmission. But as Flam notes, “the benefits of universal masking have been difficult to quantify” in the real world, where cloth models predominate and masks may not be clean, well-fitted, or worn properly.
The strongest real-world evidence in favor of general masking comes from a randomized trial in Bangladesh, which found that the use of surgical masks reduced symptomatic infections by 11 percent. That’s not nothing, but it’s a pretty modest effect, and it was achieved with surgical masks worn by adults in conditions that encouraged proper and consistent use. The same study found that cloth masks did not have a statistically significant effect.”
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“Given the situation during the omicron surge, there are additional reasons to doubt that mask mandates, even with perfect compliance, had much of an impact. While mandates required shoppers to don masks before entering supermarkets, for example, the risk of transmission in such settings is low, given the amount of time customers usually spend in them, the size of the air space, and typically wide distances between patrons. Conditions in bars and restaurants are more conducive to virus transmission, since customers spend more time there in closer proximity to each other, often while talking. But since people were allowed to remove their masks while eating and drinking, requiring them to cover their faces upon entry was more a symbolic gesture than a serious safeguard.
Beyond the question of how effective masking is in practice, there is the question of what impact mask mandates have on behavior. Even if masking works, that does not necessarily mean mandates do.
An Annals of Epidemiology study published last May found that mask mandates in the United States were associated with lower transmission rates from June through September 2020. “The probability of becoming a rapid riser county was 43% lower among counties that had statewide mask mandates at reopening,” the researchers reported. But the study did not take into account other policies or voluntary safeguards that may have differed between jurisdictions with and without mask mandates. Nor did it look at actual mask wearing, as opposed to legal requirements.
Based on data from various countries and U.S. states from May to September 2020, a preprint study published last June found that general mask wearing was associated with a reduction in virus transmission. But the researchers found no clear relationship between mask mandates and mask use. “We do not find evidence that mandating mask-wearing reduces transmission,” the authors reported. “Our results suggest that mask-wearing is strongly affected by factors other than mandates.”
An August 2021 systematic review of 21 observational studies found that all of them “reported SARS-CoV-2 benefits” from mask mandates “in terms of reductions in either the incidence, hospitalization, or mortality, or a combination of these outcomes.” But “few studies assessed compliance to mask wearing policies or controlled for the possible influence of other preventive measures such as hand hygiene and physical distancing.”
Like the debate about lockdowns, the debate about mask mandates will continue. Because there are so many variables to account for, it is very difficult to isolate the impact of any given policy. But it seems clear that anyone who takes it for granted that mask mandates have played a crucial role in controlling the spread of COVID-19 is making a series of assumptions that are not justified by the evidence.”