In a conversation with science journalist Nandita Jayaraj, physicist and Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita touched on the dismal anti-parallels between the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) and the Japanese Kamioka and Super-Kamiokande observatories. The INO’s story should be familiar to readers of this blog: a team of physicists led by those from IMSc Chennai and TIFR Mumbai conceived of the INO, identified places around India where it could be built, finalised a spot in Theni (in Tamil Nadu), and received Rs 1,350 crore from the Union government for it, only for the project to not progress a significant distance past this point.
Nandita’s article, published in The Hindu on July 14, touches on two reasons the project was stalled: “adverse environmental impacts” and “the fear of radioactivity”. These were certainly important reasons but they’re also symptoms of two deeper causes: distrust of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and some naïvety on the scientists’ part. The article mentions the “adverse environmental impacts” only once while “the fear of radioactivity” receives a longer rebuttal — which is understandable because the former has a longer history and there’s a word limit. It bears repeating, however.
Even before work on the INO neared its beginning, people on the ground in the area were tense over the newly erected PUSHEP hydroelectric project. Environmental activists were on edge because the project was happening under the aegis of the DAE, a department notorious for its opacity and heavy-handed response to opposition. The INO collaboration compounded the distrust when hearings over a writ petition Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief Vaiko filed in the Madras high court revealed the final ecological assessment report of the project had been prepared by the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON), which as the law required at the time hadn’t been accredited by the Quality Council of India and was thus unfit to draft the report. Members of the INO collaboration said this shouldn’t matter because they had submitted the report themselves together with a ‘detailed project report’ prepared by TANGEDCO and a geotechnical report by the Geological Survey of India. Perhaps the scientists thought SACON was good enough, and it may well have been, but it’s not clear how submitting the report themselves should have warranted a break from the law. Given all the other roadblocks in the project’s way, this trip-up in hindsight seems to have been a major turning point.
Locals in the area around the hill, under which the INO was to be built, were also nervous about losing access to part of their grazing land and to a temple situated nearby. There was a report in 2015 that police personnel had blocked people from celebrating a festival at this temple. In an April 2015 interview with Frontline, when told that local police were also keeping herders from accessing pastureland in the foothills, INO spokesperson Naba Mondal said: “The only land belonging to INO is the 26.825 ha. INO has no interest in and no desire to block the grazing lands outside this area. In fact, these issues were discussed in great detail in a public meeting held in July 2010, clearly telling the local people this. This is recorded in our FAQ. This was also conveyed to them in Tamil.” In response to a subsequent question about “propaganda” that the project site would store nuclear waste from Tamil Nadu’s two nuclear power facilities, Mondal said: “The DAE has already issued a press statement in this regard. I do genuinely believe that this has allayed people’s concerns.”
Even at the time these replies hinted at a naïve belief that these measures would suffice to allay fears in the area about the project. There is a difference between scientists providing assurances that the police will behave and the police actually behaving, especially if the experience of the locals diverges from what members of the INO collaboration believe is the case. Members of the collaboration had promised the locals they wouldn’t lose access to grazing land; four years later, the locals still had trouble taking their word. According to an investigation I published at The Wire in 2016, there was also to be a road that bypassed the local villages and led straight to the project site, sparing villagers the noise from the trucks ferrying construction material. It was never built.
One narrative arising from within the scientific community as the project neared the start of construction was that the INO is good for the country, that it will improve our scientific literacy, keep bright minds from leaving to work on similar projects abroad, and help Indians win prestigious prizes. For the national scientific enterprise itself, the INO would make India a site of experimental physics of global importance and Indian scientists working on it major contributors to the study of neutrino physics. I wrote an article to this effect in The Hindu in 2016 and this is also what Takaaki Kajita said in Nandita’s article. But later that year, I also asked an environmental activist (and a mentor of sorts) what he was thinking. He said the scientists will eventually get what they want but that they, the activists et al., still had to do the responsible thing and protest what they perceived to be missteps. (Most scientists in India don’t get what they want but many do, most recently like the ‘Challakere Science City’.)
Curiously, both these narratives — the activist’s pessimism and the scientists’ naïvety — could have emerged from a common belief: that the INO was preordained, that its construction was fated to be successful, causing one faction to be fastidious and the other to become complacent. Of course it’s too simplistic to be able to explain everything that went wrong, yet it’s also of a piece with the fact that the INO was doomed as much by circumstance as by historical baggage. That work on the INO was stalled by an opposition campaign that included fear-mongering pseudoscience and misinformation is disagreeable. But we also need to ask whether some actors resorted to these courses of action because others had been denied them, in the past if not in the immediate present — or potentially risk the prospects of a different science experiment in future.
Physics is often far removed from the precepts of behavioural science and social justice but public healthcare is closer. There is an important parallel between the scientists’ attempts to garner public support for the project and ASHA workers’ efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic to vaccinate people in remote rural areas. These latter people were distrustful of the public healthcare system: it had neglected them for several years but then it was suddenly on their doorstep, expecting them to take a supposedly miraculous drug that would cut their chances of dying of the viral disease. ASHA workers changed these people’s minds by visiting them again and again, going door to door, and enrolling members of the same community to convince people they were safe. Their efficacy is higher if they are from the same community themselves because they can strike up conversations with people that draw on shared experiences. Compare this with the INO collaboration’s belief that a press release from the DAE had changed people’s minds about the project.
Today the INO stares at a bleak future rendered more uncertain by a near-complete lack of political support.
This post benefited from Thomas Manuel’s feedback.
COVID-19 pandemic
artificial intelligence Bharatiya Janata Party blogging CERN Chandrayaan 2 climate change Covaxin COVID-19 COVID-19 pandemic Donald Trump Elon Musk Facebook fantasy fiction Gaganyaan Higgs boson India-based Neutrino Observatory Indian Council of Medical Research Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO journalism K Sivan Large Hadron Collider NASA nationalism Nobel Prizes novel coronavirus Open Access particle physics peer review Prime Minister Narendra Modi pseudoscience Quantum mechanics Science science communication science fiction science journalism science writing scientific publishing scientific research scientism social media SpaceX The Hindu The Wire Twitter
-
India-based neutrino oblivion
-
Hot in Ballia
More than half of the deaths reported during the heatwave in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar this week were reported from just one district in the former, called Ballia. On (or around) June 17, the medical superintendent of the Ballia district hospital was transferred away after he attributed the deaths (until then) to the heat. He was replaced with someone else.
The state government also dispatched a team of two experts to the district to assess the local situation (as they say). One of them was director of the Uttar Pradesh health department for communicable diseases, A.K. Singh. In one of his first interactions with the press, Singh indicated that they weren’t inclined to believe the Ballia deaths were due to the heat and that the team was also considering alternative explanations, like the local water source being contaminated. I think something fishy could be going on here.
First, Hindustan Times reported Singh saying “the deaths at the hospital were primarily due to comorbidity and old age and not heatstroke”, erratic power in the area, and the time taken to reach the hospital — in effect, everything except the heat. Yet all these factors only worsen a condition; they don’t cause it. What was the condition?
Second, a reporter from The Hindu who visited Ballia learnt that it will take “more than seven days” to issue the medical certificates of the cause of death (MCCDs), so the official cause of death — i.e. what the state records the cause of each death in this period and circumstance to be — won’t be clear until then.
Aside: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian Council of Medical Research issued guidelines that asked healthcare workers to not list comorbidities as the underlying cause of death for people who die with COVID-19. This didn’t stop workers from doing just this in many parts of the country. I’m not sure but I don’t think similar guidelines exist for when the underlying cause could be heat. The guidelines also specified the ICD-10 codes to be used for COVID-19; such codes already exist for heat-related deaths.
Third: Do the district authorities, and by extension the Uttar Pradesh state government, have complete knowledge of the situation in Ballia? There was the unfortunate superintendent who said there was a link between the heat and the deaths. Anonymous paramedic staff at the Ballia hospital also told The Hindu that “some of the deaths were heat-related”. Yet the new superintendent says the matter is “under investigation” even as one member of the expert team says it’s yet to find “any convincing evidence to link the deaths with heatstroke”.
I really don’t know what to make of this except that there’s a non-zero chance that a cover-up is taking shape. This is supported by the fourth issue: According to The Hindu, “the [Uttar Pradesh] State Health Department has asked the Chief Medical Officers of districts and the Chief Medical Superintendents of district hospitals to issue statements in coordination with the concerned District Magistrate only during ‘crucial situations’” — a move reminiscent of the National Disaster Management Authority’s response to the Joshimath disaster.
For now, this is as far as the facts (as I know them) will take us. I think we’ll be able to take a big stride when the hospital issues the MCCDs.
-
Real heat
In the aftermath of Chicago’s infamous week-long heatwave in July 1995, the city’s residents, but including the mayor Richard Daley and his administration, couldn’t believe that so many had perished in the severe weather. They asked if the toll was “really real”. The official figure was just under 500 and an unofficial figure put together by epidemiologists – in much the same way their counterparts in India estimated the expected national toll due to the COVID-19 pandemic – was in excess of 1,200. Both were surprising, so much so that Daley said not all the deaths could’ve been due to heat because if that were true, “everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat”.
It was an absurd claim, embellished further by a report prepared by a commission that his office had appointed, which resorted to victim-blaming for the deaths. But the heatwave and the city’s response to it together cemented three facts: heatwaves are silent disasters; like all silent disasters, their severity is amplified by silent social inequities; and the place of “really real” in climate history.
Earlier this week, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) released a prediction that the global average near-surface temperature in each of the next five years will be 1.1-1.8º C higher than the average in 1850-1900 and that at least one of these years will be the hottest on record (I prefer my father’s description of this year in Tamil: “padu kevalam“). To be sure, that’s the hottest.
Just eight years ago, most of the world’s countries entered into contentious negotiations to determine what they should be expected to do in response to the climate crisis. After a week of of talks that often ended way past the deadline, they drafted the historic (at the time) Paris Agreement, which famously asked that its participants act to limit global average surface temperature rise to below 1.5º C over the pre-industrial average. We’ve since learnt that it was an ask too far, considering how slothfully multilateral climate action negotiations have progressed. But now, in light of the WMO’s forecast, it seems to have been too ambitious for another reason as well: the world was really set to breach the 1.5º C threshold in just the second decade of the century. Even the 2º C mark that the agreement requests action on isn’t safe and may well come to pass in the subsequent decade.
The heat today is already really real. I think, in a visceral way that news and reports haven’t managed so far, the WMO’s forecast renders the insufficiency of our commitments really real as well.
-
The omicron variant and scicomm
Somewhere between the middle of India’s second major COVID-19 outbreak in March-May this year and today, a lot of us appear to have lost sight of a fact that was central to our understanding of COVID-19 outbreaks in 2020: that the only way a disease outbreak, especially of the novel coronavirus, can be truly devastating is if the virus collaborated with poor public health infrastructure and subpar state response. (Similarly, even a variant deemed mild in, say, the UK could lead to disaster in Chennai.) The virus alone doesn’t lead to catastrophic outcomes.
Just as India’s second outbreak was picking up speed, there was a considerable awareness that the delta variant was wreaking as much havoc as we were letting it. In fact, the Indian government was more than letting it. But since the outbreak began to subside in kurtotic fashion and, much later, as the omicron variant appeared on the scene, the focus on the latter has appeared to overwhelm – at least in public discourse – the extent to which we’re prepared (or not) to face it. Put another way, the focus on the omicron variant and the contexts in which it has been discussed have remained far too scientific. I’m not saying that it should become less scientific but that the social should start finding mention more.
I realise that everyone is weary of the pandemic and would like if it ended already, and together with the fact that most people in India’s cities have received their two doses of some COVID-19 vaccine, it might seem to everyone that there’s sufficient ground to persist with the idea that the omicron variant couldn’t possibly be devastating, and that we can all return to some kind of normal soon. Now, this is one kind of fatigue. There appears to be a second kind also, based on the fact that the delta variant was the first “major” variant, in a manner of speaking, and the way we talked about it and acted in its potential (and menacing) presence co-evolved with its dispersal through the population.
The omicron variant, on the other hand, affords both scientists and science communicators the option to simply refer to the narratives and discourses we developed with the delta variant, simply updated to match what we’re finding out about omicron. And this, not surprisingly, has led to a bit of laziness as well. The form I find most lazy, and most annoying, is some scientists’ insistence on pointing to graphs of the number of cases over time in different countries and saying, “If this doesn’t shake us out of our slumber, what will?”
This is scientism, pure and simple, even if it’s not on the nose: pointing to case trends alone isn’t going to solve anything, especially not in the face of the sort of significant, demographic-wide yearning for a ‘new normal’, or in fact any kind of normal, instead of more and more upheavals. In fact, consider the fact that for most of 2020, most poor people in India believed that if the novel coronavirus had an infection fatality rate of just 1%, it was no big whoop, and that they would continue going to work and eke out a living. Let’s be clear, this is perfectly reasonable. The idea of letting the virus take its course through the population went sideways in Sweden, but in India, if something has a 1% chance of getting you really sick – or even killing you – it’s tragically the case that it quickly falls down a long list of threats, most of which are often much more lethal, beginning, in too many parts of the country, with breathing the air around you or drinking the water that’s available to you.
To repeat in this context exhortations based solely on graphs printed in English and shared on Twitter that rapidly rising case-loads elsewhere on the planet should suffice to nudge us out of the Indian subcontinent’s collective torpor is a deference to facts that, I’m very tempted to say, understand only 1% of what is going on. Even if these exhortations are directed at state leaders and government officials, they are really misdirected: as I have written before in the context of Anthony Fauci’s senseless interview responses, if the government hasn’t done something that’s obvious to everyone, the reason just can’t be that it hasn’t seen the chart or the numbers you’ve seen to reach your conclusions. The only way such statements could make some sense is if they are intended to galvanise public opinion, but even then, I’m not convinced.
And seeing these scientists do what they do strikes me that just as much as we’d like to encourage scientists to communicate science as often as is possible, there may be virtue in casting science communication as much in terms of what it does as what it doesn’t. For example, as the number of cases due to the omicron variant of the novel coronavirus is increasing in different parts of the world, socially responsible science communication requires us to not stop at pointing at graphs but to continue to reflect on and articulate how much – or how little – the greater transmissibility of the variant means in and of itself. And in my view, not doing this would just be socially anti-responsible communication: sticking to the science, and accomplishing little overall.
-
Panicking about omicron
The new omicron variant of the novel coronavirus has got everyone alarmed – which is darkly ironic. This variant has reportedly racked up more mutations than previous variants of concern, including the delta, with virologists and epidemiologists from South Africa and the UK paying particular attention to real-world data that suggests it could be more transmissible and cause breakthrough infections and that some of the mutations in its RNA correspond to changes on the spike protein that could (speculatively) render the existing crop of WHO-approved COVID-19 vaccines less efficacious.
Uncertainty about what a new strain of the virus can do, or even uncertainty more broadly, has always been sufficient reason for panic. Nonetheless, the rise of the omicron variant is significant and the response to it more instructive because of its predecessor.
The delta variant set a new benchmark for how quickly the novel coronavirus could spread, but its effectiveness also prompted some wonderment if the virus may be approaching ‘peak mutation’ – that is, if the delta might represent one of the most transmissible forms of the virus and if future outbreaks happening in a partly vaccinated world may not be so deadly.
The omicron is thus significant because it dispels this line of thinking, while demonstrating that as bad as the delta was for global society, things can get worse if we let them. Clearly we have. And the world’s panic is ironic because of the particular ways in which we have.
As far as COVID-19 vaccination coverage is concerned, there are two distinct groups of people: those who have been fully vaccinated and those who have been partly vaccinated or haven’t been vaccinated at all. The corresponding split in India is qualitatively similar to the one worldwide, particularly in that it has come to be aligned almost perfectly with the class divide. This is the first point.
Second, most – if not all – of the current WHO-approved vaccines haven’t been tested for their ability to directly prevent or reduce the transmission of the novel coronavirus (such as by reducing the amount of viral shedding). So there’s a not insubstantial possibility that even fully vaccinated individuals could get and transmit the virus, while enjoying the vaccine-granted privilege of not falling ill.
Third, we don’t know if the omicron variant can cause more severe disease, so let’s say that – at least to those of us who aren’t experts – right now the chance of it not being able to cause more severe disease is a reasonable 50%.
Taken together, the three points suggest that panic is understandable only among those who haven’t received one or both doses of their (two-dose) COVID-19 vaccines, and whose populations may have been ‘incubating’ the same or different variants by allowing them to persist for longer in their bodies, and replicate, in the absence of the vaccines (depending on each vaccine’s time-to-recovery). For these people, the chance of the omicron variant being able to last for longer in the body and cause more severe disease is already higher.
This is a crucial difference between the vaccinated and those who have been kept from getting vaccinated – a difference fostered by countries that hoarded vaccines, blocked attempts to ease patent protections and transfer technology and money – the same countries that are now blocking travel from parts of the world where their selfishness encouraged the rise of new variants.
On the other hand, panic verges on the offensive for fully vaccinated individuals – who are also likelier than not both in India and around the world to be able to access and afford good healthcare and antiviral drugs – to freak out about a viral variant that is currently only known to be able to be transmitted more effectively than the delta.
This shouldn’t bother us very much because most of us seemed to have stopped thinking about transmission even though the vaccines weren’t tested for preventing that, and went easier on masking up and washing hands just because we’d received our two doses, even as the delta variant continued to spread through the population. (Infections stopped surging but that’s not the way only way a virus can continue to circulate.)
It’s disingenuous to suggest now that the situation on the ground with omicron in play is somehow different (with the 50% disclaimer) even as we’re responding by blocking travel and trade instead of by increasing access to vaccines.
In fact, apart from whether any instance of panic could be pseudoscientific or offensive, there’s the question of whether it’s warranted. Among the fully vaccinated, it’s simply not. The rise of the omicron variant in a world of vaccine apartheid should in fact be a grim reminder that, again, we can’t afford to let things get worse, because they will. More people will fall ill, more people will die, more healthcare systems will collapse, more people ill with other diseases will be at greater risk of death or disability, and so forth.
If you’re fully vaccinated, mask up; if not, please go get vaccinated and still mask up. But if you can’t because vaccines are being withheld to your country – you may have reasonable cause for panic.
-
On the lab-leak hypothesis
One problem with the debate over the novel coronavirus’s “lab leak” origin hypothesis is a problem I’m starting to see in quite a few other areas of pandemic-related analysis and discussion. It’s that no one will say why others are wrong, even as they insist others are, and go on about why they are right.
Shortly after I read Nicholas Wade’s 10,000-word article on Medium, I pitched a summary to a medical researcher, whose first, and for a long time only, response was one word: “rubbish”. Much later, he told me about how the virus could have evolved and spread naturally. Even if I couldn’t be sure if he was right, having no way to verify the information except to bounce it off a bunch of other experts, I was sure he thought he was right. But how was Wade wrong? I suspect for many people the communication failures surrounding this (or a similar) question may be a sticking point.
(‘Wade’, after the first mention, is shorthand for an author of a detailed, non-trivial article that considers the lab-leak hypothesis, irrespective of what conclusion it reaches. I’m cursorily aware of Wade’s support for ‘scientific racism’, and by using his name, I don’t condone any of his views on these and other matters. Other articles to read on the lab-leak topic include Nicholson Baker’s in Intelligencer and Katherine Eban’s in Vanity Fair.)
We don’t know how the novel coronavirus originated, nor are we able to find out easily. There are apparently two possibilities: zoonotic spillover and lab-leak (both hypotheses even though the qualification has been more prominently attached to the latter).
Quoting two researchers writing in The Conversation:
In March 2020, another article published in Nature Medicine provided a series of scientific arguments in favour of a natural origin. The authors argued: The natural hypothesis is plausible, as it is the usual mechanism of emergence of coronaviruses; the sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is too distantly related from other known coronaviruses to envisage the manufacture of a new virus from available sequences; and its sequence does not show evidence of genetic manipulation in the laboratory.
Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis (minus the outright-conspiratorial) – rather more broadly the opponents of the ‘zoonotic-spillover’-evangelism – have argued that lab leaks are more common than we think, the novel coronavirus has some features that suggest the presence of a human hand, and a glut of extra-scientific events that point towards suspicious research and communication by members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
However, too many counterarguments to Wade’s and others’ articles along similar lines have been to brush the allegations aside, as if they were so easily dismissed – like my interlocutor’s “rubbish”. And it’s an infuriating response. To me at least (as someone who’s been at the receiving end of many such replies), it smacks of an attitude that seems to say (a) “you’re foolish to take this stuff seriously,” (b) “you’re being a bad journalist,” (c) “I doubt you’ll understand the answer,” and (d) “I think you should just trust me”.
I try not to generalise (c) and (d) to maintain my editorial equipoise, so to speak – but it’s been hard. There’s too much of too many scientists going around insisting we should simply listen to them, while making no efforts to ensure non-experts can understand what they’re saying, much less admitting the possibility that they’re kidding themselves (although I do think “science is self-correcting” is a false adage). In fact, proponents of the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis and others like to claim that their idea is more likely, but this is often a crude display of scientism: “it’s more scientific, therefore it must be true”. The arguments in favour of this hypothesis are also being increasingly underrepresented outside the scientific literature, which isn’t a trivial consideration because the disparity could exacerbate the patronising tone of (c) and (d), and render scientists less trustworthy.
Science communication and/or journalism are conspicuous by absence here, but I also think the problem with the scientists’ attitude is broader than that. Short of engaging directly in the activities of groups like DRASTIC, journalists take a hit when scientists behave like pedagogic communication is a waste of time. More scientists should make more of an effort to articulate themselves better. It isn’t wise to dismiss something that so many take seriously – although this is also a slippery slope: apply it as a general rule, and soon you may find yourself having to debunk in great detail a dozen ridiculous claims a day. Perhaps we can make an exception for the zoonotic-spillover v. lab-leak hypotheses contest? Or is there a better heuristic? I certainly think there should be one instead of having none at all.
Proving the absence is harder than proving the presence of something, and that’s why everyone might be talking about why they’re right. However, in the process, many of these people seem to forget that what they haven’t denied is still firmly in the realm of the possible. Actually, they don’t just forget it but entirely shut down the idea. This is why I agree with Dr Vinay Prasad’s words in MedPage Today:
If it escaped due to a wet market, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL laboratories because a future virus could come from either. And, if it was a lab leak, I would strongly suggest we clean up wet markets and improve safety in BSL 3 and 4 … you get the idea. Both vulnerabilities must be fixed, no matter which was the culprit in this case, because either could be the culprit next time.
His words provide an important counterweight of sorts to a tendency from the zoonotic-spillover quarter to treat articles about the lab-leak possibility as a monolithic allegation instead of as a collection of independent allegations that aren’t equally unlikely. For example, the Vanity Fair, Newsweek and Wade’s articles have all also called into question safety levels at BSL 3 and 4 labs, whether their pathogen-handling protocols sufficiently justify the sort of research we think is okay to conduct, and allegations that various parties have sought to suppress information about the activities at such facilities housed in the Wuhan Institute.
I don’t buy the lab-leak hypothesis and I don’t buy the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis; in fact, I don’t personally care for the answer because I have other things to worry about, but I do buy that the “scientific illiberalism” that Dr Prasad talks about is real. And it’s tied to other issues doing the rounds now as well. For example, Newsweek‘s profile of DRASTIC’s work has been a hit in India thanks to the work of ‘The Seeker’, the pseudonym for a person in their 20s living in “Eastern India”, who uncovered some key documents that cast suspicion on Wuhan Institute’s Shi Zhengli’s claims vis-à-vis SARS-CoV-2. And two common responses to the profile (on Twitter) have been:
- “In 2020, when people told me about the lab-leak hypothesis, I dismissed them and argued that they shouldn’t take WhatsApp forwards seriously.”
- “Journalism is redundant.”
(1) is said as if it’s no longer true – but it is. The difference between the WhatsApp forwards of February-April 2020 and the articles and papers of 2021 is the body of evidence each set of claims was based on. Luc Montagnier was wrong when he spoke against the zoonotic-spillover hypothesis last year simply because his reasoning was wrong. The reasons and the evidence matter; otherwise, you’re no better than a broken clock. Facile WhatsApp forwards and right-wingers’ ramblings continue to deserve to be treated with extreme scepticism.
Just because a conspiracy theory is later proven to have merit doesn’t make it not a conspiracy theory; their defining trait is belief in the absence of evidence. The most useful response, here, is not to get sucked into the right-wing fever swamps, but to isolate legitimate questions, and try and report out the answers.
Columbia Journalism Review, April 15, 2020The second point is obviously harder to fight back, considering it doesn’t stake a new position as much as reinforces one that certain groups of people have harboured for many years now. It’s one star aligning out of many, so its falling out of place won’t change believers’ minds, and because the believers’ minds will be unchanged, it will promptly fall back in place. This said, apart from the numerous other considerations, I’ll say investigations aren’t the preserve of journalists, and one story that was investigated to a greater extent by non-journalists – especially towards a conclusion that you probably wish to be true – has little necessarily to do with journalism.
In addition, the picture is complicated by the fact that when people find that they’re wrong, they almost never admit it – especially if other valuable things, like their academic or political careers, are tied up with their reputation. On occasion, some turn to increasingly more technical arguments, or close ranks and advertise a false ‘scientific consensus’ (insofar as such consensus can exist as the result of any exercise less laborious than the one vis-à-vis anthropogenic global warming), or both. ‘Isolating the legitimate questions’ here apart – from both sides, mind you – needs painstaking work that only journalists can and will do.
Featured image credit: Ethan Medrano/Pexels.
-
Broken clocks during the pandemic
Proponents of conspiracy theories during the pandemic, at least in India, appear to be like broken clocks: they are right by coincidence, without the right body of evidence to back their claims. Two of the most read articles published by The Wire Science in the last 15 months have been the fact-checks of Luc Montagnier’s comments on the two occasions he spoke up in the French press. On the first, he said the novel coronavirus couldn’t have evolved naturally; the second, he insisted mass vaccination was a big mistake. The context in which Montagnier published his remarks evolved considerably between the two events, and it tells an important story.
When Montagnier said in April 2020 that the virus was lab-made, the virus’s spread was just beginning to accelerate in India, Europe and the US, and the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis to explain the virus’s origins had few listeners and were consigned firmly to the margins of popular discourse on the subject. In this environment, Montagnier’s comments stuck out like a sore thumb, and were easily dismissed.
But when Montagnier said in May 2021 that mass vaccination is a mistake, the context was quite different: in the intervening period, Nicholas Wade had published his article on why we couldn’t dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis so quickly; the WHO’s missteps were more widely known; China’s COVID-19 outbreak had come completely under control (actually or for all appearances); many vaccine-manufacturers’ immoral and/or unethical business practices had come to light; more people were familiar with the concept and properties of viral strains; the WHO had filed its controversial report on the possible circumstances of the virus’s origins in China; etc. As a result, speaking now, Montagnier wasn’t so quickly dismissed. Instead, he was, to many observers, the man who had got it right the first time, was brave enough to stick his neck out in support of an unpopular idea, and was speaking up yet again.
The problem here is that Luc Montagnier is a broken clock – in the way even broken clocks are right twice a day: not because they actually tell the time but because the time is coincidentally what the clock face is stuck at. On both occasions, the conclusions of Montagnier’s comments coincided with what conspiracists have been going on about since the pandemic’s start, but on both occasions, his reasoning was wrong. The same has been true of many other claims made during the pandemic. People have said things that have turned out to be true but they themselves have always been wrong, whenever they have been wrong, because their particular reasons for something to be true were wrong.
That is, unless you can say why you’re right, you’re not right. Unless you can explain why the time is what it is, you’re not a clock!
Montagnier’s case also illuminates a problem with soothsaying: if you wish to be a prophet, it is in your best interests to make as many predictions as possible – to increase the odds of reality coinciding with at least one prediction in time. And when such a coincidence does happen, it doesn’t mean the prophet was right; it means they weren’t wrong. There is a big difference between these positions, and which becomes pronounced when the conspiratorially-minded start incorporating every article published anywhere, from The Wire Science to The Daily Guardian, into their narratives of choice.
As the lab-leak hypothesis moved from the fringes of society to the centre and came mistakenly to conflate possibility with likelihood (i.e. zoonotic spillover and lab-leak are two valid hypotheses for the virus’s origins but they aren’t equally likely to be true), the conspiratorial proponents of the lab-leak hypotheses (the ones given to claiming Chinese scientists engineered the pathogen as a weapon, etc.) have steadily woven imaginary threads between the hypothesis and Indian scientists who opposed Covaxin’s approval, the Congress leaders who “mooted” vaccine hesitancy in their constituencies, scientists who made predictions that came to be wrong, even vaccines that were later found to have rare side-effects restricted to certain demographic groups.
The passage of time is notable here. I think adherents of lab-leak conspiracies are motivated by an overarching theory born entirely of speculation, not evidence, and who then pick and choose from events to build the case that the theory is true. I say ‘overarching’ because, to the adherents, the theory is already fully formed and true, and that pieces of it become visible to observers as and when the corresponding events play out. This could explain why time is immaterial to them. You and I know that Shahid Jameel and Gagandeep Kang cast doubt on Covaxin’s approval (and not Covaxin itself) after the time we were aware that Covaxin’s phase 3 clinical trials were only just getting started in December, and before Covishield’s side-effects in Europe and the US came to light (with the attendant misreporting). We know that at the time Luc Montagnier said the novel coronavirus was made in a lab, last year, we didn’t know nearly enough about the structural biology underlying the virus’s behaviour; we do now.
The order of events matters: we went from ignorance to knowledge, from knowing to knowing more, from thinking one thing to – in the face of new information – thinking another. But the conspiracy-theorists and their ideas lie outside of time: the order of events doesn’t matter; instead, to these people, 2021, 2022, 2023, etc. are preordained. They seem to be simply waiting for the coincidences to roll around.
An awareness of the time dimension (so to speak), or more accurately of the arrow of time, leads straightforwardly to the proper practice of science in our day-to-day affairs as well. As I said, unless you can say why you’re right, you’re not right. This is why effects lie in the future of causes, and why theories lie in the causal future of evidence. What we can say to be true at this moment depends entirely on what we know at this moment. If we presume what we can say at this moment to be true will always be true, we become guilty of dragging our theory into the causal history of the evidence – simply because we are saying that the theory will come true given enough time in which evidence can accrue.
This protocol (of sorts) to verify the truth of claims isn’t restricted to the philosophy of science, even if it finds powerful articulation there: a scientific theory isn’t true if it isn’t falsifiable outside its domain of application. It is equally legitimate and necessary in the daily practice of science and its methods, on Twitter and Facebook, in WhatsApp groups, every time your father, your cousin or your grand-uncle begins a question with “If the lab-leak hypothesis isn’t true…”.
-
The problems with one-shot Covishield
NDTV quoted unnamed sources in the Indian government saying it will be conducting a study to assess the feasibility of deploying the Covishield vaccine in a single-dose regimen instead of continuing the extant double-dose regimen.
At any other time, such a statement may have been sufficient to believe the government would organise and conduct a well-designed trial, publicise the findings and revise policy (or not) to stay in line with the findings, informed by socio-economic considerations. But the last 15 months have thrown up enough incidents of public-health malpractice on the state’s part to make such hope outright stupid. I’m fairly certain, especially if the vaccine shortage persists and the outbreaks on an upward trajectory in some parts of the country at the moment aren’t tamped down quickly, that the government is going to conduct a trial, not publish its methods and findings and push through a policy to deploy Covishield as a single-dose shot.
Of course I would be happy to be proven wrong – but in the event that I’m not, I’m already filled with a mix of sadness and fury. The government seems set on finding new ways to play with our lives.
News that the government is going to conduct a feasibility study broke to the accompaniment of a suggestion, by NDTV’s same unnamed sources, that Covishield was originally intended as a single-dose vaccine and that it was later found to be better as a two-dose vaccine. This is ridiculous to begin with, considering Covishield’s phase 3 trials around the world, conducted by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, tested the two-dose regimen.
But it is rendered more ridiculous because Public Health England (PHE) reported just a week ago that two doses of Covishield are necessary for a recipient to be sufficiently protected against infections by the B.1.617.2 variant. The PHE study found that one dose of Covishield had an efficacy of 33% against symptomatic COVID-19 caused by the variant, increasing to 60% after both doses. Has the Indian government forgotten that B.1.617.2 is becoming the more common variant circulating in the country? Or is laundering the national party’s image more important than the safety of hundreds of millions? (The latter is entirely plausible: in the last seven years, the country has seldom been larger than the supreme leader’s ego.)
The PHE study isn’t without its shortcomings – but I’d be more inclined to pay attention to them at this moment if:
- I didn’t have to contend with the non-trivial possibility that the Indian government will bury, obfuscate and/or twist the data arising from its assessment, and therefore we (the public) need to bank on whatever else is available;
- I didn’t have to contend with the fact that data from Covaxin’s phase 3 trial (which apparently went past its final interim-analysis endpoint in April) and Covishield’s bridging trial (which IIRC concluded on March 24) are still missing from the public domain;
- If we could access large-scale effectiveness data of the two vaccines (the National Institute of Epidemiology, Chennai, is set to begin collecting such data this week); and
- If there was any other reliable data at the moment about the two vaccines vis-à-vis the different variants circulating in India.
There is another problem. If Covishield is administered as a single-dose vaccine, its efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 caused by B.1.617.2 viral particles is 33% – which is below the WHO’s recommended efficacy threshold of 50% for these vaccines. If the Indian government formalises the ‘Covishield will be one dose’ policy and if the B.1.617.2 variant continues its conquest, will the vaccine, as it is used in India, lose its place on the WHO’s vaccine list? And what of the consequences that will follow, including other countries becoming reluctant to admit Indians who received one dose of Covishield and one dose of the BJP’s way of doing things?
I would be wary, too. The longer the particles of the novel coronavirus are able to circulate within a population, the more opportunities they will have to mutate, and the more mutations they will accumulate. So any population that allows the virus to persist for longer automatically increases the chance of engendering potentially deadlier variants within its borders. One-dose Covishield plus B.1.617.2, and other variants, will set just such a stage – compounded by the fact that Serum Institute, which makes Covishield, has a much larger production capacity than Bharat Biotech, the maker of Covaxin.
(The PHE study also found that Covishield and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had an efficacy of “around 50%” against symptomatic COVID-19 caused by an infection of the B.1.1.7 variant.)
In fact, the government could have made more sense today by saying it would prioritise the delivery of the first dose to as many people as possible before helping people get the second one. This way the policy would be in line with the most recent scientific findings, be synonymous with a single-dose campaign and keep the door open to vaccinating people with both doses in a longer span of time (instead of closing that door entirely), while admitting that the vaccine shortage is real and crippling – something most of us know anyway. But no; Vishwaguru first.
-
On The Lancet editorial
On May 8, The Lancet published an editorial criticising the Narendra Modi government’s response to India’s second COVID-19 outbreak, which has been redefining the meaning of ‘snafu’. All hell broke loose. Of course, hell has been breaking loose for quite some time in India now, but the latest episode was in one specific sense also gratifying to behold.
There were the usual rumbles in the week following the editorial’s appearance, until on May 17 India’s health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan shared a blog post penned by a Pankaj Chaturvedi deriding The Lancet‘s choice of arguments. (I’m fond of emboldening the honorific: it shows doctors can be stupid, too.) The post is mostly whataboutery studded with a few gems about how people who liked the editorial aren’t pissed enough that favipiravir and hydroxychloroquine were approved for use – as Dr Vardhan’s ministry did. More importantly, it seems Dr Vardhan, and his colleagues in fact, threw themselves into the barrel looking for anything with fully formed sentences that said The Lancet was wrong – a sign that their government still gives a damn about what foreign journals, and perhaps magazines and newspapers too, say about it.
We need to use this to the fullest extent, and I daresay that it’s the sort of resource the government is going to find difficult to duplicate as well. There was recently an article about Modi doing a great job during India’s second wave, published in an outlet called The Daily Guardian. There was enough confusion to draw the UK’s The Guardian forward and clarify that it was an unaffiliated entity – but no amount of confusion can supplant an institution, no matter how illiberal. Aakar Patel wrote in 2018: “The fact is that intelligent and intellectual bigotry is very difficult. There are very few people who can pull that off and that is why we can count the major ones on our fingers.” This is also why the government has twitched every time the New York Times, the Washington Post, BBC, The Lancet, Science and The BMJ have published articles critical of India, even if this isn’t the full picture.
It’s doubly interesting that the sophistry of the rejoinders aside, Dr Vardhan, his colleagues in government and his party’s supporters have all been antagonised by what they perceive to be a political act by a medical journal. This is an untenable distinction, of course – one that fantasises about a clear divide between the Watchers, who look out, and the Watched, who dare not know what the Watchers see. More pertinently, it’s a reflection of what they desperately expect from their own compatriots: to ignore how bad political leadership could help a virus ravage hundreds of thousands of families.
Laurie Penny wrote an essay in 2018 with some life-saving prescriptions, including that victories against fascists can never be had in the realm of reason. But when The Lancet publishes an editorial, The BMJ the work of an investigative reporter or even The Economist a tightly worded admonishment, they’re both reasoning and enacting a theatre of reason, and the latter seems to bother right-wing ideologues. These people are not going to heed reason, not now and not ever, but it’s heartening, even if my hope is naïve or misplaced, that they’re tractable in some meagre measure… less like dark matter and more like neutrinos.
Featured image credit: Kunj Parekh/Unsplash.