LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS
Public health experts, especially women, have become prey for online trolls, writes Prof Luke O’Neill
WE’RE now almost seven months into the Covid-19 crisis. And time keeps dragging on. Early on, the world turned to experts to explain what was going on. Politicians brought them in to advise on what to do. Terms like ‘epidemiology’, ‘R number’ and ‘cytokine’ now trip off many people’s tongues. And everybody now knows the name of an immunologist: Tony Fauci.
You can even buy Tony Fauci merchandise. He’s on socks, shirts, blankets and even doughnuts. You can buy a T-shirt that says: “What would Fauci do?” And he was recently nominated for an award. No, not the Nobel Prize, but Sexiest Man Alive. Previous winners include Idris Elba and David Beckham. At the time of writing, 16,000 people had already voted for him. Even Brad Pitt got to play him in a sketch on Saturday Night Live. Vanity Fair asked the 79-year-old if he ever saw himself as a candidate. He said: “Well, no. Absolutely not. When they show me this at my age, I say: ‘Where were you when I was 30?’”
And yet, in spite of all this, all is not well in the world of experts — Fauci included. They are increasingly being attacked. There are signs of burnout. Some are resigning because they are not being listened to. Or because of sustained vicious criticism in that children’s playground where passive-aggressive bullies lurk called social media. And yet we need them now more than ever.
DIFFICULT TIMES
There are a number of challenges for the experts. First and foremost, when it comes to Covid-19 there is often not enough data. Science loves data. A scientist will say: ‘This is my conclusion and I’m coming to it because I have data to back it up’. This allows scientists to sleep at night.
An early fight was: ‘This is a serious disease’ versus ‘It’s just another flu’. When scientists said the evidence indicated that 0.5pc to 1.5pc of people who are infected will die, which is much higher than flu, critics said: ‘You’re just scaremongering. You don’t care about the economy’.
When scientists said: ‘If everyone wears face masks, transmission of the virus will drop by 99pc’ they were attacked with: ‘There’s no evidence that face masks work and you’re taking away my freedom by making me wear one’.
When they said: ‘Opening the economy too soon will lead to a huge increase in infections’ they were met with: ‘We’ll be fine. We must get the economy back’. And yet the scientific consensus is that the death rate is indeed of the order of 0.5pc, face masks work, and if you want evidence for what opening an economy can do, look at the US, where the death rate began climbing once economies opened, reaching a current total of 138,000, more than were lost in World War I and over twice the number lost in the Vietnam war.
Fauci and other experts were ignored. Result: many needless deaths. And yet the debate on these issues rages on. Scientists’ opinion criticised because it’s based on incomplete data. Politicians having to make a decision, or perhaps dithering, which might annoy the experts who are trying to do their best. All of these tensions are leading to burnout and resignations at a time when we need expert advice and science most of all.
REPEATED WARNINGS
The epidemiologist Saskia Popescu was recently interviewed in The Atlantic magazine. Her job is to prepare hospitals in Arizona for outbreaks of emerging diseases. She saw the surge coming in Arizona but nobody listened. She said: “To actually see it play out is heartbreaking. It didn’t have to be that way.”
She feels duty-bound to help her country at a time of need. She watched in horror as beds in her hospital began to fill up, increasingly with younger people — huge lines of people trying to access emergency care.
“Because of poor political decisions that every public health person I know disagreed with, everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” she said. She is very tired and dispirited.
Another epidemiologist said: “It feels like writing, ‘bad things are about to happen’ on a napkin and then setting it on fire.” Many have been thrown into the spotlight, which they are uncomfortable with. One person saw his Twitter followers jump from 2,000 to 130,000. They have entered the highly constrained world of tweets, where there is no room for debate. They are accused of being happy when their dire predictions come true. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most feel that America wasted its chance of controlling the pandemic.
Public health experts have become a target for trolls and bots, which is especially evident against women. One renowned expert in Scotland, Devi Sridhar, recently spoke out against her attackers and quoted one: “Whores like you would love coronavirus to kill millions.” She keeps fighting.
But several others have resigned because of harassment. Dr Siegal Sadetzki is the Israeli Fauci. She recently resigned. In May, Israel had the virus under control. Jump to July and the country is in the middle of a large outbreak, with a 499pc increase in the number of cases. The economy is collapsing with unemployment at 23pc. Schools, bars and gyms that had reopened have closed again. No enforcement of mask wearing was implemented. She said: “Despite
systematic and repeated warnings through various channels, we are watching with frustration. My professional opinion is not accepted — I can no longer help.”
POOR REFLECTION
But let’s return to Fauci. The Trump administration has tried to discredit him. An anonymous White House official issued a list of mistakes he had made. He acknowledged that the advice he provided shifted over time. Scientists make mistakes from time to time, including me, but importantly, we correct them when they are pointed out to us by other scientists or if it’s clear we were wrong as new science emerges. That’s how science works. This is what Fauci did. He did it before during the Aids crisis when he was accused of being a murderer, because he delayed the hunt for treatments. He responded by creating a programme to make unapproved drugs available to patients. To give you a measure of the man, five years ago he suited up to treat a patient with Ebola, saying that he “wanted to show his staff that he wouldn’t ask them to do anything he wouldn’t do himself”. That’s what leadership is.
He has called the attacks on him “bizarre” and has said:
“Ultimately it hurts the president to do that. It doesn’t do anything but reflect poorly on them.” He has received death threats and his wife and children have been targeted and harassed. He has had to have security protection. And yet he keeps going.
In a recent Financial Times interview he laid it on the line in his usual truthful way. He stated that this virus is “spectacularly efficient at spreading from human to human”. He made it clear that it can make people really sick (as many as 15pc of those who become infected) and has a relatively high mortality rate. He called it “the big one” and “the perfect storm right now”. It’s for that reason he won’t give up. We all need to listen to him and other experts who aren’t afraid to speak out. They need our support.
If we listen to them and they are wrong, what will we have lost, as long as we all stand together and help each other in these difficult times? If they are right, and we don’t listen to them, how will we feel when we realise that we could have done something to save people from dying but didn’t?
Luke O’Neill is professor of biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin.
‘This virus is very efficient at spreading from human to human’