Essay:Greg Lukianoff vs. Scientific Orthodoxy

I was reading the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, and everything was going OK until I got to the section on COVID-19, which made me want to throw the book at a wall.

This is still a WIP.

Lukianoff's claim:

My observations:

Intro

COVID death statistics among youth

"By the end of 2020 there had been only 199 deaths from Covid-19 among American children (0-17 years old)[7], and 70 percent of Covid-related deaths among those under 25 years old involved a pre-existing condition[8]... [Policy makers emphasized] the small risk to children's health from Covid... Shuttering children inside, gluing their eyes to Zoom screens, and robbing them of social contact were the policy response to a disease that killed less than one-third the number of American children in 2020 as pneumonia did that year."

Both of these footnotes refer to the same source, the CDC's provisional counts for COVID-19, and are specifically dated to March 8, 2023. The website currently displays an archived version of the data from September 27, 2023, several months later, but that shouldn't be a problem for our purposes, since Lukianoff only uses data from the year 2020. Looking at it, we can see that the total number of deaths involving COVID-19 during 2020 for those in the age group "0-17 years" is 199, while the total number of deaths involving pneumonia during 2020 for the same age group is 629. However, Lukianoff fails to take into account the fact that school closures were widespread across the United States at this time, with 77% of public schools and 73% of private schools shifting to virtual learning, in whole or in part, in early 2020. This change would have the effect of reducing the infection rate, and therefore, the mortality rate, of COVID-19 among children aged 0 to 17 during this timeframe. In short, Lukianoff's analysis suffers from the lack of a control group (i.e. data collected from schools that remained open throughout 2020).

"How Covid Cancel Culture Undermined Faith in Expertise"

The "Noble Lie"

"We had been told by government officials that you shouldn't wear masks because they wouldn't keep you from getting sick[, but also] because they needed to be reserved for medical responders... If masks couldn't keep civilians from getting sick, then why would they protect frontline medical workers? Official policy... remained a confusing morass of sometimes self-contradictory advice. The face-mask bait and switch right at the beginning of a pandemic was the most harmful kind of misstep. It wasn't a mistake. It was a 'noble lie,' in which authorities were apparently trying to convince people to do the right thing (save masks for frontline medical workers) by lying to them rather than explaining their rationale."

Would you be surprised to learn that this entire section includes not so much as one footnote? There are bold, but also verifiable, claims being made here, and the authors did not even attempt to back them up with anything other than mere speculation. For the record, I was able to find an article from Scientific American criticizing the WHO's "contradictory messaging" during the pandemic, and which also clearly states that the WHO wanted to prevent the hoarding of face masks in order to save them for the people who needed them most: medical personnel dealing with COVID-19 cases. The problem here is that Lukianoff presents this information in an overtly conspiratorial manner, omitting this key detail- one which gives important context as to the WHO's actions- and thereby fostering a distrust of medical institutions overall where none is warranted.

Tom Jefferson study

"By 2023, the most comprehensive study of its kind about mask mandate efficacy would find, in the words of its author Tom Jefferson, that 'there is no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.'[12]"

I was skeptical of this claim, so I decided to follow the footnote to see the original study for myself. However, this footnote doesn't reference the original study, but rather, an article about this study which was published in City Journal, a conservative magazine. The actual study reads as follows (emphasis mine): "The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs [randomized controlled trials] during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness... There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks."

Credence for the lab leak theory?

"A ninety-day 2021 investigation by the FBI,[14] a 2022 Senate Minority Oversight Committee Report,[15] and a 2023 Energy Department report all expressed decent confidence that Covid-19 originated in a lab-related accident.[16]"

There are three documents being referenced here: a 2021 report from the US Intelligence Community (IC), a 2022 interim report from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and a 2023 report from the Energy Department, the latter of which remains classified. I have decided that it would be best to cover each of these sources individually, discussing how they really aren't as conclusive as Lukianoff seems to think.

2021 report

The question of whether SARS-CoV-2 was spread to humans through zoonotic transmission or through an accidental lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), both of which were deemed "plausible hypotheses" for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, is addressed on pages 7 through 10 of the 2021 report.

2023 report

Although this report has not been released to the public, it was covered extensively in secondhand reporting, with the earliest article to discuss it coming from The Wall Street Journal on Feburary 26, 2023; the story was then picked up by other news outlets, including The Guardian, NBC, The New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Christian Science Monitor. According to the Wall Street Journal article, the Energy Department's report favored the lab leak theory over the natural transmission theory, albeit with "low confidence," after the team had reviewed the relevant scholarly literature and consulted with experts. The American intelligence community at large, however, was more divided on the lab leak theory, with several agencies stating that they "[didn't] have enough information" to come to a clear consensus concerning COVID-19's origins. It's unclear what evidence, specifically, led the Energy Department's team to favor the lab leak theory, but looking at the other articles discussing the report can help us better understand their findings.

The article about the report in The New York Times suggests that the Energy Department may have gotten their information from their "network of national laboratories, some of which conduct biological research," as opposed to more traditional forms of intelligence-gathering. This seems plausible, given that the original Wall Street Journal article mentions a May 2020 study conducted by the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which concluded that the lab leak theory deserved to be taken seriously by researchers. CNN released several articles discussing the report, whose "low confidence" findings were deemed to be "not reliable enough or... too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgement... [There may] not [be] enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion". Several anonymous sources told CNN that the Energy Department had come to its conclusions after gathering information on research related to a specific variant of the coronavirus that had been conducted at the Chinese CDC facility in Wuhan around the time that the pandemic first originated, although other intelligence agencies have disputed whether the existence of this research constitutes sufficient evidence to support the lab leak theory over the natural transmission theory.

One of the co-authors of the Wall Street Journal article, Michael Gordon, later appeared on an interview with NPR in which he stated that the Department of Energy hasn't stated where they received their information, and that their findings shouldn't be taken as conclusive. Michaeleen Doucleff, a member of NPR's science team, mentions two papers which had been published in the academic journal Science the previous year, both of which point towards the natural transmission theory and are thus "in direct conflict" with the Energy Department's findings. The first of these papers finds evidence indicating that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the original epicenter for the pandemic, results which are consistent with the theory of zoonotic transmission, while the second paper uses genetic analysis to conclude that the two variants of SARS-CoV-2 which existed before February 2020, variants A and B, most likely originated from "at least two separate cross-species transmission events into humans". Doucleff also reiterates that the report was made with "low confidence," a label that the US federal government uses to denote findings which are "'scant, questionable, fragmented or [from which] solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred...'".

Based on this reporting, we can say a few things for certain about the Energy Department's report. Firstly, we don't know exactly where the Energy Department was getting its information from, so there's no way to verify the report's claims, alhough we do have a few clues as to what sort of research they did. Secondly, other intelligence agencies with access to the same information haven't changed their official stance on the origins of COVID-19, suggesting that, even if we did have access to the information used for the report, it doesn't even matter that much to begin with. Lastly, the report was made with "low confidence," meaning that its conclusions shouldn't be taken as definitive proof of the lab leak theory without further investigation into COVID-19's origins. Together, these three points demolish Lukianoff's claim that the report from the Department of Energy "expressed decent confidence" about its conclusions.

New York Times article on Sen. Tom Cotton

"The New York Times even called out Cotton [for promoting the lab leak theory] in February 2020 with the headline 'Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.'[17]"

Except this was from February 2020, when the above-cited evidence giving credence to the lab leak theory didn't even exist yet. Cotton was repeating this theory with little to no evidence backing him up at the time, so why are you acting shocked that people didn't believe him?

Great Barrington Declaration signatories

"The Great Barrington Declaration has since amassed nearly a million signatures from those who viewed it as a sensible approach to lockdown policy."

According to the Great Barrington Declaration's official website, the declaration has received over 900,000 signatures, including 16,000 from "Medical and Public Health Scientists," 47,000 from "Medical practitioners," and 876,000 from "Concerned Citizens". The website does not list the names of signatories to the declaration publicly, but secondhand reporting has revealed the presence of clearly-fake names that have been added to the list, such as "Dr. Johnny Bananas," "Dr. I. P. Freely," and even "Dr. Person Fakename". Looking at the form to sign the declaration, you'll find that one must include their name, postal code, email address, and consent to privacy policy, as well as a checkmark indicating whether they are signing as a "Concerned Citizen," "Medical and Public Health Scientists (sic)," or "Medical practitioner". However, the form lacks any feature that would help certify signatories' identities and stated credentials, and there doesn't seem to be a limit on how many times the form can be signed by the same user, rendering the official number of signatories incredibly suspect. Bhattacharya himself even commented on how the presence of fake names as signatories to the declaration has degraded pubic trust in himself and his colleagues, though he nevertheless cites the "volume of correspondence" received by medical professionals as proof of their support.

The definition of "fringe"

"In an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, [Dr. Francis] Collins responded to the declaration by describing Bhattacharya and his co-authors as a group of 'fringe epidemiologists'[, even though they came from] Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford.[27]"

Earlier in this same section, Lukianoff cites the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for its definition of the word "epistemology," so I have decided to follow suit. According to the third edition of the OED, one of the definitions for "fringe" is "irrelevant matter" or "an outer edge or margin of any kind, material or immaterial"; this definition remains unchanged from the first edition. Most of the modern examples cited in this definition are referring to heterodox beliefs and the people who hold them, regardless of their level of education or expertise in their respective fields. The way that Collins is using the word "fringe," then, seems perfectly in line with the definition provided by the OED.

Conclusion

Alleged groupthink in the medical world

"If experts are all compelled to think the same way and say the same things, how can we trust them to tell us the truth?"

Because that's not what happened. What happened was that there was an initial failure of communication between medical institutions when it came to dealing with the ongoing pandemic, which led to bad-faith actors using the opportunity to spread disinformation and sow doubt in the scientific consensus around COVID-19.

Who is at fault here?

"The antidote to an epistemic crisis... means not canceling the dissenters who challenge the prevailing tides."

Lukianoff defines cancel culture as "campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is- or would be- protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that [comes about as a result of these campaigns]". While some of the examples that Lukianoff cites, like the online harassment targeted at Jennifer Sey and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, clearly fit this definition, Lukianoff frames the scientists and the medical experts as the ones who were encouraging this harassment, even though there's absolutely nothing to indicate that this was the case.

Final observations

Summary.