Tag: Anthony Fauci

Yes, scientific journals should publish political rebuttals

(The headline is partly click-bait, as I admit below, because some context is required.) From ‘Should scientific journals publish political debunkings?’, Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie, August 27, 2022:

Earlier this week, the “news and analysis” section of the journal Science … published … a point-by-point rebuttal of a monologue a few days earlier from the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, where the eponymous host excoriated Dr. Anthony Fauci, of “seen everywhere during the pandemic” fame. … The Science piece noted that “[a]lmost everything Tucker Carlson said… was misleading or false”. That’s completely correct – so why did I have misgivings about the Science piece? It’s the kind of thing you see all the time on dedicated political fact-checking sites – but I’d never before seen it in a scientific journal. … I feel very conflicted on whether this is a sensible idea. And, instead of actually taking some time to think it through and work out a solid position, in true hand-wringing style I’m going to write down both sides of the argument in the form of a dialogue – with myself.

There’s one particular exchange between Ritchie and himself in his piece that threw me off the entire point of the article:

[Ritchie-in-favour-of-Science-doing-this]: Just a second. This wasn’t published in the peer-reviewed section of Science! This isn’t a refereed paper – it’s in the “News and Analysis” section. Wouldn’t you expect an “Analysis” article to, like, analyse things? Including statements made on Fox News?

[Ritchie-opposed-to-Science-doing-this]: To be honest, sometimes I wonder why scientific journals have a “News and Analysis” section at all – or, I wonder if it’s healthy in the long run. In any case, clearly there’s a big “halo” effect from the peer-reviewed part: people take the News and Analysis more seriously because it’s attached to the very esteemed journal. People are sharing it on social media because it’s “the journal Science debunking Tucker Carlson” – way fewer people would care if it was just published on some random news site. I don’t think you can have it both ways by saying it’s actually nothing to do with Science the peer-reviewed journal.

[Ritchie-in-favour]: I was just saying they were separate, rather than entirely unrelated, but fair enough.

Excuse me but not at all fair enough! The essential problem is the tie-ins between what a journal does, why it does them and what impressions they uphold in society.

First, Science‘s ‘news and analysis’ section isn’t distinguished by its association with the peer-reviewed portion of the journal but by its own reportage and analyses, intended for scientists and non-scientists alike. (Mea culpa: the headline of this post answers the question in the headline of Ritchie’s post, while being clear in the body that there’s a clear distinction between the journal and its ‘news and analysis’ section.) A very recent example was Charles Piller’s investigative report that uncovered evidence of image manipulation in a paper that had an outsized influence on the direction of Alzheimer’s research since it was published in 2006. When Ritchie writes that the peer-reviewed journal and the ‘news and analysis’ section are separate, he’s right – but when he suggests that the former’s prestige is responsible for the latter’s popularity, he’s couldn’t be more wrong.

Ritchie is a scientist and his position may reflect that of many other scientists. I recommend that he and others who agree with him consider the section from the PoV of a science journalist, when they will immediately see as we do that it has broken many agenda-setting stories as well as has published several accomplished journalists and scientists (Derek Lowe’s column being a good example). Another impression that could change with the change of perspective is the relevance of peer-review itself, and the deceptively deleterious nature of an associated concept he repeatedly invokes, which could as well be the pseudo-problem at the heart of Ritchie’s dilemma: prestige. To quote from a blog post in which University of Regensburg neurogeneticist Björn Brembs analysed the novelty of results published by so-called ‘prestigious’ journals, and published in February this year:

Taken together, despite the best efforts of the professional editors and best reviewers the planet has to offer, the input material that prestigious journals have to deal with appears to be the dominant factor for any ‘novelty’ signal in the stream of publications coming from these journals. Looking at all articles, the effect of all this expensive editorial and reviewer work amounts to probably not much more than a slightly biased random selection, dominated largely by the input and to probably only a very small degree by the filter properties. In this perspective, editors and reviewers appear helplessly overtaxed, being tasked with a job that is humanly impossible to perform correctly in the antiquated way it is organized now.

In sum:

Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of already self-selected input material. As such, massive improvement along several variables can be expected from a more modern implementation of the prestige signal.

Take the ‘prestige’ away and one part of Ritchie’s dilemma – the journal Science‘s claim to being an “impartial authority” that stands at risk of being diluted by its ‘news and analysis’ section’s engagement with “grubby political debates” – evaporates. Journals, especially glamour journals like Science, haven’t historically been authorities on ‘good’ science, such as it is, but have served to obfuscate the fact that only scientists can be. But more broadly, the ‘news and analysis’ business has its own expensive economics, and publishers of scientific journals that can afford to set up such platforms should consider doing so, in my view, with a degree and type of separation between these businesses according to their mileage. The simple reasons are:

1. Reject the false balance: there’s no sensible way publishing a pro-democracy article (calling out cynical and potentially life-threatening untruths) could affect the journal’s ‘prestige’, however it may be defined. But if it does, would the journal be wary of a pro-Republican (and effectively anti-democratic) scientist refusing to publish on its pages? If so, why? The two-part answer is straightforward: because many other scientists as well as journal editors are still concerned with the titles that publish papers instead of the papers themselves, and because of the fundamental incentives of academic publishing – to publish the work of prestigious scientists and sensational work, as opposed to good work per se. In this sense, the knock-back is entirely acceptable in the hopes that it could dismantle the fixation on which journal publishes which paper.

2. Scientific journals already have access to expertise in various fields of study, as well as an incentive to participate in the creation of a sensible culture of science appreciation and criticism.

Featured image: Tucker Carlson at an event in West Palm Beach, Florida, December 19, 2020. Credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Being apolitical doesn’t mean politics doesn’t exist

A few years ago, we had a writer who would constantly pitch articles to us about how the Indian government should be doing X, Y or Z in the fight against this or that disease. Their submissions grew quickly tiresome, and then wholly ridiculous when, in one article (well before the pandemic), they wrote that “the government should distribute good-quality masks for TB patients to use”. That the government should do this is a banal truism. But to make this recommendation over and over risks hiding from sight the fact that the government probably isn’t doing it not because it doesn’t know it should be done but because it has decided that what it is doing is more important, more necessary.

I find myself contending with many similar articles today. It is people’s right to express themselves, especially on counts on which the Indian government has dropped the ball via-à-vis the country’s COVID-19 epidemic. But to repeat recommendations that are often staring most of us in our faces I fear could be harmful – by only reminding us of what needs to be done but hasn’t been, over and over, is an act that deepens the elision and then the forgetting of the real reason why it hasn’t been done.

This doesn’t mean reminders are redundant; to the contrary, there is important value in repetition, so that we may not lose sight of which outcomes are ultimately desirable. But in tandem, we also need to start acknowledging what could be standing in the way and contemplating honestly whether what we’re advocating for could surmount that barrier. (This issue is also of a piece with the one about processes and outcomes – whereby some commentators stress on what the outcomes can or should be but have nothing to say about the processes that will get us there.)

For example, what happened to the rapid self-administered COVID-19 tests that many scientists in India developed last year? A reporter with an appetite for a small investigation could speak to the researchers, university administrators, the DST or the DBT as the case may be, and finally to officials in the Union health ministry, and weave together a story about where exactly in this pipeline of translation from the lab to the market the product vanished. There is value in knowing this but it is not paramount value. It is on equal footing with the view, from the perch of the political economy of public healthcare, that the Modi government is unlikely to okay the widespread use of such tests because many Indian states, especially BJP strongholds like Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, are widely underreporting cases and deaths, and a state-managed project to suppress this data is easier to do with centralised testing facilities instead of freely distributed rapid tests whose results can also be quickly crowdsourced.

Quite a few authors of articles (many of them scientists) also like to say that we shouldn’t politicise the pandemic. They ignore, deliberately or otherwise, the fact that all pandemics are political by default. By definition, a pandemic is an epidemic of the same disease occurring in multiple geographically distinct regions at the same time. Governments have to get involved to manage them. Pandemics are not, and should never be, carte blanche for scientists to assume power, their prescriptions to assume primacy and their priorities to assume importance – by default. This can only lead to tunnel vision that is blind to problems, and in fact solutions, that arise from social and political compulsions.

Instead, it would be much more valuable if scientists, and in fact any expert in any field, could admit the politically motivated parts of a government’s response to its local epidemic instead of forcing everyone else to work around their fantasies of separation – and even better if they could join the collaborative efforts to develop solutions instead of trying to solve it like a science problem.

Anthony Fauci demonstrates this same… attitude (for lack of a better word), in an interview to Indian Express. When asked how he might respond to India’s crisis, he said:

The one thing I don’t want to do and I hope it doesn’t turn out this way, is to get involved in any sort of criticism of how India has handled the situation because then it becomes a political issue and I don’t want to do that since I’m a public health person and I’m not a political person.

It just seems to me that, right now, India is in a very difficult and desperate situation. I just got off, in preparation for this interview, I watched a clip from CNN… it seems to me it’s a desperate situation. So when you have a situation like that you’ve got to look at the absolute immediate.

I mean, first of all, I don’t know if India has put together a crisis group that would meet and start getting things organised. I heard from some of the people in the street bringing their mothers and their fathers and their sisters and their brothers searching for oxygen. They seem to think there really was not any organisation, any central organisation.

When asked about what India should do towards getting more people vaccinated:

You’ve got to get supplies. You’ve got to make contractual arrangements with the various companies that are out there in the world.

😑 And what about the fact that the US didn’t just advance-book the doses it needed but hoarded enough to vaccine its population thrice over, and blocked a petition by India and South Africa, and some other countries, to release the patents on US-made vaccines to increase global supply?

Fauci’s answers are, again, a reminder of which outcomes are or ought to be ultimately desirable – what goals we should be working towards – but simply repeating this needs to stop being a virtue. Fauci, like many others before him, doesn’t wish to consider why we’re not on the path to achieving these outcomes despite fairly common knowledge of their existence. He may not be a political person but being apolitical doesn’t mean politics isn’t involved. The bulk of India’s response to its COVID-19 epidemic has been driven by political strategy. Is the idea that even the ideal part science can play in this enterprise is decidedly finite so off-putting?

And even if there is a legitimate aspiration to expand the part science should be allowed to play in pandemic governance, scientists need to begin by convincing political institutions – and not attempt to seize power. They may be tempted to, as we all are, because our current national government seems to think accountability is blasphemy, and without being accountable it has stopped speaking for the people of the country, even those who put it in power. Nonetheless, the fruits of scientific work need to be democratic, too.

I would also contend that Fauci complicates the picture by implying that there can be a clean separation of political and scientific issues on this matter; many scientists in India and perhaps too many people in India have an elevated opinion of Fauci, to the point of considering his words to be gospel. As one friend put it recently, “Unbelievable – the idea that a single white man is the foremost disease epidemiologist in the world” (emphasis in the original). “How do people say it with a straight face?”

This post isn’t intended to disparage Fauci, even if our exalted opinion of him deserves to be taken down a few notches. Instead, I hope it highlights how Fauci nicely demonstrates a deceptively trivial prejudice against politics that, I could argue, helped land India in its latest disaster. Even when he pitches, for example, that India should lock itself down for a few weeks – instead of a few months like it did last year – he is at liberty to ignore the aftermath. We are not. Does that mean a lockdown shouldn’t come to be? No. But if he accommodated the political in his considerations, will it mean a man of his smarts will be able to meaningfully contemplate what the problem could really be? Maybe.

Featured image: Former US President Donald Trump, VP Mike Pence and NIAID director Anthony Fauci at a press briefing at the White House on April 16, 2020. Credit: Public domain.