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Your advice was so helpful. And right now, I'm especially repeating back to myself (and here I'm paraphrasing), "You have no control over the headline. You have no control over the headline."

This is true. Even so, for many infectious diseases--SARS, ebola-- transmission increases late in the course of infection. Most infectious disease experts believed covid matched SARS transmission at the outset. Avoidable error, or trying to concentrate resources where they would be most effective?

(6) Millions of peoples' lives are at stake and you have data you know is full of errors and incomplete. But you have to make recommendations based on what you have. We punish the people willing to perform in this unforgiving environment very much at our own peril.

(5) By way of comparison, when climate scientists started saying we needed to move away from fossil fuels, they were sitting on a theory that was over a century old and data collection and analysis that had been going on for decades. During covid, the data were patchy and weeks old.

(4) That public health experts were willing to admit they had been wrong in order to inform the public about a better approach is something that could not be more valuable during a public health emergency. Imagine what it would be like if they instead hid mistakes in order to avoid punishment.

(3) What would it look like if the public expected course corrections, especially in the beginning when there is almost no reliable data on which to base public policy, and celebrated learning instead of punishing people for it?

(2) Public health experts were accused of moving too quickly without enough evidence and of sitting too long on known evidence during the pandemic. And here's the kicker. Sometimes they faced both criticisms for the exact same guidance.

(1) When a novel infectious disease arrives, you don't know how it behaves or how to interrupt transmission. We rely on experts because they learn faster and better than non experts. That is not an error free process.

"He loves the free market." Oh yeah? Like ones with no anti trust laws so there are just monopolies everywhere and no competition? Or is it some other type of *free* market that you have in mind? Do tell.

Day of the Dead

It's the same story with USAID and with public health. And with climate change for that matter. Experts pointing to an avoidable future and elected officials blatantly ignoring them. I wish there were more electoral accountability for ending up exactly in the stupid and bad place experts predicted.

I read an interview with MDs who were telling patients in a rural county that the hospital would likely close if the BBB passed and their patients didn't believe them. At the same time, I wonder if there might be a shift now that people are seeing a connection between GOP policies and prices.

He picks a weird time to imply that Americans in the US for generations have the "habits of mind" to defend democracy.

But does this assume that universities have to be faultless to exist? Is this standard applied to any other institution or sector? My money is on articulating the successes and defending them relentlessly. Stop attacking the bedrock of the US economy. Only then would I talk about university reform.

Fair point. I want universities not to fall apart assuming there is no natural tendency towards fad correction in the sciences and focus on defending this enormous contributor to US economic productivity. I worry that one doesn't win against authoritarians by naval gazing. They R big meanies, tho 🤣.

I could be wrong about this, but I see access to universities through studies departments as the mechanism by which the sciences have diversified. STEM departments didn't readily embrace accepting women and people of color. Were women's studies departments an anchor for bringing in women faculty?

Ok...why is the solution to this to go after NIH? Or to terminate social science research at NSF. That the remedy doesn't match the complaint is an enormous tell.

Here's my take. Rich business types have never wanted independent, non conflicted science. It leads to the correction of negative externalities. But now they have found common cause with white supremacists who don't like efforts to diversify access to universities science.

The thing is, skepticism, data and methods all help over time to root out fads in the sciences. Science has never been able to avoid goofy fads. It has avoided sticking with them. It's what science is good at.

Who designs the research matters. And there was as much social bias and the sciences when only white men were controlling research as there is when there is more participation from communities of color and from women. After all, eugenics was pervasive in the sciences during the Progressive Era.