If virology would be a reasonable scientific field I would expect them to care about the road viruses use to infect humans and other animals.
The experiment to determine whether or not a virus is airborne seems pretty straightforward to me. Get a bunch of animals and house them in a way where they would transmit the virus to each other if and only if the virus is airborne.
One hypothesis would be that virologists don’t really care about understanding transmissions but care about registering patents from which they profit when drugs based on the patents get developed.
People in the field of environmental health seemed to be able to know that COVID was airborne and wrote letters to the WHO saying so only to be ignored.
What’s wrong with the virologists that they didn’t manage to do the necessary science?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ina.13070
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2021.0049 gives an excellent overview of the scientific consensus regarding disease transmission pathways over the last ~150 years.
I’d strongly encourage reading the full article; this is a case where reality has a surprising amount of detail and those details really matter. Many details are disease-specific, differing both between and within viral and bacterial infections, but were later assumed to generalize. Some are about measurement: researchers often used agar plates as a proxy for infected organisms without allowing sufficient time for airborne spread across a room (potentially hours) or with non-representative airflow, or imaging techniques which are inherently focussed on short distances and do not show the smallest particles. Others include conflation of particle transport through the air and particle deposition in the lungs, misattribution of the effect of spacing rules to distance (via droplets) rather than room occupancy, neglect of size change due to de- and re-hydration, and many more.
Ultimately, I think the question should not be “What’s wrong with the virologists” but with the field of virology, and it seems basically normal to me: researchers thought they understood what was going on, disconfirming experiments were nontrivial to conduct and older research was generally ignored, and nobody influential wanted to listen to outsiders with awkward questions.
It can’t possibly be 100%, which interest groups specifically benefited from this?
I think ‘which interest groups benefited’ is the wrong question; scientists and public health officials sincerely and incorrectly believed that they understood what was going on, and were attempting to and largely succeeding in controlling infectious disease and saving many, many lives.
Remember that over this same period, this field controlled malaria in most developed countries (and we’re making good progress on the rest), banished the scourge of Polio (also close to eradication!), and eradicated smallpox worldwide.
I appreciate the elaboration on the quoted point, it still seems like it can’t possibly be 100%.
Contra the other answers, I contest that virologists haven’t been running studies like that because they believed they had already been run.
And they are correct, studies had been run, from the 1940s to the 1960s. You are also correct—the setup you propose is exactly the one which cracked the problem for tuberculosis. Those results were published in 1962 by William Firth Wells.
The problem is that the WHO mostly deferred to the CDC, and the CDC guidance was accidentally written for weaponized airborne transmission rather than airborne transmission in general. So everyone, virologists included, believed the question of airborne transmission was largely settled and 5 microns was the magic number for airborne transmission in general, when in fact that was the magic number for bioweapons which can bypass our mucous lining instead. In addition to this error, the head of the CDC at the time the 5 micron number was recorded had for most of his career criticized the group of people who made the airborne transmission discovery, and to make matters worse Wells died in 1963 so there was no persistent authority to correct the matter. Also worth mentioning is that Wells was an engineer, and not a virologist.
The only people who had cause to question the “established facts” are people who a) had deep domain expertise that applied to the physical problem or b) were highly sensitive to the contradictions provided by the evidence.
I feel like this is basically expected, since the levels at which we expect most virology to work won’t encounter this naturally. Wrong disease prevention guidelines won’t show up if you are studying the shape of a virus, or its impact on tissues, or its genetic code; they also won’t show up obviously in big picture characterizations like R number because these include multiple factors without making clear what they are up front.
In summary, virologists weren’t doing the studies because they thought they had been done and we had our answer, but that answer was wrong in the exact same fashion as a wrong entry in a published steam table. In my view the problem is not with virologists the practitioners or virology the field, but with the fact that a bunch of bureaucrats were using a wrong reference. The reference would normally be corrected, but the best person to do so died too early and was a disparaged outsider to boot.
I sourced most of this from this old linkpost from 2021 and my own spot-checks.
If bureaucrats get things wrong about virology, I would expect professors of virology to speak up, try to educate the bureaucrats, and speak to the public if that doesn’t work. Even if the CDC gives stupid guidance, I would expect there to be scientists who understand the evidence.
Why were the virologists missing in action?
If there’s a healthy field of virology I would expect professors of virology to understand the evidence for the core beliefs in the field.
I agree that if we had a healthy field, then the field should move to correct wrong information.
That being said, I don’t expect professors to understand the evidence for the core beliefs in their field, chiefly because I do not see where in the doctoral path such a comprehensive historical survey would take place. I expect them to know what the conclusions are, but no particular details about how they were reached, and to know even those chiefly through references. Even physics is shot through with apocrypha and folk tales about fundamental findings. I only expect a professor to know about the evidence for the core of their specialization, because this much is included in graduate course curricula I have seen.
At least as far as the United States is concerned, my default expectation regardless of field is that they will fail to immediately catch an error like happened with covid unless it directly conflicts with standard references in the field.
To sum up: I agree, but I think this problem affects basically all academic fields, rather than virology being especially deficient.
If you wanted to know the truth, you would need to start with all the raw data and recalculate your conclusions.
But since the raw data is often old, and only “positive” data was published and “negative” data not, and collected usually by poorly paid humans...you need to throw it all out and start over.
Would help to have enormous amounts of robotics to make this possible in a short timespan.
I assume that this is what you would need to do to solve “difficult” problems, such as biology.
I think about this periodically in the context of likelihood functions. My bet for the biggest problem is that there isn’t prior work for people to cite or data for them to build on, so it seems to me a good thing to do would be to things like:
Find good public datasets to run likelihood functions against.
Run very basic experiments in huge numbers to get strong effect sizes for fundamental findings.
I think the robotic laboratories would be a great fit for 2.
I’m not a virologist, so this is a guess from the outside.
Most of modern science works on question substitution. You want to know whether A causes B, but this is hard to measure, so you look at whether A and B are correlated in observational studies. You want to know whether or not A is related to B, and so you look at the probability of observing what you did if they were not related, and conclude they are if that probability is sufficiently low. And so on.
As well, most of modern science is determined by a three-sided market, where both grant-makers need to like a proposal enough to fund it, scientists have to consider a study interesting/rewarding enough to run it, and journals need to consider a study interesting enough to publish it. Would a straightforward experiment as you describe gotten funded, run, and published?
In that background, my main hypothesis is: they already had an answer to a question that seemed related enough that they pretended the questions were the same and thus the answers were the same. [See this article; it wasn’t until during the pandemic that someone traced down why virologists believed what they believed about airborne transmission, and also details the difficulties getting published of someone trying to fix broken beliefs about this sort of basic science.]
There’s a simple, terrible answer: because studies are hugely expensive, very time intensive, take a very long time to complete, and require multiple very slow iterations to get everything through committee in a way that our institutions will accept. Consider:
- Nobody is funding it. The cost is literally hundreds of millions of dollars to do in a way that the medical establishment would accept. Even then it would be challenged.
- It would take thousands of man hours. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
- It would take 3+ years to get everything approved and done properly, otherwise the medical establishment won’t accept it. Actually they still probably won’t.
- By the time you’re done, it’s a virtual certainty that the virus will have run its course and the result will be useless.
IMO, the above is more than sufficient. The incentives were not there—or rather, the incentives were not sufficiently large to justify the cost and were further derated by the expected utility of the information a year after the pandemic is over.
That leaves the question of why. Why was Fauci more interested in funding useless gain-of-function research than useful basic science like this?