Public Health and the Right to Reason
Referenda on Tony Fauci
One of the most substantial events in modern science-of-science has concluded. Anthony Fauci’s testimony was both symbolic and literal, a referendum on trust in science. He is a symbol that scientists only care about knowledge; the stakes for themselves be damned. He was also the actual head of a large funder for 35 years and the most visible representative of science worldwide during the pandemic. The political stakes over funding, elitism, and expertise have been too tempting for us to leave alone.
Like most rational people, I put this diminutive old man in the middle of the pack of scientists at first. I believe that scientists care about knowledge and not stakes for themselves a little, and I guessed this was true for Fauci. Where we conflicted on COVID origin, I started to suspect a noble lie.
Like two-thirds of Americans, I think the lab leak is more likely than a purely natural origin of the virus. 20% of experts agree. It’s the more rational choice based on statistics we all know and use intuitively, exemplified by the fact that the most prominent user of this reasoning is a comedian.
This reasoning is simple and nobody can say for sure whether COVID origin is simple, or not. Based on the communications that have now been released, scientists privately thought it was simple.
Naive probability
Naive probability is a technical term for probability estimated with little information. Naive probability is counting things. On COVID, naive probability is easy to illustrate with dogs.
Rabies can be spread by dogs, but rabies is rare. You could reduce the chance of rabies by saying people can’t keep dogs as pets anymore. The Chinese government could have done this with wet markets, eliminating them to prevent a new SARS. But the Chinese people might disagree. “I go to my wet market all the time and I’ve never gotten sick.”
The Chinese people, and you if you love your family pet, are right. Each market is very safe on its own. Each dog is very safe. Which is why, if someone blamed your dog for a rabies outbreak and you happen to live next to a lab studying rabies, you have the right to complain. The outbreak most likely came from the rabies lab.
This is not nostalgia, you for your dog, and the Chinese for their market. It’s math. Each market is very, very safe. Each dog is very, very safe. So when weighing the probability of one dog versus one laboratory studying rabies, there’s no question that the dog is more safe. There are only a few labs per infection. Lab leaks are relatively common compared to dogs with rabies.
Consider planes. Planes are responsible for the worst imaginable fates and yet we still use them because they’re very safe. If a plane is flying over a dynamite factory and all you knew is that there was a loud boom, you would choose being on the plane over being in the factory knowing almost nothing about dynamite factories.
Some may disagree on the details, but we’re not talking about exact numbers. We’re talking about the war over using a mental tool like counting things at all, particularly in conjunction with another mental tool, conflict of interest.
It’s safe to say that all of the formal study of scientific practice is driven by an understanding of conflict of interest. Dr. Fauci wrote about it in his diary in February 2020. He described a meeting of eleven top scientists in which only two thought deliberate insertion (gain of function) was off the table. “There was not total agreement about the likelihood of deliberate insertion. Ron Fouchier said he was sure that this could occur naturally and we should not waste our time and divert effort to pursue this.”
If you’re even moderately familiar with the field, you might be tempted to say, “Of course Ron Fouchier would say that,” and so did Fauci. Ron Fouchier was the first to insert DNA into a virus to enhance its ability to infect a human analog. “This is expected of him since he was the original GOF person with Yoshi Kawaoka.”
This may be the most ironic line in the diary because subsequently much of the world, roughly hundreds of millions of people, turned that reasoning on Fauci himself.
Even worse coincidences
Fauci is like us. He doesn’t want to have to trust experts absolutely given the high stakes involved for some of them. He also knows the statistics of coincidence and takes it even further: “...the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible and given the fact that Dr. Zhen-Li Shi at the University of Wuhan has been working for years in GOF in coronaviruses to allow adaptation of the spike protein to bind to the human ACE2 receptor…” Nature could have come up with any number of known or unknown methods of infecting cells. COVID uses a particular one that scientists knew about, and the exact one that had been practiced at the nearby lab.
If the meeting attendees go down in history as heroes or villains, it should be for not being good mentors to the rest of us. If they’re going to use some mental tool, they should encourage us to use it too. Tony Fauci is not nearly the expert that Ron Fouchier is, but he doubted Fouchier’s expertise due to conflict of interest. He should let us do the same.
The scientists whose communications were released didn’t give up their right to conclude. Far from it. It seems to be universal that they thought virtually everyone is stupid but them, even though their conclusions were common. All of the normal conclusions were privately pondered by scientists. Fauci distrusted the Chinese, for instance. So much so that he tossed around the idea that the first COVID infection could have been six months earlier than the Chinese admitted based on the age of some mice that were engineered to contract similar disease and happened to be able to contract the new virus. Not dispositive proof, certainly. But it didn’t stop him from pondering.
The epicenter
The danger in leaving simple reasoning to experts is vast. For one, we have to suffer through terrible papers. None more so than the one by University of Arizona’s Michael Worobey.
Many scientists agreed that the Chinese data was not trustworthy. They signed a petition to that effect. Dr. Worobey, one of the co-authors, nonetheless snuck off and worked in his basement to produce a paper using the data he’d criticized. He claimed it could be used to pinpoint the epicenter of the outbreak, drawing concentric circles around the market as if the Chinese are little ants never going far from their food hole. We have to suppose the virus can travel thousands of miles in a day after the market, but never traveled 8 miles before it. It can travel 8 miles from a direction that’s not the lab, but it can’t travel 8 miles from the direction of the lab. To read this paper is to suffer as one of Worobey’s ants.
It’s safe to say that Tony Fauci is familiar with the idea that scientists and governments may lie, or weigh some high stakes for themselves above the truth, or innocently kid themselves. It’s safe to say that he has faced the temptation of a noble lie. Like many public health officials, he probably weighs the tradeoffs differently from the rest of us. But there’s a spectrum of noble lies. On one end we say we’re having a great day when we aren’t. On the other, we become strangers to our own brains. That we should leave simple reasoning to scientists is on the bad end.
So last week Tony Fauci sipped lukewarm water in front of the cameras no longer needed as a truth teller, or a liar. What he represents now is the character of science in the face of high stakes. How much can we trust someone when the stakes are so high? What if they convince themselves of something untrue? Or morally right?
Dr. Fauci didn’t speak at the hearings but he will no doubt speak to us again and the stakes are very high, maybe too high for one person. What he represents is no less than the warranty of the human brain. The worst outcome may be false hope that it was all true.