"Teaching the controversy" and other terrible takes on COVID-19 origins
A new campaign to turn retconned fanfiction into teaching material is underway
Manufactured controversies for the classroom?
A recent opinion article in statnews by Michaela Kerrissey and Richard J. Tofel has caught my eye on Bluesky.
In it, the authors argued that the origin dispute should serve as a case study in how public-health agencies, science communicators, and media have supposedly struggled under conditions of ambiguity; how they treated and still treat the origin as a taboo topic, and that:
Initial concerns about the possibility of lab involvement gave way to the forging of an apparent early scientific consensus on zoonotic spread. Countering that consensus became very costly; at least one scientist who did so received enough threats to consider changing her name.
This consensus, however, has now at least partially unraveled in the face of multiple investigations.
If you are not so familiar with what they are talking about; these are basically regurgitating three totemic falsehoods highlighting how eagerly they gulped down the lab leak koolaid.
nobody “forged” an early consensus; unless the authors believe in Anthony Fauci teleconference / proximal origins conspiracy myths
The authors reference Alina Chan, who was rewarded immediately, never changed her name, never faced any real cost but rather became a media darling by playing the contrarian martyrer. In contrast, virologists that actually worked on the origin question faced incredibly dire costs, from defunding to death threats, from smear campaigns to security incidents at their homes
The scientific consensus has solidified over the years, and the investigations the authors link to are unscientific political fictions from GOP congressional operatives
Funnily, the authors claimed that they hold no position on the origin questions but somehow align 100% with lab leak lore.
Within science, the consensus remains that zoonotic spillover is overwhelmingly supported by the evidence. The many mutually-contradictory lab leak speculations lack comparable empirical grounding and are often contradicted by hard evidence.
The authors fail the basic task of recognizing the line between genuine scientific ambiguity and manufactured controversy
Anyways, that does not stop the authors from explaining their alternative history of events as a supposed failure of public health scientists to grapple with uncertainty.
The lessons here involve both management and communications […]
Beyond this, we think students (and maybe all of us) benefit from exposure to the arguments of those who believe passionately that they know something, even as passionate advocates reach very different, often irreconcilable conclusions — and even if they are partisan.
Apparently, not the strength of evidence, but the strength of belief behind a position should guide our serious considerations and public health communication.
With this simple appeal to “teach the controversy”, the authors fall back on a tried-and-tested tactic from the past. “Teaching the controversy” was a manipulation campaign by creationists from the conservative Discovery institute to subvert evolutionary theory in schools. It manufactured a controversy surrounding evolutionary theory and claimed that fairness requires educating students with a “critical analysis of evolution”, basically that creationism should be taught side-by-side.
Maybe the authors should also have learned from the past they are trying to recreate. One should not respond to manufactured controversies by taking them serious, but contextualizing and questioning them:
The scientific community and science education organizations have replied that there is no scientific controversy regarding the validity of the theory of evolution and that the controversy exists solely in religion and politics.
-American Association for the Advancement of Science. February 16, 2006
But alright, let us be cheritable and assume they were gullible and that they honestly see the origin topic as something that offers a primer in dealing with uncertainty in public health.
I would then still argue that a more robust approach would be to teach why scientific controversies emerge — how media incentives, partisanship, and online ecosystems amplify extremists views — rather than treating both hypotheses as symmetrical. This preserves the authors’ stated goal (teaching epistemic humility) without furthering unsupported narratives.
Blaming the scapegoats
Unfortunately, when continuing to read their opinion piece, the intentions and worldview of the authors become hard to explain cheritably.
We need to come to grips with the root causes of this loss and avoid the easy out of apportioning responsibility to bad actors only. Loss of trust also comes to those that are well intentioned but do not foresee — and do not return to address — the eventual consequences of their early actions, from either a management or communications perspective.
What the authors really do here is to perpetuate not only a manufactured controversy, but something more sinister; they validate the anti-science narrative that the scientists who have been turned to scapegoats by politics and bad actors are to blame for their own circumstances:
This brings them strongly in-line with an effort by many in media and politics that long gave up on pandemic introspection in favor of serving the traumatized public a convenient scapegoat: science and scientists.
I have lost count on how many supposedly “polite society” pundits and outlets have moved in the last years towards blaming scientists for the loss of trust in science, if not for the hardships and trauma of the pandemic itself.
And while the pandemic origin controversy often seems far behind, those who profited the most from it are still working every day to entrench their positions and excert influence over public understanding. All while ordinary science and scientists lose their independence, funding, freedom of inquiry and societal trust and goodwill.
So what can we do about it?
This has been a question I find myself increasingly occupied with. The participatory nature of online discourse makes it clear that influence flows through networks, that communities often decide what is heard, seen, believed. Silence is surrender, and many scientists are waking up to this reality:
To defend themselves, they [scientists] had no choice but to recognize the political battlefield they were placed on.
And you are right—scientists are now more outspoken. They’ve realized that silence isn’t neutrality; it’s surrender. If they don’t defend evidence-based inquiry, no one else will. Scientists are a minority in every country. Journalists are weakened by collapsing media ecosystems. If both remain silent, truth itself is left undefended.
Of course, scientists must also reflect on their role. For too long, many lived in ivory towers, buffered by public trust and generous funding. The pandemic fractured that trust. Politicians, charlatans, and business interests exploited the gap between science and society, deepening public mistrust. Bridging that gap now requires effort on both sides: scientists must engage more directly with the public, and citizens must reclaim science as a defense against manipulation. - Philipp Markolin, www.wsws.org
So while I spend most of my time these days researching and interviewing experts from many different fields to map out a solution roadmap, I will still try to be present and participate in correcting pandemic origin discourse.
Because althought it is exhausting, it continues to be important.
Today more than ever, I believe we need to have an honest account of what happened in this origin controversy, not regurgitate retconned bullshit, to adequately address what happened to us as a society.
If you are new, unfamiliar or have forgotten a lot about the details surrounding the lab leak narratives, you are not alone. Matt and Chris from the Decoding the Gurus pod created a fantastic primer on the topic while talking about my book:
If you have any questions, feel free to write in the comments or reach out; and I will try to answer them best I can.
Stay safe, stay smart, stay connected!