COVID Contrarians Get Galileo Backwards
Revolution Requires Expertise
When Expertise Becomes Disqualifying
If the world’s preeminent research institution wants to hear the best science on “The Search for the Origin of COVID-19”, a lapsed ornithologist seems like an odd choice for a speaker. Yet, when NIH Director, Jay Bhattacharya launched his “Scientific Freedom Lecture Series” on March, 20, that’s exactly where he turned.
His chosen speaker, Matt Ridley, a British science writer and hereditary viscount, hasn’t published original research since 1984, when he was second author on “The social organization of feral peafowl”.
But then, Bhattacharya himself is an economist who began declaring himself an epidemiologist during the pandemic, a move as meaningful as me trying to declare myself an economist during a financial crisis. He rose to prominence by challenging experts in virology and epidemiology with a study that became a wellspring for the COVID contrarianism. He rode the resulting wave of misinformation from Santa Clara to Bethesda. When federal health officials attempted to limit its spread, he cried censorship. Now, he is using the institutional authority of the NIH to elevate voices that share his grievance.
In this framing, dissent, by its very nature, earns presumed legitimacy. Those who dispute the scientific consensus, regardless of their own area of expertise, are wrapped in Galileo’s cloak. The subject matter experts are the inquisitors.
They have the story exactly backwards.
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The Galileo Myth
Galileo was anything but an outsider to astronomy. By the time he declared that the earth was not the center of the universe, he had spent forty years meticulously recording the motions of the stars and planets. He designed and built his own telescopes and even ground his own lenses.
When he published his controversial theories in 1632, the men who attacked him were not astronomers. They were theologians and Church officials. They never disputed his data. They cited scripture. They objected to his conclusions because they contradicted Church doctrine but ignored the data that supported them. Several of his inquisitors reportedly even refused to look through his telescope.
Galileo was a man who understood astronomy as well or better than anyone in the world. He took on the rich and powerful interests of his time and suffered their wrath. The opposition certainly did not come from astronomers who had been struggling to understand the solar system since Copernicus began poking holes in the church’s earth centered universe almost a century earlier.
The Myth of the COVID Contrarians
The COVID contrarians look nothing like Galileo.
First consider the tale of Bhattacharya. Six years ago today, he launched the study that provided the foundation for the myth that COVID was “no worse than the flu”, a claim the virus itself would later disprove. He was not remotely an expert in virology or epidemiology but dismissed the input of those who were.
That research was partly funded by the founder of Jet Blue. The Great Barrington Declaration which grew out of that study, was backed by a Koch funded economic think tank. Bhattacharya didn’t challenge power. He was funded by it.
Its recommendation that we abandon population level public health protection was dismissed by then NIH director, Francis Collins, as “fringe epidemiology”.
Within weeks of its release, the US entered the deadliest surge of the entire pandemic.
But none of that stopped Bhattacharya from decrying efforts to limit the spread of this misinformation as censorship.
The Pattern
There is an entire cadre of COVID contrarians who follow a similar pattern. Marty Makary, who spent the pandemic minimizing the risk of COVID-19 and criticizing the vaccine while working as a regular commentator for Fox News is a gastrointestinal surgeon. Vinay Prasad, an oncologist who got his funding from an Enron billionaire, compared public health workers to Nazis and teamed up with Makary on a paper declaring vaccines more dangerous than COVID. RFK Jr. a lawyer with abundant family wealth and no science background at all, now leads Makary, Prasad, and Bhattacharya in their war on the expert community.
Researchers who truly changed the scientific consensus look more like Charles Darwin, who spent twenty years immersed in the minutiae of evolution before publishing, On the Origin of Species. The fiercest opposition came not from naturalists but from clergymen and those who saw evolution as a threat to the social order. Or like Einstein, who had spent years immersed in the frontier of theoretical physics on problems his contemporaries already recognized. He brought testable predictions, not reinterpretation. John Snow was a practicing physician who laid the foundation for modern epidemiology because he needed it to prove that cholera was linked to drinking water. Those who opposed him were miasma theorists with a philosophical commitment to a competing framework and water companies with financial reasons to reject his findings.
Even Alina Chan, the molecular biologist who teamed up with Ridley to argue in support of the lab leak has no experience working with dangerous viruses, infectious disease epidemiology or wildlife microbiology.
The Test
The next time someone claims they are being persecuted like Galileo, apply the test:
Are they steeped in the relevant field, with years of work in the specific area they are challenging? Or are they an outsider with credentials in something else?
Are they addressing an inconsistency in the data that experts in the field already recognize? Or are they importing a conclusion from outside and looking for evidence to support it?
Are they openly assessing all available data? Or are they cherry picking research to fit a preferred narrative?
Does the opposition come from the expert community acting on evidence, or from outside forces with vested interests?
Galileo passed all four. Darwin passed all four. Snow passed all four. Einstein passed all four.
Ridley fails all four. Bhattacharya, Makary, Prasad, and Kennedy fail every one. And now they run HHS.
These are not the heirs of Galileo. They are the heirs of the men who refused to look through the telescope, because they had already decided what they would see.
The difference is that this time, the Inquisition has the keys to the NIH.
Terrific piece - and the juxtaposition of the timing of the Great Barrington Declaration and the Alpha wave is truly a picture worth a thousand words.
Another good article!