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Government Medicine United Kingdom United States Politics

What Happens When Epidemiologists are Undermined By Politics? (msn.com) 504

Posted by EditorDavid from the wisdom-of-crowds dept.
Earlier this month Slashdot covered the Imperial College in London forecast of "what happens if the U.S. does absolutely nothing to combat COVID-19," which predicted 2.2 million deaths just in the U.S. and another 510,000 in Great Britain. The paper was co-written by Neil Ferguson, one of the world's leading epidemiologists, and "launched leaders in both countries into action," according to the Washington Post.

Earlier this month Ferguson posted on Twitter that Microsoft and GitHub are working to "document, refactor and extend" the thousands of lines of C code written over 13 years ago to run pandemic simulations, "to allow others to use [it] without the multiple days training it would currently require (and which we don't have time to give)."

But the Washington Post's national health correspondent and senior political reporter look at a new twist this week: In recent days, a growing contingent of Trump supporters have pushed the narrative that health experts are part of a deep-state plot to hurt Trump's reelection efforts by damaging the economy and keeping the United States shut down as long as possible. Trump himself pushed this idea in the early days of the outbreak... After Ferguson gave new testimony to British officials Wednesday...Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrongly stated that in his testimony Ferguson's projection had been "corrected." The chyron on her show Thursday night stated, "Faulty models may be skewing COVID-19 data...."

But in fact, Ferguson had not revised his projections in his testimony, which he made clear in interviews and Twitter. His earlier study had made clear the estimate of 500,000 deaths in Britain and 2.2 million in the United States projected what could happen if both took absolutely no action against the coronavirus. The new estimate of 20,000 deaths in Britain was a projected result now that Britain had implemented strict restrictions, which this week came to include a full lockdown...

[O]ne factor many modelers failed to predict was how politicized their work would become in the era of President Trump, and how that in turn could affect their models.
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What Happens When Epidemiologists are Undermined By Politics? More

What Happens When Epidemiologists are Undermined By Politics?

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  • Fox News Lies Shock (Score:3, Funny)

    by nagora ( 177841 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @02:38AM (#59887078)

    I'm stunned and amazed that such a reputable organisation would deliberately say something that was not true.

    I assume heads will roll.

    • Well, they're aiming for Ferguson's in this case.

    • That’s nothing new either, and certainly not something unique to “the era of president Trump”. Suggestive language from the Post there.

      • That’s nothing new either, and certainly not something unique to “the era of president Trump”. Suggestive language from the Post there.

        Yep. Fox used to tell lies under Obama, too.

    • I'm stunned and amazed that such a reputable organisation would deliberately say something that was not true.

      I assume heads will roll.

      Nope, just eyes will roll.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      Everyone wants to use the Corona virus for their own political gains.
      It's like a bull rampaging thru the city and people just trying to lure the bull to wreck the rival's china shop and booing at the people trying to stop the bull.

  • Turn back now (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Delicious Pun ( 3864033 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @02:56AM (#59887114)
    Holy fuck this comments section is going to be terrible. Just turn back. There will be nothing of actual value here.

    • They're not even addressing the question!

      To answer it: "What Happens When Epidemiologists are Undermined By Politics?"

      What happens is the current clusterfuck that's unfolding on TV.

      • Media driven hysteria compounding unlikely scenarios from models isn't pretty.

        Dr. Birx: Coronavirus Data Doesn't Match The Doomsday Media Predictions [realclearpolitics.com]

      • They're not even addressing the question!

        To answer it: "What Happens When Epidemiologists are Undermined By Politics?"

        What happens is the current clusterfuck that's unfolding on TV.

        I'll address it too. People die. Lots of people die needlessly. What more do you need? The USA had more warning than South Korea and is further from China than South Korea. The comparison of the pandemic in South Korea [wikipedia.org] which was one of the earlies countries outside China to get the disease and so should be one of the worst affected compared to what's happening in the UK [wikipedia.org] where WHO advice was ignored for months and is still not fully implemented or the pandemic in the USA [wikipedia.org] clearly shows that there are man

      • They're not even addressing the question!

        To answer it: "What Happens When Epidemiologists are Undermined By Politics?"

        That's because they're undermined by politics.
        Politics is everything now. You can't just turn to the news to see what's going on, because you first have to decide whether you want the left-wing or right-wing version of the news.

    • Can't...turn...away...help....me

    • The value is that while things suck in my country, it's comforting to see that it can still be worse.

  • American CEO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by khchung ( 462899 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @03:04AM (#59887122) Journal

    [O]ne factor many modelers failed to predict was how politicized their work would become in the era of President Trump, and how that in turn could affect their models.

    I guess these researchers, not surprisingly, never worked in any large US companies.

    What Trump did was essentially SOP of any US CEO:

    • * When you hear bad news, you pretend you didn't hear it
    • * When pressed, say whatever that will make it sound like you are on top of the problem and make stock holders happy
    • * When further bad news came, say it will be fixed in the near future, make promises with good visual impact - "by [certain time], you will see ....". That will put huge pressure on your workers to make it happen
    • * When all the above didn't work, say what your experts had been telling you all along, forget what you have said previously.

    • Re:American CEO (Score:5, Funny)

      by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @03:40AM (#59887176)
      If you're running the country like a business, you're treating CDC briefings like sales pitches: "You've got 5 minutes to sell your idea, and then I'm turning on Hannity."

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        If you're running the country like a business, you're treating CDC briefings like sales pitches: "You've got 5 minutes to sell your idea, and then I'm turning on Hannity."

        I think every InfoSec person knows *exactly* what this is like. You want to use how much on antivirus/firewalls/IDS/backup/disaster recovery with no immediate ROI? One of many reasons I got out of that area.

    • Did you mean this [twitter.com]?

  • Simple (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @03:14AM (#59887132)

    This is one area where reality kills those that ignore it pretty fast. Ignore the experts in an epidemic, cause a lot of deaths, ideally including the ones ignoring the experts as well, so there is at least a small chance of something positive coming out of it. For example, the delayed response of a certain orange-haired fool will have pushed the number of dead this time up by at least 10x. Pretty much the same in Spain and the UK, and probably Italy, with Spain being a bit ahead and Italy being a lot ahead in the time-line.

    In contrast, global warming (which is several orders of magnitude more deadly) has the main problem that anybody that can do basic fact-checking can by now see the catastrophe coming, but it is a long, long way off and those that still massively profit from doing nothing or accelerating the catastrophe will be difficult to take to account for their evil. The completely invalid excuse of "nobody could have predicted this" also gets a lot more effective the longer the time between cause and effect, because people in general have short memories.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Problem is our individual health now depends on our neighbours. So does the economy. If everyone sticks to the rules this can be over as quickly as possible with as few deaths as possible, but as long as there are selfish asshats and misinformation being spread from the very top of government that isn't going to happen.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Zocalo ( 252965 )
        This, and I guess the geographic distribution of Reps/Dems too - e.g. more aligned with urban/rural lines than state ones, per the Purple America [wikipedia.org] map. Those that are more likely to take Trump's worldview on Covid-19 and dismiss the contrary science as "Fake News" are more likely to be Republicans, and since many of those tend to live in more rural areas, they're going to be at a reduced risk of contracting it by virtue of fewer interactions, so it's going to balance out somewhat. That's not to say that th

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed. Although there are a lot of morons that not only tolerate proven liars at the top, but seem to want them. So it is not only some "asshats". It is more like a major fraction of the population has their heads up their backsides and does not understand that lying about reality does not actually change it and often makes things worse. It is like people desperately want to believe in fairy-tales and magic. (For a pretty impressive data-point just look at how many people are still religious in this suppos

    • Ignore the experts in an epidemic, cause a lot of deaths, ideally including the ones ignoring the experts as well, so there is at least a small chance of something positive coming out of it. ... because people in general have short memories.

      ~gweihir

      Indiscriminate loss "ideally" resulting in "at least a small chance" to produce "something positive" demonstrates a "memory" loss of what words mean within a sentence serving a premise to assign motivation to an agenda.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        I cannot even parse that fully and what I can parse makes no sense. Overly complex "statement" generator that assembles "sentences" from a give list of words?

    • Re:Simple (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @05:27AM (#59887374)

      This is one area where reality kills those that ignore it pretty fast.

      If only that were true. The reality is that those people who put the best effort into ignoring it and spreading ignorance to the masses are usually the people who will be just fine. If Trump got the virus now he'd get the best healthcare in the world. If Fox News correspondents got the virus they'll likely be fine, but if they weren't they'd be replaced quite easily with the next person who can easily spread ignorance.

      The people who will suffer the most are those who believe lies fed to them, and 3rd parties who are caught in the crossfire of stupidity.

      • But their stock portfolios will suffer.

        You can own media, you distort the narrative. But when the economy stumbles, and stock plunges, their perceived networth wll reduce. The closest thing the Republicans have that passes for a soul is the feelings they have for their stock market portfolio. So, yeah, these days, stock market is the only thing that can send a message to the political leaders that they can not ignore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jzanu ( 668651 )
      I propose an old fashion but much faster and more ethical solution: shooting at dawn for any coronavirus denialist found to have caused the death of anyone else.

  • To be fair... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Rei ( 128717 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @03:21AM (#59887146) Homepage

    ... the impacts of the lockdown are not the only factor updated by Ferguson in his model. He also updated the pre-lockdown R0 from 2,5 to 3. This may not sound like much of a change, but because it's an exponential factor, it implies that far more people have the disease relative to how many have been detected (something already shown by the Iceland/deCODE and Italy/Vo studies).

    You cannot separate his 20k figure from the lockdown impacts, which have also been factored into the model. But nor is the original 550k figure valid anymore, either. Ferguson has not "walked back" anything, but the model has evolved in several different ways. The 550k figure should no longer be cited. But the 20k figure should only be cited in the context of the lockdown.

    The changes to the model also shift the peak date, from nov.-dec. to just 2-3 weeks from now. Ferguson has also clarified that he never thought locking down the economy for a year or two was actually plausible, that even a short stop will be paid for for years or decades to come; he's more focused on how and when to restart the economy in the near-term. He wants to see the UK implement the sort of policies that South Korea has (which - unrelated - Iceland has already done), which allowed it to avoid a lockdown. Ferguson also added that we don't know how many of the people dying would have died anyway this year, but "It might be as much as half to two-thirds of the deaths we're seeing from COVID-19, because it's affecting people who are either at the end of their lives or in poor health conditions. So I think these considerations are very valid." Basically, one of the biggest changes has been his tone; the original report left people with the impression that the only solution is for us all to live in caves for the next two years and there will be people hauling carts in the street shouting, "BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!".

    But the original report was not "retracted" in any way. Just obsoleted, and with a lot more nuance added.

    Summary here [reason.com].

    • . But nor is the original 550k figure valid anymore, either. Ferguson has not "walked back" anything, but the model has evolved in several different ways. The 550k figure should no longer be cited.

      Yes the original figure is still valid. He says as much himself... [twitter.com]

      I think it would be helpful if I cleared up some confusion that has emerged in recent days. Some have interpreted my evidence to a UK parliamentary committee as indicating we have substantially revised our assessments of the potential mortality impact of COVID-19. This is not the case. Indeed, if anything, our latest estimates suggest that the virus is slightly more transmissible than we previously thought. Our lethality estimates remain unchanged. My evidence to Parliament referred to the deaths we assess might occur in the UK in the presence of the very intensive social distancing and other public health interventions now in place. Without those controls, our assessment remains that the UK would see the scale of deaths reported in our study (namely, up to approximately 500 thousand).

      If nothing is done, it's still the base line number. If people don't know what the alternative will be, they aren't going to take things seriously or put up with the mitigation measures to hopefully bring it down to 20k.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rei ( 128717 )

        I had not seen that tweet. That's a strange comment, because he did increase R0 in the latest study, which has a profound impact on the outcome, independent of the lockdown effects (as it greatly changes the estimated current number of cases, and thus greatly changes the IFR).

        • Maybe it changed the rate, but the hospitals were all overwhelmed anyway so didn't make much difference to the outcome with no mitigation.

          But with mitigation it makes a bigger difference because the hospitals aren't getting overwhelmed as much as the earlier predictions. Or herd immunity was built up faster. Or the lockdown was shorter and so politically easier to implement. Just guessing really.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          From the above article:

          "What we've been seeing in Europe in the last week or two is a rate of growth of the epidemic which is faster than we expected from early data in China," said Ferguson, who testified from his home via video link. "So we are revising our central, best estimate of the reproduction number [i.e., the number of people the average carrier can be expected to infect] to something on the order of 3 or a little bit above rather than about a 2.5 level." In his view, that revision "actually adds

  • $2 trillion (Score:4, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @03:26AM (#59887152)

    We spend $2 trillion on bailouts and paying people to buy toilet paper, but only $1 billion of that is for research? Why not put real money into finding cures for disease? I mean put like $50 billion into it FFS. And yes there are lots to do, like figuring out how to modulate the immune system, how to make a vaccine against this thing. Making molecules that can bind and disable the viral proteins etc. FFS there is no money put into that stuff and people wonder why we can't cure this stuff.

  • Perhaps a new generation with new standards. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tgibson ( 131396 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @03:26AM (#59887154) Homepage

    Perhaps the experience of the pandemic will change the values of the political coming-of-age generation. The prescriptive educational movies from the 1950's are quaint and silly to us now, but seem less so when you place them in the context of a generation that came of age during WW2. This pandemic may well shake the younger generation out of their stupor and nudge them towards values that are less prone to being influenced by showmanship and more amenable to solving problems through earnest discussions, even if uncomfortable.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • At one extreme you have idiot presidents and at the other you have top people in a science field, so it is a no-brainer...

    however, the really interesting arguments are in the middle ground, where doctors, economists, and all varieties of experts, are debating what’s a least worst course of action, and the answers are not at all easy.

    As one very high level and experienced global expert put it, the strategy of lockdown is medieval. As another expert familiar with NICE operations put it, we are spending

  • It's like watching a 70s disaster movie (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @04:45AM (#59887302)

    I will never again moan about how unrealistic they are.

    You know the movies. Where the world renowned scientist notices that something is going terribly wrong and tries to warn politicians and people alike, only to be ignored and belittled, has his reputation ruined and descends into alcoholism, only to see his worse predictions come true.

    Only that in reality, he won't be redeemed and returns to save the day.

    • Remember in The Andromeda Strain how the scientists were shocked to find out the facility they were in was built way ahead of time.

      "We knew something like this would happen eventually."

      Obviously their government had more foresight than we have.

      This is one of the most plausible scientific epidemic movies ever made and for some reason it's only available on pay-per-view.

  • Actuaries, actually (Score:3)

    by GerryHattrick ( 1037764 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @05:12AM (#59887348)
    Years ago, when I worked on the response to (then-new) 'AIDS', epidemiologists were very helpful. But we shared an office with a qualified Actuary, and she kept us all very practical. When it came to persuading management, her numbers carried more weight than our elegant monte-carlo simulations. (footnote: the result was less bad over time than anyone had expected).
  • Trump wouldn't say climate change is happening if Antarctica disappeared and he was standing waist deep in water. I wouldn't trust him to make proper decisions on the pandemic either. It's politics and business first, logic and science second and he thinks he's always right about everything and should have the final say. That said, as an American I'm sick of solving the world's problems with my tax dollars. China caused it, everyone else go fix it.

  • literally every side has the same reaction (Score:4, Interesting)

    by superwiz ( 655733 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @05:45AM (#59887406) Journal
    Every political party in every country reacts to this in the same way:
    There is less than 250 ppl who are infected: this is less severe than the flu, there is no reason to panic. We are well prepared.
    There is less than a 1000 ppl who are infected. It may get worse, so, please, wash your hands everyone.
    There is less than 5000 ppl who are infected, please avoid crowded places because this can some people
    There is more than 2000 ppl who are dead. If you can't listen to reason and go outside and you don't absolutely have to, we are gonna put you in jail, you idiots.

    Hope dies last. This isn't unique to any political party or any country. This is literally happening everywhere. Survivorship bias is real.

  • Except for South Korea (who learned their lesson in 2015 with MERS), no Western leader was willing to do what was necessary to stop this virus from spreading. If you wanted to halt COVID-19, you needed to take quick and decisive action the moment any case was detected. None of this pansy self-quarantining of people who test positive or suspect they might be infected. The entire town or city needed to be quarantined the moment a case was detected, with police and the military patrolling the streets to enforce the quarantine.

    Unlike China (which had no problem doing this since they're an authoritarian state) and South Korea, and possibly Japan (haven't heard much news from them, but their citizens are incredibly compliant to authority), the rest of the West likely isn't going to stop this. They're on a trajectory where this becomes like the flu - the majority of their population will eventually catch it. The only difference politics will make in those countries is whether or not they can keep the number of sick at any given time below their hospital capacity. Because none of their leaders had the guts to face the public backlash that swift and strict quarantines would've caused because "it hasn't even killed as many people as the flu!" Heck, the European press was chastising Trump for banning all flights from the EU to the U.S., saying it was a pointless and ineffective gesture. When within a week their countries did the same thing and sealed their borders. That's how allergic democracies are to restricting freedom of movement.

    The moment this was detected in that Washington nursing home, the entire town should've been locked down and sealed. When it was detected in NYC, the bridges and tunnels to the city should've been closed for a minimum 3 weeks. Yes those closures would've cost hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. But by failing to nip this in the bud, we've now guaranteed that this epidemic will cost us trillions of dollars.

    • Re:No Western leader was willing to do the necessa (Score:4, Informative)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @06:58AM (#59887566)

      Having read up a bit beyond mainstream narrative, this is simply not true because it's a half-truth. The speed and quality of South Korea response talked about in mainstream media narrative is only part of truth. The other half however is missing utterly and its critical to understanding South Korean success.

      It's completely correct that having been hit by two previous China Flus this century and then MERS, they decided that enough was enough and created a system to contain future China Flus. It's completely correct to point out the speed with which limits on movement of people was exceptional, as was their effort to test everyone in infected areas rather than just those with symptoms. That's half of the story.

      The other half is "how did it get in?" It got in through a church which had overwhelmingly young worshippers who lead a relatively introverted lifestyle. They didn't have to deal with "it's in through all our international airports carried by people without/with minor flu symptoms" issue that other Western nations had to deal with, because once the initial problem occurred, they started locking things down. And initial infection was exceptionally easy (from institutional point of view) to lock down.

      If it's in your nursing homes for the elderly, it's already too late for a South Korean style response, because it means that people who spread it likely came on an airplane. Which means you have the same problem across your nation with multiple entry points, many of which are have no symptoms and are infectious.

      And that will require a much more invasive response to properly lock down propagation.

  • He's Richard Epstein, as reported in the New Yorker: [newyorker.com]

    Epstein, a professor at New York University School of Law, published the article on the Web site of the Hoover Institution, on March 16th. In it, he questioned the World Health Organization’s decision to declare the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, said that “public officials have gone overboard,” and suggested that about five hundred people would die from COVID-19 in the U.S. Epstein later updated his estimate to five thousand, saying that the previous number had been an error. So far, there have been more than two thousand coronavirus-related fatalities in America; epidemiologists’ projections of the total deaths range widely, depending on the success of social distancing and the availability of medical resources, but they tend to be much higher than Epstein’s. (On Sunday, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, estimated that there could be between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand deaths in the U.S.)

    Epstein is a right wing pundit run amok. He thinks he knows better then any epidemiologist or medical professional and confuses his lawyerly ability to argue with scientific reasoning. His thinking is ass-backwards: the result comes first and the bullshit gobbledygook only exists to justify the conclusion, except it doesn't work.

    Read the article, it's the best way to see how "post truth" Conservativism enables irrational behavior.

  • Virus (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Schmo Schollie ( 6164562 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @09:02AM (#59887960)
    Is a virus. Doesn't matter where it originated, only matters how it was initially perceived and handled per jurisdiction. The evidence points to "very poor" as the answer to both categories in areas that haven't seen a drop off or plateau in new cases death.

    Not to mention about 5-10% of confirmed patients have relapsed after being deemed "recovered". It isn't just a one-and-done. changes everything.....the fact that we live in a reality where misinformation goes as far to call it a hoax is fucking insulting.

    My mom is a doctor on the front line short of supplies and one of my best friends, in his 30s mind you, still has trashed lungs as he continues to recover from getting the virus.

  • The party of stupid (Score:3)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Monday March 30, 2020 @09:36AM (#59888096)
    Not for nothing is the Republican Party now known as the party of stupid, even by some of those ideologically aligned with it.

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