Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks

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On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease COVID-19,ย was officially a โ€œpublic health emergency of international concern.โ€ At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and deaths in China had reachedย 170.

The very next day, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) published an article titled, โ€œCoronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will Itย Be?โ€

โ€œIs coronavirus worse than the flu?โ€ it began. โ€œNo, not evenย close.โ€

โ€œIt already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it probably won’t go far,โ€ ACSH added. โ€œAnd the American healthcare system is excellent at dealing with this sort ofย problem.โ€

ACSH is one of several organizations promotingย climate science denial that are now spreading misinformation on the coronavirus, with potentially deadlyย consequences.

American Council onย Science andย Health?

The ACSH presents itself to the public as a proponent of โ€œpeer-reviewed mainstream science,โ€ in the words of the organizationโ€™s mission. Their experts have frequently been quoted in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and they pen columns criticizing journalists who write critically about companies like Monsanto. Theย groupย hasย received funding from oil giants includingย ExxonMobil, as well as from the agribusiness, chemical and tobacco industries to name aย few.

Whenย it comes to climate change, ACSH has published a steady stream of articles downplaying climate science and criticizing efforts to slow carbon emissions โ€” even in the face of a mountain of peer-reviewed research on the climateย crisis.

ACSH slammed the medical journal The Lancet as โ€œan ideologically driven outlet with a very clear political agenda where being sensationalist and culturally woke trumps evidence and reasonabilityโ€ (after the Lancet published an article titled โ€œThe carbon footprintโ€). The purported โ€œpro-scienceโ€ advocacy group hasย labeled Greta Thunbergโ€™s activism โ€œdoomsday prophesying.โ€ It has (falsely) suggested that climate change is less of a concern because โ€œmore people die in winter than in summerโ€ (theyย donโ€™t).

And thatโ€™s all just in the past nine months. The ACSHโ€™s stance against climate action dates back to at least 1997.

When it comes to coronavirus,ย now a global pandemic, ACSHโ€™s authors rushed to judgment. They assured readers that there was little to worry about, and put some of the same faulty thinking that underlies their stance on climate change onย display.

ACSH isnโ€™t alone.ย Other organizations that have also engaged in climate science denial made similar missteps on COVID-19, including prominent organizations that fanned the flames of conspiracy theories or confidently promoted complacency when circumstances required rapidย action.

To be clear: No one should be faulted for failing to foresee precisely how severe of a problem COVID-19 would prove to be. None of us has a crystal ball and few, if any,ย expected this situation to unfold in this particularย way.

But these organizations published positions that not only wound up being laden with false reassurances, but they did so based on claims that they made confidently at the time that now appear to have been false orย misleading.

Defending Conspiracyย Theorists

Take for example, the American Enterprise Instituteโ€™s (AEI) publications on COVID-19.

AEI fanned the flames of a conspiracy theory that claims COVID-19 was developed for biologicalย warfare.

AEI resident scholar Michael Rubin published a piece titled, โ€œWas coronavirus a bioweapon? We donโ€™t know, but history shows we canโ€™t trustย China.โ€

The article defended Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas for his Fox News interview circulating theย theory.

Roger Bate, an AEI visiting scholar, also penned a Januaryย 29 piece headlined, โ€œThe media is driving the overreaction to theย coronavirus.โ€

The piece argues against action on COVID-19, without citing any evidence about the virus itself, but instead based on characterizations and generalizations. โ€œIโ€™ve seen several news reports essentially implying that, even if quarantining travelers or imposing travel bans to China are overreactions to the risk of the coronavirus, this is ok because itโ€™s better to be safe than sorry,โ€ he wrote. โ€œCompanies are so fearful of negative press that they seem to base much of their own rhetoric on what the media and liberal elites demand. While some of this is arguably harmless โ€” note much of the hot air at Davos about climate change โ€” when it becomes corporate policy and is echoed by government policy, it then has realย consequences.โ€

โ€œA contagion will happen at some point, and itโ€™s important we recognize it and react,โ€ heย added.

โ€œUnless the coronavirus mutates into something far more dangerous,โ€ he concluded, โ€œthis isnโ€™tย it.โ€

To be sure, there was not a visible consensus on those views within AEI.ย That same day, another AEI fellow published an article calling the coronavirus a โ€œbig economic deal,โ€ citing its impact on Chinaโ€™s economy. And a three-paragraph AEI post later labeled claims that COVID-19 is a bioweapon โ€œfakeย news.โ€

Those other pieces, however, do not undo any impacts from AEI publishing claims that proved to beย baseless.

Readingย Comprehension

Other times, articles downplaying the risks from COVID-19, penned by organizations that have adopted climate-science denying stances, present arguments laced with logicalย fallacies.

In some cases, itโ€™s not clear whether the authors understood the comments they wereย critiquing.

Take, for instance, the Cato Instituteโ€™s March 4, 2020 column on โ€œCOVID-19 Deaths and Incredible WHO Estimates.โ€ That piece attacks a statement by the WHOโ€™s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was quoted in The New York Times as saying, โ€œGlobally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVIDโ€โ€‹19 cases have died.โ€

Catoโ€™s column labeled that statistic โ€œsensationalist nonsense.โ€ The number doesnโ€™t take into account the fact that mild cases are more likely to go unreported, Catoโ€™s Alan Reynoldsย wrote.

That, of course, is exactly why Dr. Adhanom included the word โ€œreportedโ€ in his description of the statistic. Thereโ€™s no ball being hidden here. And in case readers missed that word and its importance, The Timesโ€™ report included an explanation of that precise context. (โ€œBut the figure came loaded with caveats,โ€ The Times wrote. โ€œExperts, including those at the WHO, say that when more is known about the epidemic, the death rate will be considerablyย lower.โ€)

One day later, President Trump took a similar tack to Catoโ€™s, calling the 3.4 precent statistic โ€œreally a falseย number.โ€

โ€œNow, this is just a hunch, but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this,โ€ Trump added.

Itโ€™s not clear where exactly Trump picked up his impression โ€” but then of course, Trump has his own well-known stance on climateย science.

‘Not Evenย Close’

The author of the ACSH piece claiming that coronavirus is โ€œnot even closeโ€ to as bad as the flu was Dr. Alex Berezowย โ€” a PhDย in microbiology, according to his bio, not a medical doctor. Berezow has been interviewed about coronavirus precautions by the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Insider, and Yahooย News.

Berezow doubled down on his claim that the flu is a worse threat than coronavirus in a Februaryย 18 article. โ€œInfluenza is far deadlier than the Wuhan coronavirus, but few people worry about it,โ€ that article begins, referring to the virus with the Chinese city initially at the center of the outbreak (a practiceย that’s since been viewed as stigmatizing and racist, amid a growing number of cases of stigma-motivated racialย violence).

A few weeks later, Berezow changed his tune, offering readers assurances that even if COVID-19 was far more deadly than the flu, there was still little reason for alarm in an article calling media reports โ€œunreliableโ€ andย โ€œsensationalism.โ€

โ€œEven though the Wuhan coronavirus is currently thought to have a case-fatality rate of 2 percentย (which would make it 20 times deadlier [than influenza]),โ€ he wrote, โ€œitโ€™s unlikely that it will rack up a similar annual death toll because โ€” at least for the time being โ€” it is not going to infect hundreds of millions ofย people.โ€

A week later, on Februaryย 27, Berezow admitted he had changed his mind, saying that the facts had changed and writing: โ€œWhen COVID-19, aka the Wuhan coronavirus, first emerged, it seemed most likely that the virus would fizzle out. But as the disease continues to spread, that outcome now appears nearlyย impossible.โ€

But by mid-March, Berezow was back to arguing that, as he wrote on March 11, โ€œ[f]or now, influenza remains the far bigger global public healthย threat.โ€

In contrast, public health organizations like the WHO have sought to offer information in ways that are both careful and candid. The Centers for Disease Controlโ€™s (neglected) guidelines for public health communication call for messaging thatโ€™s consistent, accurate, and doesnโ€™t withhold importantย information.

Thereโ€™s an enormous amount of uncertainty about what the coming days will bring when it comes to this pandemic. But if weโ€™re all going to make the best decisions possible today, weโ€™d be well-served to pay close attention to medicalย science.

And when so much of the message that thereโ€™s nothing to worry about on climate change comes from think tanks like Cato, AEI, and ACSH that made unsupported and flawed calls on COVID-19, itโ€™s worth taking a moment to pause and think about that asย well.

Because as monumental as the impacts of this pandemic are now, the science tells us that if we fail to dramatically cut carbon and methane emissions, the impacts of climate change may be even more profound over the longย run.

Main image credit: Photo of Donald Trump by Laura Evangelisto. Coronavirus image via CDC.

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Sharon Kelly is an attorney and investigative reporter based in Pennsylvania. She was previously a senior correspondent at The Capitol Forum and, prior to that, she reported for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Earth Island Journal, and a variety of other print and online publications.

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