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 โpublic 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, โCoronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will Itย Be?โ
โIs coronavirus worse than the flu?โ it began. โNo, not evenย close.โ
โIt already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it probably won’t go far,โ ACSH added. โAnd 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 โpeer-reviewed mainstream science,โ in the words of the organizationโs 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 โan 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 โThe carbon footprintโ). The purported โpro-scienceโ advocacy group hasย labeled Greta Thunbergโs activism โdoomsday prophesying.โ It has (falsely) suggested that climate change is less of a concern because โmore people die in winter than in summerโ (theyย donโt).
And thatโs all just in the past nine months. The ACSHโs stance against climate action dates back to at least 1997.
When it comes to coronavirus,ย now a global pandemic, ACSHโs 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.
Five Reasons You Don’t Need to Panic About the COVID-19 Coronavirus.
I found this short, fact-filled piece very reassuring and perspective-granting:
https://t.co/ymxgC4VHrTH/T @ACSH
โ Lenore Skenazy (@FreeRangeKids) March 3, 2020
ACSH isnโt 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 Instituteโs (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, โWas coronavirus a bioweapon? We donโt know, but history shows we canโt trustย China.โ
Was coronavirus a bioweapon? We donโt know, but history shows we canโt trust China.https://t.co/d6gGkWeDG1
โ AEI Foreign Policy (@AEIfdp) February 24, 2020
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, โThe 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. โIโve 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 itโs better to be safe than sorry,โ he wrote. โCompanies 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
โA contagion will happen at some point, and itโs important we recognize it and react,โ heย added.
โUnless the coronavirus mutates into something far more dangerous,โ he concluded, โthis isnโtย 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 โbig economic deal,โ citing its impact on Chinaโs economy. And a three-paragraph AEI post later labeled claims that COVID-19 is a bioweapon โfakeย 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, itโs not clear whether the authors understood the comments they wereย critiquing.
Take, for instance, the Cato Instituteโs March 4, 2020 column on โCOVID-19 Deaths and Incredible WHO Estimates.โ That piece attacks a statement by the WHOโs director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was quoted in The New York Times as saying, โGlobally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVIDโโ19 cases have died.โ
Catoโs column labeled that statistic โsensationalist nonsense.โ The number doesnโt take into account the fact that mild cases are more likely to go unreported, Catoโs Alan Reynoldsย wrote.
Because most #CoronaVirus cases are mild and aren’t reported, the WHOโs alleged 3.4% #Covid19 mortality rate is nothing more than sensationalist nonsense. The actual death rate among infected people outside China may be as low as 0.5%. https://t.co/CQmNYEkXsE #CatoHealth pic.twitter.com/nnyUH0DqXe
โ Cato Institute (@CatoInstitute) March 8, 2020
That, of course, is exactly why Dr. Adhanom included the word โreportedโ in his description of the statistic. Thereโs 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. (โBut the figure came loaded with caveats,โ The Times wrote. โExperts, 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 Catoโs, calling the 3.4 precent statistic โreally a falseย number.โ
โNow, this is just a hunch, but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this,โ Trump added.
Itโs 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 โnot 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. โInfluenza 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 โunreliableโ andย โsensationalism.โ
โEven 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, โitโs 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: โWhen 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[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 Controlโs (neglected) guidelines for public health communication call for messaging thatโs consistent, accurate, and doesnโt withhold importantย information.
Thereโs an enormous amount of uncertainty about what the coming days will bring when it comes to this pandemic. But if weโre all going to make the best decisions possible today, weโd be well-served to pay close attention to medicalย science.
And when so much of the message that thereโs 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, itโs 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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