Note: this email was originally sent on January 27, 2021. The date at the top of this archive page is from when it got moved over to a new email provider.
This week I have been mostly reading about cholera! Because I certainly know how to switch off and relax in the middle of a pandemic.
Here’s a fun (??) cholera story I hadn’t heard before: the “Day of the Straws” in Ireland, which was not actually a day but a week-long mass hysteria event triggered by an appearance of Our Lady in Cork during the Europe-wide outbreak of 1832. The Mother of God suggested that cholera could be cured by taking ashes from beneath her feet and distributing them to four houses, and then for those four households to spread the blessing to another four houses each, and so on. The bug/feature of this approach was that houses which had already been visited were apparently ineligible for further visits, leading to people searching far and wide for houses which had yet to recieve their cure – thus creating a vast pandemic-avoidance pyramid scheme which, three days after Mary’s original apparition, had spread almost the full length of the island.
Excellent stuff.
Motivated scepticism and implicit conspiracies
Speaking of miracles, as the UK ticks off one grim milestone™ after another, we’ve had to confront the surprising revelation that – despite what a variety of prominent public figures have spent many months promising us! – the coronavirus has at no point simply got bored of being a pandemic and gone off to explore fresh opportunities.
There’s been some enjoyable recent pushback on the Covid sceptics, notably from the likes of increasingly fighty MP Neil O'Brien and Sam Bowman et al’s Anti-Virus site. Taking on these kind of arguments is akin to wrestling an octopus: it’s slippery, it has too many parts to ever pin down at once, and at some point you’ll probably begin to wonder why you started doing this in the first place.
Part of the frustration of dealing with the Covid sceptic universe is, obviously, just the sheer bloody-minded wrongness of many of their claims (personal favourite: that there were no excess deaths, at a time when we were almost three months into a sustained period of excess deaths). But more than that, the frustration comes from its incoherence. Even when individual arguments may have been plausibly defensible (or, less charitably, a bad faith exploitation of areas of genuine uncertainty) they’ve never added up to a consistent whole.
So in the early stages of the outbreak, some people spent ages insisting that the true fatality rate was far lower than most estimates suggested, and therefore stringent public health measures were an overreaction – but cheerfully ignored the implication that, given the known number of deaths, this must mean the virus was massively more infectious than we thought. Which… would also seem to be an argument for fairly strict measures?
Then we had months of being told that PCR tests were delivering a wave of false positives, and that most of these “cases” were not really cases. Except, um, wouldn’t that imply that the fatality rate was actually a lot higher than we thought? After that, we flipped back to a variant of the “more infections, lower fatality rate” model, being informed at quite some length that the virus had already hit a peak of natural population immunity – even as every indicator continued ticking predictably upwards, leading to the inescapable conclusion that either more than 100% of the population of London had somehow already contracted the virus, or that everybody was now getting infected for a second time. Which, if true, would seem to rather undermine that whole “herd immunity” plan. And so on.
(As a side note, the freestyle jazz maths that lies at the heart of many of these arguments continues unabated. The other week a Conservative MP was making an anti-lockdown argument with figures that implied 1.5 billion people in England and Wales had been infected. That strikes me as implausible, for a number of hopefully obvious reasons.)
Extra frustration comes from the way these arguments were often accompanied by the usual “just asking questions” defence – which is annoying, because asking questions is good! I like questions! Scepticism is a valuable quality, and it’s pretty low to claim its mantle when you’re doing nothing of the sort. The problem is when you’re only asking questions that lead in one direction, while deftly avoiding any questions that might steer you the opposite way. That isn’t scepticism; it’s motivated reasoning playing a scepticism dressing up game. Or, as a rival Tom put it:
Writing the word “sceptical” on your movement doesn’t make you sceptics, any more than writing the word “cold” on a box makes it a fridge. Scepticism involves work, real work, assessing and revising your own beliefs, not just reflexively rejecting what you see as orthodoxy https://t.co/nCVoGEOE6N
— Tom Chivers (@TomChivers) January 25, 2021
You can see this in the way that the same people try to question every measure of Covid deaths (“died with, not died from!”), while simultaneously holding almost as an article of faith the assertion that huge numbers of people have died from the effects of lockdown, despite there being minimal evidence for this to date. Or you can see it in the output of some representatives of the increasingly confusingly-named Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, whose basic position seems to be that the only acceptable evidence for any belief is a randomised clinical trial – unless of course you’re proposing an entirely novel biological theory of the spontaneous emergence of infectious diseases, in which case screw it, just roll with it lads.
By contrast, for all that the picture painted by Covid data is often blurry and out-of-date – navigating it akin to trying to steer a car along a mountain road, when all you can see is an out-of-focus video of where you were twenty seconds ago – it was always basically coherent. Cases rose, then hospitalisations, then every possible measure of deaths in lockstep; the unforgiving logic of exponential growth stubbornly refused to give it a rest. The brute force of reality required ever more elaborate contortions to avoid it.
Many of the most public faces of the UK’s Covid sceptic movement – the media contrarians and the iconoclast academics – have carefully shied away from endorsing outright conspiracy theories, and I suspect many would react quite angrily if you ever accused them of spreading such stuff. But at some point, when all of the evidence points one way and all of the questions you’re just asking point the other, there’s an implicit underlying accusation of conspiracy that becomes impossible to ignore.
To make your side of the argument stand up, picking holes in one aspect is no longer enough. It can’t just be that some tests might return false positives: it has to be that hospitals are secretly lying empty, that thousands of doctors across the land are all recording false information on death certificates, that Chris Whitty isn’t simply mistaken but actively deceiving the public. (I’ve always been unclear on exactly what the motivation is supposed to be there. Does he have shares in Amazon, or something?)
The complexities of Covid are huge, and the restriction of liberty and potential for harm in the public health response demands rigorous questioning. Even when I’ve personally found the arguments unpersuasive, I’ve tried my best to view them through that lens – as mistaken, not deceptive, in a field of honest uncertainty. But realistically, that’s been a harder and harder sell for some time. The evidence has been chipped away, the zone of plausible good faith has shrunk, and the implicit conspiracism required to sustain those arguments has grown stronger and stronger – which can lead to some pretty strange bedfellows.
There may well be convincing arguments for lighter touch public health interventions that the lockdown sceptics could yet make – but it sure as hell isn’t the arguments they were making.
Eventually, you have to either admit that you were wrong, or jump down the rabbit hole of an alternative reality where you were right.
Extra fun things to read and do
A great long read on the food delivery economy, especially the stuff about dark kitchens and virtual restaurants that exist only in apps. There needs to be a word for the slightly spooky, dissociated feeling that these kind of phantom brands provoke when you spot them. (There’s a hipsterish fried chicken restaurant near me on Deliveroo. It has many of the trappings of a real venue, modelled in the Mother Clucker mode; all the signifiers of a place that’s making an effort to tempt trendy young people through its doors with the promise of an ~experience~ that goes beyond serving them moderately spicy chicken burgers. But it doesn’t exist. It’s a wisp of free-floating brand concept, untethered from reality, street food without a street; the evocation of an experience nobody will ever have.)
The chicken was pretty good, though.
This is about three months late because I am catching up on podcasts, but the episode of Naomi O'Leary and Tim Mc Inerney’s The Irish Passport about the electrification of large parts of Ireland in the 50s and 60s is a delightful thing.
“Right now, our most fiery national debate is over whether New Zealanders were nice to the singer Amanda Palmer in a cafe.” Some top notch investigative fact checking here.
“Simba was conceived after keepers and veterinarians collected semen from his father, Mufasa, a geriatric lion, using the process of electro-ejaculation. Mufasa was ‘not revived following the procedure’, said WRS, adding that ‘his deteriorating health was a key factor’.” ⚡️🦁💦💀☹️