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Fun questions I've been asked today: If science is so great, why didn't we have any warning about COVID-19? Delivered with the smug "gotcha" of someone who knows for a fact that they've just won.
Except, my dude. We did.
Except, my dude. We did.
I am not a doctor. I did not go to medical school. I have described myself for years as a "hobby epidemiologist." I enjoy studying plagues and pandemics for fun.
This really got underway in 2008, when I started working seriously on a book called NEWSFLESH, that would go on to become FEED. I subscribe to the school of writing books about shit you like, because it's an excuse for fun research.
I read a lot of books. I audited a lot of college courses. I spoke to a lot of experts. And the one thing they all agreed on, without question, was that a pandemic was coming.
Probably out of Asia or Africa, based on the science we already had and understood; almost certainly spillover; probably something we already knew existed, but considered harmless.
WE KNEW. And we can't say "they didn't warn us," because they DID warn us, again and again. But for Johnny Disease, becoming a true pandemic is sort of like becoming a bestselling novelist. Everything has to break your way.
You need the right mutations. You need easy transmission. You need a family that doesn't make whipping up a new vaccine fast and easy. You need people to believe they're too good for quarantine.
(There's a reason that my biggest THE MORAL OF THIS STORY IS THE THING I AM BEATING YOU WITH soapbox stories have always been about vaccination and quarantine.)
A few diseases have come very, very close to pandemic status since I started following the science, which was, again, in 2008--not that long ago. Swine flu did a lot of damage. Ebola scared the shit out of us. Measles flirted with a comeback.
We've been Little Red Riding Hood thinking our mother invented the wolf to keep us on the path, but Mom's been saying there were wolves in the wood all along.
We just chose to stop believing her.
We just chose to stop believing her.
We knew COVID-19 was coming, or something like it, because the science said it was coming, and those of us who believed the science have been sounding the alarm every time it came close. People just stopped listening.
Look at the response to COVID in America. "Oh, there's this new disease...but the last one was nothing, this one will be nothing too. Wash your hands, I guess, and maybe avoid large crowds. Or don't. YOLO."
I worked in tech on Y2K, and the big lesson of that was that when smart people work really, really hard, you can dodge disaster...and your reward will be most people deciding you made the disaster up to make yourself look cool.
Public health scientists have been facing a Y2K every other year for decades, and now that they finally couldn't defeat one, mostly because the majority of people refused to help, we're blaming them for not giving us warnings THEY ABSOLUTELY GAVE. I WAS THERE.
So much of this could have been avoided. When directing blame, don't direct it at the scientists for not having all the answers about something brand new. Blame the media that glorifies breaking quarantine. Blame the governmental officials who told us we were too good for this.
No one is morally superior to airborne disease. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
A good friend has just pointed out that when news of COVID broke, she didn't go straight to "THE SKY IS FALLING" because we've had so many near-misses with pandemics that it was easy to assume this one would be the same, and she's not wrong.
And this is where the government failed us, hardcore. They had data we didn't; they could see that this was going to be bad. Choosing to downplay to avoid a panic cost a lot of lives, and billions of dollars. Shutdowns have done nothing to the economy compared to their lies.
And yes, if I know that your bedroom is full of venomous snakes and tell you it's fine to go to bed, I am lying by omission. "This will just go away" when the EIS is considering going rogue to save lives, nope. Cannot give you even a gold star for trying.
If you didn't magically know COVID was going to be the big bad the first time you heard it mentioned, don't beat yourself up. The early warning systems did what they were supposed to. The people they warned did not.
