The United States had a pandemic plan. But when a pandemic came, we hesitated to follow it. The country was hobbled by argument and doubt. Much of that doubt came from experts who proposed that Covid might not be as lethal as scientists feared. Michael Lewis returns to the subject of his latest book, The Premonition, to understand why it's so hard to trust the truest signs of expertise: a willingness to follow the evidence.
If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.
Pushkin. Well, I'm going to take you back to two thousand and five, the winter November December of two thousand and five. In two thousand and five, the team was just assembled to begin writing the National Plan. This is a doctor named Carter Metscher. The team he's talking about was in the Bush White House, and the national plan was for what to do in a pandemic. Back in two thousand and five, the White House asked Carter to help answer a big question, how do you minimize disease and death between the time a new virus starts to spread and the time we might have a vaccine for it. You know, an analogy we use is fire and thinking of the exponential growth in a fire. Just like an epidemic grows exponentially, a fire, grow exponentially. Slow a fire and you give yourself a chance to put it out. Slow a pathogen, and you buy time to save lives because you can stock up on medical supplies, learn about the new disease and how to treat it before lots of people get sick. Carter Metcher really wasn't a political guy. He was just an ICU doctor with a reputation for thinking about problems in unusual ways. The White House had called him up totally out of the blue, and at that moment it was not at all obvious how to slow a new virus, especially a virus that can spread through people without symptoms. Public health experts still had the year nineteen eighteen in mind. Back in nineteen eighteen, different American cities that tried various ways to slow down the Spanish flu. They close saloons and churches and ban large gatherings. None of it seemed to make any difference. Carter teamed up with another doctor brought in by the White House, an oncologist named Richard Hatchett. Together, Carter and Richard went back and looked more closely at what had actually happened back in nineteen eighteen. And so what we began doing was pulling daily newspaper accounts from a number of cities to be able to identify when they were reporting their first cases, when interventions were being implemented. The two doctors were looking for what they called NPIs, or non pharmaceutical interventions, the various things that cities had done to distance people. They were also looking for death tolls. Back in nineteen eighteen, Philadelphia had been an outlier in this regard. People died at a greater rate in Philadelphia than in almost any American city. And as we looked at Philadelphia closer, what we realized is that they did eventually implement you know, the the NPIs trying to slow transmission, but they implemented those measures awfully late in the course of the disease outbreak. After looking at Philadelphia, the doctors moved on to other cities and found some really weird stuff. In Saint Louis, for example, the death rate there was less than half of Philadelphia's. What we found was that the cities that implemented these interventions earlier had a lower mortality rate than the cities that implemented these measures later. And no one had done this before. You know, I don't, and I don't. I'm not aware of anyone doing this before. Back when I first heard about these White House doctors, I got so interested that I set out to write a whole book about them, called The Premonition. I just thought the whole situation was wild. You had these two doctors, both sort of shocked to find themselves in the White House, trying to figure out how to save lives during a pandemic. Then they earn themselves into amateur historians and find things that no historian has ever really noticed. They also know that their way out of their depth, so they recruit a proper professor, a world class Harvard epidemiologist named Mark Lipsitch. Lipsitch, Carter Mesher, and Richard Hatchett publish a paper that will one day become famous because it shows in a rigorous, academically respectable way that the death rates in the United States back in nineteen eighteen had actually been very different from city to city how many people died depending on how quickly each city had done its social distancing. The trick was to intervene before it was obvious that the disease was present. Once you see the disease killing people, it's too late. There's a lag after people get infected, before they get sick, and another lag between the time they get sick and the time they die. So MPIs were sort of like a fire extinguisher, less useful after the fire has reached the roof. If you're trying to put out a fire or control a fire, it's much easier to do that when the fire is contained to for example, your stove you've got a pan with oil in it that starts on fire, It's much easier to contain or to suppress that fire if you act. Then then if you wait for the entire kitchen to be engulfed or half the house to be engulfed by the time your kitchen's fully ablaze or half your house is ablaze, that fire extinguisher is not going to be very effective. Carter Metscher and Richard Hatchett wrote the Pandemic Plan for the United States back in two thousand and six. Actually, this part of the plan was officially written by the CDC, but Carter and Richard basically created it with the help of a mid level CDC employee named Lisa Coonin the plan stress the importance of distancing people at the very start of the pandemic to slow a virus down. And so when a pandemic actually happened in two t Carter Metcher was more shocked than just about anyone that the United States ended up playing the role of Philadelphia and all these other countries wound up playing the role of Saint Louis because a lot of those countries had learned pandemic strategy from US. I'm Michael Lewis and This is Against the Rules, a show that explores unfairness in American life by looking at what's happening to various characters in American life. This season has been all about experts. Mostly, it's been about how it's all our fault that we don't use expertise better than we do. But this episode is a bit different. It's about how much trouble experts can cause when they exploit our desire for them to tell us what we want to hear. I don't know about you, but I feel as if I spent the last two years living inside a casino. I've lost all sense of time. March of twenty twenty feels to me like about ten years ago. Back in March of twenty twenty, only a handful of Americans had died of COVID, but a surprising number of the early cases occurred in California's Santa Clara County. On March the sixteenth, that county's health officer, Sarah Cody, issued the country's first shelter in place order. She closed schools and banned gatherings of more than fifty people and so on. These new orders direct all individuals to shelter at their place of residence and maintained social distancing of at least six feet from any other person when outside their residence. Doctor Cody was basically just following the plan that the doctors had conceived in the Bush White House, but she found herself way out on a limb. At that moment, only two people in Santa Clara County had died, and no one knew anything for sure, not how many Americans were likely to get COVID, not how many of those were likely to die. In March, I heard about a study that was happening at Stanford where we were going to try to measure the amount of antibodies in our community. Malory Harris was a twenty three year old first year graduate student in biology at Stanford University, which happens to be in Santa Clara County. This study that Stanford was about to do was going to try to learn the most important thing to learn about COVID. Malory jumped into help, and this would allow us to figure out these important quantities about how the disease was spreading. You need to know how transmissible and how lethal it is. Right exactly, the Stanford study would wind up having seventeen authors. A few of the names were known in the medical research world, especially Jay Baticharia and Johnny Unidis. Eunidas was a really big deal. His name. The study instant credibility. So I had like this tiny volunteer thing that I did. I like handed people their Amazon gift cards after they got tested. And at the time, like everyone I knew was volunteering on this study, like because it was that important, right, Like we all wanted this information. And specifically the information is how many people in Santa Clara County have been infected with COVID, right exactly, because if you know that, then you know how many people have died, so you can start to guess what the fatality rate is of this disease. Right, So there's that question. There are also questions about, like how many people who get sick are actually going to have symptoms at all and get detected as cases. You know, that number would be helpful for us in figuring out how transmissible is this virus? So you were excited. I said that this was probably one of the most important studies that I would ever be a part of. The Stanford students had gathered blood samples from thirty three hundred Santa Clara County residents. The Stanford professors then tested the samples for COVID antibodies. The results were sensational. Between fifty and eighty five times more people in Santa Clara County than previously thought had been infected with COVID. Thousands of people had apparently survived COVID without ever knowing they had it, yet only two had died, which suggested that the virus wasn't all that lethal. Welcome back America. We have a tremendous guest, doctor John Ionidas. At that moment, it really did feel possible that anyone reacting to COVID was overreacting. Welcome You are a co director the Meta Research Innovation Center at Stanford University. It's now April nineteenth, two and twenty. Doctor Unidas is a guest of Mark Levine, host of Life, Liberty and Levine on Fox News. Tell me what was in your mind when you wrote this piece and tell me why you were right. I'm a person who's working with data, and I'm also trained in infection diseases, so it was natural that when the COVID nineteen pandemic evolved, it became a top priority for me to understand what was going on. Unidus is wearing a white sports jacket. He has the air of a man who's descended onto TV. He's a doctor, though he doesn't see patients. He's made his name exposing the shoddiness of a lot of medical research. It became very obvious to me that the evidence that we had in the early phases of the pandemic was utterly unreliable. Up until now, Unidas's published work has been kind of fun, almost crowd pleasing. He once wrote a paper where he took the first fifty ingredients in a cookbook and investigated with medical researchers that about them. Half of the ingredients supposedly cured cancer, half of them supposedly cause cancer, and a bunch supposedly did both. I wanted to talk to him for this episode, but he didn't return our email anyway. In early April twenty twenty, Johnny Unidis might be the most dangerous scientist alive to any medical researcher who uses weak data to make some sensational claim, but he himself is about to make a sensational claim that the world's experts in communicable disease, have no idea what they're talking about. It is just an astronomical error. And over the last several weeks, we have started accumulating data that show that there's far more people who are infected with this virus. The vast majority of them don't even realize that they have been infected. They are asymptomatic, they have no symptoms, or they have very mild symptoms that they would not even bother to do anything about. This was such an important moment. No one could be totally certain about COVID, how many Americans would get it or how many of those might die. But Professor Johnny Unidas of Stanford University sounded certain in the big picture, the risk is much much much lower compared to what we thought before. I think you and your team have developed a growing consensus. I think among experts and certainly among the people. Take care of the vulnerable, but let the rest of us go free, that we have lives to live. No more than ten thousand Americans will ever die of COVID. That's the claim unit is put in print. He became a regular on Fox News, a go to expert for other media outlets. He and his co author Ja Bodicharia offered their views to the Trump White House, and the Trump White House listened to them. Scott Atlas, who ran Trump's COVID response, wound up talking to Johnny Unidis and Jay Bodicharia nearly every day for a year. America had a pandemic plan, much of the rest of the world was effectively using it, but we hesitated. And here was a big reason why this Stanford study and these important experts shouting to anyone who would listen that we didn't need a plan. Why socially distance anyone? We were looking at ten thousand American deaths max And just then in mid April twenty twenty, that statement felt plausible. I remember talking to a scientist friend of mine about it, who was also sure that this Stanford professor had proven that COVID was just way overblown and we were all way overreacting. We were both totally pissed off that our kids schools had closed. What neither of us knew was what other people were making of the Stanford study. Here it is. Here's my original posts from April nineteenth, twenty twenty. Someone emailed me Andrew Gellman's a professor at Columbia University and one of the country's leading statisticians. What I focused on in that my first analysis was accounting for uncertainty in the false positive and false negative rates of the test itself, and there I concluded that their data are consistent with a zero rate, in which everything is false. In plainer English, the antibody test used by the Stanford professors was unreliable. So unreliable that you could have just as easily concluded that zero people tested by Stanford had actually had COVID. Therefore, all the confirmed cases of COVID were in dead people. You could take the same study and argue that COVID was actually extremely lethal. Basically, Andrew Gellman showed that there was no useful new evidence in anything in the Stanford study was total garbage. I said that they owe an apology, not just to us, but to Stamford. Stamford has a world leading statistics department, and they could have easily got on the phone with these people. They also have some great epidemiologists at Stamford. Everyone makes mistakes. I don't think they should apologize just because they screwed up. I think they need to apologize because these were avoidable screwups. These are the kind of screwups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding and you don't look too carefully at what you might have done wrong. But the authors of the Stanford study didn't apologize, at least not the famous ones. They did the opposite. They just kept doing these media appearances, going on podcast, etc. Even though scientists were just so vehemently a gas at what they've done. That's definitely science. Reporter at BuzzFeed she covered the expert reaction to the Stanford study, which just got louder and louder. It was the response that you were detecting on Twitter really unusual for an academic paper. It was unusual in that it was it was so heated, and it came from just so many people all at once. Help me understand. Is it unusual for a paper that has seventeen authors to have these kind of problems? People were struck by. Yes, the big number of co authors on it, the sort of like caliber of the people on its Johnny need is his name, you know, being on there definitely made people take a second look. Does it not strike you as strange that this person then proceeds to produce a paper that's statistically shoddy and amplifies its message in spite of criticism about its findings. I mean, he seems like he's just done in this paper. Would he's accused everybody else of doing for the previous fifteen years. That is the APPS salute they on the head. Tragic irony of this whole situation is this person who became famous for calling out problems of scientific research is now seemingly perpetuating those very same problems and not realizing the disconnect between those two things. If I sound fixated on this one person and on this one moment in time, it's because I am right. Then the country had the chance to agree on something important, exactly how dangerous COVID was, and the answer was about to be available, thanks in part to the work of two Australian PhD students, Leah Moroney and Gideon Meyerwitz cats I saw all these people saying wildly different things about the fatality rate of COVID. That's Gideon. He and a colleague got the bright idea of taking the dozens of studies made of COVID's lethality all over the world and analyzing them to get as a group. These studies suggested that COVID's death rate was somewhere between half a percent and one percent. So, for example, if half the American population caught COVID, somewhere between eight hundred and seventy five thousand and one and a half million people would die. They released the preprint of their study May six, two twenty. We were cited by the CDC mid last year in their planning scenarios. We've been cited by the WHO and the EU, I think as well. Lots of people looked at their work and said, yip, looks about right, and it was about right. But right away they came under attack from this Stanford professor named Johnny Unidis who said that our paper had I think the precise words were it was overtly wrong, and that perhaps this was because we were PhD students. Right. How common is the argument that you shouldn't listen to those book because they're still working on their PhDs. I've never heard it before. I guess people do PhDs at all points in their life. Sometimes they have had very long careers before their PhDs. So to say that someone is only a student is a bit reductive. I don't want to be reductive either, and I have found instances of Unitas being gracious online with his critics. For example, in a comment on the science blog Absolutely Maybe, he wrote, and I quote, we need nuance and some distance to understand the strong and weak points of the science that we and our colleagues produce. This takes time, patience, and goodwill. In the meanwhile, I consider my critics to be my greatest benefactors. I am always grateful to them end quote. Which is nice and all, but it was still weird to Gideon. The unit is set out and attacked PhDs in general. They are literally the leading experts in a certain thing, and they're doing their PhD to uncovenue evidence in that specific thing. These important Stanford professors were clinging to the meaningless results of their screwed up study. Instead of admitting they've been wrong, they tried to discredit those who were right by comparing their academic degrees. You might think that these Stanford guys would write about now be laughed at by every respectable human being on the planet and slink away in shame, But you'd be wrong. Okay, let's pretend it's still early April twenty, and no one's totally sure how lethal COVID will be. And for a very brief period at the start of the pandemic, that crucial moment when we needed to act, we were hobbled by arguments and doubt. But one thing was becoming clear. Lots of Americans were suddenly dying all at once, most obviously in New York City. It was kind of an eerie place. There were two people in rooms meant for one person, and they were just motionless in debated bodies. Jonathan Howard is a neurologist and psychologist at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, but because he was a medical doctor living in New York in late April twenty twenty, he felt he had no choice but to try to save these COVID patients. So you had a kind of a ringside seat to the first kind of wave of carnage. You saw how serious it was. Absolutely, I mean it was you know, everyone in New York did. The sirens were wailing throughout empty streets all of the time. You know, most people didn't see it. To look at a hospital, there was nothing special going on, but the entire hospital was COVID and the turnover was massive. I would leave, you know, at five or six in the evening. I'd come back at you know, seven in the morning, and half of my patients had been transferred to the ICU overnight, and half of them, you know, were replaced, replaced because they were dead. Had you ever seen anything like it? There was nothing like it. Every five you know, the sounds are going to stick with me as much as anything. Every five minutes, you know, cold blue Airway team to this bed. Five minutes later, airway team to this bed. Inside of a month, more than ten thousand New Yorkers had died. They hadn't just caught COVID. They caught COVID early before doctors had a chance to learn how to treat it. Here's a shocking fact. If you went into an American hospital with severe COVID symptoms in March of twenty twenty, you had a twenty five percent chance of dying. Three months later, that number had fallen to five percent. In the course of three months, your chance of surviving severe COVID had gone way up because medicine had figured stuff out. But in March of twenty twenty, medicine still needed time to figure stuff out. Jonathan Howard wasn't watching Fox News. He was watching Americans die of COVID. But if it had more time on his hands, he could have watched Johnny Unidas staying on message even though the American death toll was already twice what he had forecasted it would, ever be. The totality of the evidence points to an infection that is very common, that typically is very mild. Most people have no symptoms, they don't recognize that they have the infection. I really respected him prior to the pandemic. He is a big proponent of avidence space medicine. Jonathan Howard had once considered Johnny unitas something of a hero. They shared an interest in the weirdly unscientific things that doctors didn't said. Jonathan had actually written a book on medical misinformation, cognitive era and diagnostic mistakes. It's called which sounds boring, but it grew out of stuff that Jonathan saw doctors. So there's a doctor who I trained with and knew pretty well and was very friendly with who has since gone onto infamy as one of the disinformation doesn't These are the twelve people most responsible for spreading vaccine misinformation on Facebook. This is someone you studied with. Yes, yes, we were professional colleagues and friendly, and shortly after she graduated our residency programmed together. You know again, she started posting this sort of stuff to Facebook, and I became very fascinated after that point, as many other people are, about why smart people can believe such weird and wrong things. Because she's not stupid. She went to Cornell, she went to mt she went to NYU residency. She's smart. But how is it that she believes viruses don't cause disease? Our coffee enemas. I'm not making that up cure mental illness? Jonathan thought of the disinformation doesn't as a type people inside medicine who basically rejected science. Science could protect itself from them. These Stanford professors, though, they were a totally different beast. They can speak in great scientific jargons. And there's something about this, like there's something that I find and I have to sort of talk to my psychiatrists about this. But but personally offensive about doctors who I feel spread misinformation and you think they've had real effect. Oh? Absolutely. They are on the Wall Street Journal, they are on Fox News. They have testified in courts they have massive platforms. Ironically, whenever anyone criticizes them, they say they have been silenced. After the first wave of deaths in New York, Johnny Unidas raised his loose forecast for American deaths from ten thousand to forty thousand. But he never said he'd been wrong, and at no point did he grapple with the new evidence. When the evidence started to make him look like a fool, he just began to attack the evidence. Same things, like people didn't die of COVID, died with COVID. It sounds incomprehensible as those words are coming out of my mouth. But this idea that death certificates can't be trusted, and even he implied in one article that doctors have a financial incentive to put COVID on death certificates. I can remember hearing too that people weren't really dying of COVID. The people who were dying were going to die anyway. That's a claim that still exists today. Most people I saw who died were older and unhealthy, but they were sixty year olds with diabetes. Sixty year olds with diabetes. Sure, it's not unheard of that they die of a heart attack, but they don't die in mass in large numbers. At the same time, I saw thirty year olds diet. The youngest eyes personally saw die at that time was a twenty three year old, So it was very clear that something different was happening. We were at the start of an ugly new war, not just on COVID, on reality and in this war, Doctor John you needus acted like the general of one of the armies. He's aimed frontline doctors for killing their patients. On a podcast, he said a lot of lives were lost at the very beginning because of doctors not knowing how to use mechanical ventilation, just going crazy and relating people who too early did not have to be intubated. So probably we lost a lot of lives, if you know, we were sort of too aggressive early on, so be it. Let the statistics say that. But the multiple studies have shown that that's not to be the case. So rather than sort of say, you know what, I underestimated COVID, I got it wrong. Let me try to do better from here out, he kind of threw frontline doctors under the bus. In a previous episode this season, we heard about a COVID patient whose family tried to refuse to allow him to be treated because they all knew that doctors were killing patients by intubating them. Those people didn't just pluck that bit of misinformation from some conspiracy theorists. It had the endorsement of a professor or of medicine at Stanford University. You know this paper, very ironically entitled Forecasting for COVID nineteen has failed, in which he spoke about empty hospital wards, that most hospital awards were empty, expecting a tsunami of disease that never came, writing as if the pandemic was over at that point. Essentially, we begin tonight with that grim new milestone, as the nation tries to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Total US cases have now topped five million since this pandemic began, a grueling eight months ago, in which nearly one hundred and sixty three thousand Americans have died and our way of life has been altered. By August twenty twenty, the picture of COVID was a lot clearer, and it obviously didn't look anything like the picture painted by the experts who claimed to know more than what we could see right under our noses. There's now this dreadful league table for COVID. It just came out in the Lancet as I was reporting this episode Pandemic Preparedness and COVID nineteen. The studies authors ranked countries by their ability to prevent COVID infections. In the rich country division. The United States ranked second to last, just above Argentina. In the lower weight class division. Here are some of the countries that have outperformed the United States. Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe. The deaths are bad enough, but they speak to a bigger problem. I once had this realization because I was riding in a taxi to the airport and the taxi driver is listening to one of those holy radio stations. That's Andrew Gelman, again, professor of Statistics and political science at Columbia. The voice on the Holy roller radio station started telling him how we're all sinners and we have to accept that added the human rights, and it really resonated with me that we are all sinners in that sense that we make mistakes and accepting that you are as sinner, and like, that's kind of the first step. And then the next step is is that you say, like how can I learn from my mistakes? I find it very frustrating at all levels when people don't admit their mistakes. It just makes me want to scream. I have a hard time imagine you screaming, but I believe you the ice cream. I've been known to scream. That's what's its steak, our ability to learn so we don't wind up going through this all over again. And there's one very obvious thing that we might have learned from a pandemic. It's now killed one million Americans. It's what they didn't learn back in nineteen eighteen, and with card measure helped to figure out what saved people and what killed them. Right now, the city of Miami has more than triple the death rate of San Francisco. Why the red counties in California that followed the lead of the Stanford professors and revolted against public health rules early in the pandemic, Well now they have double and triple the death rates of the blue counties that more or less complied with the rules. The United States had a pandemic plan that advised city and county health officials to intervene early and distance people when a new pathogen started to move through the population. Did the cities and counties that more or less did this actually save lives? I mean, it looks to me like they did, But what do I know? The trouble is that no one seems to know. Do you think we've learned in this country how to better respond to the next one? I think, if anything, you know, we probably have regressed. Carter Mesher again, who created the pandemic strategy, We didn't really use that. People haven't looked at what's happening and said, oh, that worked and that didn't and in a sensible way that enables us to move forward more intelligently. They haven't done that. No, I you know, I don't think. I don't think we have. It's not just an opinion this. There's data to support the point. For it turns out that not only did the United States do a worse job than other countries at preventing disease at the start of the pandemic compared with other countries, we're actually doing even worse now despite having better access to vaccines than just about everyone else. So you look from July first, twenty twenty one to today and what happened in those countries, Well, in the United States, we've seen twelve hundred dusts per million. If you take a look at the UK, they're at about six hundred deaths per million. They're half the death rate in the UK during that period of time across those waves is half the death rate of the US. If we look at Canada, Canada had a death rate of about three hundred deaths per million, so about a quarter of what the United States has. If we take a look at Japan, they had about one hundred deaths per million over that same period of time that the United States had twelve hundred deaths per million. By now, it just sounds like numbers. So let's do something to make it sound like something else. Think of one person you loved who's died, a single person, take a moment. I'll do the same. Now, multiply that feeling by hundreds of thousands. Our society is still failing its people in ways that other societies are not, and there's a reason for that failure. These other societies or learning we're not. When you all were looking back at nineteen eighteen, it seems kind of, oh, it's quaint that they didn't understand. They didn't understand what happened, and now you can come in and you can understand for them what they didn't understand at the time. And we would never do such a thing. And we're exactly, you know, we're exactly where they were that we don't This stuff is happening and no one's learned anything. And I just don't, you know, I can understand what their excuse was. I don't know what our excuse is. Yeah, I don't don't. I don't either. I don't either, I don't know. One of my takeaways from Carter Mesher and this entire season is the importance of I don't know, and how it's a sign of true expertise, but how hard for an expert it is to say, especially as they age and grow used to being viewed as the person who knows. Which brings us back to Malory Harris, who had come to Stanford as a twenty three year old graduate student. She'd arrived thinking she understood the rules of expertise. Her job, she thought, was to accumulate evidence, to ask questions of it, but to let the answers fall where they may. In March of twenty twenty, I started to see that that's not actually how this works. She watched her superiors, John Unidas and Jay Batachario and a handful of other Stanford scientists how they went on TV and sounded certain about things that they either could not know or were entirely wrong about. So I had it explained to me by a more senior academic that at the beginning of COVID, journalists were looking for people who would say either that this is the flu or that it's ebola, and those were the only scientists who you would hear from, even though the majority of the scientific community was like, it's somewhere in this range and there's a lot of uncertainty here. But the people who would get platformed were the people who were making kind of the most sensational and the most certain claims. Malory was meant to be studying biology with these guys. Now she was just studying these guys. And I read about, you know, what happened with tobacco, and who were the scientists who were attacking the link between smoking and cancer and what happened with climate change? And why, like, even though we knew for decades before I was even born, that this was going to be a problem, why weren't we seeing action, and who were the scientists who were helping to delay that right? And like what happened with AIDS denialism. Why did you have the small group of people who were saying that HIV doesn't cause AIDS who kept getting platformed even when they didn't really have solid evidence for that. Did you see any patterns? Oh? Yeah. One thing that had happened a lot was scientists claiming they were experts when in fact they'd wandered pretty far from their area of genuine expertise. And how hard it was for the general public to see the difference. For example, you might have made your name debunking bad medical research, but it didn't mean you had the first clue about virology or disease control. Another pattern was the way people seemingly devoted to reason became wedded to positions, That is, they didn't change their minds with the evidence. One day, Malory looked up and saw that her Stanford professors were advising a governor to do things like keep schools from enforcing mass mandates. We're talking about Florida now seeing record numbers of new cases. Despite that the governor, Rhonda Santacis, is fighting to ban mass in schools, and that fight is escalating very dramatically today. Malory's family lived in Florida, and her own professors were now threatening their lives. She finally broke and wrote an open letter in the Stanford School newspaper in which she called out her superiors. For the past year and a half, I have carefully followed public health recommendations and university guidelines to protect those around me, including the people mentioned here, even as they work to undo these protections for others. That's what bravery sounds like. I'm like a shy person actually, so you know, being public is really like intimidating for me. I didn't know if it could harm me professionally. I just really felt like I needed to say something. There's a question hidden in her words, why me let me take a moment here, because this is our final episode and it echoes a lot of our previous episodes. The experts who happened to have been quickest to see just how deadly COVID was had no talent for self promotion. They didn't go on TV like the Stanford professors. We sort of got to this problem in episode two. The Stanford professors were actually a lot like the old baseball people that Bill James talked about in episode three. They stopped thinking because they thought they knew something that they didn't. But this episode is also returned to the first episode of the series, our episode about the L six These PhD students are the L sixes of academic life. We've arrived at the point where we need them so badly that they're stepping up and putting their careers on the line to save us from ourselves. But why, where the hell are the l ones? Why do we now require that our young PhD students be brave? What forces are you worried about being corrupted by? When you get to be an old, established academic, Being a scientist isn't a glamorous job. I think that getting public attention can be really exciting to scientists, and you know, making compromises in how you communicate so that you can get that public attention. We all carry with us our own values, our own ways let we think that the world should work. The sticking point would be if those values were to impact the quality of my science and the ricor with which I approach my science. Your willingness to actually live in the world of evidence, right, I don't have some grand point on which to end this season, just a small one. Life eventually humbles us all. What I love about experts, the best of them anyway, is that they get to their humility early. They have to. It's part of who they are, it's necessary for what they're doing. They set out to get to the bottom of something that has no bottom, and so they're reminded constantly of what they don't know. They move through the world focused not on what they know, but on what they might find out. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Katherine Girardeau and Lydia Jean Cott. Julia Barton is our editor, with additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our fact checker, and mil o'bell executive produces. Our music is created by John Evans and Matthias Bossi, a stellwagen steinfanette. We record our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly helmed by Cofa Ruth, Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John SNAr Is, Carly mcglory, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Rattner, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Daniella Lakhan, Mary Beth Smith, and Jason Gambrel. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing the Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscribe that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts subscriptions. Keep in touch, sign up for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin dot Fm, or follow at pushkin pots Define more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You really want people to go away with that. It's like start trusting people who say they don't know. That's the main takeaway if they don't take anything else. So where from the season, hopefully they'll take that away. Yeah, we're gonna there's gonna be spring up in the wake of our podcast, a new cable news channel where every day nobody knows anything. Everybody's you might be right, that'll be every show will be that I might be wrong. We could get a bunch of women, right. I know, I know I'm probably wrong. I'm really not sure, but I mean you might be right, probably wrong. I mean I don't want to step on any toils. I can't, yeh, followed by our new show, Am I an impostor?