Abstract:

This essay discusses the proliferation of discourses about the COVID-19 pandemic, presenting the challenges both to science and public policies that such an information overload present, having Collins’ sociology of expertise as a theoretical framework.

Keywords:
Science; Communications Media; Internet; Social Media

Resumo:

Este ensaio discute a proliferação de discursos sobre a pandemia da COVID-19, apresentando os desafios para a ciência e as políticas públicas, criados pela sobrecarga de informações, tendo como referencial teórico a sociologia da expertise, de Collins.

Palavras-chave:
Ciência; Meios de Comunicação; Internet; Mídias Sociais

Resumen:

Este ensayo discute la proliferación de discursos sobre la pandemia de COVID-19, presentando los desafíos para la ciencia y las políticas públicas creados por la sobrecarga de información, teniendo la sociología de la expertise de Collins como marco teórico.

Palabras-clave:
Ciencia; Medios de Comunicación; Internet; Medios de Comunicación Sociales

The past as prologue

“What experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it” (Georg Hegel).

Addressing the UN General Assembly in 1987, Jonathan Mann, then director of the Special Programme on AIDS, made the historical remark about the three epidemics ¹1. Mann JM. Statement at an informal briefing on AIDS to the 42nd session of the United Nations General Assembly. J R Stat Soc Ser A Stat Soc 1988; 151:131-6.: first the propagation of the virus itself, then the irruption of the disease, and finally the social, cultural, economic and political reactions. Mutatis mutandis, this is a reference framework that could be applied to the current pandemic, albeit the second epidemic is not so distant from the first as it was with HIV and AIDS.

In this essay, the focus is on the third epidemic, an epidemic of meaning, borrowing from the analysis made by Paula Treichler in the heart of the storm, in her aptly titled book How to Have Theory in an Epidemic²2. Treichler PA. How to have theory in an epidemic: cultural chronicles of AIDS. Durham: Duke University Press; 1999.. She pointed out how the social dimensions of the AIDS epidemic were far more relevant than one might think, even when acknowledging the central role of biomedicine in the response of that other pandemic. Treichler at one point lists 38 different meanings attributed to AIDS, ranging from the absurd to the outrageous, many of which could apply to the present situation ²2. Treichler PA. How to have theory in an epidemic: cultural chronicles of AIDS. Durham: Duke University Press; 1999.. Leveraged to support discrimination, used as a sort of pedagogic resource to put forward moral theses, and rife with conspiracy theories, those were ideas that circulated wildly in the media then. Similar cultural and mediatic processes are taking place now with COVID-19, the biggest difference with the present is, obviously, the massive presence of Internet-mediated social networks, which were still in its infancy back then.

The proliferation of narratives creates a crowded field, making much harder the task of making sense of the prevailing cacophony and finding trustworthy guidelines for action. This is an attempt to reflect about this situation, albeit having in mind a caveat about the risk of bringing critical reflections to such an unstable landscape, as pointed out in a quite satirical piece recently published in the academic blog Somatosphere: “in the haste to manufacture mental personal protective equipment against the Coronascene, it is all too easy to make mistakes, to mass produce instead fatuity, guesswork, and irrelevance” ³3. Anderson W. Epidemic philosophy. Somatosphere 2020; 8 Apr. http://somatosphere.net/2020/epidemic-philosophy.html/.
http://somatosphere.net/2020/epidemic-ph... .

Epidemic information

“Too much information running through my brain, Too much information driving me insane” (Sting).

A common trope on the recent literature about the new pandemic is the excess of information, especially bad or incorrect, about it, creating what some have called an “infodemic” ⁴4. Cinelli M, Quattrociocchi W, Galeazzi A, Valensise CM, Brugnoli E, Schmidt AL, et al. The covid-19 social media infodemic. arXiv 2020; 2003.05004. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.05004.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.05004... ^,55. Singh L, Bansal S, Bode L, Budak C, Chi G, Kawintiranon K, et al. A first look at COVID-19 information and misinformation sharing on Twitter. arXiv 2020; 2003.13907. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13907.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13907... ^,66. Velásquez N, Leahy R, Restrepo NJ, Lupu Y, Sear R, Gabriel N, et al. Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19 content online beyond individual platform control. arXiv 2020; 2004.00673. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00673.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00673... ^,77. Kouzy R, Abi Jaoude J, Kraitem A, El Alam MB, Karam B, Adib E, et al. Coronavirus goes viral: quantifying the COVID-19 misinformation epidemic on Twitter. Cureus 2020; 12:e7255.^,88. Mian A, Khan S. Coronavirus: the spread of misinformation. BMC Med 2020; 18:89.^,99. Zarocostas J. How to fight an infodemic. Lancet 2020; 395:676.^,1010. Garrett L. COVID-19: the medium is the message. Lancet 2020; 395:942-3.^,1111. Depoux A, Martin S, Karafillakis E, Preet R, Wilder-Smith A, Larson H. The pandemic of social media panic travels faster than the COVID-19 outbreak. J Travel Med 2020; [Epub ahead of print]..

Internet-mediated social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and others, have played a large role in this process. Unlike traditional mass-media, unidirectional in its interaction and with a restricted number of information providers, the new media allows for multiple voices, with little to no curation, lending itself to the propagation of misinformation, in particular health-related. The number of users of such networks has expanded exponentially all over the world, and become the prime source of information for increasingly more people, whereas trust in traditional media has been shown to decrease over the years - a Gallup poll in 2016 showed that only 32% of the American population trusted the mass media to provide accurate information ¹²12. Swift A. Americans' trust in mass media sinks to new low. https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/americans-trust-mass-media-sinks-new-low.aspx (accessed on 05/Apr/2020).
https://news.gallup.com/poll/195542/amer... .

Of particular interest are conspiracy theories related to the pandemic, which were analyzed by Singh et al. looking at exchanges over Twitter ⁵5. Singh L, Bansal S, Bode L, Budak C, Chi G, Kawintiranon K, et al. A first look at COVID-19 information and misinformation sharing on Twitter. arXiv 2020; 2003.13907. https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13907.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13907... . They grouped the main myths in five clusters, in decreasing order of frequency:

References to the first cluster had more than twice the frequency of the second, showing its relative relevance in the overall conversations. Similar ideas were present (and maybe still are) with regard to HIV/AIDS, and were part of Treichler’s aforementioned list, with varying culprits (shady governmental agencies, Big Pharma, ancient plagues). Incredible or even laughable as they seem, the latter author reminds us that they are part of the epidemic of signification, pointing out to what is deemed relevant by different groups ²2. Treichler PA. How to have theory in an epidemic: cultural chronicles of AIDS. Durham: Duke University Press; 1999..

Much of those “theories” mimic to a certain extent scientific discourse, although deliberately distorted to fit some agenda ¹³13. McGarity TO, Wagner WE. Bending science: how special interests corrupt public health research. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2008.. Despite much of the existing literature about such distortions being about economic stakeholders ¹³13. McGarity TO, Wagner WE. Bending science: how special interests corrupt public health research. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2008.^,1414. Michaels D. Doubt is their product: how industry's assault on science threatens your health. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2008.^,1515. Oreskes N, Conway EM. Merchants of doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. London: Bloomsbury Publishing USA; 2011., all kinds of political and ideological interests can lead to such outcome. In this particular case, for reasons that go beyond the scope of this analysis, the discourses about the pandemic became intensely politicized, and this is reflected in the variations of conspiracy theories being floated. In the present situation, such conspiracies reflected tensions in foreign relations, with opposing parties attributing the origins to deliberate acts of aggression from each other ⁸8. Mian A, Khan S. Coronavirus: the spread of misinformation. BMC Med 2020; 18:89., despite lack of evidence and, on the contrary, clear evidence of natural origins ¹⁶16. Lu R, Zhao X, Li J, Niu P, Yang B, Wu H, et al. Genomic characterisation and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding. Lancet 2020; 395:565-74.^,1717. Zhou P, Yang X-L, Wang X-G, Hu B, Zhang L, Zhang W, et al. A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin. Nature 2020; 579:270-3.^,1818. Andersen KG, Rambaut A, Lipkin WI, Holmes EC, Garry RF. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Nat Med 2020; 26:450-2.. Misinformation has been weaponized as a political tool, something that was previously identified with regard to anti-vaccine agitation on the Internet, with certain parties incensing both sides of the information war in order to further promote discord ¹⁹19. Broniatowski DA, Jamison AM, Qi S, AlKulaib L, Chen T, Benton A, et al. Weaponized health communication: Twitter bots and Russian trolls amplify the vaccine debate. Am J Public Health 2018; 108:1378-84.. The leveraging of misinformation on the Internet by online hate communities to further their agendas was detected by at least one study ⁶6. Velásquez N, Leahy R, Restrepo NJ, Lupu Y, Sear R, Gabriel N, et al. Hate multiverse spreads malicious COVID-19 content online beyond individual platform control. arXiv 2020; 2004.00673. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00673.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00673... .

Even naming the new virus and the associated disease became politically charged; the World Health Organization (WHO) has deliberately avoided tying the naming pathogens and diseases to purported geographical origins ²⁰20. Fukuda K, Wang R, Vallat B. Naming diseases: first do no harm. Science 2015; 348:643.. Despite that caution, the insistence in associating the pandemic to China led to racist assaults to people with apparent Asian characteristics, and prompted scientists to publicly condemn conspiracy-theory based attacks on Chinese scientists and health care professionals ²¹21. Calisher C, Carroll D, Colwell R, Corley RB, Daszak P, Drosten C, et al. Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19. Lancet 2020; 395:e42-3..

The exponential spread of misinformation led high-level WHO officials to engage in an effort to control its proliferation, partnering with traditional media outlets and the major Internet companies ⁹9. Zarocostas J. How to fight an infodemic. Lancet 2020; 395:676.. The WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, made a public denunciation of the adverse consequences of such massive diffusion on the job of scientists, public health officials and health care workers, declaring that “we’re not just battling the virus; we’re also battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists that push misinformation and undermine the outbreak response” ²²22. World Health Organization. Director-General's remarks at the media briefing on 2019 novel coronavirus on 8 February 2020. https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/director-general-s-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-2019-novel-coronavirus---8-february-2020 (accessed on 15/Apr/2020).
https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/d... .

Science to the rescue!

“Every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored” (unknown author).

The irruption of a novel disease prompted signals of alarm from health care personnel and scientists, which were at first - as usual - ignored or not properly valued by governments in many places of the world. Realizing the potential threat, however, authorities and the general population turned in varying degrees to scientists for answers.

The identification of the clinical and epidemiological characteristics of the disease as well as the isolation and genetic sequencing of the causing virus were remarkably fast; it is noteworthy that, unlike the case of HIV and AIDS, there has been no argument about the putative cause of the disease. This made possible the creation of diagnostic tests early in the pandemic, but as happens throughout the history of medicine, no effective treatment has been yet identified. The development of vaccines, despite a dramatic worldwide effort, is still a considerable way in the future. Faced with a relatively easily transmissible new pathogen with no known treatment and no existing vaccine, public health responses were limited to traditional measures against transmissible diseases, namely, varying forms of isolating people ²³23. Hellewell J, Abbott S, Gimma A, Bosse NI, Jarvis CI, Russell TW, et al. Feasibility of controlling COVID-19 outbreaks by isolation of cases and contacts. Lancet Glob Health 2020; 8:e488-96.^,2424. Anderson RM, Heesterbeek H, Klinkenberg D, Hollingsworth TD. How will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the COVID-19 epidemic? Lancet 2020; 395:931-4.^,2525. Niud Y, Xu F. Deciphering the power of isolation in controlling COVID-19 outbreaks. Lancet Glob Health 2020; 8:e452-3.^,2626. Tang B, Xia F, Tang S, Bragazzi NL, Li Q, Sun X, et al. The effectiveness of quarantine and isolation determine the trend of the COVID-19 epidemics in the final phase of the current outbreak in China. Int J Infect Dis 2020; [Epub ahead of print].^,2727. Lee VJ, Chiew CJ, Khong WX. Interrupting transmission of COVID-19: lessons from containment efforts in Singapore. J Travel Med 2020; [Epub ahead of print].^,2828. Parodi SM, Liu VX. From containment to mitigation of COVID-19 in the US. JAMA 2020; [Epub ahead of print].^,2929. Salzberger B, Glück T, Ehrenstein B. Successful containment of COVID-19: the WHO-Report on the COVID-19 outbreak in China. Infection 2020; 48:151-3.^,3030. Maier BF, Brockmann D. Effective containment explains subexponential growth in recent confirmed COVID-19 cases in China. Science 2020; [Epub ahead of print]., which led to a whole set of new problems.

Some critics - most remarkably the Italian sociologist Giorgio Agamben ³¹31. Agamben G. L'invenzione di un'epidemia. https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-l-invenzione-di-un-epidemia (accessed on 17/Apr/2020).
https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben... - voiced stark criticisms of such measures, deploring what was deemed an excessive encroachment of State authority on people’s lives, a position quite similar to arguments made against vaccinations ³²32. Camargo Jr. K, Grant R. Public health, science, and policy debate: being right is not enough. Am J Public Health 2015; 105:232-5. and tobacco control ³³33. Rochel de Camargo Jr. K. How to identify science being bent: the tobacco industry's fight to deny second-hand smoking health hazards as an example. Soc Sci Med 2012; 75:1230-5..

Much of those arguments seek support in the body of work of the science and technology studies. After all, as pointed by Hacking ³⁴341. Hacking I. The social construction of what? Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 1999., such studies (under the umbrella of “constructionism”) are inherently iconoclast in nature, showing the many shortcomings of the scientific enterprise, eventually denying it any epistemic privilege.

This approach, however, runs the risk of throwing away the proverbial child with the bathwater, especially when faced with deliberate attempts to distort, misrepresent or deny science. Bruno Latour ³⁵35. Latour B. Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Crit Inq 2004; 30:225-48. raised the alarm years ago, pointing out how the intellectual tools of criticism were being recruited by political an economic interests to undermine perfectly reasonable science, citing climate change denialism as an example. Similar caveats have been voiced regularly by Harry Collins and his collaborators, who have been working on the sociology of expertise for a considerable time. They argued that “science studies has shown that there is more to scientific and technical expertise than is encompassed in the work of formally accredited scientists and technologists, but it has not told us how much more” ³⁶36. Collins HM, Evans R. The third wave of science studies: studies of expertise and experience. Soc Stud Sci 2002; 32:235-96. (p. 237) and that “failing to maintain a distinction between science and technology, on the one hand, and politics on the other, leads to the stark choice between technological populism, in which there are no experts, and fascism, in which the only political rights are those gained through supposed technical expertise” ³⁷37. Collins H, Evans R. Rethinking expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 2008. (p. 8). They defend, then, the role of science as a trusted reference for political decisions, pleading that “democratic institutions do not ignore, distort or deny the advice of scientific experts. If they want to overrule a strong consensus, that is their choice, but they should be clear it is a choice they choose to make” ³⁸38. Collins H, Evans R. Populism and science. Epistemology & Philosophy of Science 2019; 56:200-18. (p. 214). One thing that the responses to the unfolding pandemic have made painfully clear is that despite correct arguments about the power held by scientists, politicians do call the shots in the end.

This has been paradigmatically exemplified by attempts by some governments to undermine or even do away with isolation policies, based on a dichotomy between “saving lives” and “saving the economy”. Pressure from certain economic agents try and force their hands to choose the latter, despite prominent economists defending the necessity of keeping the confinement measures and suggesting economic policies that would help to mitigate the ensuing economic downturn ³⁹39. Baldwin R, di Mauro BW, editors. Mitigating the COVID economic crisis: act fast and do whatever it takes. London: CEPR Press; 2020..

This has translated to the adoption to varying degrees of denialism by such governments, from outright denial of the disease (“it’s just another cold”), to underestimation of its death toll.

At the same time, governments and general population have demanded responses from the scientific establishment, especially with regard to possible treatments - and respond it did. From February 11th 2020, the day the new disease was officially named by the WHO, to April 15th of the same year PubMed has recorded 4,130 articles published with that theme, 1,176 in the last week of that interval. ArXiv, medRxiv and bioXriv, preprint servers, had a total of 2,150 articles uploaded to their repositories in the last date of that interval.

This presents another problem. Understandably, at least part of that explosion is due to legitimate intentions to provide more insights into various aspects of the pandemic. But despite the best intentions, the ever increasing pressure on researchers to publish creates a bandwagon effect, putting pressure on an already overburdened publication ecosystem, with likely ill effects on the quality of what is being published despite valiant efforts by editors to create fast-track mechanisms for articles dealing with this subject. Characteristically, this has been evidenced by the proliferation of poor quality articles on various purported treatments, to which authorities intent on breaking isolation policies have hung their hopes and public discourse, touting certain substances as the silver bullet that will cure the disease, so no need to worry about it, get back to work.

This problem is compounded by the tendency of the traditional media to exaggerate (“hype”) scientific findings, especially related to biomedical issues. This is not a new phenomenon, and has been analyzed by different authors, which have shown however that much of the blame lies with the scientific institutions themselves. In the competitive environment that big science became, good press is a strategy to achieve better funding for both research departments and journals, leading those, particularly the former, to produce press releases that overstate research results and can contribute to the creation of false expectations on the public, at first, and discredit of science itself as the bold promises do not materialize ⁴⁰40. Cassidy J, editor. Science, risk and the media: do the front pages reflect reality? Science, risk and the media: do the front pages reflect reality? http://www.smf.co.uk/publications/science-risk-and-the-media-do-the-front-pages-reflect-reality/ (accessed on 16/Apr/2020).
http://www.smf.co.uk/publications/scienc... ^,4141. Moore A. Bad science in the headlines. EMBO Rep 2006; 7:1193-6.^,4242. Hopf H, Matlin SA, Mehta G, Krief A. Blocking the hype-hypocrisy-falsification-fakery pathway is needed to safeguard science. Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2020; 59:2150-4.^,4343. Matlin SA, Mehta G, Krief A, Hopf H. The scientific publishing conundrum: a perspective from chemistry. Beilstein Magazine 2017; 3(9). https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/publications/magazine/scientific-essays/hopf.
https://www.beilstein-institut.de/en/pub... ^,4444. Sumner P, Vivian-Griffiths S, Boivin J, Williams A, Bott L, Adams R, et al. Exaggerations and caveats in press releases and health-related science news. PLoS One 2016; 11:e0168217.^,4545. Chambers C, Sumner P, Boivin J, Vivian-Griffiths S, Williams A. Science and health news hype: where does it come from? The Guardian 2014; 10 Dec. https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/dec/10/science-health-news-hype-press-releases-universities.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog... . The media, on the other hand, often falls into the trap of false equivalence (“bothsiderism”), giving equal consideration to opposing views, no matter the credibility or quality of the parties in the debate, an attitude that has contributed much to the general public misconceptions about issues such as vaccines or climate change ⁴⁰40. Cassidy J, editor. Science, risk and the media: do the front pages reflect reality? Science, risk and the media: do the front pages reflect reality? http://www.smf.co.uk/publications/science-risk-and-the-media-do-the-front-pages-reflect-reality/ (accessed on 16/Apr/2020).
http://www.smf.co.uk/publications/scienc... .

What is to be done?

“Science can be wrong (...) but this does not make the opposite view right. In the absence of careful research about the opposite view, science is probably the way to bet. This is even more likely to be the case if science is continually put under scrutiny” (Harry Collins & Trevor Pinch).

Taken together, the proliferation of misinformation, the avalanche of published research and its echoes in the media create an information overload that compromise the public debate and the possibility of adopting sound policies, and possibly undermining the trust in science itself. As Collins & Evans ⁴⁶46. Collins H, Evans R. Why democracies need science. New York: John Wiley & Sons; 2017. put it, the speed of politics exceeds by far that of science, meaning that decisions may have to be made without the kind of evidence that would make a scientist happy, and might even be proven wrong in the long run. The burden on experts is to assess the best evidence available and provide the necessary advisory to the political instances. As such, the best approach might not be rush to have a plethora of individual articles published, but to establish wide cooperation networks including researchers, public health authorities and health care workers. Such a network would permanently propose and revise guidelines, overlooking the ongoing research and extracting at each moment knowledge good enough to act upon, even if provisionally. The diffusion of such guidelines, given their impermanent nature, would be better suited to be presented over the Internet, in hotsites collectively curated by the governing bodies of such networks.

Collins & Evans ⁴⁶46. Collins H, Evans R. Why democracies need science. New York: John Wiley & Sons; 2017. stressed that the better defense of science is to present it as a value-driven enterprise, starting with the classical Mertonian “CUDOS” definition (Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism) ⁴⁷47. Merton RK. The sociology of science: theoretical and empirical investigations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1973.. Reinstating those values is possibly the best way to serve the public and at the same time defend the role of science in the political debate.

Acknowledgments

To the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), the Rio de Janeiro State Research Foundation (FAPERJ), and the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq).

References

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