Is Science Enough? Unlikely. The ISLC-PAIS Conference and Why Science Is Necessary But Not Sufficient

Hello Reader,

I hope you’re well as can be as we navigate the 13th major wave of the ongoing pandemic. The small mailing list that began as a personal point of contact to discuss pandemic matters is now the Pandemic Integrity Institute, a nascent platform and systems consultancy focused on systemic approaches to public health disasters.

You can learn more about the Pandemic Integrity Institute’s mission here. If it aligns, we’re glad to have you. If it’s not the right fit or you want to restrict the messages you receive, you can unsubscribe, change your email, or set up a filter to access the information on your timetable.

The pattern of spread with SARS-CoV-2 mirrors the pattern of inflammation spreading on social media: it’s hard to go for long without a conflagration or controversy in the community, and given how marginalized much of the covid-conscious community is, this pattern makes it even more difficult to develop the tools needed for change.

From a first-principles, cause-and-effect perspective, offline contagion and online rancor are interconnected in ways people may not yet realize, and the subject of whether Long COVID scientists should wear respirator masks at the ISLC-PAIS conference, which ended on August 29, has become yet another topic of debate and focal point within pandemic discourse. You can learn more about ISLC-PAIS here.

Where people disagree on Long COVID researchers and human behavior

A quick scroll through the feed reveals that researchers are leaving Twitter because of how they’ve been approached by members of the diverse CC community. There are a multitude of perspectives on the topic of wearing respirators, even within the research community. Researchers like Michael Hoerger say that scientists should mask up, and nothing less, while others like Jack Hadfield suggest that it’s the wrong focus.

Those defending Long COVID researchers independent of their specific behavior have their reasons. Without that research, the timeline to a cure becomes even longer. At the same time, placing “the research agenda” above activists’ concerns that Long COVID researchers aren’t engaging the practices that prevent the spread of the diseases they’re studying can reveal a person’s theory of change and where their true priorities lie. I share this not to justify hostility of any kind, but to illuminate why the tension runs deep between different sides of the issue.

In moments like these, it’s easy to flatten the discourse or compare two equally incomplete takes when a whole-system pathogen with whole-system social implications requires an equally systemic response. One of the great pitfalls that researchers can run into is that they believe that if they push the science along, everything else will follow. But if you go outside molecular and cell biology or immunology as immediately and traditionally understood, their premises are incomplete—which gives context as to why activists are pushing back on unmasked researchers.

Why the systems thinkers are pushing back on narrow ideas of “research-as-service”

In many cases, activists pushing back has less to do with policing, control, or even anger, and more to do with a connected way of perceiving called systems thinking. Responding to Jack, I propose that looking at the pandemic in purely scientific rather than whole-system terms (which includes the scientific process) slows the entire timeline and prolongs suffering, not the other way around. As much as it makes sense to want scientific tools to treat and cure Long COVID, brushing off activists’ concerns is part of the problem within the discourse.

Three major areas where I push Jack’s thinking:

1) The idea that reversing the unmasking trend on a population-wide basis is “effectively impossible.” This assertion implies that scientific progress is the main way through the pandemic, which reinforces the modernist paradigm responsible for our inability to handle COVID-19 as a collective action problem of comparable scale to climate change. It assumes that changes in human behavior are unidirectional, oversimplifying the drivers of said behavior. In reality, science is part of a multi-pronged suite of solutions; to imply science is the main bottleneck misses many crucial dimensions of the ongoing pandemic. We could have solved the pandemic with N95s and distribution and still can.

2) The idea that masking will become “less common over time unless we face another pandemic more severe than COVID.” This statement assumes we might even make it to the next one and risks implying that the current one doesn’t have a chance of reversing. That framing freezes historic denial rather than realizing it’s a stage through which people can move even within the current pandemic.

3) The idea that science is the main path forward, rather than a necessary tool within a broader set of solutions. While it would be great to make the tech so good that preventing infections no longer requires major inconveniences, that “inconvenience” is part of what the pandemic is trying to teach. If you look at complexity science and operations research as far back as the 80s, what’s being framed as “inconvenience” (e.g., wearing masks) is the behavioral evolution that complexity and diversity demanded for decades—the same reason activists are pushing researchers to evolve their ideas and behavior.

If interested, you can read my response here. Please consider supporting Jack’s work here as he works to identify biomarkers for Long COVID and ME/CFS. I look forward to continuing to be in conversation and providing perspectives and coverage that, without ever leaving behind the most vulnerable, help us make this pandemic a thing of the past.

Kindly,
Rayner