Brave sealed world –Part I: Contagion
This story is second in a five-parts reading about the pandemic. It argues that the outbreak has vertiginously accelerated a worldwide authoritarian trend that has been rampant for twenty years.
- Introduction: 28 Days Later
about the strange hopes triggered by the outbreak at its western beginning
Part 1: Contagion
about the mechanisms that triggered panic among citizens, markets and governments
- Part 2: Parasite
how differing interests orchestrated the panic to mute the public debate - Part 3: The Discreet Charm of the Authority
how the proclaimed epidemiological success of China and the Asian Dragons becomes one more nail in a twenty-years-old coffin - Conclusion: Deliverance
an argument that a tightly controlled society is already at the very root of the crisis.
Mass Hysteria
Did the government maintain their composure? In a democracy, one can assume that a government will act according to the expectations of the people who elected them. It is fortunate that radical ecologists and 99% percent movements did not belong to the part of the electorate that pushed Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson, Matteo Salvini or Donald Trump to power.
It is fortunate, because their message to political leaders is not one that would help at the present time : “I want you to panic”, said 16-year-old Greta Thunberg at Davos a year ago. This peroration echoed, almost a decade later, 93-year-old Stéphane Hessel’s “Indignez-vous !”, the post-subprime mortgage crisis pamphlet that gave its name to the Indignados movement. Despite all respect I have for both, I don’t think panic or indignation should be hoped for. Panic and indignation both imply overwhelming emotions and both exclude rationality.
In the short term, what we need is rationality. What we need is composure. Rationality and composure will grant us the time needed to wonder in which world we want to live once we emerge from confinement — the kind of questioning that can never happen in a world where the pace is forced year after year by GDP growth and austerity rules. What we need is a plan. If we, the people, act rationally and with composure, it’s only rational that we can set equal expectations to our leaders.
Of course, it would not be fair on the first days of an unprecedented crisis to expect any rationality or civility from us citizens. Irrationality took the shape of a frenzy for staples. Pasta and toilet paper disappeared from the shelves, although no dramatic breach of food supply chains is to be expected, artificially creating shortage. Lines outside supermarkets extended dozens of meters outside on the sidewalk. “Social distancing” might partly explain the lines, but absolutely does not account for virtual lines: when connecting to online supermarkets, ever since the beginning of confinement, you had to wait up to fifteen minutes. As a person rather versed in technologic systems, I don’t understand the use of virtual lines mimicking physical stores to manage stocks. Especially when the orders are for delivery ten days later !
Anyways. People did the last thing they ought to in an economy based on just-in-time or lean production : they piled stocks. Carrefour is my first-hand example, and first-hand examples are important in the face of panic, for reasons that will be detailed below. If Amazon looks more like your reference and you’re a prime member, you are looking at one month rather than ten days.
In the US, people have been piling another type of merchandise : firearms. Four times as many guns were sold on March 16th as the same day one year before, according to Newsweek. More unsettling : a significant part of this consumption fever occurred within the Asian-American community. Not that this particular community would have a strong tendency to empathize with characters from The Walking Dead and other zombie-apocalypse shows. But rather because they have been made to identify with the zombies in the show, as a significant part of the American media and political leaders spent the last weeks referencing COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus”. An increase of racist incidents has been reported by several outlets, driving the community to turn to guns for self-protection. One must be fair : on March 25th, almost three months after the pandemic was identified in China, Trump announced, with great magnanimity : “Look, everyone knows it came out of China, but I decided we shouldn’t make any more of a big deal out of it”.
When it comes to firearms, Europe and the United States are two different worlds. When it comes to government and media-fueled China fear, though, convergence started early on. The scale apparently justified its own Wikipedia page drawing up the inventory of racist incidents. Ten minutes walk from my place: in Belleville, the Chinese community started wearing masks as soon as the end of January. In February, anti-racism associations already triggered alerts, on twitter and elsewhere. The connection? In the mind of French people, masks without a lab coat means you are the virus. How do you create such misconceptions?
Elite Hysteria
The French government repeatedly instructed that masks are useless and should not be worn by the population, except for medical staff and infected persons. It went further : two days into confinement, police officers were explicitly ordered not to wear masks, turning them into exceptional vehicles for taking the virus on a tour. As if it were not enough, the government deployed a hundred thousands policemen to enforce confinement. Identity controls, self-written certified attestation and fines pass from hand to hand without protection. Police syndicates are now calling for strikes !
Let’s bury ourselves a bit deeper into the communication strategy deployed by the French government. Stage 3 of the epidemic response plan was triggered on March 13th. This plan was laid out in 2011. It can be accessed on the government website. From then on, official communication stated that once “stage 3” is started, large scale COVID-19 screening tests were not useful anymore, as the target shifted from “restraining the spreading” to “alleviating the impact” of the epidemic. Hence, tests are used to confirm critical cases only.
Masks and tests are useless, or, so we heard in France. Despite these being two key weapons used by China to stem the pandemics. Do I really need to explain that these positions only reflect the country’s poor ability to distribute masks and tests?
This is far from being the only approximation in government communication. In his address to the nation, President Macron also said taxis would be requisitioned for medical staff, which hospital doctors in my circles failed to notice in any way. Municipal elections were held on a beautiful first day of spring, and despite the speech, nothing was in place to secure the process (no gloves, masks, hand-cleaning solutions in sight). The same evening, the Premier Ministre lectured French on being disorderly, and stated stronger measures would follow, failing to observe how contradictory messages from the government might have confused the people. Second round of the elections were obviously cancelled the next Sunday.
Confinement measures also don’t seem to be delivered in any logical order. The jogging drama is a relevant example. People were first allowed to jog, provided that they would run equipped with a paper certificate and an identity card. The certificate could be an electronic one. Until it could not anymore. The rule was updated some time after: running was still allowed, but within one kilometer around your home. Is the pattern for infecting people or getting infected by them different when you run in a circle or in a straight line? I suppose these people think you get less wet if you run under the rain in circles rather than following a straight line? Then again, the rule changed, for Paris only, as the police commissioner and the mayor wanted their say in the matter. Running should only happen before 10am and after 7pm. It seems like the preoccupying question of how people run is burning at all levels of the state, and the final solution has not been found yet.
We could give France a break and look at Boris Johnson’s wanderings across the Channel, where herd immunity would be the answer for weeks before confinement would suddenly become the thing (and the whole thing was just misinterpretation). Should that be seen as another Brexit debacle? The first time when the UK was finally free of policies cooked in Brussels and started doing things their way, the way suddenly ended in a U-turn? Ironically, one can wonder if the iconoclastic Prime Minister was not a victim of the one-track thinking he was elected for denouncing. One-track thinking can even strike in the den where conformist thought is created. At the beginning of the outbreak, an institution like Goldman Sachs got a strong backlash for having the cheek to estimate that coronavirus impact on the economy would be limited. The opinion was released in the form of private notes leaked from a private meeting… But even private notes of private opinions are scandalous when they go against dominant thought in times of panic. Boris Johnson was no match for choosing a different epidemiologic response from its fellows head of government. The irony even fired twice at its victim: the unfortunate Prime Minister since then became critically ill from COVID-19.
But Boris himself can seek comfort in watching on a loop the interview of the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde. She explained that the ECB was “not here to close spreads”, resulting in Italian bond selloff. Of course, markets panicked. Markets are designed to panic whenever there is a crisis. Fortunately, the ECB caught up a few days later, and reassured the financial world with a 750 billion euros plan, mimicking Draghi’s “whatever it takes” response to the eurozone crisis in 2012. And as in 2012, Europe’s united stance instantly shattered, as Angela Merkel opposed the idea of “corona bonds”. Corona bonds would pool Europeans debts together. The Chancellor of Germany favors the European Stability Mechanism, designed to force austerity measures on countries that resort to it. Europe’s unity also came to a halt when masks destined to Italy were hijacked by the Czech Republic, and later on, beginning of April, France requisitioned the stock of a Swedish company aimed at Sweden.
It would be a little tedious to go over U-turn patterns of all Western governments since the beginning of this crisis. For the US, let us just point to the Last Week Tonight show and let them do their weekly carpet bombing of the Trump administration. For other European countries, let us just spare them.
The point here is not to confront the government with the lack of such dull equipment as masks and gloves. Not even with the pitiful state of the public hospital, compared to what it was a few decades ago. The time for reckoning will come later, and certainly won’t put the blame solely on the last few years of government. The point is not even to confront governments with inappropriate measures or slow reaction. Personally, I have been amazed by the speed at which governments worldwide voluntarily decided to shut down the economy. Most agree this crisis is unseen in our lifetime.
The point here is to understand why, in western democracies that pride themselves as being exactly that, democracies, the governments prefer to use a martial voice (“we are at war !” said Macron six times in twenty-one minutes in front of the nation) rather than clearly outlining open questions, thought process, learnings and, yes: mistakes. Or why pretending masks are useless is better than admitting we don’t anymore have the supply chain to produce them. Or why, two days after green-lighting municipal elections, the government increases the fines for breaking confinement (meaning not printing each time you go out the right piece of paper) on the ground that the citizens take the crisis lightly.
Why is it that in democracies, following on the United States heels, that more and more emphasize the role of private enterprise as opposed to a strong State guiding the economy, governance models are more and more rooted in authority and bureaucracy? Corporate governance models encompass collegiality, transparency, top-down and bottom-up feedback loops. Why does it not appear to be part of any government’s communication framework?
The point here is the irrationality of the public debate. In times of confinement, such debate seems to happen solely by way of electronic media (private WhatsApp, snap or whatever conversations, semi-public Facebook walls, public twitter and YouTube accounts, traditional media), with the occasional bass drum orientation given by a public government address.
With such hysteria orchestrated by the elites, how do you expect we the people not to panic in these conditions? What exactly triggered such irrationality?
Virus and Virality
Well, the usual. For a start, what we now call fake news, as if fake news were a new thing, resurged. Let’s have a look at one of these. Here are two separate WhatsApp conversations I had on the same day, March 16th. On that day, rumor was spreading that confinement in France was imminent, and that it would be military enforced :
There is reason for hope and reason for awe in this anecdote. Hope: people learn. They now have knowledge of the fabric of rumors. They know the rumor should not originate from more than one degree of separation, if they want to be trusted. Hence, they now claim responsibility. Awe : when people want to believe in their own truth, they are ready to cheat to try and impose this truth.
How do you impose your own truth? In such trivial a case as above, if your truth only is fact, you can rely on the good manners of your interlocutor (or the cowardice of the times) not to be called a liar to your face. If your truth is more of an opinion, say about the efficiency of social distance, or the use of chloroquine as the endgame weapon for Covid-19, you can resort to mimicking the voice of irrefutable science. The National Health Service and WhatsApp / Facebook, Twitter and the US government are all actively battling fake news, with twitter loosening the definition of fake news as an information not proven — or not proven yet — by science.
In the 1963 essay Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Karl Popper stated : “A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.” This popular belief Popper highlighted half a century ago is now more popular than ever.
Back to the chloroquine debate, then. On March 17th, French physician and microbiologist Didier Raoult made a raout (French word loosely translating into buzz) when announcing his team at the IHU Méditerranée Infection (a hospital unit specialized in infections disease in Marseille) was treating COVID-19 infected patients with chloroquine (also known under the brand Plaquenil), with promising results so far. Professeur Raoult’s research team has been very influential since the eighties, publishing about three hundred papers, and fifty patents so far. Professeur Raoult’s eloquence and charisma — part of which is the long white hair and beard he lately and admittedly embraced as a way to annoy conformists and establishment in the French capital — certainly contributed to ignite the web, and propel the reputation of chloroquine worldwide.
Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Indonesia rolled out official directives to treat the virus with chloroquine derivatives, with Morocco requisitioning Sanofi’s stock of drugs containing chloroquine piled with their sovereign territory. The impetuous US president was not long in claiming chloroquine was “a game changer” in the fight against coronavirus. Only to be tempered the day after by Dr Fauci, the head of his own White House task force against coronavirus, as a wave of self-medication was observed throughout the country.
What seems to be the problem? Only this : thirty patients, with half of them used as a placebo group, are not enough to produce statistically significant results. Especially when the study is made in fifteen days, which does not let enough perspective to check the lack of bias in the control group. Moreover, post-publication reviews highlight a number of flaws in the protocol. In short, what it means is that, unsurprisingly, more research is required to validate Professeur Raoult’s intuitions.
Wait and see? Of course not. Because virality was already at work and the internet was ignited with petitions asking officials why Professeur Raoult’s protocol was not widespread by now. And officials answered in the same manner as they did for masks, tests and municipal elections : when they had a chance to educate and be transparent over their process for testing treatments, the most debatable arguments and personal attacks loomed. We heard that chloroquine was toxic and could be dangerous (as if any drugs under the wrong dosage wouldn’t be dangerous), that combination with other drugs should be inquired (as if the dosage and side effects had not been known for seventy years), and reputation of Professeur Raoult as a “climate skeptic” (which should soon replace Nazis in Godwin’s law) was reminded to the public.
Hence, the scientific conversation was once again replaced with barren debate. Nonetheless, all debaters claim science and scientists are on their side. Forgetting what science is : a method under which phenomenons are observed, theories are formulated, and tests prove them valid within a specific scope. Instead, science is mistaken for what in rhetoric is called “argument from authority” (or maybe I should quote in Latin so as to acquire more authority in my own argument : argumentum ad verecundiam).
Argument of authority starts when you use a source without checking the underlying data and theory on top, which happens a lot in journalism, as free press made journalistic economic constraints so tight fact checking became a waste. A benign example : many outlets (here is one) let it know that air quality in Beijing had significantly increased due to industrial slowdown in Beijing. In fact, I myself even put it in the incipit of this article. Most quote fine particles (PM2.5) concentration peak in February was twice smaller year-on-year, referencing data from aqicn. The data lies below. When I compare the peaks, I see the exact opposite…
This phenomenon is true especially among the elite. Elite today broadly means the top x% of society. What is “top” and what figure lies behind “x” doesn’t really matter. What matters is that what immediately came to mind was not scientists and researchers, but business elites and public servants in the top administrations.
All the usual suspects are present, beginning with twitter artists. We will extend respite for Donald Trump and focus on Elon Musk for once, who asserted early on, among other things, that kids were “essentially immune” to the disease. For all his credit, Musk is not legitimate on the topic.
The case of the Silicon Valley messiah is not insignificant. His SpaceX venture already has an essential feud with the science and astrophysics community. As I stated in another article, the Mecca of technology has deeper roots in mysticism than in science. The valley believes in the goodness of the valley (don’t be evil, as Google used to put it), and move fast, break things, said Facebook. Which explains how a blood testing startup like Theranos could raise more than 700 millions dollars from investors, ignoring the fact that no science was backing any of the claims of the company.
The devil is in the details, and especially in the vocabulary. Most startups today claim they are backed by science rather than technology. Job titles debase the very word science, creating positions like “data scientist”. Many mathematicians with expertise in AI actually are data scientists, or even simply scientists, as they contribute to the body of scientific theories (on arguing why computer science is science and not mere technology, refer to the theoretical achievements of Alan Turing, considered to be the father of AI, or read this old interview,). But comparing the one million data scientists listed on LinkedIn with the mere twelve hundred PhDs awarded each year in the US in the field of mathematics should help understand that the word “scientist’’ is rather used as a way to embroider database and statistics jobs.
This is hardly the first blow from neoliberalism to science. For decades, oil and gas lobbies, chemicals, tobacco and agribusiness disparaged the scientific community for putting forth environmental or public health issues.
Back to Professeur Raoult and the miracle medicine : on March 26th, the Académie de Médecine and the Académie des Sciences jointly concluded that the effectiveness of chloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19 was not yet demonstrated. Yet, the official voice of science in the country was no match for the online virality of chloroquine. French Health Minister Olivier Veran green lighted the use of the drug in hospitals (disapproving its use by private practitioners, though) in the decree 2020–314 of March 25th.
This story continues on Part 2: Parasite
