Author: Simon Sheridan

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

I mentioned in the last post how the government’s response to the corona event is a prime example of what James C. Scott calls a high modernist, top down, bureaucratic intervention. However, it is also my contention that governments did not want to go down that path. Rather, they were pressured into it by public sentiment that was stoked by the media and the financial interests that use the media to pursue their agenda. Some people have gone down the conspiracy theory route with the corona event and I can see why that seems true. My take is that a system had already been set in place through the WHO and the public bureaucracy. That system necessarily serves certain financial interests given the enormous sums of money involved. When the panic set in, governments were forced to use that system as it was the only game in town.

The fact that the system is a high modernist one is no coincidence because the modern medical and pharma industries are predicated on the naïve germ theory model, a simplified version of the science that is completely out of date with the findings of modern microbiology. High modernist interventions require simplified science because the bureaucratic organisational structure cannot handle complexity. Thus, such interventions will either try to re-shape the world according to the simplified model or simply ignore anything outside that model. The stubborn refusal of governments to allow any criticism of the measures undertaken during the corona event and the wilful exclusion of dissenting voices from the official public discourse are no coincidence. They are part of the pattern of a high modernist intervention.

It is also the case that much of the business model of the modern medical industry is predicated on naïve germ theory. This makes sense for a variety of reasons. One of the main ones is that the germ theory puts the problem outside of you and in the germ while the terrain theory looks for the problem inside of you. If you are sick and you go to a terrain theorist for a diagnosis, they will look for a problem with you. Are you not eating correctly? Are you not exercising? Do you drink too much? Smoke too much? Are you overweight? Are you stressed from too much work? Having found such problems, they will tell you to fix them. You’ll have to exercise. You’ll have to stop eating so much. You’ll have to stop drinking. That’s going to take effort and willpower on your part and this effort and willpower is not trivial. It is easy to see why people would seek a different solution.

The germ theorist doesn’t look for the problem in you. They look for it in the virus or the bacteria. The germ theorist will have a ready-made solution that doesn’t require anything on your part except a trip to the chemist. Of course, sometimes medicine really is the best option, especially for acute illness. However, the modern medical industry now offers a pill even for illnesses such as high blood pressure which are clearly caused by lifestyle and whose obvious solution should be to change that lifestyle rather than take medication.

Another way to look at the difference between the germ theorists and the terrain theorists is that the terrain theorist gives you the power. They’ll tell you that your health is in your hands. With naïve germ theory, the power is in the hands of the doctor and the enormous medical and pharmaceutical industries that stand behind them. Taking care of your own health doesn’t make anybody any money but enormous sums of money are spent on visits to doctors and hospitals. How many of those doctor and hospital trips could be avoided if people were in better health? It’s probably not insubstantial. About 50% of people in our society have a chronic illness and it seems about half of those are related to lifestyle illnesses.

So, there’s an obvious business element to all this. But there is also a moral element to it and it’s this moral element that I want to talk about in this post. The moral element of germ theory involves at least a trust in the medical and pharma industries. But this trust expanded into something more during the corona event.

To my mind, one of the strangest things that happened early on was the spontaneous adulation heaped on the medical profession. In particular, the scenes in Britain were deeply weird. It became the custom at a certain time of day to go out your front door and join your neighbours in applauding the NHS. Doctors and nurses had apparently become the new football players or rock stars. We were told they were heroes.

Interestingly, a kind of hero worship has been part of germ theory right from the start and nowhere more pronounced than in the person of Louis Pasteur. It was not uncommon for Pasteur to also receive applause and standing ovations when he spoke at various conferences. Whatever his scientific merits, there is no doubt Pasteur sought to heighten that fame and adulation.

Antoine Bechamp, his terrain theory rival, did not. As a result, it was Pasteur who was favoured among the political class and was given various assignments funded by the state. This mostly involved going in to solve problems that farmers were having. For example, issues with the grape harvest or problems with disease among livestock. It seems most of Pasteur’s solutions failed and in particular his early attempts at vaccines killed many more animals than they saved. These failures look a lot to me like the failures described by James C. Scott and, indeed, Scott also spoke of the heroic and utopian elements in the high modernist schemes. Here was Pasteur as hero sent in to save the floundering farmers.

With the corona event, it seems that the public wanted a similar heroism.

This desire for heroism wasn’t just limited in the applause for the NHS in Britain. It manifested elsewhere too. Where I live in Melbourne, a mini cult has sprung up around the State premier who has repeatedly taken decisive action including locking down the city on multiple occasions. Nevertheless, I still remember the early days back at the start of March where he, like most political leaders, was accused of dragging his feet. He eventually got the message: the public wanted action. It wanted heroic measures. That’s exactly what he has given them since: firm, decisive action. The fact that the decisions made today are completely at odds with the decisions made a month or two ago doesn’t seem to matter. Consistency is not required. Just decisiveness.

This desire for authorities to intervene might sound so obvious to a modern reader that we forget that it’s still a relatively new thing that really took off after world war two with the massive expansion of the public bureaucracy. Prior to that there was a much more self sufficient ethic among the general public.

In his book, Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel DeFoe (the same guy who wrote Robinson Crusoe) describes the events of 1665 in London during the Great Plague. It is a fascinating read in light of the corona event. In particular, the first quarter of the book is relevant because it details the lead up to the London plague and the response of the public in anticipation of what was to come. That response was stunningly similar to what we saw in the early days of the corona event. With just a little effort to translate the actors of that time into their modern counterparts, you can see that very little has changed in the three and half centuries since Defoe’s day. Of course, back then, the panic was set off by death statistics and not by infection statistics and the geographical area was a London borough rather than a nation state. But the underlying psychology on the part of the public was incredibly similar.

There is, however, at least one striking difference: the people back then expected nothing from the authorities. The King left London at the first sight of trouble. He moved to Oxford and apparently paid no attention whatsoever to the plague or how it affected his people. This was seemingly not a problem among the public who did not expect that his majesty would lift a finger to help them. They had to help themselves. Where the local authorities intervened, the people would simply try and get around those interventions as best they could. In short, there is no heroism nor any expectation of heroism in Defoe’s account.

Of course, back in De Foe’s day there was no public health system and nobody who really could help you. The so-called doctors of the time were mostly quacks and you were better off spending your money trying to get supernatural help which at least didn’t make you any physically sicker than you already were. We, on the other hand, have a sophisticated medical system to come to your aid in the event of illness. The word ‘system’ is the key point here. A system is a collective. A system functions by itself. It is in some sense the opposite of heroism which is about an individual.

In early the days of the corona event, we were told the lockdown measures were in place to protect this system and prevent it from collapsing under a sudden spike in admissions. This was the ‘flatten the curve’ mantra. Politicians initially told us we could flatten the curve by basic measures that wouldn’t require a shutdown of society but there was a revolt against this idea and a demand for tougher and tougher measures. It wasn’t enough to just protect the hospital system. We had to do something more. We needed heroism to save the system.

This example of systems vs heroes is something I have seen in my professional life of building IT systems. Within the parts of IT where I have worked there is an active distrust of the hero mentality because the hero constructs a kind of system where they make themselves indispensable. There are good reasons for companies to not want to have heroes simply because it gives the hero too much power. If you are the only one who knows how a system works you can use that your advantage. It also makes the system that is the company unstable. If something happens to that person the system can grind to a halt.

I remember once sitting in a job interview where the candidate was a hero. He was asked the usual cheesy interview question of what he liked about his job and he said something like waking up in the middle of the night and getting the system back up and running. What he might have said was ‘I like building systems where I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night.’ He wasn’t offered the job. In that company we didn’t want heroes. We wanted system builders.

It’s probably because of this background that I always get a little suspicious when heroics are concerned. No doubt sometimes in life genuine heroics are required. The rest of the time, it seems to me that heroics are a cover for a poorly designed system.

Were our hospital systems poorly designed or, at least, not designed to handle the corona event? Did they need heroes to come and save the day? Obviously this will differ from country to country, but it seems that in most places the answer was a firm ‘no’. Almost everywhere that makeshift hospitals were constructed, they weren’t used. Apart from a couple of hotspots, most places have not seen hospitals overwhelmed. The models used to justify the construction of those makeshift hospitals were not the epidemiological models that I have spoken of earlier in this series. Rather, it was the models of Neil Ferguson and the like. The doomsday models. According to those models we needed action. According to those models, we needed heroism.

We got that heroism in a never before imagined lockdown of society that was supposed to flatten the curve. But that message quickly morphed into something else. It was no longer about saving the hospital system, it was about eliminating the virus and heroic efforts to get a vaccine. I haven’t heard any coherent explanation of why that has to happen. It’s certainly nothing to do with systems anymore. It appears to be pure heroics or pure theatrics. With this we return right back to Louis Pasteur only now he takes the form of Bill Gates. We are told society itself can no longer function as a system without a vaccine. Once again, germ theory and heroism fit together like hand and glove. Once again, we look all set for a high modernist grand plan.

Recall that one of the elements of James C. Scott’s high modernist intervention was that civil society must be made or kept prostrate. I can think of no better way to do that than locking people in their houses. Perhaps the high modernist dreamers saw their opportunity and took it. As society went into lockdown the heroes came out of the woodwork with their grand plans. Perhaps that was always part of the grand plan as the conspiracy theorists would point out. Either way we are now looking at just such a grand intervention. A vaccine for everybody in the world according to Mr Gates.

If a prostrate civil society is required for the enactment of such high modernist plans, one of the more interesting dynamics during the corona event is how civil society became self prostrating. Of course, the army and the police were used to keep people physically in their homes. But there has also been social pressure exerted on dissenters and this pressure took the form of a strange kind of call for anti-heroism. This call focused particularly on quelling dissent around the lockdown itself and also around the wearing of masks.

The reader can search the internet for many different examples of the memes that went into circulation. But the common underlying thread in many of those memes was to juxtapose the ‘hero’ against you, the lowly everyday citizen.

Here’s just one of countless examples where Mr T (the hero) puts you in your place courtesy of a bad bit of photoshop.

One of the memes that aimed to quell dissent around staying at home stood out to me. It went along the lines of: “Your grandfather had to fight a war. All you’ve got to do is stay home on the couch and watch television. Think you can handle that?”

Once again, we have the hero (your grandfather at war) and you who are simply asked to do, well, nothing. The irony in this is the fact that so many young soldiers back in the day couldn’t wait to go to war precisely because they wanted to leave home and go and have a heroic adventure.

The underlying message in all these examples is the same. What was required of you during the corona event was precisely not to be a hero. You just had to sit back and let the real heroes do the work. Is it a coincidence that this is exactly the form of the germ theory patient just doing what their doctor says? Is it a coincidence that a terrain theorist would say exactly the opposite: of course, you shouldn’t stay at home. You should go outside and get fresh air and vitamin D and stay active. You should mix with other people and keep your spirits up.

The fact that this clearing out of opposition from civil society apparently took place quite spontaneously via everyday people on social media is just another deeply weird component of the corona event. Just like the people clapping for the NHS in Britain, it seems everyday citizens needed no prompting. They knew the script already. In my opinion, the germ theory has actually become part of our modern collective subconscious. I don’t see any other way to explain the uniformity of action from disparate actors. The germ theory implies a hero doctor and a passive patient. So, we needed the public to play their role and be passive. In the meantime, the real heroes, the real high modernist schemers had moved into position.

At time of writing, we are looking right down the barrel of an epic high modernist ‘heroic’ intervention in our lives. It’s captured in that dreary bit of alliteration ‘the new normal’. Other wannabe heroes have come out of the woodwork with all kinds of ideas of how to re-shape society in accordance with whatever utopian ideal is in their heads. No doubt a lot it is just talk. But with civil society prostrate, now is the time to try your luck. To come back to my heroes vs systems distinction, we are no longer worried about the system. Society as a system now lies helpless on the operating table just waiting for the surgeon’s scalpel. It’s apparently time to operate.

Against the backdrop of this kind of heroism and anti-heroism that has played out during the corona event I would like to give my version of heroism as seen from the vantage point conveyed by this series of posts. The heroes that I see are the ones that have spoken out against the stifling consensus and at least given people some alternative framework by which to understand what has happened. To elucidate this heroism, I’m going to draw on what’s probably my favourite era of film: the film noir of the late 40s and early 50s.

The big, dumb, blunt interventions of James C. Scott’s bureaucrat high modernists remind me a lot of 80s action movies with their big, dumb, muscle-bound heroes running around with bazookas blowing the enemy to smithereens. That works OK in the movies where the bad guys are 100% bad and get exactly what they deserve. It doesn’t work in the real world. In the real world there is ambiguity and complexity. That ambiguity and complexity is far better captured by film noir. Unlike the 80s action hero, the classic film noir hero is a conflicted person with his own inner demons that are exacerbated by the social context in which he or she finds himself.

That hero is often juxtaposed against a rabid mob out to enact ‘justice’. This was a favourite trope of the German director Fritz Lang who had, after all, witnessed that exact dynamic play out as Hitler came to power. Naturally, mobs are not easy to reason with and it’s up to the protagonist to fight back against them.

One of the greatest of the film noirs is the movie Boomerang directed by Elia Kazan. It features exactly this dynamic of a conflicted protagonist trying to neutralise an irrational mob.

In the movie, a callous and cowardly murder has taken place in a small city in America. The townsfolk are horrified and demand the murderer be brought to justice immediately. However, the police have no good leads and results are not forthcoming. Frustration grows and political pressure is exerted on the chief of police to get results quickly. Still no good leads are found but eventually they come across a suspect whose alibi is weak and, although he maintains his innocence, they force a confession out of him.

The case goes to the district attorney who is a handsome, competent and popular man with a beautiful wife and a wonderful life ahead of him. The matter is as straightforward as can be. A suspect has confessed. Everybody in town wants him to be found guilty. All the district attorney has to do is run through the motions. But the district attorney is a man of honour. He checks the evidence and sees that it doesn’t add up. In a dramatic twist he declares that he believes the man innocent at which point he is taken aside by the powers that be and presented with a series of carrots and eventually sticks to get him to do what is wanted. His final choice is clear: he can pursue justice and have his life ruined or he can try the defendant, who will definitely be found guilty, and continue his rise through the ranks of the elite.

The heroism presented in this case is the heroism to pursue what you know to be right even though the society around you will forsake you. Anybody can follow along with what the mob wants especially when it calls you a hero. But the deeper heroism is to do what is right though you will be condemned for it.

The reason why this is specifically relevant in the case of the corona event is because most of the people working in the medical and scientific fields are compromised by the fact that they make their living mostly from government money. Indeed, the corona event has seen a flood of new money go into the biomedical fields. Money for vaccines, the money for the PCR tests, more money for hospitals and all the rest. This gives the people who work in those areas a very strong incentive not to speak out against what is happening. To speak out requires exactly the kind of bravery and heroism presented in the movie Boomerang. It’s to do what is right even though it will hurt your life chances.

One of the surprising and disappointing factors in the corona event has been the failure of the institutions in our society to provide at least one alternative viewpoint on what is happening. In Australia there has been absolutely nothing from opposition political parties, the mainstream media or the scientific and medical establishment. Apparently, we have a complete consensus here on the path forward even though it’s obvious that path forward has changed almost daily and our politicians are making it up as they go. We could barely muster a single dissenting voice that mattered. Lesser voices were of course quickly put down via the usual social media mob mentality that Fritz Lang would recognise.

Fortunately, in this age of the internet we are not restricted by national boundaries and so dissenting voices from other countries are available to us. One particular dissenting voice from overseas captured my attention: Professor Sucharit Bhakti, a professor of medical microbiology and apparently one of the foremost in Germany. Bhakti went public because he saw what was happening made no sense from a scientific point of view let alone a moral point of view. Why Bhakti is even more interesting though is because he was born in Thailand and only recently became a citizen of Germany because he wanted to live in a democracy. Unlike the rest of us who take democracy so much for granted that we are happy to put it on hold, apparently indefinitely, Bhakti reacted with horror as he watched democracy be thrown out the window. The fact that it was done on the pretense of science that didn’t make sense to him was just the icing on the cake.

That is my kind of heroism. The heroism to speak against a stifling consensus. Incidentally, it’s also the job of the true scientist. Where have been the other scientists to speak out? Even Bhakti lamented that his own students (of which there are apparently many thousands) have remained silent. No doubt they are worried for their careers. No doubt many of them are happy to play the role of doctor-as-hero or scientist-as-hero that our society has created for them. But the true scientific hero is the kind of person like Professor Bhakti.

Is it just a coincidence that Germany seems to be one of the few countries where some citizens are protesting against the measures being put in place? At least there they have somebody to give an alternative view based on science.

To return to the movie Boomerang, the district attorney does save the day and he does so in a dramatic gimmick in the courtroom that proves beyond a doubt that the defendant is innocent. Unfortunately, we are not going to get such a certain proof with the corona event. This is the real world and not the movies. There is no smoking gun evidence that is going to change people’s minds. It seems to me that the naive germ theory and the kind of heroism that seems to go with it has now morphed into a high modernist, 80s action movie hero dynamic. Just like an 80s action movie, there’s going to be collateral damage all over the place. The only question at the moment seems to be, how much?

Postscript: the victory of the bourgeoisie

There is one final riff on the hero theme I would like to throw in. It’s related to the modern dynamic between what can broadly be called the romantics and the bourgeoisie that’s been going on western culture for a couple of hundred years. The romantic hero is perhaps best defined by Nietzsche as having a cheerful fatalism. Goethe was Nietzsche’s favourite exemplar: somebody who could accept nature for all it is both the good and the bad. The romantics did not reject nature, they celebrated it in all its power and all its terrifying ambivalence to human life. By contrast, the bourgeoisie was the one who thought they had ‘conquered’ nature but all that had really happened was they removed themselves from it.

When viewed this way, the government mandate to stay at home represents a symbolic victory of the bourgeoisie. Stay home and watch tv. How hard is that? All you’ve got to do is exactly what you’re told.

One imagines the scene from A Clockwork Orange where Alex is hooked up to the Ludovico apparatus and is flashed the hashtags #staythefuckhome and #wearafuckingmask over and over again.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

When it became clear that the corona event was going to get serious, I started looking into the science behind viral disease. Like most of us, I had been taught about germ theory in high school and hadn’t given it much thought since. What I had heard about, for example, new findings around our microbiome, made me suspicious of the official narrative that was taking shape around corona. However, given that it looked like we were about to shut our society down, I assumed there must have been some big breakthroughs in the science that had given us new certainty in relation to viruses.

I was right about the big breakthroughs in the science but wrong about the certainties. In fact, the scientific breakthroughs in microbiology of the last few decades have made the whole field far less certain and this uncertainty stands in direct contrast to our single-minded response to corona. In post 2 of this series, I made the claim that the corona event could never have happened without the PCR test. In this post, we’ll see that the PCR test and other technological advancements have completely upended the naive version of germ theory which has been the primary mode of explanation in the public discourse around corona and we’ll see that it’s not just germ theory that gets brought into question but our entire conception of selfhood.

Right from the start of the corona event, the focus has been all about ‘infection’. I began my investigations into the science by trying to find out how we tested for infections. I learned about the PCR technology and that it was a form of genetic detection. A virologist finds what they think is the virus causing the infection, they analyse its genome and come up with a segment of the genome that they think uniquely identifies just that virus and nothing else. The PCR test, an incredibly complex bit of technology involving all kinds of chemical processes and fluorescent probes, looks for that segment of genome. It is a calibrated test, which means that you have to find the right number of cycles for it to give the most accurate results. Like all biological tests, there will be an error rate and it is up to the technician and others to ensure the error rate is as low as possible. The error rate exists in the test itself (which chemicals are used etc), in the collection of the sample (contamination, invalid sample capture), and in the laboratory processing (technician error, temperature, contamination etc).

There are 99 potential problems with the PCR test and it seemed to me that you’d want some very strict quality control measures to ensure that the system as a whole was not producing excessive errors. In the rush to respond to corona, we actually threw those quality control measures overboard. We allowed ‘emergency approval’ of the test kits, bypassing the usual quality control measures. We heard stories of whole batches of test kits being invalid. In Melbourne, we had run out of qualified people to take samples so we had non-specialists going door-to-door to test people. We even had ‘self service’ test kits where people could sample themselves. And it seemed that nobody was testing the labs to ensure they were producing accurate results. In short, we had set up a system that seemed guaranteed to produce error. When the President of Tanzania produced his famous speech about test results coming back positive for various fruits and farm animals, those of us who knew how the system worked were not at all surprised.

Setting aside the logistical issues with the tests, the main problem from a theoretical point of view is that we were using the PCR test as the ‘gold standard’. In Australia, the government considered you to be a ‘confirmed’ case on the basis of a single positive test. This is a problem because the PCR test does not ‘prove’ causality. It is not a ‘gold standard’ test in the sense in which I understood the term. The gold standard test as I understood it was based on Koch’s postulates but it seemed that nobody had run that test. Until that had been done, how could you know that the PCR test was valid at all?

Opponents of the measures undertaken during the corona event were using this failure to fulfil Koch’s postulates to argue that our response was invalid. As it happens, most of the people I came across making that argument were also advocates of a little-known theory of disease called terrain theory. In listening to their objections to the PCR test, I also heard about their alternative take on what was happening. In our society, the terrain theory is supposedly discredited while the germ theory is the accepted and yet it seemed to me without looking into it further that modern microbiology had as much support for terrain theory as for germ theory. We will see exactly how much as we progress.

For now, let’s do a very quick summary of the two positions. Everybody knows germ theory as it is the default in our culture. A pathogenic germ comes from outside the body, gets inside and makes us sick. Louis Pasteur was one of the foremost exponents in his day and he had the idea that a single germ should cause a single illness. Robert Koch came up with his postulates as an attempt to put the germ theory, which at the time was not yet in the ascendant, on firm scientific footing.

Some version of the terrain theory was actually the default position of most scientists in the 19^th century but the version that comes down to us today is mostly attributed to Antoine Bechamp. Leaving aside the specific mechanics of how it might happen, the theory states that illness comes first and then germs are attracted to the illness. That is, the body first becomes weakened and in that weakened state germs are able to gain a foothold.

Exponents of the terrain theory like to invoke Koch’s postulates because those postulates have never worked for viruses and for many other pathogens as well. Even in Koch’s day, it was known that the postulates did not apply across the board. Later there would be the technical problem that viruses cannot be propagated in pure culture which was a requirement of Koch’s third postulate. But more importantly there was the problem of asymptomatic cases and this is where the link to the corona event becomes clearest.

When I first heard about all the asymptomatic corona ‘cases’ my first impression was that it was great news. Here’s a virus that’s so weak that it doesn’t even make most people sick. Surely that was cause for celebration. The media response was the opposite. We heard horror stories about asymptomatic ‘carriers’ and how this was terrible because it meant that you couldn’t know who was spreading the virus from symptoms alone. This reveals a key pattern with corona event and one that driven both the public’s understanding and also the public health bureaucracy’s understanding. With the corona event, we have focused almost entirely on ‘infection’ and very little on ‘disease’. The strange thing about that is that it is a repetition of the very beginning of the germ theory vs terrain theory debate that was going on back when Pasteur and Koch and Bechamp were discussing the matter. The early opponents to germ theory pointed to asymptomatic cases as evidence against germ theory. The germ theorists pointed out that it was awful because it meant we had invisible carriers of a virus.

Let’s return to Koch’s postulates.

The germ theorists wanted to be able to prove a causal relation between a virus and an illness. But if you have asymptomatic cases, then there is no fixed causal relation. All you can say is that the virus ‘might’ cause illness. In fact, Koch had to make exactly this modification to his postulates. Where he wanted to say the virus ‘must’ cause illness he could only say it ‘may’ cause illness. This seemingly small alteration in language has been everywhere during the corona event. We have heard endlessly about what ‘could’ happen and what ‘might’ happen. These horror stories go right to the heart of the uncertainty caused by the fact that Koch’s postulates cannot be fulfilled. Terrain theorists point to this uncertainty as evidence that they are right. According to them, the difference between the asymptomatic person and the symptomatic one is the terrain: the person’s own body. The epidemiological evidence around corona provides justification for this. Statistically, the people who have gotten sick were overwhelming the elderly and immuno-compromised. The germ theory exponents fought back by highlighting stories of otherwise healthy people who got sick but these were rare individual cases many of which were found to be of dubious veracity.

The question of asymptomatic cases has thus been at the core of the germ theory vs terrain theory debate right from the start. That it should rear its head with the corona event is no surprise. There are all kinds of statistics floating around about the asymptomatic rate of sars-cov-2 infections. I’ve seen everything from 40%-80%. The fact that the public debate has turned what should be good news into cause for alarm is not a coincidence. It reveals that the germ theory interpretation has been foregrounded at the expense of the terrain theory.

This is no surprise. Our public health bureaucrats, through their counterparts in the WHO and other such bodies, chose a pandemic response strategy that implies a simplified version of the germ theory of disease. It is no coincidence that this strategy, like the naïve version of germ theory that it uses, is straight out of the 19^th century. From the beginning of the lockdown and even before, there has been a political imperative to completely disallow public debate that could call the strategy into question. We will look at this issue in the last part of this post.

For now, let’s look at what modern microbiology has to tell us about viruses and viral illness. We will see that our public health response to the corona event is completely out of date with modern microbiology. Ironically, it is the very technology that we have used to detect infections – the PCR test – alongside other technological advances that has blown open the question of germ theory vs terrain theory.

The Microbiome and the Virome

The naïve version of germ theory, the one that is part of our collective cultural subconscious, is that our body is ourselves and the world is outside of us. The germs ‘live’ in the world outside and they try to get into our body where they cause trouble. This notion goes right back to Pasteur and Koch. The truth is this idea hasn’t corresponded to scientific understanding for many many decades. As far back as 1950s and probably earlier, we knew about chronic infections; viruses that exist in the body indefinitely. At that time, just as now, there was an explosion of technological advancement in the identification of viruses. That led, just as now, to all kinds of spurious correlations with vaguely defined illness. Huebner wrote in 1957:

In addition to many opportunities for spurious etiologic associations provided by the simple chance occurrence of numerous ubiquitous and prevalent viruses, some representatives of these agents are demonstrably persistent in the human host for weeks or months . . . and simultaneous multiple viral infections are extremely common.

In the last twenty or thirty years, we have seen a repeat of what happened back around the 1950s i.e. a huge explosion in viral identification due to technological breakthroughs. We have seen a repeat of the surge in spurious etiological associations calling into question once again the problem of Koch’s postulates. But this time, the technological breakthroughs are not just a problem for microbiology. This time we have a whole new paradigm shift in what we thought we knew about the human body. The PCR test and other gene-based tools of analysis have opened up a new world but this new world challenges not just the germ theory of disease but our entire conception of our self.

We now know that viruses are literally everywhere in the world. The oceans in particular are a melting pot of viruses but viruses are on land, in the air and all other places. It is said there are possibly 10³¹ viruses in the world. In every human body, there could be 380 trillion viruses.

Most people would have heard about the microbiome in particular in relation to gut health. It turns out each of us also has a virome and the virome appears to be larger than the microbiome. There are more viruses inside us than bacteria. They appear to be in all places on and inside us: our blood, our mouths, our gut, our skin. Those facts are hard enough to wrap your head around but it also turns out that a very large number of those viruses are from exogenous sources. That is, they originated in the outside world. Even in human blood, researchers have found all kinds of viruses, fungi and bacteria that originated outside the body which raises all kinds of questions of how they got there. Presumably it must be through the intestinal tract.

This is, of course, a huge problem for naive germ theory. We are not self-contained entities just minding our own business and waiting for a nasty virus to come along. We are more like an ecosystem of micro-organisms (including viruses) most of which are in a symbiotic relationship with us:

Perhaps the most radical change is the realization that most of the microbes that inhabit our body supply crucial ecosystem services that benefit the entire host-microbe system. These services include the production of important resources, bioconversion of nutrients, and protection against pathogenic microbes.” (Young, 2017)

That’s right: viruses can protect us from other pathogenic microbes. We are even now starting to research using viruses as a form of disease prevention or mitigation thus completely turning the germ theory of disease on its ear.

Of course, most of these viruses are bacteriophages and the like. What about the viruses that are typically associated with illness? Well, we already know from the corona event, that we can be infected by such viruses without getting sick but the research is only beginning to show how prevalent that is. During the corona event we still assumed that asymptomatic people had been newly infected but it’s starting to look like asymptomatic infection by potentially disease-causing viruses is the norm. Studies that test asymptomatic people for infection are relatively new but are showing that it is perfectly normal to be infected by a virus that could make you sick but doesn’t.

Although malaria, most Leptospira spp., influenza, and dengue were identified more frequently among the febrile [feverish] patients, the detection of these same pathogens in the afebrile control group at a nontrivial rate was striking…

We now know that potentially pathogenic viruses can be inside us without causing illness. We know we can have multiple infections of ostensibly pathogenic viruses at the same time. Another study found that you were more likely to get sick with a single infection than with multiple. Another study found that some viruses require coinfection to cause illness. This all raises the question: what is it that causes the illness. It can’t just be the virus. Maybe it is something in the terrain too?

All these new findings exacerbate the uncertainty that already existed around Koch’s postulates and causality of viral illness. We can’t assume there is a one to one relationship between a virus and an illness. This leads to all kinds of computational difficulties if you were to approach the matter in a purely statistical fashion. Furthermore, in order to get reliable statistics, you would need mass testing of the population to try and figure out how many asymptomatic infections are there. But that would be just the start of the problem because now you need to try and figure out which variable differentiates the asymptomatic from the symptomatic.

For example, let’s say we have 50% of people infected with sars-cov-2 who are asymptomatic. We want to know what is the difference between them and symptomatic people? It could be the presence of another virus. It could be the absence of another virus! It could be a general state of health or lifestyle matters or geographic factors like air pollution. How do you reduce the number of variables down to a manageable size?

That the PCR and other technological advancements have made these problems more pronounced is well known within mainstream microbiology:

As with traditional culture techniques, nucleic acid amplification technology has the ability to detect microbes that may behave as ‘‘true’’ or frequent pathogens, transient or permanent commensals, opportunists that take advantage of pre-existing pathology or altered host defences. The difficulty in making these distinctions is made more challenging by the extreme sensitivity of the amplification technology. (Fredricks and Relman, 1996)

It is one of history’s ironies that the corona event and the naïve interpretation of the germ theory implied by it should come at exactly the time that microbiology is showing how outdated that germ theory is. What’s more, all this new information is actually shifting the focus back towards the terrain theory as an explanatory framework because in an ecosystem perspective you can’t worry about simplistic cause and effect. There are too many variables to calculate to find cause and effect. You have to fall back to observation of the system as a whole and that is exactly what terrain theory implies. This observation of the system as a whole is exactly what epidemiology does. I mentioned in earlier posts how we relegated epidemiology in our response to corona and this has been a big mistake in my opinion.

There have been and still are ongoing attempts within microbiology to save the underlying notion of Koch’s postulates. One of the more recent ones is from Fredericks and Relman who suggested a new set of postulates that aimed to account for the technological advances of recent times and put microbiology on a more secure footing. Let’s look at just the first two of those postulates as they relate to the corona event:-

A nucleic acid sequence belonging to a putative pathogen should be present in most cases of an infectious disease.

Straight off the bat we have a problem in relation to the corona event. As I pointed out in earlier posts, the disease ‘covid-19’ doesn’t have unique symptoms. Thus, it’s not clear what ‘disease’ means here. You can say the disease is covid-19 but the only way to know that is from the PCR test which leads to circularity. On the other hand, if you say the disease is pneumonia or Influenza Like Illness, then we still have a problem. In Australia, for example, the overall test positive rate last time I checked was about 0.5%. That is certainly not ‘most cases’ and would therefore fail this criterion.

Fewer, or no, copy numbers of pathogen-associated nucleic acid sequences should occur in hosts or tissues without disease.

I read this to mean, the number of asymptomatic ‘cases’ should be less than symptomatic ones. As stated earlier, the asymptomatic rate for sars-cov-2 is said to be somewhere between 40%-80%. This would seem to be a negative on this criterion.

Based on what, in my opinion, are the two most important criteria of their list, I would say that sars-cov-2 does not cause covid-19. The problem is that Fredericks and Relman say that not all of their criteria need to be fulfilled and that there must be scientific ‘concordance’ on these matters. But where does that leave us except in a position that we have to trust the experts. The whole point of Koch’s postulates was to fix objective criteria by which these things could be discussed. Such criteria are also implied by the reproducibility criteria of science. If I can’t reproduce your work because we cannot agree on the interpretation of the rules then we can argue endlessly about semantics with no result.

Whilst I have no dog in the fight (at least I didn’t until the corona event), it seems to me that we have more than a hundred years now of germ theorists coming up with criteria that never get satisfied. At what point do we say the germ theory as a whole is on the wrong path?

There is an idea that seems prevalent in microbiology that all these new technologies are going to open up opportunities for new understanding. I see the exact opposite. There are going to be way too many variables to calculate. It’s going to be the three-body problem on steroids. False positives are going to be the norm even by researchers who are doing good work let alone sloppy speculators such as the ones I mentioned in post 7 who spent five years scrounging around in bat caves with nothing to show for it.

These questions have now become matters of urgent political importance. Virologists have tools to find new viruses and they are going to keep finding them. Without firm criteria to establish causality, the public is helpless at the hands of the ‘experts’. There can no point in arguing on the basis of facts because the interpretation of those facts is what is at stake and essentially it comes down to who has the power to enforce their interpretation. With the corona event we have seen ICTV appoint a working group to officially announce a ‘new’ virus. Their decision is final. There’s no point in arguing with it because there are no criteria by which to argue against. Similarly, the WHO officially declared a new disease. They broke their own standards to do that but who can argue against them?

This is not the way that science as we traditionally understand it is supposed to work. It seems that analytical problems in both virology and microbiology are leading us in the direction of having to accept expert opinion. Why not just address those analytical problem? Could it be that the entire fields of virology and microbiology are on the wrong path? The underlying problem in both cases seems to stem from the requirement in western philosophy to assign ‘essential’ attributes to things. As this debate is right at the core of corona event, I will devote a future post to it and in particular to how the philosopher Wittgenstein could point the way forward out of this conundrum.

Conclusion: legibility and infection

A number of microbiologists and doctors have spoken out against the public health measures taken during the corona event including two doctors from California who explicitly discuss the modern ideas around ‘microbial health’ and how the lockdown and mask wearing are decidedly unhealthy given what we now know about the human microbiome and virome. Of course, none of them made it into mainstream discourse.

Against this backdrop of developments in microbiology, the political and public health response during the corona event seems absurdly simplistic. But it was following a pattern that I recognised from one of my favourite books: James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. It is no coincidence that our public health response has been about a hundred years out of date because the type of response we launched is straight out of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is an example of what Scott calls high modernism: the attempt to re-work society according to scientific laws. These attempts were run out of the public bureaucracy and involved re-structuring society for legibility so that bureaucrats could understand what was going on. It is all about top-down schemes and top down governance. Such schemes require a simplification of reality in order to work. Usually this involves re-structuring reality to be simple enough to do your scheme but it can also occur by simply ignoring anything that doesn’t fit your categories, like doctors and microbiologists who point out that your science is wrong.

The corona event ticks the box on all of Scott’s conception of such high-modernist schemes. There is the administrative re-ordering and simplification of society seen in lockdowns, compulsory masks, curfews and restricted movement. There is the overconfidence in science to address the problem, a confidence that can only occur by putting your faith in a version of germ theory that’s a hundred years out of date. There is the use of authoritarian state power seen in the police and the army. And there is a prostrate civil society that cannot resist state power seen in possibly its ultimate form of people literally being confined to their homes.

I encourage the reader to check out Scott’s book although I warn that a terrifying glimpse will open up about what possibly lies ahead of us. Such high modernist schemes brought misery and destruction on a grand scale but those schemes were mostly at the national level and mostly occurred outside of the West. The West now appears set to embark on a similar Quixotic adventure which it will try to enforce at the global level. The results could be devastating.

The fact is, our public health response has been the opposite of what modern microbiology would advise. Things in nature need to flow and that goes also for germs and our exposure to them. The forced wearing of masks, the locking of people in their homes, the shutting down of civil society stops that flow at the microbial level. It removes us from nature. Apart from the obvious damage it does economically, psychologically and socially, it also doesn’t work for our health. The mainstream debate and the entire focus of the public health bureaucracy has been on ‘infections’ and ensuring there is maximal legibility around this so that bureaucrats can stamp out said infections. We know from modern microbiology that such infections are a normal part of everyday life and so the public health response has essentially become a war on that everyday life.

As with so many of the things around the corona event, this should have been a non-starter. It seems so self-evidently wrong that we marvel that it even got done. But perhaps there is something else going on and perhaps that something else is actually part of the recent developments in microbiology.

Maybe the reason we cling to the germ theory of disease is because it preserves a deeper web of meaning around ourselves as individuals. The vista that microbiology is opening up for us is one where our own body is radically unseparated from ‘nature’. This challenges all kinds of notions around selfhood and touches on deep issues in morality. What is at stake here is the question of whether we have any control at all and what sort of control we have. Microbiology is giving us a glimpse into how little we control and we don’t like it one bit. Maybe the massive over-reaction has been an attempt to regain the appearance of control at all costs. In this the politicians and public health bureaucracy have, in my opinion, only been doing what the public wanted. The public health response was a cover for deeper philosophical and psychological problems.

In the final post in this series I will return to this theme of the philosophical issues that underlie the corona event. In the next post I want to talk about the concept of heroism. As the corona event unfolded the public cried out for ‘heroes’. This cry was in direct response to the existential crisis that corona afforded, not the public health requirements. The concept of heroism and heroic effort has come out in some very strange ways during the corona event. We’ll unpack them next.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s nothing novel under the sun

One of the noteworthy things about the corona event is how many members of the general public thought the science is ‘on their side’ as if there was a scientific consensus that they were following while their opponents, who were by definition ‘unscientific’, were merely parroting superstition and nonsense. This betrays a lack of understanding about what actual science is. Not having a consensus is the norm in science but it seems most people nowadays treat ‘science’ like some big monolith from which truth emanates. That is certainly the way science is taught in school where the emphasis is on learning what has already been ‘proven’ over long periods of time rather than experiencing the ambiguity and uncertainty that characterises live science. Sad to say, in our society, science has in many ways simply replaced religion as a form of dogma. During the corona event, there have been people referencing ‘science’ in exactly the same way that people would once have pulled a passage out of the Bible to try and win an argument.

I showed in part 5 of this series how little ‘science’ had to do with the actions of the WHO and other players at the start of the corona event. In this post, I want to take a look at the public’s perception of the science as communicated to them through the media. There are numerous, in fact too many, ways to investigate this so we are going to focus on just one: the idea that the virus was ‘novel’ or ‘new’.

As this distinction is primarily a linguistic one, we’ll use a little linguistic theory to help elucidate what happened. To start with, let’s recognise that there’s a distinction between what you can call folk language or natural language and scientific language.

Natural human language is vague and context based. This flexibility is beneficial in everyday life but a hindrance in science where logic and rigor are required. Thus, scientific language tries to remove ambiguity. Words are given fixed meanings and a big part of learning to become a scientist is to learn to use those specific meanings so that disagreements don’t end up becoming endless arguments over semantics.

Because of this difference, the two types of language – folk language and scientific language – actually need to be translated in order to be understandable. The problem is that scientific language uses the same words as natural language and this can lead a speaker of the language to assume they have understood something when in fact they haven’t. Scientific language is a lot more like reading Shakespeare: you recognise the words but the meanings that you assign to them are not necessarily the same ones that people used in Shakespeare’s day.

If you want to understand science as a lay person, you must spend the time really understanding the specific meaning that a scientist is giving to a word. Conversely, as a scientist speaking to a lay person, you must be sure to translate the scientific meaning of into unambiguous everyday language. Of course, translation is a separate skill from doing science and there is no guarantee that a scientist will be good at it.

I’ll take this opportunity to yet again reference Richard Feynman who stated that a scientist should be able to explain their work to a ten year old and, if they couldn’t, it meant that they themselves didn’t understand it. Thus, it should arguably be part of the scientific profession for scientists to regularly explain their work directly to the public as this would be beneficial to both.

Of course, that doesn’t happen. What happens is that the media steps in and ostensibly fills the role of translating science into a form the public can understand. But, as we will see, they failed to do this during the corona event.

A useful way to examine the specifics of that failure is to introduce another concept that’s well known in linguistics: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis simply states that languages influences thought. The different languages of the world encode different bits of information about the world and therefore in order to speak those languages you will be predisposed to pay attention to whatever information the language requires you to express. Most people have heard about the Eskimos and all their words for snow but there are all kinds of other nuances built deep into the grammar of languages that can theoretically bias thought.

An example of this is that in many Australian Aboriginal languages there are particles to express coordinate directions. Thus, you wouldn’t say “the fork is to the left of the spoon”. You would have to say “the fork is east of the spoon”, or west of the spoon or whichever direction it happened to be. Because the language requires the speaker to encode cardinal directions, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis predicts that speakers of those languages should be better able to identify cardinal directions than speakers of other languages. Cognitive linguists set up a range of experiments to test this and those tests provide evidence that it is true: speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages are more likely to know which way is north, south, east or west at any given time than speakers of other languages.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was also once used in a court case and it is this example that is most relevant to the corona event because it nicely highlights the difference between folk language and scientific language.

The court case was about a factory worker in the US who had taken a cigarette break in the side yard at the company where he worked. In the yard there were a number of 44-gallon drums that had been marked ‘empty’, which was the signal for them to be collected by the trucking company. Having finished his smoke, the worker thought to make use of one of the drums as a rubbish bin but neglected to extinguish the cigarette before doing so, with explosive results.

The case went to court. The company was charged with negligence on the basis that the sign ‘empty’ was misleading. The lawyers for the man argued that the sign had the connotation of being ‘inert’ or ‘safe’ and that the company was responsible for what had happened because the label they had put on the drum was untrue: the drums were not empty, they were full of explosive gas.

The man’s lawyers won the case.

This might sound spurious and an example of where some clever lawyers tricked the jury on a technicality. But let’s think about it from a scientific point of view. Scientifically speaking, a 44-gallon drum is never ‘empty’. There is a concept in physics of a perfect vacuum but that doesn’t exist in reality. There is, in fact, no actual way to make a drum properly ‘empty’ or ‘vacant’ or ‘void’.

In the case of the worker, the normal contents of the 44-gallon drum were paint thinners and even though the liquid version of the paint thinners had been removed there were still technically paint thinners in the drum, they were just in gaseous form. As the gaseous form of paint thinners is as explosive as the liquid, the company was ruled to be negligent to have labelled the bin ‘empty’.

It turns out that ‘empty’ is a strange kind of word that really doesn’t mean much in physics but we use it all the time in everyday language. In order to understand the meaning of the word ‘empty’ in this specific case we need to understand that natural human language has a number of ground rules that are assumed in interactions. These are not captured in the semantics of the words themselves but they play an important role in the construction of meaning. They are sometimes called implicatures because they are implied by what is said or not said.

Without going into the theoretical details, let’s just say that there is an implied meaning in the phrase ‘the drum is empty’ and that meaning is as follows:

‘The drum is empty [of its usual substance]’.

These kinds of implied meanings happen all the time in our use of language. If I say ‘the fridge is empty’ you assume it is empty of food because food is what is normally stored in a fridge (unless it’s a beer fridge). Another way to say the same thing is ‘there is no food in the fridge’ and that statement is also true. However, you can’t translate ‘the drum is empty’ into ‘there are no paint thinners in the drum’. The second statement is not true. A true statement would be something like ‘there are no paint thinners in liquid form in the drum’.

So, this is not a legal technicality and it certainly wasn’t a technicality for the worker who had thrown his cigarette into that drum. Words matter and it’s often the simplest of words that can trip you up. That is why science spends so much time and effort to fix the meanings of words and ensure there are no implicatures used. In scientific language, we deliberately remove ambiguity so we don’t fall into just the kinds of traps that the worker fell into (this helps us to achieve Feynman’s first principle as outlined in part 5: don’t fool yourself).

Translating science into everyday language is hard and to do it properly often requires just the kind of seemingly long-winded explications that we have just seen. Scientists who speak to the public might try to avoid this so they don’t appear boring or patronising and in fact this was a pattern I saw a lot during the corona event: scientists would often qualify their statements with the phrase we don’t really know.

Here’s just a few examples I saw of this pattern.

There was the case in Canada where somebody got a false positive test. A news report featured a public health bureaucrat who reassured the public that all was well and the tests were trustworthy. Buried down in the second last paragraph of the article, the bureaucrat admitted that she didn’t really know how many false positives or false negatives there were, but that she ‘expected’ the rates were very low.

On a virological podcast, the special guest virologist was firstly asked to explain how we know that the coronavirus came from bats. She prefaced her answer by saying that we don’t really know and that, unfortunately, the phrase we don’t really know was probably going to be true of every answer she gave that evening. Everybody laughed then she preceded to explain what’s become the accepted story about where the coronavirus came from; the one that she didn’t really know was true.

A favourite example of mine was an Australian academic who was asked on tv how accurate the PCR tests were. He admitted that we don’t really know because there is no gold standard test for sars-cov-2 but he expected it was about 70% accurate. The host simply continued on with the program as if that was a perfectly acceptable answer.

The phrase we don’t really know is highly ambiguous. It could mean we have no idea, but here’s a blind guess. It could mean you’re 50% sure or it could mean you’re 99% sure and you’re just being a good scientist and acknowledging that science proves nothing. When used in the examples above, there is an implied meaning in this phrase:-

We don’t really know [but it doesn’t matter]

If I tell you my house is on fire but give no more context, you’ll probably ask me about it because it seems like it should matter that my house is on fire. Houses being on fire is normally a problem in everyday life. But if I tell you we don’t know how accurate the PCR test is, as a lay person you don’t know if that matters because you’ve never done a PCR test before and in fact have no idea how they work. You don’t have the context to understand so you assume that it must be ok. The experts know what they are doing. Unfortunately, in the case of the corona event, this little phrase we don’t really know led to the avoidance of all the interesting and ambiguous science and gave the public an incorrect understanding of that science. What I would have given to hear the journalist just once ask the question: why don’t we really know?

Let’s now turn to the question of the virus coming from bats and let’s look at another pattern I have seen a lot throughout the corona event. In this pattern, a media article’s headline and main argument is contradicted by the contents of the same article. I have seen this a surprising number of times recently but we’ll look at just two articles both of which deal with the notion that sars-cov-2 came from bats.

The first article is from NPR.

The headline reads “Where did this coronavirus originate? Virus hunters find genetic clues in bats” and in the third paragraph we see the claim “Scientific evidence overwhelmingly points to wildlife, and to bats as the most likely origin.”

Of course, this ‘overwhelming evidence’, like so much of the evidence used in the corona event, is genetic analysis. In this case, the key word is ‘origin’ which means something like genetic predecessor. Using techniques of genetic analysis, scientists now believe that the origin of homo sapiens is in a species called homo antecessor. But homo antecessor hasn’t existed for 800,000 years. So, that word ‘origin’ when used in genetic analysis can mean a very long time. The fact that sars-cov-2 originated in a bat virus says nothing necessarily about its ‘newness’. The story told to the public is that the virus jumped from bats in Wuhan, but the genetic analysis cannot tell us that this is what actually happened. In fact, the genetic analysis has a problem because sars-cov-2 is 96% genetically similar to the bat virus and it turns out this probably equates to quite a long time in terms of evolution.

The NPR article includes quotes from a microbiologist pointing out this exact fact: “But that 4% difference [between sars-cov-2 and its bat relative] is actually a pretty wide distance in evolutionary time. It could even be decades.”

Huh? Decades? But weren’t we told that virus jumped from bats in Wuhan?

The microbiologist goes on to claim that there were probably intermediate hosts and that the most likely animal from which the virus jumped was actually pangolins. That’s strange. Why didn’t the article mention pangolins in its title if that was the most likely explanation? We’ll find out shortly.

The article also contains the following statement: “The 2003 outbreak of SARS was eventually traced to horseshoe bats in a cave in the Yunnan province of China, confirmed by a 2017 paper published in the journal Nature.”

This is a stronger claim. They say it was ‘confirmed’. That sounds like there is solid evidence. Let’s have a look at that 2017 paper.

The headline is “Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus”. The first line of the article refers to a “smoking gun”. Again, the framing of the entire article gives the reader the impression of solid scientific evidence.

But then things start to sound less certain: “virologists have identified a single population of horseshoe bats that harbours virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans in 2002, killing almost 800 people around the world.”

Huh? What exactly are genetic building blocks? You mean genes?

Then we get this phrase: “The killer strain could easily have arisen from such a bat population…”

That doesn’t sound like a confirmation to me. That sounds like speculation. Yes, it could have happened. But where is the evidence that it did happen?

“They sequenced the genomes of 15 viral strains from the bats and found that, taken together, the strains contain all the genetic pieces that make up the human version. Although no single bat had the exact strain of SARS coronavirus that is found in humans, the analysis showed that the strains mix often. The human strain could have emerged from such mixing…”

So, if you rearranged the genome from fifteen different bat viruses you could get the original SARS virus. That’s not a smoking gun. That’s a trial where the judge throws the case out and the lawyers get disbarred for wasting the court’s time. (Apparently it took the scientists in question five years scrounging around in bat caves to get that finding so I salute their determination if nothing else).

In one final irony the article features a quote from another virologist commenting on the research done by the others and for the first time we get a wonderful glimpse of real science at work: disagreement.

“But Changchun Tu, a virologist who directs the OIE Reference Laboratory for Rabies in Changchun, China, says the results are only “99%” persuasive. He would like to see scientists demonstrate in the lab that the human SARS strain can jump from bats to another animal, such as a civet. “If this could have been done, the evidence would be perfect,” he says.”

In other words, can we please get some real empirical evidence rather than speculation based on genome analysis. Interestingly, Tu’s suggestion is a variation on Koch’s postulates except in this case you are trying to infect an animal with a virus from another species.

So, there was no smoking gun. The case hadn’t been solved. Nothing had been confirmed. Why were the journalists so eager to put the bat spin on the story?

Towards the end of the NPR article we are introduced to Peter Daszak, President of the U.S.-based Ecohealth Alliance. Ecohealth Alliance is a non-profit organisation that aims to “improve planetary health for the public good by uniquely integrating health research and conservation”. The NPR article just happens to contain a link to research that was funded by the Ecohealth Alliance. That research aims to show that the viruses in bats could infect humans. It apparently does so by modifying bat viruses in the lab and then seeing if the modified virus can infect human cells. Why is an environmental not-for-profit funding virological research? Apparently it’s to justify their conservation efforts. In Daszak’s words:

“We don’t need to get rid of bats. We don’t need to do anything with bats. We’ve just got to leave them alone. Let them get on, doing the good they do, flitting around at night and we will not catch their viruses,” Daszak said.”

So, it seems the NPR bat story was promoted by an environmental not-for-profit trying to get humans to leave bats and other wildlife alone. Just when you thought the corona event couldn’t get any weirder! Apparently wildlife activists are doing virology these days. A far cry from the hippies of old.

According to Ecohealth Alliance’s website, their “budget has has grown exponentially and, in turn, so too has our staff and our scientific and media outreach”. Media outreach? So, that’s the reason why the NPR journalist had to bend over backwards to put the bat spin on the story.

With media coverage like this, what chance did the public have of understanding the corona event?

Of course, the bat story was the one that caught the public imagination and if there’s one lesson of the modern world it’s that once something has become an internet meme, the PR battle is over.

So, in the mind of the public, the virus had come from bats, it was brand new to humans and therefore super dangerous. But let’s take a big step back and have one final look at the science.

Buried in that NPR article was a crucial piece of information that had been given by a scientist but ignored by the reporter who was too busy trying to focus on bats. That crucial piece of information is at the centre of the issue because it deals directly with whether the virus was ‘new’.

Recall that the Chinese researchers ran the genetic identity of the ‘new’ virus against known viruses and the closest match was this bat virus which is 96% similar. The microbiologist in the NPR article stated that this 4% probably equates to decades in evolutionary time (other have speculated between 20-50 years). In other words, the closest match we have to sars-cov-2 is decades old. Of all the viruses that humans have identified, the nearest one to sars-cov-2 diverged decades ago. This gives us some insight into a point I made in post 5: we really don’t know much about viruses. If the closest match we have is decades old, then there must be heaps of viruses that we have not yet identified. Which is not surprising because apparently the research funding is given to virologists to hunt around in bat caves rather than testing the general public (although perhaps that’s a very good thing and maybe we should send more virologists to the caves).

Others have realised this problem with the 4% difference. Here is an example of an attempt to save the bat hypothesis by a story of how the bat virus jumped to miners eight years ago and was then transported to the viral lab in Wuhan. It just happened to leak out late last year and cause the pandemic. It’s a nice story, to be sure. It could have happened but, let’s face it, we don’t really know.

There is another hypothesis that is much simpler and doesn’t require bats or pangolins or murky goings-on in viral labs: sars-cov-2 (or some variation of it) was already in circulation and has been for years.

According to this hypothesis, all that happened in Wuhan was that we identified an existing coronavirus. The virus has been in circulation for years, perhaps decades and the Chinese CDC in Wuhan just happened to discover it while investigating some pneumonia cases. Virologists ran off and made a test for it, public health officials put the test into action and ‘infections’ started popping up everywhere. It looked new, but really it had been around for a long time. Just another one of the respiratory viruses that we know exist but we have not yet identified.

There is no evidence that I know of that disproves this (in theory antibody tests could do so but they seem even less reliable than the PCR tests). But there is a very good reason that nobody wants to talk about it because this hypothesis is political and psychological dynamite. It would mean admitting that we lost our heads and panicked for no reason.

Of course, we don’t really know. And we never will know because these hypotheses are untestable. All we can do is speculate.

It is tempting to blame the media for the misleading coverage of the corona event. Certainly articles like the one in NPR should be condemned as obvious fake news. But on the whole I think both the media and the scientists tried to do their best. The simple fact is that the corona event represents a level of complexity that simply can’t be dealt with in single articles or single programs on television. That’s true just of the science behind it but once you factor in the public health response, the politics, the fear among the public, the statistics and everything else we simply never had a chance of making sense of it. We have made our world too complex to deal with and that complexity itself became the danger with the corona event. The authoritarian measures taken by politicians were a way to simplify things back to what we can make sense of. Close the borders. Stop all travel. Stop a large part of commerce. Stop everything because we don’t really know what we’re doing.

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

In the years leading up to the corona event there were a number of developments that were happening in my home town of Melbourne, Australia that I had been watching with a combination of interest and consternation. Most social change is very slow and therefore happens quite invisibly. But things were changing so quickly in Melbourne that the effects of that change were very noticeable and they were having a direct impact on my life and the lives of others. The official public position was that everything was going great. The economy was booming and Australia was considered some kind of economic wunderkind. We hadn’t had a recession in decades. From my position on the ground, that position didn’t add up. Many of these changes had a self-evidently detrimental impact on quality of life for citizens on the ground.

Firstly, public transport had become intolerable. (Overseas readers, especially those in the US, should note that in Australian capital cities it is normal for most people to take public transport and in particular the salary class uses public transport to get to work as most salary class jobs are in the CBD). People would show up to work complaining about how they had to wait three trains before they could even get on and if you managed to get on you were crammed in like a sardine.

Traffic had become so bad that the time it took to drive some place had in some cases doubled or even tripled. My father told of how his drive to work, which would have taken twenty minutes on an uncongested road, would usually take over an hour. That’s an extra hour and half every day of the week sitting in a car. I didn’t drive a lot but whenever I had to drive anywhere during business hours I was stunned how bad the traffic was and wondered how anybody, in particular tradesmen and other people who made their living driving around, put up with it.

The last refuge, the one good way to get around Melbourne, was cycling. As an enthusiastic bike rider, I had always made use of this form of transport whenever possible. But in the Melbourne CBD the footpaths had become so full that people were walking on the road. As the cycling path is right next to the footpath, this meant that the bike lanes were now full of pedestrians. Although I try to be polite when on my bike, many Melbourne bike riders are notoriously rude and I saw many incidents of cyclists screaming at pedestrians to get out of their way.

This was the general background of what happening in Melbourne. The population was growing at a furious rate and the media crowed about how we were going to soon be ‘bigger than Sydney’.

There was a more particular incident which sticks in my mind because it relates very directly to the corona event.

I got a new job in an office. I should say upfront that the quality of offices in Melbourne had long been a bugbear of mine. They are usually dingy and drab but, more importantly from a health point of view, the ventilation in them is awful. Usually the windows don’t even open and there is some antiquated HVAC system from the 1950s pumping god knows what through the vents. Even the newer offices featured HVAC systems designed for low energy usage rather than for effectiveness.

The office at my new job was a particularly poor example of the type of problem I’m talking about. Some split systems had been tacked onto to an old building. The windows in the place did open, but apparently I was the only one who wanted them open. After a few instances of me opening a window only to have it closed again shortly after, I gave up. People didn’t seem to like fresh air. Maybe it reminded them that there was a big beautiful world outside and they were stuck in an office.

Winter rolled around and, inevitably, people started to get sick. Now, bear in mind that in Australian culture prior to the corona event, you only stayed home from work if you were really sick and couldn’t work or if you were pretending to be sick and were really going to the beach. If you had a cough and a sneeze, it was expected that you would come to the office and nobody had the slightest problem with it.

At one point in mid-winter, the office resembled a hospital ward. I counted how many people were coughing and sneezing. It was about 80% of the office. Not just cough here and a sneeze there. All day long. Finally, I too succumbed and had to spend three days in bed with a fever.

A respiratory virus had infected everybody in that office. You didn’t need any advanced laboratory tests to prove it. It was plain to the naked eye. But here’s the thing: nobody cared. There were a couple of comments about the “bad flu year” and people just got on with their lives.

Why did the illness spread so easily in that office? Well, for one it was overcrowded. The company had grown strongly and there had been a lot of rearranging of furniture to fit as many people as possible in. There was no proper ventilation. Partly because people didn’t want to open the windows and partly because the HVAC system (if such a name could be given it) had simply never been designed with health effects in mind. And, of course, everybody in the office travelled to work on overcrowded public transport meaning all manner of potential germs were tracked into an office where they had the perfect incubator-like environment.

Note that nobody in the office at that time paid any of this the slightest bit of attention. The only reason I had a problem with it is partly because I learned about ventilation and its effects on health when I was doing a house renovation once upon a time and also because in this case I spent three days in bed and was 99% sure it was because of my work environment. So, I was a little annoyed.

It seemed to me quite obvious that this was an example of another case of inflation. Good quality HVAC systems cost money. Renting office space costs money. I don’t blame the people in charge because our culture prior to the corona event simply paid no attention to these kinds of things. But it was also a very obvious example of cost cutting at the expense of employee welfare.

There’s another more blatant example of cost cutting at the expense of employee welfare which became popular in large corporates in the last decade or so: the hot desk movement. For those who haven’t been exposed to his innovation, it means you don’t have your own desk. Each day you show up for work, collect your things from a locker and try to find somewhere to sit. Supposedly it was all about encouraging employee communication. In reality, it is simply a measure aimed to prop up the bottom line. It’s about cramming more people into the same floor space. The official justifications didn’t try and hide this fact. We were told how, given you have X% of people either sick or on leave on any given day, there was ‘wasted’ floor space that didn’t get used. Why not turn that wasted floor space into money for the company?

Hot desking is inconvenient for employees. In the best case scenario, it means you had to haul your stuff to a locker twice a day. In the more dysfunctional organisations, it often meant you simply couldn’t get a place to sit. I recall one company where there was a constant battle to try and find somewhere for team members to sit. Literally hours a week were wasted on this activity.

In economic jargon, the costs were being externalised and they were being externalised onto us.

This externalisation of costs is exactly what has happened in the last two decades in society as a whole. Those trends that I mentioned above are just extra cost which is another way to say hidden inflation. Once upon a time, you could pay for a train ticket and get a seat. Then you couldn’t get a seat and had to stand. Then you had to stand crowded in with other people. Then you could barely get on. Finally, you couldn’t even get on. Each step along that path is inflation but it’s not the kind of inflation that gets counted in the official statistics. The official statistics also don’t count the amount of time you have to spend in your car to get from A to B or the fact that your bike ride now involves trying not to run over pedestrians or the fact that ventilation system where you work is nothing more than a glorified germ dispersion unit.

In the last two decades, all of this hidden inflation was going on alongside very obvious forms of inflation. The real estate boom saw an absurd increase in prices alongside subdivision of land. You could now buy half as much land for five times the price. Nevertheless, people convinced themselves that this was good and that they were now richer.

With the corona event, all this invisible inflation has come to the fore in the most spectacular fashion. Overcrowding, high density accommodation, tourism, the immigration-higher education-real estate bubble that has propped up the Australian economy for decades, cheap buildings and offices, just in time logistics, high debt levels etc. Arguably, the fact that we spend so much on health care is also indicative of a problem. Why is it that in rich countries we have so many people with chronic illness? Could it be that all that money we pay for ‘health’ doesn’t actually give us value for money?

I have stated in previous posts that I consider the corona event to be a false alarm not predicated on science. But now that it has happened, the general public is viewing their lives and their lifestyles through the prism of pandemic. When viewed in such a way, it turns out that almost everything that has been source of hidden inflation over the past decades has been shut down.

Tourism and immigration have stopped. Higher education (and all education for that matter) continues on but in a debased, online form. Nobody’s buying real estate. There’s no overcrowding on public transport anymore; nobody takes it. There’s no traffic anymore; nobody is driving. Nobody is going to the cheap, overcrowded offices with shoddy ventilation systems; they are staying at home. Nobody is even going to hospital or doctors any more. In many countries, medical workers were furloughed due to lack of work. Emergency departments were empty. Sometimes that led to real problems such as people avoiding treatment for what became terminal conditions. But clearly a lot of those hospital and doctor visits that happened in the past simply didn’t need to happen. People seem to get by without them now.

We’ve even had governments officially declaring which jobs are essential and which aren’t. This has given some people the hope that we are about to see a big re-evaluation of our economy. A sorting out of what is really of value and what is not. I’m not so sure.

The corona event is going to be blamed for whatever happens economically in the years ahead but actually it was the logical outcome of years of deliberate economic policy. The things described above were no accident. They were part of the deliberate of the policy of globalisation. All that hidden inflation in Australia was caused by globalisation because a core tenet of globalisation is the free movement of people and it was the increase in population which caused all that inflation. That’s why you couldn’t get on a train. That’s why you couldn’t walk on the footpath. That’s why there were so many people in the office.

The free movement of people is a core part of the doctrine of globalisation but, as it turns out, the free movement of people is also the free movement of communicable disease. I’m going to go into what I call “the morality of the germ theory of disease” in a separate post. But the germ theory of disease makes us think that the germs are out there and if we can eliminate them we can solve our problem. In actual fact, the germs are in us. We are made up of germs. We are ecosystems of germs many of which we rely on in order to survive. No surprise then that almost every measure to ‘combat the germs’ is a measure that requires a change in our behaviour: wash your hands, cover your mouth, stay at home.

Everybody now knows how personal behaviour apparently prevents viral disease but how many have reflected on their behaviour in the last two decades and how it may or may not have contributed to said illness? In the last two decades, we travelled all around the world, exposing our body to new germs everywhere we went and bringing our own germs to new people and locations. We crammed onto public transport. We went to work while sick. People actually went on cruise ships. Tell that to your grandchildren because the cruise ship industry may be one that doesn’t survive for posterity. As my story above demonstrates, nobody gave any of this a second thought. All this behaviour which would now be considered risky at best and murderous at worst (yes, I have seen videos of people accusing others of murder) was apparently no problem prior to corona.

And that makes sense. For all this movement of people, I haven’t seen my general health deteriorate or the health of others I know. I haven’t gotten sick any more than usual. I too have travelled to the other side of the world and never had a problem (except for that one time in India, but I don’t talk about that).

Whatever the actual health effects, the more interesting thing right now is that the policy of globalisation seems to have run face first into what would seem to be a brick wall of insurmountable proportions. In the mind’s of the public, the free movement of people is now the same thing as a public health catastrophe. And yet the debate hasn’t borne that out. In fact, we have already seen the first scramblings to try and put humpty dumpty back together. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men seemed to have been waiting for just this exact thing to happen.

The same people that brought us globalisation also believe that there is an increased health risk from all this movement of people (it’s not clear to me that this is true but a simplistic interpretation of the germ theory of disease does predict it). That’s why those people set up the early warning signal that has triggered the corona event. That’s why they also did us all the favour of constructing the solution in advance. It’s called suppress and vaccinate. Right now we are in the suppress phase. The movement has been restricted and masks put on citizen’s faces. We are currently waiting for a vaccine at which point our lives can go ‘back to normal’.

I am not going to talk about this strategy from a medical or scientific point of view. I will simply point out that from an economic point of view it represents exactly the same kind of inflation I have been talking about in this post. The people that bought us the inflation of that last twenty or thirty years now want to give us more.

Even assuming it were true that masks ‘work’, the wearing of a mask is the most obvious kind of inflation. Despite desperate attempts by some people to convince themselves otherwise, wearing a mask sucks. It is uncomfortable and unpleasant in the most basic physiological sense let alone the psychological, political and symbolic elements to it. To have to wear a mask is the exact same kind of inflation as cramming onto public transport or having to sit in your car an extra five hours a week. But we put up with the cramming onto public transport for the last ten years. We put up with not being able to walk on the footpath. We put with the endless traffic jams. We have been conditioned over the last two decades to accept just this kind of inflation. Only it wasn’t called inflation. Just like the marketers tried to convince office workers that hot desking was all about ‘enhancing communication’, the globalists have tried to pretend that this inflation was ‘growth’ and ‘progress’. This is the same trick that is being pulled now. That’s what’s behind the phrase ‘the new normal’.

Logically, this new normal shouldn’t even get to the starting gate. What is being promised is all the problems that were there before only now you get masks and vaccines on top of it. You’ll still have your miserable commute and now you get to wear a mask too. We won’t do anything to solve the underlying spread of communicable disease, we’ll just create vaccines faster. Of course, the new normal also promises to solve some of those old problems. We’ll get around the overcrowded trains and the crappy offices by letting office workers work from home. That will also save us a lot of petrol cos people won’t need to drive. That will help the environment. And so on and so forth. But really, it’s all just inflation dressed up as progress.

When it became clear that western governments were going to lockdown, I admit I was stunned. I didn’t think it could happen. It went against everything I thought our societies stood for. Since it has happened, it has further baffled me how many people seem to think it’s perfectly natural. As if a thing that had never been discussed before and certainly never presented to the electorate during normal politics, a thing that nobody even knew was possible at the start of the year, was logical and rational.

Now I realise it’s in many ways the continuation of trends that have been building for a long time. One of those trends is this hidden inflation. Not really hidden, of course: deliberately removed. Airbrushed from the record books and given the names ‘growth’ and ‘progress’. ‘The new normal’ is the slogan of progress. Everything is fine. Everything is just as planned. Carry on and wear your mask.

As to what happens now, that’s anybody’s guess. I admit things don’t look good from where I sit. However, it is best to bear in mind that the people pushing the ‘new normal’, the people running the suppress and vaccinate strategy, had a head start. They were prepared for exactly what has happened.

In theory, there should now be a big pushback. The economic consequences are going to be so obvious that no amount of spin will be able to cover up for them. All of that inflation now has to be counted. It’s not hidden anymore. Those who want to protect the status quo are going to blame the virus and offer us masks and vaccines in exchange for our old lives back (‘the new normal’). Will there be a new political movement that offers an alternative? There certainly should be. There are plenty of alternatives to the one being offered and if I’m reading things right there are going to be a lot of people willing to listen once the smoke clears.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona