Here is another essay on the epidemic; if the previous one also counts as related, then this is the fifth. I still ask friends to circulate it cautiously.
The rumors about the Wuhan Virus Institute are still continuing: some claim to be real-name whistleblowers accusing the director of secretly selling animals; others solemnly identify a certain graduate student as “Patient Zero.” These conspiracy theories are, of course, all rather crude and not worth refuting.
But the significance of rumors does not lie in their own professionalism or accuracy, but in the public sentiment and popular will they reflect. The cruder a rumor is, the fact that it can still spread so widely already points to something: namely, the public is losing trust in the scientific community represented by the Wuhan Virus Institute.
The key question is: why do the public not trust scientists? Is it simply because the public cannot understand research papers and do not know basic scientific facts, so they do not trust scientists? Quite the opposite: more often than not, precisely because they cannot understand research papers, the public place blind trust in scientists. Those who can truly understand research papers have a better grasp of the complexity and controversy behind certain issues, and therefore are less inclined to believe a scientist’s one-sided account. But among the public, if an old man puts on a white coat and says a few words in an expert’s tone, they will believe him without a second thought.
Many scientists or science popularizers are extremely contemptuous of the public. Whether the public are too credulous or not credulous enough, they always take it to mean that the public lack scientific knowledge, and then they keep posing with an attitude of “you don’t understand, you’re so stupid,” lecturing from on high in a didactic style of “popular science.” As I discussed in my previous article, this kind of popularization often merely talks about science in isolation, cutting science off from politics and other external factors, while what the public care about is the “mixed” reality. To preach by starting only from scientific knowledge may look like discussing the matter on its merits, but in fact it is the real version of “answering obliquely and evading the point.”
Take, for example, the suspicion surrounding “Patient Zero”: it reflects the public’s imperfect understanding of the concept of “Patient Zero,” and it reflects an oversimplified view of epidemic tracing. But are the public really concerned with who “Patient Zero” is as a rigorous scientific concept? Not at all. What the public actually care about is “the cases in the early stage that were not connected to the seafood market.” People heard that among several early December cases, not all had a history of exposure to the seafood market, yet in the diagnostic criteria issued by the health authorities, exposure to the seafood market was insisted upon as one of the necessary criteria for confirmation, and for a long time they kept insisting that there was no human-to-human transmission and no cases outside the seafood market. Why was that?
Those popularizers either failed to notice, or pretended not to notice, the public’s real concern, and instead fixed their gaze on the public’s less precise understanding of “Patient Zero” in order to make a point. This is very much like those eight people who were reprimanded: they were criticized for not saying SARS accurately enough, but what they were really concerned about was the contagiousness and danger of whatever the disease was called. In this sense, dwelling on a technical term to explain things is simply an act of seizing on the trivial while letting the major issue slip away.
The public do not know the specific details of how the diagnostic criteria were formulated, but at least they know that these standards must surely have been the result of collusion between officials and scientists, and that scientists must have actively participated in them. So the question is: what role did they play? Were they puppets on strings, or the original instigators?
More specifically, scientists may have given the following two judgments: 1. there was no human-to-human transmission; 2. the outbreak was confined to the seafood market. It should be noted that the second judgment is even more extreme than the first.
Why? The reasoning is very simple: suppose the outbreak was transmitted from animals to humans, and only from some animal X to humans, with humans not continuing the spread afterward. Then the question is, where did this animal X come from? Clearly, the seafood market is not the natural habitat of any animal; the animals there always have a source of supply. If animal X was caught in the mountains, then the mountains may continue to infect others; if X was bought from a breeding farm, then the breeding farm may continue to infect others; if X escaped from a zoo, then the zoo may continue to infect others; if X was secretly sold out of a laboratory, then the laboratory may continue to infect others; if X fell from the sky or sprang out of the ground, then there may also be infection somewhere else.
So even on the assumption that human-to-human transmission was impossible, one still could not ordinarily be certain that the epidemic was confined to a tiny seafood market. Unless—there are only three possible reasons—1. stupid, 2. bad, 3. negligent.
Stupid means truly, utterly stupid: believing that the virus appeared out of thin air in the seafood market, as if it were original and primary, and therefore there could be no cases elsewhere. But how stupid would that have to be? It would be like some children thinking “the source of grain is the supermarket”; any brain even slightly more mature could not possibly make such a judgment.
Bad means that the scientists called a stag a horse: they clearly knew there was a danger of infection elsewhere, and that lives were at stake, yet they did not care at all.
What does negligence mean? This is the most reasonable line of thought: only when the animal X and its source had already been identified could the scientists confidently judge that no cases would appear outside the seafood market. They knew there were patients A and B outside the seafood market, and they knew about animal X, but they judged that the outbreak resulted from A or B bringing X into the seafood market. So they believed that once the sources of A, B, and animal X were controlled (the laboratory, zoo, breeding farm, or whatever known place), the epidemic’s scope could be determined with confidence. But they were negligent; they failed to notice that the virus could be transmitted from person to person, and failed to notice that the virus had long since gotten out of control.
Let me summarize again briefly. “Negligence” means that scientists mistakenly believed they had grasped the source of the virus, underestimated the extent of human-to-human transmission, and therefore wrongly judged that the virus would be confined only to the Huanan market. If the scientists had not grasped the source of the virus, then even if they insisted that the virus would not be transmitted from person to person, they could not reasonably infer that the epidemic would not occur outside the seafood market.
So the popular science explanations given by many popularizers now are actually ironic. They explain that Patient Zero is not easy to find, and that determining the source of infection is a very complex and difficult matter, and so on. But since determining the source of infection is so difficult, how could those scientists at the time have confidently believed that the source of the virus could be contained within the seafood market? Since Patient Zero is not easy to find, and the origin is not easy to determine precisely, on what grounds would scientists have set exposure to the seafood market as a diagnostic criterion?
Thus, ironically, according to these popularizers’ explanations, the scientists who participated in setting the diagnostic criteria were either extraordinarily stupid or extraordinarily bad. Let me ask the popularizers: the scientists who supported or tacitly allowed exposure to the seafood market to be included in the confirmation criteria—were they stupid or bad?
Instead, it is the public who still kindly want to believe in scientists, believing that scientists are not foolish and not rotten to the core, and then doing everything they can with immature logic to help the scientists “make it work.” Then they have no choice but to believe that the scientists had already grasped the source of the virus at the time, and had (supposedly) controlled the source, which is why they could confidently convey outward the information that the epidemic was limited to the seafood market. So they then ask further: who, exactly, was that source?
Rumors are often not born out of thin air; their soil is often the missing link in some self-consistent chain of logic. Through sniffing out clues and forcing imaginative fill-ins, people complete an entire set of rationalized explanations. Why can rumors spread so quickly? The greatest force driving them is precisely “rationalization”: it is the power of reason that is propelling the rumors forward.
I need to explain something. Personally, I do not believe these rumors, and I do not even support the “negligence” theory. In my view, the scientists were simply a combination of stupid and bad. Moreover, in fact, this world is not always so rational; in many places there really are absurd things that no amount of head-scratching can make sense of. So I think the most likely final situation is this: the process of setting the diagnostic criteria was nothing but an absurd drama that cannot be explained rationally. But I can understand the public’s need for “rationalization,” especially their hope that at least the behavior of the scientific community is rational.
Popularizers preach earnestly and always ask the public to trust science, to trust scientists. Their favorite line is: if even scientists cannot be trusted, then who is worthy of trust? Indeed, but I at least know two things more worthy of trust: one is “conscience,” trusting that every person has at least some sense of good conscience; the other is “reason,” trusting that various actions more or less have some rationale. But I also know that, just as with trusting scientists, trust in conscience and reason cannot be excessive; people really do commit extremely mad acts against their conscience. In this case, people trusted the scientists’ conscience and rationality too much, unwilling to believe that they could be this insane, and so they had to use rumor and conjecture to help the scientists cover up the lie.
Before any scientist steps forward to confess to wrongdoing, or steps forward to provide a public and transparent rational explanation of the entire decision-making process, the rumors cannot subside on their own, because the public still ultimately bear goodwill toward scientists.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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