In the face of a crisis politicians do have strong incentives to conceal, lie and even spread disinformation. There seems to be a natural impulse to do so, to try to avoid blame or perhaps out of a form of wishful thinking that reality will somehow conform to the deception. A politician might even have seemingly good reasons to conceal and deceive, such as avoiding seeming weak to other nations or to try to avoid panicking the population. No matter the motivation, concealing the facts will only make the problem worse, while disinformation will make it even worse than silence would.
One lesson that should have been learned from the 1918 influenza pandemic is that honesty and accurate information are critical to fighting a pandemic. The threat of the flu was initially downplayed, allowing it to spread and officials failed to inform the public of the true danger. One example of this is the infamous Philadelphia parade which allowed the flu to spread like wildfire. This resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 people and over 200,000 were infected. While this disaster should have provided a clear lesson to others, the denial, downplaying and deceit continued in the United States. The inaction extended all the way to the top, with President Woodrow Wilson (a Democrat) remaining silent. While there is no way to calculate exactly how many people would have not died if a policy of providing accurate information had been adopted, it is reasonable to infer that many lives could have been saved. Given this clear historical lesson, one would have thought that we would have been ready to address COVID-19 with honest, accurate information. But this was not the case. As an American, I will focus on my government, though examining other nations would also be useful.
When COVID-19 was first identified in January, former Trump officials (Bossert and Gottlieb) started sounding a warning about the virus, drawing the obvious and tragic lessons from the 1918 pandemic. The initial response from Fox News was to cast the virus as a hoax intended to harm Trump. In the previous version of this essay I asserted that both Trump and Fox put forth the claim that the virus was a hoax. According to Snopes, Trump did not directly claim the virus was a hoax but instead accused the Democrats of creating a new hoax—the target of the alleged hoax being his inept and dangerous handling of the virus. This evolved into downplaying the severity of the threat, with Trump making dangerously false claims about the spread of the virus and other critical matters. While the White House and Fox news eventually seemed to take the threat seriously, dangerous disinformation was still being spread. One example of utter moral irresponsibility is the claim that test kits were readily available so that the federal government would be able to provide them to the states. This was, of course, not true and the lie costs the states precious time they could have used to create and distribute their own test kits. To use an analogy, it is as if your apartment building were on fire and the fire department said that they were just about there and ready to fight the fire with their great new firetrucks. But they were lying—they were not on their way and only had a few hand pumped hoses.
Because of the downplaying and deceit, there will be many deaths that could have been prevented by the truth. If Trump and Fox News had told the truth from day one, people would certainly still have gotten sick—but we would have been far better prepared with test kits and with defensive measures that could have greatly mitigated the virus. Instead, Trump and Fox News (and others) have aided and abetted the enemy with their disinformation and some of the deaths that have occurred and will occur are partially their fault. While damage to the economy would have still occurred under an honest administration, it would have been less since the virus’s impact would have been lessened.
The lesson from COVID-19 is essentially a repeat course of the lessons from the 1918 pandemic: those in power need to provide honest and accurate information to the public in the face of public health threats. Such honesty can impose a cost on a politician, especially if they are ill equipped to handle and actual crisis. But the cost of silence and disinformation is always vastly higher on the public. And a politician can, from a selfish viewpoint, stand to benefit from being honest—if they are able to handle the crisis competently, then they can be rewarded by the public. However, the main concern of a leader should always be the good of those they lead, not their own perceived private good—especially not at the expense of the people.
It could be objected that there have been cases in which silence and disinformation were beneficial—that is, the leaders’ concealment or lying yielded a better outcome than the truth. While this might have some merit, this does not seem to be the case—as the 1918 pandemic shows. To claim that there might be some secret cases in which silence or deception were the best choices would be to use a variant of the appeal to ignorance fallacy—asserting that silence or deceit might be good because there might be unknown cases in which they worked is obviously terrible logic. While the above focuses on politicians and leaders, it is also worth considering the threat of disinformation from members of the public.
As would be expected in a time of crisis, citizens also spread misinformation. In some cases, this is the result of ignorance—people might be acting from benevolent motives, but they are doing harm because they are spreading untrue claims. For example, a person might believe that bleach drinking can cure COVID-19 and they share this because they care. While such benevolent motives cannot be faulted, people have an obligation to critically assess claims about a crisis before they share them with others. A quick test of a claim is to check it against one’s own observations, against one’s background information and against established credible claims. Using the bleach example, bleach bottles figure prominent warnings about the dangers of bleach (observation) and most people should have in their background information that bleach is a poison. If a claim matches up with all three, then it is reasonable to accept it as likely be true. If it does not, then it can often be reasonable to doubt the claim or at least suspend judgment. People also need to critically assess the sources of claims about a crisis. If no source is provided, then one must go with the methods of testing a claim. If a source is provided, the source must be confirmed (for example, is it really from the CDC?) and assessed. The credibility of source depends primarily on the knowledge of the source (how likely they are to be right) and their lack of bias (a biased source is less credible, since they have a reason to lie). In general, knowledgeable and unbiased sources are good sources; biased or ignorant sources are not. When in doubt it is wisest to suspend judgment.
There are also those who spread misinformation knowingly. This might be to make money, such as Televangelist Jim Bakker’s efforts to sell a fake corona virus cure or for political advantages, such as Russia’s efforts to worsen the pandemic by spreading disinformation in the West. There are, as always, the trolls who will spread disinformation because they find it amusing or because they want to hurt people. There seems to be no reasonable way to argue that it is morally acceptable for people to lie in health crisis to make money or from a free-speech-for-trolls viewpoint. But perhaps a case can be made justifying nations weaponizing misinformation. After all, if the use of war and means short of war that involve hurting and killing people are morally acceptable, then hurting people through misinformation would also seem acceptable. That is, if we accept killing people with bullets and bombs, then it is hard to balk at killing with lies.
One possible response is to argue that a pandemic is a war with two sides: humans and the pathogen. As such, when a country uses disinformation in a pandemic, they are aiding the enemy of all humanity—that is, they are committing treason in a time of war. A less dramatic and more pragmatic response is to point out that misinformation, like a virus, tends to spread—so a country that weaponizes misinformation runs the risk of it infecting their population. Social media is, of course, the vessel of choice for distributing most disinformation and misinformation.
While there can be sensible debate about what sort of political speech social media should restrict, if any, there seems to be no good arguments that social media companies should allow and enable the spread of misinformation and disinformation about a pandemic. Returning to the virus analogy, this would be like Uber having a policy of allowing drivers to knowingly transports people infected with COVID-19 around to interact with health people just because they can make some money doing so. There is also the war analogy—if social media does not fight misinformation and disinformation in a pandemic, they are aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war.
In closing, the lessons here are clear: leaders need to immediately provide accurate information about pandemics, citizens need to be critical in their acceptance of information, and intentional spreading of disinformation should be regarded as moral crime against humanity in a time of war.
Misinformation is indeed everywhere, and some people are super spreaders.
Your sentence: “When COVID-19 was first identified in January, former Trump officials (Bossert and Gottlieb) started sounding a warning about the virus, drawing the obvious and tragic lessons from the 1918 pandemic.” with a link to a New Yorker article. Did you check that article in any way before spreading it?
The reference to Gottlieb is completely unsourced, so there is nothing to say about that, but the Bossert reference is an interesting case of how misinformation is absorbed and spread by the credulous.
From the article, the relevant section reads:
When the virus was first identified, in January, Tom Bossert was one of several prominent voices in the realm of emergency preparedness to sound a warning. “We face a global health threat,” he said on Twitter. The problem was that Bossert—a Homeland Security adviser and an official with deep experience in emergency management—was a former Administration figure, having been pushed out last year.
…
“What the American people need to brace themselves for is a large rate of sickness and death in this country,” Bossert told me.
I note with perverse pleasure the construction that links Bossert’s purported second comment with his first, leading a careless reader to think that the two might be comtemporaneous, or at least connected. This is often used in attempts to invent misinformation and give misleading impressions while preserving a defence against the charge.
Anyway, back to that first reference. I read Bossert’s Twitter timeline in January. During January, Bossert was warning of many things – Iranian cyberattacks, the consequences of Apple’s non-cooperation with the government on encryption, nuclear terrorism, Red Cross blood shortage, threat of civil war in Iraq, the inability of non-state partners to detain foreign fighters indefinitely, the Turkey/Syria/Greece situation – and Libya,
In the midst of all of these alarms, he also tweeted “While China & HK jerk around w/ ego politics, we face a global health threat. Wuhan disease now identified as a *new* kind of coronavirus, similar to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) & Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Coordinate! @WHO”
It’s an old, old con game played by fortune tellers since forever – if you warn about enough potential threats, preferably vaguely, some are going to happen, and you hope those are the ones that will then be remembered. Some, like Ehrlich, manage to make a successful career without any of their warnings ever happening.
For context, Bossert seems to have been satisfied with the Wuhan situation, because on Jan 31, he tweeted “Let’s be clear: A-plus to @realDonaldTrump @HHSGov & the entire public health community for the handling of this public health emergency. Executing the National Biodefense Strategy. Special thanks to Admiral Tim Ziemer, Ret. and Dr. Kadlec.”
And then, out of this thin gruel, Remnick writes a condemnation of Trump, carefully omitting the Jan 31st tweet, and you drink the concoction whole and regurgitate it.
People are raising alarms all the time, every day, about many things. If we stopped the world for every one, we would all starve to death. There may well be a case to make that Trump was negligent. There certainly might be a case that Tedros was derelict in his duty, if not cowed or corrupted. And when we come to the CCP and Xi Jinping, well, I condemn them unreservedly, because they at the very least suppressed critical information.
But if you want to make the case against Trump, you need to set out a timeline of what was known and when he knew it, and you didn’t even attempt that.
At least we can agree that “citizens need to be critical in their acceptance of information, and intentional spreading of disinformation should be regarded as moral crime against humanity in a time of war”.
Just to see if I am getting this right, your four main criticisms are 1) the writing construction style is often used to invent misinformation therefore this specific claim is misinformation, 2) Bossert predicted many bad things, so he is running a fortune teller style con and thus presumably wrong in some way that is relevant to criticizing him, 3) Bossert praised Trump, therefore his criticism is not true and 4) I am a spreader of false information because I used the Bossert example and Bossert is flawed because of 1-3?
April, 2009, Swine Flu response. Obama: There’s no cause for alarm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOOnzsMAvMk
But he said it with a different tone than Trump, so, cool.
Was this a lie from Obama? Or just what the experts told him?
National emergency not declared until 8 months later.
Global deaths from CV19 just passed US deaths from Swine Flu 2009-2010.
We’re being hypnotized.
That is all.
Sorry, emergency declared in October, 6 months later.
CV19, less than 4 months.
In any case, Orange Man bad, Obama super-cool radio voice.
Attacking Obama does nothing to defend Trump; this is just a red herring/what about.
To use an analogy:
Sally: “Don murdered 4 people, he is bad!”
Alice: “Barry murdered 6 people; so Don ain’t bad.”
Sally: “That is not how it works.”
Huh. Weird. It’s almost like Mike ignores Democrat “lies”.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/16/joe-biden/biden-falsely-says-trump-administration-rejected-w/
I’m not Joe’s keeper this week and he is not in office but he should still not be making false claims.
Also, pointing out that Joe says false things is just a case of “what aboutism” that does not refute any claims I made–if the goal is to somehow discredit me or refute my claims.
if the goal is to somehow discredit me or refute my claims.
Yeah, Magus. Cut it out. Mike does a good enough job discrediting himself. We can’t have philosophers thrown out of work as well.
Joe Rogan becomes the voice of reason. Intelligentsia needs sunshine and manual labor.
https://youtu.be/Krl5aA0h9Zs
Mike, in a post on misinformation you should be double-sure to get your facts straight.
Trump did not in fact call the virus a hoax.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-remark/
True, his ambiguity was misleading. One on interpretation he seems to be implying that the virus is the Democrats’ “new hoax.” On the other, he seems to mean by “hoax” that the virus itself is real but the Democrats are creating a hoax about his incompetent and dangerous response to the virus. So, the alleged new hoax is not the virus but the true claims about how he botched the initial response.
As Snopes notes:
I’ll adjust the text to reflect this disambiguation by Snopes.
Mike, this story seems a little more nuanced than your “Trump and Fox News lied and now we are all going to die” narrative.
What went wrong with the CDC’s test kits?
Early on, all COVID-19 testing was done at the CDC with its own kit, and it performed well. The kit was successfully used to diagnose the first COVID-19 case in the U.S. on Jan. 20 in a patient returning from Wuhan to Washington state. A CDC report also notes that between Jan. 18 and Feb. 23, the agency tested 2,620 specimens from just over 1,000 people.
Problems arose after Feb. 5, when the CDC began shipping its kits out to qualified state and local public health labs in an effort to expand testing. Initially, the agency said it was releasing 200 kits — each capable of testing around 700 to 800 specimens — giving labs just one kit each. But by Feb. 12, the CDC told reporters that some labs had been experiencing issues when doing verification tests to make sure the tests worked.
The CDC has not clarified exactly what the issue was, but has said that there was a manufacturing problem related to the third test component, which led to “inconclusive” results. The Association of Public Health Laboratories told us more specifically that a negative control, which should not have reacted to any of the primer and probe sets, was coming back positive for the third set, which was the test for all SARS-like coronaviruses.
For a while, the agency promised to re-manufacture the faulty third component and distribute that to the public health labs and, in the meantime, asked any lab that had difficulties to send samples into the CDC for testing. As a result, as of Feb. 25, only 12 state or local labs out of more than 100 nationwide could do their own testing.
More than two weeks after first announcing the testing issue, the CDC said it had come up with a fix — labs could proceed without the third test, and just use the two other primer and probe sets to make accurate diagnoses. The agency also said that it had manufactured new tests with just the two components, omitting the third.
What other factors limited testing?
Other than the lack of CDC test kits, several other circumstances prevented wider scale testing early in the outbreak.
One was the criteria the CDC used to determine who would be tested for the virus. At first, the CDC recommended testing only for those who had a fever and/or lower respiratory symptoms, and had traveled to Wuhan or had contact with a suspected or confirmed coronavirus case.
In late February, after a patient in California was found to be infected despite a lack of known exposure, the CDC guidelines were relaxed to include anyone with a fever who was hospitalized with a respiratory illness. Then, on March 3, Vice President Pence announced that the CDC would lift all restrictions, as long as a doctor ordered the test.
The CDC updated its clinical criteria web page the next day, stating that clinicians “should use their judgment” in deciding who should be tested, keeping in mind the local epidemiology and COVID-19 symptoms — and strongly encouraging testing for other respiratory infections, such as influenza.
Another issue had to do with who could do COVID-19 testing.
Academic labs and other similar facilities that had the expertise to develop tests were advised not to use their own tests for diagnosing patients until they sought permission from the Food and Drug Administration. As we’ve explained before, this is not a law but has been a de facto FDA policy. On Feb. 29, the FDA announced that validated in-house tests could be used for diagnosis immediately, as long as the agency received applications for the emergency use of the tests within 15 business days.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-coronavirus-testing/
I don’t claim that “Trump lied so we will all die” (but nice callback to Obama). Sure, there is an explanation as to why the kits were not available. But my issue is that Trump made false claims about the test kits when he should have known better.
From the source you cite:
“President Donald Trump claimed on March 6 that anyone who “wants a test can get a test,” while Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said in a television interview the same day that there “is no testing kit shortage, nor has there ever been.”
Contrary to both men, we were told by the Association of Public Health Laboratories on March 9 that although things had improved since a week ago, “demand for testing is greater than the tests available.”
Numbers still not matching original models. Oxford scientists now cutting original future death estimates for Brits from a quarter of a million, to 20K.
Speaking of misinformation Task Force doctor now saying this:
“ So these are the things we are looking at, because the predictions of the model don’t match the reality on the ground in China, South Korea or Italy. We are five times the size of Italy. If we were Italy and did all those divisions, Italy should have close to 400,000 deaths. They are not close to achieving that.”
Which should have been fairly obvious in first two months.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/03/26/dr_birx_coronavirus_data_doesnt_match_the_doomsday_media_predictions_or_analysis.html