Experts rarely learn from their mistakes

January 23, 2022. This afternoon, while reviewing a 2021 folder, I came across a piece (attached at the end of this post) by John Tierney in the October 3, 2021 Wall Street Journal. It is worth reading and digesting now, just as it was three months ago. Excerpts, in italics, follow.

When AIDS spread among gay men and intravenous drug users four decades ago, it became conventional wisdom that the plague would soon devastate the rest of the American population. In 1987, Oprah Winfrey opened her show by announcing, “Research studies now project that 1 in 5—listen to me, hard to believe—1 in 5 heterosexuals could be dead of AIDS in the next three years.” The prediction was outlandishly wrong, but she wasn’t wrong in attributing the scare to scientists.

One early alarmist was Anthony Fauci, who made national news in 1983 with an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association warning that AIDS could infect even children because of “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” After criticism that he had inspired a wave of hysterical homophobia, Dr. Fauci (who in 1984 began his current job, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), promptly pivoted 180 degrees, declaring less than two months after his piece appeared that it was “absolutely preposterous” to suggest AIDS could be spread by normal social contact. But other supposed experts went on warning erroneously that AIDS could spread widely via toilet seats, mosquito bites and kissing.

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Another victim of 1980s-style cancel culture was Michael Fumento, who meticulously debunked the scare in his 1990 book, “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.” It received good reviews and extensive publicity, but it was unavailable in much of the country because local bookstores and national chains succumbed to pressure not to sell it. Mr. Fumento’s own publisher refused to keep it in print, and he was forced out of two jobs—one as an AIDS analyst in the federal government.

The AIDS fear-mongers suffered few consequences for their mistakes. The false alarms were long forgotten by the start of the Covid pandemic, when the news and public policy were dominated by scientists who overestimated fatalities by a factor of 10 and erroneously warned that people could easily be infected by touching contaminated surfaces or breathing air outdoors. Today most people, especially the young, vastly overestimate their risk of dying thanks to press coverage more uniformly alarmist than during the AIDS epidemic.

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With Covid, though, skepticism is mostly confined to the right. The mainstream press and public-health authorities have largely ignored or smeared eminent scientists who question the worst-case scenarios and the wisdom of lockdowns and mandates for tests, masks and vaccines. Their legitimate challenges to Covid orthodoxy have been rejected by medical journals, denounced by officials like Dr. Fauci, and censored by social-media platforms. The journalistic, political and scientific establishments haven’t merely ignored the lessons of the AIDS epidemic. They’ve repeated and amplified the mistakes, spreading more needless fear and eliminating more civil liberties than the AIDS alarmists ever imagined.

Unlearned AIDS Lessons for Covid - WSJ.pdf

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