YouSaid · the spoken record

Zeynep Tufekci

lines on the record: 72
first: 2021-08-25
most recent: 2021-08-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And in some ways, one of my friends who's an immunologist and a medical doctor at Harvard, Michael Mina, who's done a lot of work on rapid tests, one of the things he keeps joking about is how basic our virus is like the virus that has caused our pandemic is a coronavirus. And if you had a, it's SARS too, essentially, with a minor twist. Like there's not much we need to figure out about it. Yes, of course, you know, figuring out things like vaccines is important, but in terms of its basics, it's not a retrovirus like HIV, which forced us to write the textbook, right? So the virology part of it wasn't very complicated in some ways to, you know, a competent virologist or something. Michael jokes like, you know, it's just first year student can handle most of it. It's a very simple, straightforward virus. But the things like the groupthink in”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, for one thing, the sociology of the situation is always very important. For example, one of the reasons that they were saying you don't need to wear a mask early on where they were saying something like, well, you should only wear a mask if you're sick. And you don't need to sociology degree to understand stigma, right? If you have a deadly pandemic with an unknown disease, there's no way you're going to go wearing a mask if only sick people are wearing masks. I mean, you don't really, if they had anybody within a social science background or any common sense in that room, they'd say, wait a minute, how are sick people supposed to wear a mask? Like that is just not humanly feasible for them to paint a target on themselves like that. So that's the kind, that's one of the ways that it helps. The other way it helps is that, so I used to teach things like group think and institutional inertia and all those things that we've seen.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need to move fast, especially for things like masks, for which downsides are very little. If you found out they were useless, you can change it next month and you didn't lose anything. We don't do it. There's some thing we haven't really completely come to grips with. And the pandemic's urgency is perhaps acted like a stress test. It's shown us the problems, but it's still ongoing. So we haven't sat down and said, let's think about it because this is not good. And I think that's job number one. Like after the pandemic gets kind of calmer, which will happen pretty soon. It's going so fast that it's going to end relatively soon. We should sit down and say, this wasn't just Trump. We screwed up a lot of things and we also have revealed a lot of cracks in our institutions and it's time to try to fix it.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Western scientific, public health, economic governing our institutions, there's something not functioning very well. But because we are fairly wealthy nations with an enormous amount of inheritance, we can get by. We have a lot of science, we have a lot of scientists, we have excellent universities. So a lot, but I feel like we're almost like the second generation or even the third generation that's still spending the inheritance. And since we started so rich, it's kind of hiding the deeper problems and Trump's year made it look like it was all Trump. But I'm looking at Western Europe and I'm like, well, they didn't do that great either. In fact, they've done terrible relatively speaking. So I feel like we haven't really gotten our heads wrapped around how we do risk assessment, how we move, as you say, fast when we...”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm forcing you to do it. That doesn't seem to make sense. And I'm just looking at it and thinking, you know, we vaccinated in this country by more than 100 million people. We've vaccinated a billion around the world. We have a very good idea of the safety profile. And it's better than most vaccines that are approved. So why are we waiting for the full approval? And I have no answer to that one. Like, well, sometimes I try to do the most charitable reading. Maybe they with the approval, the initial emergency one, maybe it could have been 10 days instead of three weeks. Maybe a week difference. I don't really know. I don't have like background information. I'm just looking at the full approval and I don't understand. I think there's something that Trumps presence has obscured, which is there's a malaise.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seem to recur in many different stages. I don't know the details of that particular one, but with something like vaccines, the reason I'm cautious is that, you know, once again, there's a saying, it's not vaccines, but vaccination that saves lives. So it's the slightest screw up in vaccines can undermine confidence and just kind of even if they're approved and they're scientifically kind of solid, if you overlook something or if there's some unexpected thing that can be dramatic and terrible. So I'll give you an example that I can't figure out right now, which is that why haven't we gotten the full authorization? Right now they're still functioning as EUA and that is both causing people to think it's experimental because it's still emergency and it is sort of holding back some of the necessary things like mandates because which employer is supposed to say, okay, it's an emergency thing and it's not fully a”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would say that there are many things for which you do randomized trials for good reason. What we didn't get was the flexibility necessary to match the question to the method, right? With something like masking up, the precautionary principle plus the mechanistic science plus the South Asian experience to me was more than clear where things were. With other things like vaccines, like I'm on the side that there would have been problems with and we can discuss this with things like human challenge trials for a bunch of complicated reasons. So what you needed was flexibility in what's the right method given the risk you're taking for masks I think it was clear.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why didn't they create like a consortium? Why didn't the universities create their own advisory body or some sort of, like, even if our own authorities weren't functioning very well, partly because of Trump's not great, I mean, really negative influence, we didn't like step up as academics to say, here's another consortium of lots of experts, not just one person saying, oh, by the way, because that's really corrosive at some point to have individuals be ahead of the health authorities.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I started tweeting out the argument on why they were wrong just on the sort of science side of the virus, sociology side of masks, all of that. And I just sort of twiddled my thumbs after tweeting out the whole argument, hoping like somebody would write it and not me because it shouldn't be like, I mean, it's kind of really terrible to undermine, as you say, nation's leading health authority. So I hoped it would come from, I don't know, the ex-director of CDC, somebody like that, somebody with really high stature. So it didn't look like a random challenger. Because like, how are you going to distinguish that from an anti-vaccer or a quack, right? That is a real problem, but it didn't happen. So I think the real question you're asking isn't what should the New York Times have done. In some sense, I think what should of our scientific establishment have done?”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we screwed it up. This is a really difficult question because I ended up writing on our pets essentially criticizing CDC and the WHO en masks in March 2020 before any, like at the time people were still saying, you know, masks could infect you, make things worse. And never in a million years, I thought I'd start my own personal pandemic, you know, criticizing global health authorities or the CDC. That was a really weird situation. And I have to say, I did not like it one bit. I knew they were wrong around early March. I have links to Hong Kong. I was researching the field. There's a lot of infectious specialists in Southeast Asia. We're way ahead of us, partly because they've been through SARS and partly because they really are way ahead of us.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a climate still where you can't have a sensible conversation. And that means that it's gotten Republicans versus Democrats or crazy scenarios versus a sensible oversight and investigation. And I don't think that's good because our medical technology is really powerful. It's got all these great things. Like look at our vaccines. And if you have a really powerful technology and a really powerful science, you have to figure out like does this power come with risks? It's very similar to nuclear physics, I think, in that way. If you don't figure out the risks and the downside, it's going to come bite you anyway without you knowing it. So even if this one had nothing to do with the lab, it would have been a good time to say just the fact that we can't be sure should”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we have one pandemic in 1977 that was indeed triggered because of a vaccine trial gone wrong. And that was essentially covered up at the time too. The scientists knew that it had to involve something like a vaccine trial, but you've got almost no public discussion of it till 2008, almost 30 years later, partly because the scientists were thinking, you know what, now it's not going to create a suspicion around vaccines or any of that. See 1977 and you're at the height of the smallpox campaign. And then we have this one, which is unclear. I mean, if we have one more incident of any kind, it's just going to be horrific, both for our research project and what we can do with it. So I think what it ended up happening is that there's a few people who keep getting quoted in media who are actually a small number of folks.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think one fundamental mistake we're still making right now is letting this be Republican versus Democrat, China versus not China thing instead of a fundamental problem of biosafety. It's a little bit like nuclear weapons and nuclear physics and nuclear reactors. They can be really powerful and useful. They might be very crucial for fighting climate change with the new kinds of energy we can use. But if you don't have it as a safe thing, right? If you have questions about its safety, people are not going to want to use it. Countries are going to say, no, not in my backyard. And we see this. I think Germany recently essentially stopped whatever it has. It's just not going to have any nuclear reactors. That's partly because of Chernobyl. It scared the living lights out of people and for good reason. So, and I think the fundamental mistake we're making it is not treating this like a biosafety crisis.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if we do find something out, or as we do at the moment, we keep finding cover up from the Chinese side, which is not at all sort of reflected in what's going on in that report, it makes science itself look bad. And that's how we got to the March letter in the journal Science, the scientific journal science, where 18 very prominent people sign something saying, you know what? We need an actual investigation, whatever it can do. The report was too certain and both hypotheses are viable. I would say the way they think about it would be that the existing evidence base, such as it is, it's very limited and full of contradictions and a huge cover-up is compatible with almost everything, like almost anything you can imagine the existing evidence base is compatible with. You can think what's more likely or less likely based on your own personal preferences, but there's no evidence base to rule anything at all.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were limited in what they could do because in an origins investigation, you can't just do it if the Chinese government isn't cooperating. But it wasn't that. That would have been ununderstandable limitation. The WHO report we got was almost like a PR exercise in how it phrased things, what it was certain about, how it repeated assertions, what it didn't question. It could have done things like, well, we've been told this, but we couldn't verify or could have questioned a few things in the report.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relatively powerful and gatekeeping positions. So, do you really want to sort of in the middle of a pandemic? Do you want to go to work on the pandemic stuff and do your work and get future grants? Or do you want to like raise your hand and say, yeah, my field needs more regulation and perhaps some investigation into whether our research practices were implicated in something so horrendous. That's not going to make you very popular with your colleagues. So I think that's how it was set up. The turning point, probably not as visible to people outside, is the WHO investigation. You know, I wrote a New York Times article about the origins of COVID and I didn't really go into the WHO investigation. It is a debacle. It's going to go in history books into how bad it is. It is essentially just sort of typing up what the Chinese officials told them almost uncritically. I mean, I realized they...”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wants to work there. And as an academic who also likes to choose where she works, I sympathize with that, but that's a big conflict of interest. The very field who has been quoted most in this is the most conflicted field because they both have colleagues and a vested interest. The people you don't hear from a lot are the biosafety people who are actually the actual experts in this. them we should have been speaking to where people are kind of perhaps independent in some ways from all of this and as the defensiveness grew it became really hard from what i heard from a lot of people in the field to say if you thought it was like a viable thing it should be investigated you didn't even have to believe what had happened because there's so much obfuscation you don't really know what happened because the people who were loud were”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“integrated with the Western scientific establishment, publishing in nature, science, all those big things. So I think there was a sort of desire to protect their colleagues, which once again these are human. Plus, if a lab incident of some sort or a field incident of some sort could be implicated, that really would bring the push for much more strict regulation on the kind of research we do. And I'm just talking about even the more benign scenarios, right? You know, somebody screwed something up. They might not even known about it. Because for example, there have been a lot of calls for moving the high-risk pathogen labs outside of cities, right? Outside of populated places. And when I floated that with a couple of leading virologists, they were really aghast at the idea. They thought, well, how are we going to hire people if you put it us in the middle of nowhere?”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the Western scientific establishment, especially Sensars, the other near miss we had in 2003 that didn't become a pandemic because of a lot of reasons had created a lot of interest. So you had this double whammy there. Once there was the sort of the Trump angle, but there was also this defensiveness around both the field, I think, because you're asking a field. I mean, I'm an academic and if somebody came to me and said, would you like to think about the fact that your field may have inadvertently perhaps, you know, even in the mildest potential case, spark something that killed millions of people, of course defensiveness is very human in that. And people sometimes see, you know, China versus US, but as I said, in reality, these scientific establishment that we're talking about in this particular case is very, very much.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it really did seem like just deflecting the blame in many ways. And plus, you know, the attendant racism and sort of calling the virus various racist names didn't help the situation. So that's, I think, the one that's most obvious. The second one, I think that's not as obvious to people is that the world of urology is not that big. And the Chinese lab in question, the Wuhan Institute of Urology, and there are a couple other labs in Wuhan, they're very much part of the scientific establishment globally, right? I know there's been some speculations about the sort of the whole bioweapons thing, and I just have never been very interested in that because if you're going to do an actual bioweapon, a coronavirus is not your proper pathogen. The kind of scientists who work on coronaviruses are genuine normal scientists most of the time and deeply, deeply embedded.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think two things happen, and one of them is the easiest one because it's kind of quite easy to see in other things too, which is that at the initial phase of the pandemic, what the Trump administration, to put it politely bungling, the response and also occasionally adding overt racism to its bungling, there was a great reaction, I think, to anything they suggested that looked like they were just trying to deflect blame, right? In fact, people have forgotten about it, but President Trump went through a period during which he denied the pandemic was a big deal in praised China's president for a couple of months before it had exploded in the United States. He switched the saying, well, it was China's fault. And I think that created a big backlash among not just the scientists, but the public.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I will, but I have to let you know there's no ground truth. So you can just make it up and there would be nobody who knew what it was supposed to be. So you could have gotten away with whatever you wanted it to be. But it is ZNIP to feci.”
2021-08-25 · Conversations with Tyler · Zeynep Tufekci on the Sociology of The Moment (Live) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source