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A Study Said Covid Wasn’t That Deadly. The Right Seized It.

How coronavirus research is being weaponized.

Credit...The New York Times

Aleszu Bajak and

Mr. Bajak and Mr. Howe teach journalism at Northeastern University.

Last month, a group of Stanford University researchers released a remarkable study: Covid-19 infections in Santa Clara County, Calif., might well be 85 times higher than official estimates. The fatality rate for coronavirus might be as low as 0.12 percent, the researchers concluded, which would make Covid-19 only as deadly as the seasonal flu.

Within hours, the paper had been leveraged by conservative commentators and activists on social media, forged into ammunition to support the protests against lockdowns and other social mitigation efforts meant to contain the coronavirus and minimize deaths. The right-wing, prospecting for proof that the severity of the pandemic was overblown, had found their science, plain as day.

The study provoked a very different reaction from another realm of our increasingly Balkanized internet. As soon as the Stanford study went online, it began drawing intense criticism from other experts. Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and applied science at Columbia University, suggested that the authors issue an apology for wasting everyone’s time — not so much because they made mistakes, but because “they’re the kind of screw-ups that happen if you want to leap out with an exciting finding.”

This paper, and thousands more like it, are the result of a publishing phenomenon called the “preprint” — articles published long before the traditional form of academic quality control, peer review, takes place. Preprints aren’t new, but they have flourished on the internet, especially during the pandemic.

Preprints are meant to help scientists find and discuss new findings in real time, which is especially important during a pandemic. They generally carry a warning label: “This research has yet to be peer reviewed.” To a scientist, this means it’s provisional knowledge — maybe true, maybe not. But in the right-wing news media, all that is just fine print, and anything carrying the mark of a respected institution counts as knowledge, particularly when it reinforces the day’s talking points.

Preprints have been around for years, but their use has exploded in our current crisis. More than 10,000 academic works have been published about Covid-19 since January alone, 3,500 of them preprints. By comparison, only 29 studies were published before the 2003 SARS pandemic ended.

Science can’t move as fast as the coronavirus, but it’s coming close.

The instant sharing of valuable data has accelerated our race for vaccines, antivirals and better tests. But this welter of information, much of it conflicting, has sown confusion and discord with a general public not accustomed to the high level of uncertainty inherent in science.

A Harvard epidemiologist, Yonatan Grad, says that a proper peer review would have required the authors of the Stanford study to make major changes before publication. They compounded their errors, he notes, by trumpeting their findings to the media. Given that, he said, “It’s incredibly shortsighted to imagine that any mistakes would go undetected.”

There were at least 480 comments posted on the first version of the study that went online. The very first one raised doubts about the researchers’ methodology. It was posted by one of the study’s participants.

What followed next was the academic version of a roast, with critics raising issues with the researchers’ recruitment method (Facebook ads), flaws in their statistical methods, and even the tests themselves — manufactured in China, and since banned from export.

The tests are known to generate false positives up to 1.7 percent of the time. Given that the Stanford study originally identified 1.5 percent of its participants as having the antibody, critics pointed out that in theory, every single one might have been a false positive. The tests are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and a subcommittee in the House of Representatives opened an investigation into four vendors of antibody tests, including Premier Biotech, the maker of the tests used in the Stanford study.

All this is science doing what it’s supposed to do, according to Daniel Larremore, a computational biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “What we saw with the Santa Clara study is what happens when a really important result and an important study gets really put under the microscope by an entire community,” Dr. Larremore said. “It’s not because there’s some vendetta out there, it’s because the community really cares.”

But even as the scientific community was in this process of rough-and-tumble self-healing, the study was receiving a very different reception in the alternate universe occupied by the right-wing media. Having already been weaponized to serve an ideological purpose — lift the lockdowns — the scholarly debate could easily be cast as another attempt by elites to exercise a chokehold on an inconvenient truth.

Here’s how that weaponization took place.

How a Few Tweets Led to a Surge of Misinformation

Two conservative commentators tweeted the Stanford study one Friday morning, resulting in thousands of retweets, shown below. Conservative media and Facebook groups picked up the study. Protestors later claimed the virus was less dangerous than believed.

Provocateur and former Times reporter

Alex Berenson shares the study

Sized by

number of

followers

Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe

tweets about the study

Retweeted by conservative podcaster Daniel Horowitz

11:47 a.m. — Conservative media personality Steve Deace

picks up the study. Three minutes later, Spectator U.S.

publishes a story.

April 17

12 noon

Retweeted by Fox News political analyst Brit Hume

People retweeting Berenson

People retweeting Boothe

Conservative radio host Bill Mitchell

1:51 p.m. — The study is shared on Reddit’s

r/Conservative subreddit

2:06 p.m. — Health Freedom Louisiana posts the study

2:28 p.m. — Conservative commentator Bill Mitchell

retweets and says, "If we had know THIS at the beginning

we would have NEVER shut down America for a virus half

as deadly as the seasonal flu.”

2:53 p.m. — Daily Caller publishes a story

3:00 p.m.

3:02 p.m. — Washington Examiner publishes a story

@SunnyJL52 quotes the tweet to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers,

writing, "The science is not with you closing down Wisconsin.”

4:52 p.m. — A screenshot is shared on the #FreeTN Facebook group.

Two days later, Tennesseans protested social distancing orders.

5:13 p.m. — Steve Deace's BlazeTV publishes a

story calling the study a "GAME CHANGER”

5:29 p.m. — Study is shared on r/conspiracy subreddit

6:00 p.m.

Andy McCarthy of the National Review

9:00 p.m.

Midnight

Sized by

number of

followers

Provocateur and former Times reporter

Alex Berenson shares the study

Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe

tweets about the study

Retweeting

Berenson

Retweeted by conservative podcaster Daniel Horowitz

11:47 a.m. — Conservative media personality Steve

Deace picks up the study. Three minutes later,

Spectator U.S. publishes a story.

April 17

12 noon

Retweeting

Boothe

Retweeted by Fox News political analyst Brit Hume

Retweeted by conservative radio host Bill Mitchell

1:51 p.m. — The study is shared on Reddit’s

r/Conservative subreddit

3:00 p.m.

2:06 p.m. — Health Freedom Louisiana posts the study

2:28 p.m. — Conservative commentator Bill Mitchell

retweets and says, "If we had know THIS at the beginning

we would have NEVER shut down America for a virus half

as deadly as the seasonal flu.”

2:53 p.m. — Daily Caller publishes a story

3:02 p.m. — Washington Examiner publishes a story

3:27 p.m. — @SunnyJL52 quotes the tweet to

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, writing, “The science is

not with you closing down Wisconsin.”

4:52 p.m. — A screenshot is shared on the #FreeTN

Facebook group. Two days later, Tennesseans protested

social distancing orders.

5:13 p.m. — Steve Deace's BlazeTV publishes a

story calling the study a "GAME CHANGER”

5:29 p.m. — Study is shared on r/conspiracy subreddit

6:00 p.m.

Retweeted by Andy McCarthy of the National Review

By Aleszu Bajak and Stuart A. Thompson

By the end of the weekend, right-wing social media had passed around the study, often with hashtags like #ReopenAmerica, #FactsNotFear, #endthelockdown and #BackToWork slapped on. In all, the preprint’s web address was retweeted more than 18,000 times. It even showed up, on April 22, in a Facebook political ad from Tony Wisniewski, a Republican in the Idaho Legislature: “Due to increased antibody testing, a Stanford University study has found that many more people have been infected than what earlier confirmed cases indicate … So, is all the hysteria justified? Let’s get Idaho back to work!”

What this cascade of sharing behavior reveals, based on our analysis of nearly 900 Covid-19 preprints, is a tale of two internets: one largely ideological, in which science is leveraged as propaganda, and one that consists of the kind of discussion and debate vital for academia — and democracy.

When mapped graphically, the “traffic” in each case takes a readily identifiable shape:

Few Interpretations, Many Followers

Sharing among right-wing provocateurs mostly depends on a few voices sharing to many followers. Here, Ann Coulter and others share a preprint study suggesting the virus is not transmissible outdoors.

SIZED BY NUMBER OF RETWEETS

Retweet

P.D. Mangan

Ann Coulter

shares the study

Only a few interpretations

are shared widely

Brendan Eich

Alex Berenson

SIZED BY NUMBER OF RETWEETS

Retweet

Ann Coulter

shares study

P.D. Mangan

Brendan Eich

Alex Berenson

Only a few interpretations

are shared widely

By Aleszu Bajak and Stuart A. Thompson

In one pattern, a conservative commentator like the Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe takes a study that would seem to confirm an existing talking point — say, that the Covid-19 fatality rate is actually far lower than Dr. Anthony Fauci would have you believe; or, that the virus is not transmissible outdoors, a position that Ann Coulter recently used a preprint to argue — and broadcasts it to an army of retweeters. This conforms most closely to traditional broadcast media, even as it bypasses traditional forms of vetting like peer review or simple fact-checking.

The other pattern vividly illustrates the shape of collegial debate, adhering to our idealistic notion of peer review, but writ large across dozens or even hundreds of commentators.

Many Interpretations, Fewer Followers

Among researchers and other academics, preprints were shared and discussed within many groups and between fewer followers. This is the ideal outcome from releasing preprint studies.

SIZED BY NUMBER OF RETWEETS

Many smaller clusters

discuss and share the

preprint study on Twitter

Jens Lundgren

May Almeida

Dr. Nick Mark

Infectious Diseases

Dr. C. Michael Gibson

Pradeep Natarajan

Nico Cortes

Dr. Angela Hewlett

David Juurlink

Dr. Gaetan Burgio

SIZED BY NUMBER OF RETWEETS

Many smaller clusters discuss

and share the study on Twitter

Jens Lundgren

May Almeida

Dr. Nick Mark

Infectious Diseases

Dr. C. Michael Gibson

Pradeep Natarajan

Nico Cortes

Dr. Angela Hewlett

David Juurlink

Dr. Gaetan Burgio

By Aleszu Bajak and Stuart A. Thompson

In this case preprints — like studies on the efficacy of antimalarial medication or clinical trials with Covid-19 patients — are usually taken up by scientists debating their merits in real time, spreading them via Twitter in the process as they disseminate papers to colleagues for discussion.

The former pattern might be good politics, but it makes for bad science.

Preprints aren’t going away anytime soon, and at any rate, will be harder to unroot once the pandemic passes. We believe this is ultimately good for the public — and the scientific community. But it’s not without cost. Partisans have a new tool for disruption, and some bad preprint studies could get coronavirus very wrong, putting lives at risk.

But in the long term, it will help correct the insular way science has normally operated — with studies hidden in expensive journals, only helping scientists long after pandemics pass.

The public must, in turn, become more skeptical and better at vetting new research they encounter.

That was already needed even with traditional peer review studies, which were hardly infallible.

“It’s not like peer review guarantees good science,” says Brian Nosek, a co-founder and the executive director of the Center for Open Science. Dr. Nosek studies the replicability of scientific findings, and has found that many published results are difficult to replicate, peer reviewed or not. “Preprints open the box on science. And science is messy. Right now people want certainty, and science doesn’t provide certainty.”

Aleszu Bajak is a science and data journalist who teaches at Northeastern University. Jeff Howe is a fellow at the Global Resilience Institute and an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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