The Federalist: The Art of the Denial
The Federalist was once a liberalist leaning outlet for conservative news that appealed to a broad spectrum of people from center to far right. In 2020, amid the Coronavirus outbreak, it has become a teachable example of medical denialism in action. Some of the more widely editorialized articles from the site focus on obvious examples of long-outdated practices like voluntarily exposing oneself to a virus or medical quackery like gargling with salt water to prevent the virus. A wider reading of the publications from the site, however, shows multiple articles that follow the classic tropes of medical denialism in the Internet era:
Selective Distrust of Scientific Authority
One of the hallmarks of medical denialism is to portray the medical and scientific communities as intellectually compromised. In its article, The Scientist Whose Doomsday Pandemic Model Predicted Armageddon Just Walked Back The Apocalyptic Predictions, the author takes issue with a provisional model for the virus outbreak published by the Imperial College. The actual paper predicted that if no action were taken to combat the virus, the results would be dire. The Scientist in question, Neil Ferguson, later gave revised numbers, based on updated assumptions, with the single approach of social distancing put in place. This is a normal process in the creation of models, especially models based on assumptions that are necessarily revised based on newer information. Dr. Fauci on CNN’s State of the Union (Mar 29, 2020) addressed this issue:
When someone creates a model they put in various assumptions, and the model is only as good as, and as accurate, as its assumptions. Whenever the modelers come in, they give a worse case scenario and a best case scenario. Generally, in reality, it’s somewhere in the middle. I’ve never seen a model of the diseases that I’ve dealt with that the worst case scenario actually came out; they always overshoot. So when you use numbers like a million, a million and a half, two million that almost certainly is off the chart. Now it’s not impossible but very, very unlikely…I just don’t think we need to make a projection when it’s such a moving target, that you could so easily be wrong, and mislead people.
Other epidemiologists added that though with social distancing the spread of the virus becomes more manageable, that we shouldn’t rely on it as our only mitigation, a sentiment echoed by Dr. Fauci that “given the spread we’ve seen, you know, anything’s possible. And that’s the reason why we’ve got to be prepared to take whatever action is appropriate to contain and mitigate the outbreak.” The consensus message was clear; social distancing is a method that improves the outlook for public health in the wake of the outbreak, but it shouldn’t be our only mitigation, because the virus is unpredictable, and there are still many unknowns.
Another general problem with the media, not just The Federalist, is how they handle epidemiological models. As Dr. Fauci touched upon, the media fails to understand how models are used. When an epidemiologist looks at an epidemiological model, the first thing they will do is look at the assumptions, change independent variables based on their own assumptions, and see how the changes in assumptions affect the outcomes. The press takes the raw number from the original projection uncritically, despite the fact that the assumptions would have changed from the minute the model was published and reports that number. The press wants concrete answers that are simple but inevitably wrong and overlooks the fact that a model can be perfectly valid, even when the underlying assumptions have changed. When reality doesn’t meet their own self-reported number, they attempt to assign blame instead of looking at themselves critically for the irresponsible use of the tools that epidemiologists provided.
The Federalist’s article portrays the normal process of revising the projections based on the U.S. and U.K. government’s policy actions as “walking back the apocalyptic predictions,” and how it makes that argument is by relying on the reader not making a close examination of the supporting evidence and general ignorance of how virological models are constructed. Common to all denialists are a rejection of the consensus of the scientific community. NIH researchers Tara C Smith and Steven P Novella explained in their paper HIV Denial in the Internet Era that by “denigrating the notion of scientific authority in general” that:
this type of thinking is convenient for deniers as it allows them to choose which authorities to believe and which ones to dismiss as part of a grand conspiracy.
The Federalist suggestion that the virus is part of a wider conspiracy is in full display in its article Inaccurate Virus Models Are Panicking Officials Into Ill-Advised Lockdowns, suggesting in sinister tones “perhaps the goal of COVID Act Now was never to provide accurate information, but to scare citizens and government officials into to implementing rash and draconian measures.” The article As Trump’s Poll Numbers Rise, Media Begin Censoring Press Conferences further suggests, “The political media have been working extremely hard to craft a narrative that the spread of the coronavirus was essentially the fault of the man they had blamed for all other ills in recent years.” The biases of the mainstream media aside, the Coronavirus does not care about partisanship, it will infect people across the aisle, and it does not care who the President is. To recast a policy debate as a conspiracy of liberal, scientific interests who “peddle faulty models that incite horrific panic” is itself damaging to public health policy.
Portraying Science as Faith and Consensus as Dogma
Smith and Novella also discuss in their paper that because “the ideas proposed by deniers do not meet rigorous scientific standards, they cannot hope to compete against the mainstream theories. They cannot raise the level of their beliefs up to the standards of mainstream science; therefore they attempt to lower the status of the denied science…characterizing scientific consensus as scientific dogma.”
In Senior Editor Margot Cleveland’s Federalist article It’s Time For Us All To Get A Little More Humility And Wonder About Coronavirus, all these characteristics of denialism are on display. Researchers and the creators of virus models are portrayed as arrogant, in need of more “humility to recognize the limits in our predictive capabilities; the uncertainty of scientific models; and that the countervailing interests of safeguarding lives and livelihoods render it impossible for any political leader to achieve a perfect outcome.” The error of this article is its straw man argument that science argues for perfect outcomes, that it is never wrong, in short dogmatic. Outside of the sound bites that play on an endless loop in the media, one would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the medical or scientific community who has argued that we’ve done everything right, know precisely what the outcomes will be, or that we are much closer to understanding how the Coronavirus spreads. There is consensus that doing nothing and carrying on with our daily lives as if nothing was happening would have dire outcomes, a consensus Cleveland rejects saying “It may well be that that data will suggest early decisions were an overreaction and that businesses and livelihoods were unnecessarily destroyed” without offering any contrary evidence.
Pushing Back the Goalpost
Smith and Novella also discuss one of the most common tactics of medical denialism, pushing back the goalposts:
Of all the characteristics of deniers, repeatedly nudging back the goalpost — or the threshold of evidence required for acceptance of a theory — is often the most telling. The strategy behind goalpost-moving is simple: always demand more evidence than can currently be provided. If the evidence is then provided at a later date, simply change the demand to require even more evidence, or refuse to accept the kind of evidence that is being offered.
The Federalist’s lack of intellectual honesty in dealing with the virus could serve as a master class in this technique of rhetorical argumentation:
Just as the experts did not know the reach of the coronavirus in January, they did not know the risk of the respiratory disease in March. How deadly is it? How easily is it spread? How is it spread? How many lives are at risk? Who is at risk?”(Cleveland)
As U.S. state and local officials halt the economy and quarantine their communities over the Wuhan virus crisis, one would hope our leaders were making such major decisions based on well-sourced data and statistical analysis. That is not the case. (Osburn)
Ferguson, who has since tested positive for the Wuhan virus himself, has not issued any official retraction or apologies for his incorrect predictions. (Osburn)
Though it offends common decency that The Federalist would attack a respected epidemiologist with over twenty years of study and research in the spread of viruses for catching the virus, like so many in public health fighting on the frontlines of the war against Coronavirus have, it is unsurprising. Denialists have been using the same tired rhetoric for decades, unashamedly, in disease after disease, and as President Trump has said, this is “…our big war. It’s a medical war. We have to win this war. It’s very important.” Medicine and science are ruled by evidence and firmly held consensus. Perhaps those who have little to offer in either respect should refrain from playing fast and loose with the work of others.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
Smith, Tara C., and Steven P. Novella. “HIV denial in the Internet era.” PLoS Medicine 4.8 (2007).
