Calm-mongering
Fine-tuning the potential emotional impact of risk is not the same as managing it
A particularly pernicious aspect of the public health and media reaction to the ongoing COVID pandemic has been the tendency to downplay bad news and slow-walk a public discussion of the risks by invoking the specter of “fearmongering”.
Panic about public panic has been a leitmotif of the current pandemic, going back to the very beginning. In February 2020, when the WHO should have been actively engaged in fighting the nascent outbreak, they — gripped by fear about fear — were busying themselves instead with semantic tone policing:
From a risk communications perspective, using the name SARS can have unintended consequences in terms of creating unnecessary fear for some populations, especially in Asia which was worst affected by the SARS outbreak in 2003.
For that reason and others, WHO has begun referring to the virus as “the virus responsible for COVID-19” or “the COVID-19 virus” when communicating with the public.
Even so, the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic a month later was immediately greeted by a barrage of opinion pieces warning about the dangers of overreaction. Of course, these articles have aged about as well as takeout sushi on a camping trip. Their central claim — that the infection and mortality burden of COVID would be negligible, and governmental action taken to mitigate its spread was unnecessary, was wildly off the mark. For example, this article, whose deck (sub headline) read “The evidence does not support our panicked inferences”, predicted 500 deaths from the pandemic, later revised (twice) to 5,000 or 50,000, depending on whether you believe the correction or the correction to the correction. In any case, the author argues,
(M)y adjusted figure, however tweaked, remains both far lower, and I believe far more accurate, than the common claim that there could be a million dead in the U.S. from well over 150 million coronavirus cases before the epidemic runs its course.
Almost five years into a pandemic that has no end in sight, we are at 1.2 million confirmed COVID deaths in the US, and most people have been infected more than once (meaning that the number of infections is far in excess of 150 million).
As this example shows, not only were these reckless warnings about panic unhelpful, they were based on false reassurances. They reflected a fixation of the media — and government officials at the time — on the health of the stock market, rather than the health of the public.
In fact — aside from some difficulty in finding toilet paper and flour in supermarkets — panic has not been a hallmark of the average person’s reaction to COVID. If anything, the public has been almost bizarrely sanguine about the prospect of being infected once or twice a year with a virus capable of persisting within the body, and causing long-term health issues, in young and old alike. That must represent success of some sort, especially if you consider it from the virus’ point of view.
Even now, as new developments unfold in the ongoing pandemic, the public would benefit from accurate and honest communication about the risks in real time. What they get instead is reflexive “calm-mongering” from public health authorities, politicians and the media in response to every new piece of bad news that has come down the pike.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how calm-mongering works. We’ll also talk about how it has been deployed repeatedly to cloud the public’s judgment about the risks of COVID, and how it continues to interfere with the development of an effective public health response
Calm-Mongering as a Recurrent Theme
When the novel coronavirus first appeared on the radar screen of our collective consciousness, no one fully saw the scope of the threat. It’s safe to say that “learning to live with a rapidly evolving airborne pathogen that’s capable of repeated reinfections, with the potential for long-term health consequences” was on nobody’s bingo card in late 2019.
But the bad news wasn’t dropped on our laps all at once. Each new finding was greeted as an unpleasant surprise, which usually unfolded slowly. The trajectory of the ‘reveal’ was similar for the most part — a steady progression from rumor to preprints to skeptical media coverage to accepted fact. At every step along the way, the calm-mongerers accompanied us on this journey, repetitively whispering sweet (it’s-) nothings in our ears:
Aerosol spread: It took two years for the WHO to acknowledge aerosol transmission of the virus, despite clear (early) warnings of its significance. This had consequences, as we’ll discuss later.
Asymptomatic infections: Early reports on asymptomatic transmission were promptly subjected to second-guessing and “it’s too early to tell” skepticism, delaying the incorporation of this critical piece of information into infection control procedures.
Possibility of reinfection: The potential for reinfection was initially downplayed, creating a false sense of security among those who had recovered from COVID-19. Despite the fact that reinfection is common among the other coronaviruses known to infect humans, early reports of reinfection were dismissed with skepticism about the possibility (“it’s too early to tell”). Once cases of reinfection were definitively identified, the calm-mongering kicked into gear.
Rapid evolution of the virus: At the outset of the pandemic, media coverage repeatedly assured us that SARS-CoV-2 viral evolution would not be a major concern. Early reports of viral evolution were dismissed, and met with skepticism (more about that later). The prediction that the virus would quickly evade immunity was made by a team led by one of us (A.C.) towards the end of 2020.
Long COVID: From the beginning of the pandemic, there have been reports of viral persistence and prolonged post-acute symptoms of COVID. These conditions, which overlap with the CDC definition of Long COVID, have been subjected to continuous skepticism by calm-mongerers over the years. There have been coordinated campaigns by contrarian “scientists” to dismiss these effects as psychosomatic, which have, unfortunately, made their way into the media. It’s not psychosomatic, it’s not a functional disorder, and it’s not mass hysteria. It’s a set of physiological conditions impacting hundreds of millions of people worldwide at this point.
Impact on children: Initially, pro-infection scientists focused their attention on arguing that children were unable to be infected by or efficiently spread COVID, despite evidence to the contrary at the time. This gradually progressed to the claim that “children don’t get sick from COVID”, which flew in the face of available data at the time. None of these claims have stood the test of time. COVID was a top ten cause of death for children during the first years of the pandemic, which is difficult to reconcile with the idea that the “kids are safe. They always have been”. Six million children have been impacted by Long COVID, and the health harms to children are large, and growing.
In each of these cases, the immediate response of platformed experts in the media (and often public health authorities) was to meet newly identified threats with skepticism and pushback. Fear and concern in response to potentially existential threats is a rational response, and ignoring these concerns is evolutionarily maladaptive. Assessing potential threats correctly is the first step in being able to eliminate them. We didn’t get here as a species because our prehistoric ancestors “learned to live with” cave lions.
The Techniques of Calm-Mongering
Calm-mongering is, at its heart, a propaganda technique. Like other propaganda techniques, it relies on a number of rhetorical tricks to be effective. Spelling out these tricks helps us spot when calm-mongering has entered the chat about potential public-health risks:
Waiting for definitive information ("milling"): Calm-mongering often leads to delaying action until more conclusive data are available, often at the expense of taking precautionary measures. We see this in the fetishization of evidence-based medicine in the acceptance of COVID mitigation measures. Mitigation measures such as masks and air purification are engineering controls — their effectiveness is governed by the laws of physics. As they lack a “therapeutic window” (limitations due to toxicity) issue, clinical trials are neither required nor relevant for their use. Calm-mongering scientists often misrepresent clinical data as “proof” that these interventions don’t work. Another common dilatory technique used is to dismiss preprints as being “too preliminary”. This approach interferes with threat assessment, as the offhand dismissal of breaking research (preprints) slows the process of threat assessment. A good example of this was when the Korber Lab posted a preprint about the D614G mutation in the spring of 2020. This mutation improved viral transmissibility. It was — and should have at the time been — a big deal. We were one month into the pandemic, and already there were clear signs that the virus was evolving. The story was picked up by the media, and the lead author spelled out her concerns clearly: “We cannot afford to be blindsided as we move vaccines and antibodies into clinical testing.” This was an incredibly prescient warning, and we would have been in a far better place today if it had been incorporated into the development of the public health strategy for the virus. Instead, the media was quick to pick up and amplify ‘calm-mongering’, both-sidesing an issue that in no way benefited from this treatment, as in this media article that (unironically) quotes a tweet that’s complaining about a Facebook post:
This LATimes article is INFURIATING. So much misinformation based on just that preprint. They took quotes from the author's PERSONAL FACEBOOK PAGE. An anonymous quote that this is 'classic Darwinian evolution.' Commentary on viral load and pathogenesis from a toxicologist. pic.twitter.com/dN2T4oYOCa
— Brian Wasik (@BrianRWasik) May 5, 2020
Calm-mongering “experts” focused their energy on dismissing the emergent information (which was in a preprint), instead of evaluating it critically and addressing its implications. By the time the D614G paper was published in August, the news cycle had moved on. All the public heard was the biased critique in April that the preprint findings were ‘too early’. The reality is that the peer-review process is not designed for emergent threats. A typical paper takes 3-6 months to go through peer review. Preprints with time-critical public health implications deserve to be read and evaluated critically on their merits by those claiming expertise in a given subject. Any expert who bases their expertise on Nature Reviews articles or textbooks, while being reflexively skeptical of preprints, is worse than useless in an emergent crisis.
Russell's Teapot: This is an analogy by the philosopher Bertrand Russel — if you claim that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun between Earth and Mars, you cannot expect to be believed, because the claim is unfalsifiable. The point is that, when a claim is made that cannot be disproven, the philosophic burden of proof belongs to the one making the claim.
Calm-mongering scientists will often respond to bad news around SARS-CoV-2 with the claim that the inference being drawn is “too simplistic”, and “biology is more complicated than that”. Often, it’s spun as “we don’t fully understand the situation yet”, or “more study is needed”. These statements are generally true for any aspect of science — no subfield of biological study is ever complete, and there is always more left to learn. However, the invocation of ‘scientific dark matter’ can confuse situations when the need of the hour is for decisive action. For example, early reports showed that the neutralizing antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 was short-lived and heterogeneous, while also being easily evaded by the virus. This had direct (unpleasant) implications for public health strategy that needed immediate consideration. At around the same time, however, a number of high-profile scientists published studies promising durable, even lifelong immunity for the virus, based on mechanisms of immunity that were (then and now) not proven to play a direct role in SARS-CoV-2 immunity. This led to wild claims about durable immunity in the media. The reality was straightforward at the time, even if the implications were unpleasant to contemplate: immunity to the virus is short-lived. The Russell’s Teapot claim of “maybe these other mechanisms will help us” was speculative at the time, and deserved to be treated with the skepticism and scrutiny that is usually reserved for ‘bad news’ with COVID, rather than being uncritically platformed. Having had a clearer picture of the situation at that point in the pandemic would have permitted more honest communication around the limitations of the vaccines, preserving public trust in a vital tool. Again, calm-mongering had real practical (negative) consequences for public health.
Straw-man arguments: A good example of this is with the ‘airborne’ debate. A common response to the claim that the virus was airborne during the early pandemic was that it couldn’t be, because then it would be like measles, and of course this virus was not like measles. The sleight of hand here was conflating the claim that the virus (which at the time had an R0 of around 3) was airborne with the claim of measles-like transmissibility (measles has an R0 of around 18). More generally, straw man arguments are used to forestall any rational discussion of the risks of COVID (“so you’re saying we should lock down forever”). Arguing that Public Health should take a suppression approach for COVID — the same approach taken for every other infectious disease with long-term consequences — is often met with the straw-man response of “we will never be able to eradicate it”. Conflating disease suppression, which is standard Public Health practice, with disease eradication (“zero COVID”) is a sleight of hand that’s used by those who are in favor of unlimited viral spread (“infinite COVID”).
Wishful thinking: A recurrent theme among calm-mongerers is the insertion of their own emotions into the discussion. During the ‘aerosol spread’ debate, a Public Health official went so far as to say that he “want(ed) to believe” that the virus was spread by droplets because it would be too difficult to control if it wasn’t. That’s not how reality works, of course. Calm-mongering has similarly been used to argue that the virus will become less virulent over time, with one scientist justifying their argument by saying because “that’s what we want”. Very often, articles about a particular newly identified risk will “balance” the risk with wishful thinking from experts. When a lay person engages in wishful thinking, it’s easy to see right through it. In the hands of platformed “experts”, wishful thinking can be insidious, as it adds a veneer of scientific credibility to what would otherwise be seen to be a fantasy.
False claims: Very often, calm-mongering comes with an appeal to “false facts”. These tactics are borrowed from the oil & tobacco industry’s decades-long war on science in the service of their own profit margins (discussed in the book, “Merchants of Doubt”). In fact, here’s a veteran of the oil industry’s misinformation campaigns (featured in “Merchants of Doubt, no less) turning his attention to spreading calm about COVID with the false claim that there is an ‘avanclance (sic) of science that proves’ that ‘lockdown hysteria’ did more harm than public health measures. False reassurances — which contradict the available science — are a key part of calm-mongering, as the goal is to shut down the debate. For example, many of the early articles warning about ‘fearmongering’ in March 2020 emphasized how few cases of COVID had been detected worldwide, or how few deaths there had been at that point. Anyone with a high school education could have seen through that — you can’t use the low case counts/death toll to argue that there is no cause for concern in emergent situation where infections are doubling every three to five days. At other times, the false reassurances are based on outdated information or misrepresentation of existing knowledge, as was the case in the WHO’s misinformation campaign opposing the acknowledgement of airborne spread.
In any case, false reassurances are a non sequitur during a risk management conversation. If someone is pointing out to you that you shouldn’t drive home from the bar after downing three beers in half an hour, “well, I did this last week and I was fine” is not a valid response.
“Switchblade science”: At this point, there are hundreds of thousands of papers on Covid, and the scientific consensus on many of the risks that it poses is very clear. You wouldn’t know it to listen to the media coverage, though. It’s often the case that ‘contrarian’ COVID papers are platformed quickly and uncritically. Borrowing straight from the “Merchants of Doubt” playbook, a handful of (to put it politely) motivated and “contrarian” papers have received disproportionate media coverage. In many cases, these papers are quickly retracted by the journal, clarified with editorial statements, thoroughly debunked in independent analyses and/or proven wrong by the facts. The media is usually silent about this second part, and the damage is done. Like switchblade knives, these papers pop out, draw blood and are retracted shortly afterwords. Motivated science, often by a handful of academics, has formed a large part of the calm-mongerers arguments. (We’ll have more to say about ‘switchblade science’ in a later post).
The Eighth Deadly Sin: How Calm-Mongering Harms People
Calm-mongering often promotes a false sense of security, a “moral calm” that hinders risk mitigation by clouding our judgement with dubious reassurances. Throughout the ongoing pandemic, two US administrations (and public health agencies worldwide) have focused on manufacturing consent for the repeated infections, as a public health strategy of some sort.
The litany of public-health failures throughout this ongoing pandemic has been fueled by this misplaced emphasis on shutting down discussion about risks as opposed to recognizing and mitigating them. Emergent risks should be met with action, not debate. When a hurricane is barreling down on a community, the focus should be on boarding up the windows, not on questioning the forecasts.
As the analogy makes clear, calm-mongering during a crisis can get people killed. In a glaring example, as the Omicron BA.1 wave crashed into the United States, the Biden administration (whose response was already laser-focused on urging ‘calm’) was accused of ‘fear-mongering’ by its critics. There was, in actual fact, no rational basis for calm. It was clear at the time that Omicron BA.1 was highly transmissible, and the correct application of the precautionary principle would have focused on minimizing the number of people infected. In the event, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in under two months by the Omicron BA.1 wave.
Both the Biden administration and its critics, faced with an impending wave of disease with the potential for mass death and disability, chose to spend their time focused on critiquing or defending the tone of the messaging. The comical absurdity of the situation belies the horrific public health failure. It was a mass mortality event without precedent in the history of the United States. Given that the level of concern of the public was likely to impact their degree of adoption of risk mitigation measures, this misplaced focus on urging calm, rather than masking and vaccination, was a deadly mistake. A more honest discussion about the risks could have saved lives. All the back-and-forth about whether fear was or was not being mongered distracted from the task at hand, which should have been (checks notes) protecting the public from Omicron BA.1.
This unfortunate example underscores what commonsense should already have made clear — calm mongering is anathema to the rational management of risk. There are many other examples during the early pandemic where calm-mongering impeded the ability to respond to emergent threats in a rational and timely manner:
Delay in mask recommendations: The protracted debate around aerosol spread, driven by active calm-mongering, in turn delayed the implementation of measures like recommending widespread mask usages and continues to undercut the case for ventilation improvements.
Underestimating asymptomatic spread: Early messaging downplaying the role of asymptomatic transmission had the effect of undercutting the implementation of effective testing and contact tracing strategies. Symptomatic screening was followed for years, despite its known lack of utility in limiting spread. From a risk mitigation standpoint, the time and energy would have been better spent in accepting asymptomatic spread as a potential risk, rather than dismissing it.
False hope around herd immunity: False reassurances about the impossibility (unknowability), extreme rarity and mildness of reinfections harmed the development of a rational mitigation strategy for COVID. The implication of reinfections — that herd immunity was off the table, and that vaccines alone would not bring about an end to the pandemic— took a long time to sink into the public consciousness, permitting scientifically flawed approaches to public health to take center stage.
Ineffective disease control strategy: The inability to acknowledge the possibility of evolution fed into a lack of agility in responding to the problem. Simply put, even during the Operation Warp Speed era, enough was known about the biology of the virus to know that committing to a vaccine-only strategy was doomed to fail. Calm-mongering made it difficult to plot a course of action that was more closely aligned with reality. The delayed recognition of the threat posed by new variants resulted in an inappropriate relaxation of mitigation measures that led to the spread of the Delta variant in fall 2021. (As predicted before the fact, by the way).
Lack of meaningful medical care options for Long COVID: The calm-mongering narrative has made it more challenging for Long COVID patients to get appropriate medical care. Making matters worse, dismissal of long COVID as psychosomatic has also led to wasted time and money on Long Covid research by lumping it with functional neurological disorders, with a misguided emphasis on funding efforts to examine the impact of wellness and mental health interventions on the condition. As the pressure mounts for an effective “Long COVID moonshot”, the harms inflicted by calm-mongering in delaying the recognition of the condition merit a much longer discussion. (Subsequent posts will explore this topic in much greater detail, as there’s a lot to be said about this).
Widespread infections in schools: False reassurances about the inability of children to be infected dominated the messaging about schools in 2020. Deeply flawed contact-tracing and the use of the wrong metrics compromised a slew of studies that painted a false picture of school safety in the absence of mitigation measures. A variety of cognitive biases undermined the case for in-school measures to mitigate spread, which in turn led to the seeding of infection chains in schools that drove community spread, most noticeably in the fall 2020 (as predicted before the fact, again). Once again, it is the calm-mongering that was the irresponsible course of action here — it goes without saying that parents deserved to know the truth about COVID in children from the outset.
The cumulative effect of these unforced errors has been the creation of a narrative that it is "too late to do anything now”. (Of course, this is a common failure mode of governments that extends far beyond the failed Covid response, parodied here to great effect in the 80’s BBC sitcom “Yes Prime Minister”.) This defeatist conclusion is a direct result of consistently underestimating risks and delaying responses to crucial developments. (If you spend your time debating the existence of a risk rather than mitigating it, suprisingly enough, the risk doesn’t get mitigated!).
But the crisis is far from over. At this point in the pandemic, new threats to public health continue to emerge or become apparent on almost a monthly basis. Calm-mongering has remained a constant through-line in communications about the crisis, and talk of fear mongering remains common in the media to this day. As a current example, as it becomes increasingly clear that persistent infections are fairly common with COVID, media coverage of this unpleasant fact gets “balanced” with a healthy dollop of calm-mongering. That we are at the point now where half the American public, for example, believes that they’ll never get COVID again bodes ill for our ability to respond to future threats.
Managing risk is about thinking through what could go wrong, not what could go right.
The Only Thing We Have to Fear
From (before) the start of this pandemic, the public health response has repeatedly been hamstrung by a reluctance to confront the full scope of the risks posed by COVID. This reckless approach to crisis management is fueled by active calm-mongering at every step along the way. Memory-holing the pandemic increases, not decreases, downside risks. Public health messaging and media reporting need to be grounded in the reality that exists, not the reality that we all long for.
Calm-mongering interferes with the rational development of a risk management strategy, as the mere mention of plausible downsides becomes subjected to critique. This is no way to manage risk during a crisis. Fear in response to a real threat, as we mentioned before, is a rational survival response. The bigger the risk, the more important it is that it be discussable. Just because something has never happened before, doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t happen.
The danger of calm-mongering is well known in the context of other kinds of disasters — false reassurances were directly responsible for the deaths of many of the victims of the sinking of the Titanic and the World Trade Center attacks. The failure to properly identify and consider potential downside risks is a hallmark of man-made disasters, from the Columbia and Challenger shuttle disasters to the catastrophic failure of the Castle Bravo H-bomb tests (which devastated entire communities in the Marshall Islands). Assessing and reacting to potentially deadly threats is a survival skill.
And it’s something that individuals tend to be pretty bad at. For this reason, the “hold-outs” in a hurricane evaluation zone are a focus of disaster response planning. If a hurricane is headed your way, and you decide to try to ride it out, you’ll receive a knock on the door from local law enforcement. They’ll ask you write your name on your skin, to make it easier to identify your body after the hurricane kills you. No one accuses the local Sheriff’s Office of fear-mongering in this case, because they are precisely right about the potential downside risk of trying to ignore a hurricane. It’s not the job of the Sheriff’s Office to “meet people where they are” when they are embarked on a course of action that could expose themselves and others to mortal harm.
Five years in, the virus is evolving more rapidly than ever before, and most people can expect to get infected at least once a year if they take no precautions. Long COVID is a serious health risk, and everyone is vulnerable to it. Every new variant creates the possibility for new, unanticipated threats. The pandemic is far from over. There are numerous ways in which the current strategy could lead to crises that require quick and decisive action. As the Omicron BA.1 wave showed, the public health response to such crises are at real risk of being hamstrung by meaningless, dilatory debates about fear mongering.
In a dynamic environment, the ability to assess and act on threats quickly is key to creating an effective risk management framework. The current pandemic response worldwide has been so focused on damping down a sense of panic that it has no means of accurately conveying risk. Lulling the public into a false sense of security about an ongoing pandemic is an irresponsible approach to public health. In an emergent crisis, the public deserves to know the truth about potential risks. Calm-mongering is a dangerous tactic, and the virus is its only beneficiary.
The only thing we have to fear is the fear of fear itself.