Are You Vaccinated?

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From the epad, are there situations where public health and transparency are intention? And in those cases, should the public health authorities either lie to people or simply deliberately not tell them the full truth? I i just cannot imagine where we should not tell people the truth. For example, i do agree that for the most part, that the vaccinated are back at base line risk,. but that's not the same as saying, like, we should not have any indor mask mandates.

When Zeynep Tufekci penned a New York Times op-ed at the onset of the pandemic challenging the prevailing public health guidance that ordinary people should not wear masks, she thought it was the end of her public writing career. Instead, it helped provoke the CDC to reverse its guidance a few weeks later, and medical professionals privately thanked her for writing it. While relieved by the reception, she also saw it as a sign of a deeper dysfunction in the scientific establishment: why should she, a programmer and sociologist by training, have been the one to speak out rather than a credentialed expert? And yet realizing her outsider status and academic tenure allowed her to speak more freely than others, she continued writing and has become one of the leading public intellectuals covering the response to COVID-19.

Zeynep joined Tyler to discuss problems with the media and the scientific establishment, what made the lab-leak hypothesis unacceptable to talk about, how her background in sociology was key to getting so many things right about the pandemic, the pitfalls of academic contrarianism, what Max Weber understood about public health crises, the underrated aspects of Kemel Mustapha’s regime, how Game of Thrones interested her as a sociologist (until the final season), what Americans get wrong about Turkey, why internet-fueled movements like the Gezi protests fizzle out, whether Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise in Turkey, how she’d try to persuade a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic, whether public health authorities should ever lie for the greater good, why she thinks America is actually less racist than Europe, how her background as a programmer affects her work as a sociologist, the subject of her next book, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Note: This conversation was recorded on July 14th, 2021, before the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine.

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Thumbnail photo credit: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society