How Did You Come to Know About the Lab Leak?

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De backle that it became unacceptable in mass media to talk about the lab leak for a while. How at its most fundamental level, would you explain how we came to make that mistake? The initial phase of the pandemic, with the trump administration, bungling the response and also occasionally adding, yo know, avert racism to its bungling,. There was a great reaction, i think, to anything they suggested that looked like they were just trying to deflict blame.

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