Realise that this was going to be a political issue and an ideological issue and it was all about,
you know, libertarian values and all the rest of it because it certainly isn't in Asia.
You just put people masks on and that's that. It became heavily politicised.
It became linked to the Christian right in America, you know, that kind of thing.
And I got some very rude messages, shall we say, extraordinary messages, actually, from people who thought I should shut up.
I also got an email actually from an email from Peter Horby saying, look, you're wrong about masks, which is a bit old, really.
So why are you bending back? And I said, look, I don't think I'm wrong about masks and I don't really like the way you phrased that.
I think he was the chair of Nervtag.
What he meant was there is not definitive evidence from randomised controlled trials so you should stop behaving as if there is.
My response to him was I know there's not definitive evidence from randomised controlled trials.
I am not pretending that there is.
What I am doing is invoking the precautionary principle and I'm saying even though there is not definitive evidence from randomised controlled trials,
we should still bring in mask mandates because hundreds of thousands of people are going to die if we don't.
And I think Peter would be still probably feels that I was I was jumping the
gun on masks and I'd be very happy to have a conversation with him about it.
So he wasn't the only researcher within Oxford who has published papers saying that not only that there isn't evidence that masks work,
but that there isn't evidence that the virus is airborne.
Yes. Yes. So that's there's a group led by Carl Hennigan at the Centre for Evidence based Medicine in my department.
I worked very closely with Karl's team.
Initially, we were putting out rapid reviews and I remember the rapid review where we basically parted company.
So we had various medical students and relatively junior clinicians working on these reviews.
And one of the questions that we've been asked was, should we be social distancing at two metres or one metre?
So we had a paper called two metres or one question mark. And if you assume that the virus is airborne, if you take on board the evidence,
the virus is airborne, of course it doesn't really matter whether it's two metres or one.
If you are sitting in a room breathing the same air with the windows closed and you've been there for a long time because you know,
just like if someone's smoking or if they farted it, these things travel through the air.
So, yes, it is important to socially distance.
And even with airborne viruses, the closer you are, the worse it is because airborne transmission happens at close contact as well as long distance.
But it isn't. That's not the solution. And so the people came to me, the the junior academics came to me and said,
look, we're struggling here because Carl didn't like what we've done, basically.
And I looked at what they did and said, Well, you haven't gone far enough.
What you need to do is link up with an expert in aerosol transmission.
Now, experts in aerosol transmission do not assume that everything is an aerosol.
What they're good at is deciding whether something is in aerosol or not.
So I think Nick Jones, who was leading on that paper, I linked him video.
Bob Riba, who is who studies the aerodynamics of coughs and sneezes.
She's she's published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine called A Sneeze and kind of films them and that kind of thing.
And Lydia and various others not only do this and they do.
Maresca in Australia that Kimberly Prather and her team in America there's hosted Jimenez who's also in the different parts of America.
There's lots of aerosol scientists and I linked my team with one of those aerosol scientists,
and we produced a paper which brought in all this aerosol science that I hadn't really realised existed, interdisciplinary work again.
And I then began to work with the aerosol scientists and I realised that the stuff they were doing was really pivotal.
It was absolutely pivotal, but it was being ignored, completely ignored by public.
Having been born W.H.O. and initially by the CDC in America, although they came round now there was a meeting in October.
I think much of the aerosol scientist wrote to the W.H.O. on I think it was the 8th of July there, said an open letter to the W.H.O., say 2020.
Yeah, still in 2020. So early July 20, 27th of July, an open letter from over 200 aerosol scientists.
And look, the evidence is overwhelming that this virus is airborne.
It's overwhelming. Your key infection control committee does not include any expertise in aerosol science.
Please, can we help? We are available. And the W.H.O.
Published two days later what they called a scientific brief, saying, well, we don't believe you, we don't value your evidence.
We don't when you help. And I was gobsmacked.
I was absolutely gobsmacked. I realised what was happening was and this sort of draws on my background as a social scientist who has
read sort of critical sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu around the links between science and power.
And again, I put out a tweet, actually, anyone an expert in Bonjour,
we need to look at this through the lens of critical sociology, critical philosophy of science.
So a couple of people, one guy from Canada and another chap who I showed published with before Moustafa was Belgian and Damien contact drew up us.
So one sociologist, then a big sociologist really.
And we did a deep dive into what was going on in key W.H.O. committees,
Public Health England committees about how they had systematically dismissed and denied aerosol science.
How, you know, the slogan I was using was Evidence is what powerful people say it is.
And there were people who were on the key committees were saying, this evidence counts, that evidence doesn't count.
And that needed to be analysed in an academic way.
So we published a paper on Welcome Open Research all about orthodoxy and heterodoxy, which are these terms that Bill introduced.
The Orthodox view code is spread by droplets.
Handwashing is important, scrubbing surfaces is important.
Quarantining your post is important. Aerosol isn't important.
That was the orthodoxy. The heterodoxy was, look, this is an airborne disease.
How did all that how did the choir get sick, you know, if it wasn't an airborne disease?
And here is chapter and verse from aerosol science, but they weren't getting a look in because they weren't on the relevant committees.
And so there were all these power plays from people who were on the committees and
didn't want to backtrack on what they said because it would erode their power base.
And that was happening internationally.
The W.H.O. nationally in places like Public Health England and indeed in local public health departments and right down to schools.
For example, I read only this morning of a nine year old child who had gone to school and said we really ought to
still be wearing masks because the virus is airborne and the child being told off by the teacher saying,
no, it's not. It's spread by droplets. You must keep washing your hands.
And someone had tweeted me saying, Can you please help my nine year old?
So I sent them a couple of things. But that is all about power.
The teacher can say to the child, I'm your teacher.
Therefore my science is more correct than your science.
It's scary, it's really scary. So we unpacked quite a bit of that and I think it's probably by putting a marker down for another paper,
probably the paper that's had the most influence actually. So I've worked with Kim Prather,
we've hosted Gimenez with a couple of infectious diseases guys to write a piece for The
Lancet called Ten Scientific Reasons Why We Know that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is Everyone.
It was very derivative. It was summarising stuff that had already been published.
Stuff that was bombed for obvious to aerosol scientists.
So I don't take any credit for having done this work myself, but I could see that we needed to make a rhetorical move.
We needed to do a power play, if you like. And that was publish something in one of the world's leading journals,
which was short enough from punchy enough for people to get their heads around it
because they were publishing in journals such as this journal called Indoor Air.
Well, when did you last pick up a copy of Indoor Air to read it?
It was too nice, you know. So we needed to shift the publications from even from places like science.
That's a pretty mainstream high impact journal.
Actually doesn't read those, but they do read The Lancet. They do read the British Medical Journal.
So we needed to get stuff in there anyway. We constructed that paper and we lobbied and lobbied the editors of The Lancet and they said, Yeah, right.
Will publish it. Will publish it as a comment. So it wasn't exactly in the front bits of the journal, and that was in April 21.
It was in April 21. And one reason why we did that, we did it fast, was that Carl Hennigan, his group,
who'd been funded by this particular committee that didn't have any aerosol scientists, they'd been published to do that.
They funded to do a systematic review which had just concluded that there was not
really any there wasn't enough evidence of airborne spread to take any action.
And I was still mourning the death of my mother. My mother had gone into hospital,
having had a fall and having been completely isolated and in the nineties had spent while
on a trolley in the A&E department and had come back and very quickly developed COVID.
I jolly well knew she caught it through the air in the hospital.
It was, you know, and I suppose that drove me to feel particularly passionate and to to give this a particularly strong piece.
But, you know, we've had wave two. Wave two was worse than wave one, you know.
Tens of thousands of people had died and was still dying.
So that was the context of this. And then co-head and group having.
Had a very narrow and a theoretical approach to the question of whether this this virus was airborne.
They published this systematic review as a preprint, and it has actually failed peer review and still has failed peer review that it was.
It was published on an open preprint server, open peer review.
And three scientists said, this is flaky.
This is not good science. Now, this is not something I would normally do.
I do not go around disparaging other scientists, and I'm not disparaging the scientists.
But that particular systematic review, which was the official W.H.O. funded review on which international guidance was going to be based,
was scientifically flawed, and we had to make noise about it.
So within it took us ten days to pull together the evidence,
and we published that paper in The Lancet ten scientific reasons why we know this and put on that paper.
It's now it's still in the top 20 of out metric scores of all time.
So out metrics is, you know what, how often is it tweeted about or how often is it on Facebook, you know, all those kind of social media outlets?
It's also been cited hundreds of times and it was peer reviewed.
It was independently peer reviewed. So I've never tried harder in my life to get a piece of a publication out there.
We did loads of TV interviews all around the world and the W.H.O. took notice.
So senior people in the W.H.O. contacted particularly Zeynep Tufekci.
Actually, she's a social sociology professor, but she's also a leading journalist.
She really understands how to play the media.
And she co-authored that, Zain, that actually worked with a couple of senior people at the show and I think some of them.
Said. You may be right.
You may be right. And one or two publications from the W.H.O. started to acknowledge airborne transmission.
But the relevant committee, the key committee, which was the one that puts out that scientific brief in July 2019,
is still to this day saying that the virus is only situation of the apple,
in other words, in aerosol generating procedures and in highly unusual settings where there's a high degree of crowding.
And that is still something that I worry about and I'm cross about and I lose sleep about it.
But I think we did move the needle with that paper.