Mainstream Science, and Governments, Rejected Early Evidence of Symptomless Transmission

(p. 1) MUNICH — Dr. Camilla Rothe was about to leave for dinner when the government laboratory called with the surprising test result. Positive. It was Jan. 27 [2020]. She had just discovered Germany’s first case of the new coronavirus.

But the diagnosis made no sense. Her patient, a businessman from a nearby auto parts company, could have been infected by only one person: a colleague visiting from China. And that colleague should not have been contagious.

The visitor had seemed perfectly healthy during her stay in Germany. No coughing or sneezing, no signs of fatigue or fever during two days of long meetings. She told colleagues that she had started feeling ill after the flight back to China. Days later, she tested positive for the coronavirus.

. . .

Dr. Rothe and her colleagues were among the first to warn the world. But even as evidence accumulated from other scientists, leading health officials expressed unwavering confidence that symptomless spreading was not important.

In the days and weeks to come, politicians, public health officials and rival academics disparaged or ignored the Munich team. Some actively worked to undermine the warnings at a crucial moment, as the disease was spreading unnoticed in French churches, Italian soccer stadiums and Austrian ski bars. A cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, would become a deadly harbinger of symptomless spreading.

. . .

(p. 10) Though estimates vary, models using data from Hong Kong, Singapore and China suggest that 30 to 60 percent of spreading occurs when people have no symptoms.

. . .

After two lengthy phone calls with the woman, doctors at the Robert Koch Institute were convinced that she had simply failed to recognize her symptoms. They wrote to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, casting doubt on Dr. Rothe’s findings.

Editors there decided that the dispute amounted to hairsplitting. If it took a lengthy interview to identify symptoms, how could anyone be expected to do it in the real world?

“The question was whether she had something consistent with Covid-19 or that anyone would have recognized at the time was Covid-19,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, the journal’s editor.

“The answer seemed to be no.”

The journal did not publish the letter. But that would not be the end of it.

. . .

On Monday, Feb. 3, the journal Science published an article calling Dr. Rothe’s report “flawed.” Science reported that the Robert Koch Institute had written to the New England Journal to dispute her findings and correct an error.

. . .

Dr. Rothe’s report quickly became a symbol of rushed research. Scientists said she should have talked to the Chinese patient herself before publishing, and that the omission had undermined her team’s work. On Twitter, she and her colleagues were disparaged by scientists and armchair experts alike.

“It broke over us like a complete tsunami,” Dr. Hoelscher said.

. . .

If Dr. Rothe’s paper had implied that governments might need to do more against Covid-19, the pushback from the Robert Koch Institute was an implicit defense of the conventional thinking.

Sweden’s public health agency declared that Dr. Rothe’s report had contained major errors. The agency’s website said, unequivocally, that “there is no evidence that people are infectious during the incubation period” — an assertion that would remain online in some form for months.

French health officials, too, left no room for debate: “A person is contagious only when symptoms appear,” a government flyer read. “No symptoms = no risk of being contagious.”

. . .

(p. 11) Dr. Rothe, . . ., was shaken. She could not understand why much of the scientific establishment seemed eager to play down the risk.

“All you need is a pair of eyes,” she said. “You don’t need rocket-science virology.”

. . .

While public health officials hesitated, some doctors acted. At a conference in Seattle in mid-February, Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University professor, said his research suggested that Covid-19’s rapid spread could only be explained if there were infectious patients with unremarkable symptoms or no symptoms at all.

In the audience that day was Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist and former U.S. energy secretary. “If left to its own devices, this disease will spread through the whole population,” he remembers Professor Shaman warning.

Afterward, Dr. Chu began insisting that healthy colleagues at his Stanford University laboratory wear masks. Doctors in Cambridge, England, concluded that asymptomatic transmission was a big source of infection and advised local health workers and patients to wear masks, well before the British government acknowledged the risk of silent spreaders.

The American authorities, faced with a shortage, actively discouraged the public from buying masks. “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams tweeted on Feb. 29.

. . .

By the end of the month [March 2020], the U.S. Centers for Disease Control announced it was rethinking its policy on masks. It concluded that up to 25 percent of patients might have no symptoms.

Since then, the C.D.C., governments around the world and, finally, the World Health Organization have recommended that people wear masks in public.

Still, the W.H.O. is sending confusing signals. Earlier this month, Dr. Van Kerkhove, the technical lead, repeated that transmission from asymptomatic patients was “very rare.” After an outcry from doctors, the agency said there had been a misunderstanding.

“In all honesty, we don’t have a clear picture on this yet,” Dr. Van Kerkhove said. She said she had been referring to a few studies showing limited transmission from asymptomatic patients.

Recent internet ads confused the matter even more. A Google search in mid-June for studies on asymptomatic transmission returned a W.H.O. advertisement titled: “People With No Symptoms — Rarely Spread Coronavirus.”

For the full story, see:

Matt Apuzzo, Selam Gebrekidan and David D. Kirkpatrick. “How the World Missed Covid’s Symptom-Free Carriers.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, June 28, 2020): 1 & 10-11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 27, 2020 and has the title “How the World Missed Covid-19’s Silent Spread.”)

In Italy Regulators Ban Gelato in Cones but OK Gelato in Cups

(p. A10) Europe is lifting its lockdowns, but the new rules to battle the coronavirus are baffling Europeans as the continent goes into a familiar mode: regulatory overdrive.

. . .

When Italian beaches reopened in late May, windsurfing was allowed but tanning was banned. Except at other beaches, where it was the other way around.

. . .

In Lerici, a town of pastel houses on the Italian Riviera, Mayor Leonardo Paoletti spent months coming up with a plan.

. . .

“Where the virus is, or not, is irrelevant. What matters is that there are rules, and the job of us mayors is to enforce those rules,” Mr. Paoletti said.

Some rules confuse even the mayor. Take ice-cream cones. Rules on them vary widely across Europe. Many people don’t know whether they’re allowed or not.

In Lerici, some gelato sellers were reprimanded by a central government regional representative office for offering cones instead of only paper cups.

“I don’t see why,” said Mr. Paoletti. As far as he is concerned, ice cream can be served in cones.

“At this point, nothing makes sense to me anymore,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Margherita Stancati, and Valentina Pop. “Europe Reopens With Rules for Ice Cream in Italy, Dates in Denmark.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 10, 2020): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 9, 2020, and the title “Moving to Reopen, Europe Goes Into Regulatory Overdrive.”)

Oliver Williamson’s Subtle Attempt to Get Pablo Spiller to Turn Down the Music

Several years ago, I presented a paper in an economic methodology session at the AEA in which Williamson also presented a paper. He was a fellow pluralist in method. I think his work deserves more attention than I have given it. The profession will be worse for his absence.

(p. A9) Building on the work of Ronald Coase, Dr. Williamson developed transaction-cost economics, examining costs that go beyond the price of a good or service.

. . .

Some of Dr. Williamson’s thinking took shape when he worked for the Justice Department’s antitrust division in 1966 and 1967.

The department had accused Schwinn & Co. of restraining trade by limiting the retailing of its bicycles to authorized merchants. The conventional wisdom among antitrust enforcers was that such arrangements could be explained only as an effort to reduce competition.

Dr. Williamson found the question more complicated and argued that Schwinn’s motive might be to reduce costs. For instance, a restricted number of retailers would make it less costly to control quality and agree on how to share advertising expenses. The resulting increase in efficiency could benefit consumers.

. . .

Pablo Spiller, a friend and Berkeley colleague who lived across the street from Dr. Williamson, recalled that he spoke precisely but not always directly. One night Dr. Spiller was playing music a bit too loudly. Dr. Williamson called. Rather than mentioning the volume, he said: “You know, I actually like the current song more than all the previous ones.”

For the full obituary, see:

James R. Hagerty. “Economist Explored Inner Life of Firms.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, June 6, 2020): A9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date June 4, 2020, and the title “Oliver Williamson, Nobel Economics Winner, Studied Inner Life of Firms.”)

Rigid Merged Health Systems Cause Slow Covid-19 Testing

(p. A1) When a stay-at-home order in March all but closed the revered labs of the gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, her team at the University of California, Berkeley dropped everything and started testing for the coronavirus.

They expected their institute to be inundated with samples since it was offering the service for free, with support from philanthropies. But there were few takers.

Instead, the scientists learned, many local hospitals and doctors’ offices continued sending samples to national laboratory companies — like LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics — even though, early on, patients had to wait a week or more for results. The bureaucratic hurdles of quickly switching to a new lab were just too high.

. . .

(p. A5) In normal times, scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute at Berkeley spend their time advancing the gene-editing technology called Crispr that the lab’s founder, Dr. Doudna, is known for.

But after the pandemic shut down the institute’s research in March, Dr. Doudna called for volunteers to redirect most of the labs’ work to coronavirus testing. The country was clamoring for more tests, after all, and her lab was full of researchers with the technical skills to make it happen.

Unlike many other major research institutions, Berkeley does not have a medical school or run its own hospital. So Dr. Urnov reached out to others in the area, who were still ordering from LabCorp and Quest, despite lengthy delays in processing results at the time.

“We would come to these entities and say, ‘Hi, we hear you have problems,’” Dr. Urnov recalled. “And they said, ‘Well, you have to basically work with our EHR,’” the acronym for electronic health records.

For the full story, see:

Katie Thomas. “In Testing Chaos, Some Labs Drowned While Others Sat Idle.” The New York Times (Friday, May 22, 2020): A1 & A5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 21, 2020 and has the title “These Labs Rushed to Test for Coronavirus. They Had Few Takers.”)

YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitter Censor Firm Working on Ultraviolet Covid-19 Cure

(p. A15) Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Aytu BioScience made a commitment to find ways to help. One of those ways came through our newly formed relationship with a prominent Los Angeles hospital.

On April 20 [2020] we put out a press release titled “Aytu BioScience Signs Exclusive Global License with Cedars-Sinai for Potential Coronavirus Treatment.” The treatment is called Healight, and it was developed by research physicians at the hospital’s Medically Associated Science and Technology Program. The technology, which has been in development since 2016, uses ultraviolet light as an antimicrobial and is a promising potential treatment for Covid-19.

Aytu and Cedars-Sinai have engaged with the Food and Drug Administration to pursue a rapid path to human use through an Emergency Use Authorization. But hardly anyone noticed—until Thursday, when President Trump mused, “. . . supposing you brought the light inside the body . . .”

My team and I knew the president’s comments could trigger a backlash against the idea of UV light as a treatment, which might hinder our ability to get the word out. We decided to create a YouTube account, upload a video animation we had created, and tweet it out. It received some 50,000 views in 24 hours.

Then YouTube took it down. So did Vimeo. Twitter suspended our account. The narrative changed from whether UV light can be used to treat Covid-19 to “Aytu is being censored.”

For the full commentary, see:

Josh Disbrow. “Ultraviolet Light Takes Political Heat.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 28, 2020): A15.

(Note: bracketed year added, ellipses in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 27, 2020, and the title “An Experimental Ultraviolet Light Treatment for Covid-19 Takes Political Heat.”)

Seeking Cure for Covid-19, Scientist in Elite Group Identifies the FDA as “the Problem Here”

(p. A1) A dozen of America’s top scientists and a collection of billionaires and industry titans say they have the answer to the coronavirus pandemic, and they found a backdoor to deliver their plan to the White House.

The eclectic group is led by a 33-year-old physician-turned-venture capitalist, Tom Cahill, who lives far from the public eye in a one-bedroom rental near Boston’s Fenway Park. He owns just one suit, but he has enough lofty connections to influence government decisions in the war against Covid-19.

. . .

(p. A6) Brian Sheth, co-founder of private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners, and a Democrat, had been watching the effort gather steam from his home in Austin, Texas. He was an early investor in Dr. Cahill’s fund and had been on the first call. His expertise was technology, though, not immunology.

He had become friendly with Thomas Hicks Jr., the Dallas businessman and co-chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mr. Sheth introduced Mr. Hicks to Dr. Cahill’s group.

The connection cinched ties between a group of mostly liberal scientists from left-leaning institutions with a Republican stalwart who hunts birds with Donald Trump Jr.

In his first chat with the group, Mr. Hicks said, “I’m not a scientist. Make it clear enough for me, and then tell me where the red tape is.”

A major concern of the scientists was the FDA. The scientists had in their research identified monoclonal antibody drugs that latch onto virus cells as the most promising treatment. But to make the medicine in sufficient quantities, one drugmaker, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., would have to shift some of its existing manufacturing to Ireland. FDA rules required a monthslong wait for approval.

Mr. Scolnick, who had tussled with bureaucracy during the AIDS epidemic, tried reaching the FDA. The call ended poorly after the bureaucrats told the group they already had the pandemic under control. In a group call afterward, one of the scientists said, of the FDA: “They’re the problem here.”

Dr. Cahill got in touch with Mr. Ayers. Once the group briefed the vice president’s aide on the bottleneck, Mr. Ayers said he knew who to call. That evening, March 27, Regeneron received a call from the FDA. They had permission, starting immediately, to shift production to Dublin.

For the full story, see:

Rob Copeland. “Scientists, Billionaires Mount Manhattan Project for Covid-19.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 28, 2020): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 27, 2020, and the title “The Secret Group of Scientists and Billionaires Pushing a Manhattan Project for Covid-19.”)

“For Every Scientist Employed by the F.D.A., There Are Three Lawyers”

(p. 5) Imagine that the fateful day arrives. Scientists have created a successful vaccine. They’ve manufactured huge quantities of it. People are dying. The economy is crumbling. It’s time to start injecting people.

But first, the federal government wants to take a peek.

That might seem like a bureaucratic nightmare, a rubber stamp that could cost lives. There’s even a common gripe among researchers: For every scientist employed by the F.D.A., there are three lawyers. And all they care about is liability.

For the full commentary, see:

Stuart A. Thompson. “How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, May 3, 2020): 4-5.

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated April 30, 2020 and has the same title as the print version.)

California Places the Regulatory “Final Straw” on Elon Musk’s Tesla

(p. A15) Informed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s authorities that his factory in Fremont had to remain in lockdown, Mr. Musk tweeted: “Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas/Nevada immediately.”

The keyword here is “final straw,” suggesting that Mr. Musk’s cost-of-doing-business problems with California predate this virus. Hundreds of businesses already have relocated out of California, fleeing the uncountable regulatory straws the state has laid across the backs of anyone doing business there.

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Henninger. “WONDER LAND; Elon Musk’s ‘Final Straw’.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 21, 2020): A15.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 20, 2020 and has the same title as the print version.)

In Most Red States, the Benefits of Opening Economies Exceed the Costs

(p. A4) Two-thirds of confirmed coronavirus cases are in states with Democratic governors. When states are measured by the sheer number of coronavirus cases, six of the top seven have Democratic governors. Together, those six blue states have about half of the nation’s cases, though only about a third of its population.

. . .

“A red-state governor is losing his business in exchange for blue-state lives,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at a Brookings Institution seminar last week. “So for him, opening up is a no-brainer, which is sort of why it is happening.”

He added: “It is a lot to ask those governors to kill their businesses and their GDP for people who live far away, and who they may not even like very much.”

For the full commentary, see:

Gerald F. Seib. “CAPITAL JOURNAL; Virus Exacerbates the Red-Blue Divide.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, May 19, 2020): A4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 18, 2020 and has the title “CAPITAL JOURNAL; Why Coronavirus Increasingly Exacerbates the Red-Blue Divide.”)

Deaton’s comments quoted above, are consistent with the central message of his co-authored book:

Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Cancer Mortality Declines Mainly Due to Less Smoking and Better Lung Cancer Treatment

(p. A12) . . . the American Cancer Society reported that the United States had experienced the sharpest one-year drop in cancer death rate ever recorded, . . . .

. . .

The society’s latest annual report on cancer statistics, released on Wednesday, noted that the death rate had dropped steadily over 26 years, from 1991 to 2017. The largest single-year decline ever reported, when the rate fell 2.2 percent, occurred from 2016 to 2017.

. . .

Experts attributed the decline in mortality to reduced smoking rates and to advances in lung cancer treatment. New therapies for melanoma of the skin have also helped extend life for many people with metastatic disease, or cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.

For the full story, see:

Michael Levenson. “Cancer Death Fell Sharply, And Trump Took Credit.” The New York Times (Monday, January 13, 2020): A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 12, 2020 and has the title “Trump Took Credit for Lower Cancer Death Rates. Advocates Say Not So Fast.” Where there was a minor wording difference between the print and online versions, the quotation above follows the online version. )

The report from the American Cancer Society, mentioned above, is:

Siegel, Rebecca L., Kimberly D. Miller, and Ahmedin Jemal. “Cancer Statistics, 2020.” CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 70, no. 1 (2020): 7-30.

Physicians Fighting Covid-19 Use Social Media “to Share Improvised Solutions”

(p. A9) In mid-March [2020], as U.S. hospitals scrambled for ventilators to treat a surge of coronavirus cases, a Vermont pulmonologist proposed a different treatment on a blog popular with emergency-medicine doctors.

Joshua Farkas observed in the post on the EMCrit blog that many Covid-19 patients seemed to benefit from less-invasive alternatives to help their breathing, including pressure therapy used to treat sleep apnea—sometimes referred to as CPAP, for continuous positive airway pressure.

. . .

The post helped galvanize an emerging theory about the treatment of Covid-19 patients, which in recent weeks has taken hold in U.S. hospitals. In New York City, where ventilators are in perilously short supply, doctors say they have since embraced CPAP and other treatments to improve breathing in Covid-19 patients.

The shift is one example of how health-care workers are writing the playbook for treating coronavirus patients on the fly, knowing they can’t wait for peer-reviewed articles or studies in established medical journals. Instead they are tapping into social media, podcasts, inside-baseball medical blogs and text-message groups to share improvised solutions to supply shortages and patient care, forcing hospitals to quickly re-evaluate their practices.

“This has been a rapidly evolving process,” said Dr. Farkas, who has treated Covid-19 patients in the intensive-care unit at the University of Vermont in Burlington. “As we struggle with how to treat a disease that so recently was totally unknown, this rapid exchange and updating of information is crucial.”

. . .

Last week, Michelle Romeo, a chief emergency-medicine resident at NYU Langone and Bellevue hospital in Manhattan, tweeted photos of a jury-rigged breathing device involving a mask used for BiPAP—an airway pressure therapy similar to CPAP.

At Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, pulmonologists worked with the hospital’s sleep lab to figure out a way to use BiPAP machines like a ventilator. The result was posted on Reddit, and got “all kinds of different responses,” said Valerie Burgos-Kneeland, a registered nurse in the hospital’s Medical Intensive Care Unit. “It’s kind of been an opportunity for people to get creative.”

For the full story, see:

Rebecca Davis O’Brien. “Doctors Improvise, Share Treatments.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, April 10, 2020): A9.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 9, 2020, and has the title “Doctors Are Improvising Coronavirus Treatments, Then Quickly Sharing Them.”)