A D.S.A. Model for Pandemic Information Management
Guidelines for Media Outlets
Taking a massive step out of my comfort zone today, here is a bold proposal informed by many of the mistakes made in our collective response to COVID-19. We clearly need a new model for organizing & quantifying the validity of opinions, especially those generated in the onset of a pandemic crisis. Thus, I am proposing a D.S.A. model (no relation to the Democratic Socialists of America) for pandemic information management. It stands for Doctors, Scientists, and Academics - in that order. Where we gravely went wrong with COVID-19 is that often times, “A” cut to the front of the line and created massive problems for the rest of us when the media treated their supposed insights as valuable.
The earliest most obvious example of this (of which there are many) is Stanford’s John Ioannidis. While hospital ICUs in New York City were being wildly overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, John sat comfortably in his university office and proclaimed non-pharmaceutical interventions to be, loosely paraphrasing, akin to an elephant attempting to avoid a housecat and being so stricken with fear that they inadvertently jump off a cliff. He tortured datasets to proclaim that Americans were merely dying with COVID-19, not from it. This obscene myth would tragically become a mainstream liberal talking point in the winter of 2021.
Another fantastic example is Brown University’s Emily Oster, an unqualified economist who peddled all sorts of obscene myths about COVID-19 and children. When medical research was published contradicting her claims, she attacked the research instead of admitting error. Pediatric Long COVID is now the leading chronic illness in children, overtaking asthma. Oster has offered no apology while raking in millions, leaving a colossal mess for everyone else to deal with.
Stage One: Doctors
In the onset of a pandemic, doctors who see their hospitals overwhelmed with new patients showing similar systems are the first in line to generate an understanding of how this new disease functions and the threat it poses to the public. This obviously means that the media is wasting its time interviewing cranks like radiologist Scott Atlas, or the Brookings Institute’s (a conservative think-tank) Leana Wen, who hadn’t practiced medicine in years. The media has done the public such a massive disservice in serving up misleading, minimizing narratives to sabotage decision making.
What has actually happened is that the media is prioritizing doctors that are readily available for interview or comment, which is why you’d see Leana Wen, Monica Gandhi, or other wannabe celebrities exploiting the pandemic to raise their profile, even if they had nothing to do with actually treating COVID-19 patients. This drowns out the legitimate information the public is entitled to and allows misleading fictional narratives to be elevated into the mainstream. It’s irresponsible and much of journalism owes the public an apology.
Stage Two: Scientists
One of the greatest mistakes of the early days of the COVID-19 response comes from the willful ignorance of how Arabian Numerals function. For SARS-CoV-2 to exist, that implies the existence of a SARS-CoV-1. A decade prior to 2020, we already had published research showing that a significant percentage of people infected with SARS-CoV-1 developed serious long-term health complications, which completely invalidates any proposal of “herd immunity via mass infection.” Instead, tens of millions of Americans got to learn this sad reality the hard way.
Following doctors, scientific researchers with relevant expertise, experience, and credentials are the next important pillar of informing and shaping a pandemic response. This excludes “political scientists” Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee of Princeton, who are forced to resort to outright lying when defending the fraudulent & unethical COVID-19 seroprevalence sham that economist Jay Bhattacharya concocted on behalf of an airline CEO. This excludes economists like Emily Oster, who committed data fraud on behalf of reactionary billionaires like Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg.
We need scientific research to uncover the impact of the virus, its potential for harm, how to best prevent and mitigate those harms - and develop new tools to fight this virus. Instead, fraudulent propaganda masquerading as science was deployed to mislead the public into embracing the virus, killing and disabling many. Political pundits such as David Leonhardt of The New York Times was especially notorious for peddling unscientific disinformation to millions of readers, and never admitted his many errors. It should be worrying that he was personally endorsed by Biden, according to a Politico article.
Upon building a body of evidence and concrete understanding, we can move forward with a more ethical and scientific approach to developing pandemic policy.
Stage Three: Academics
From the very beginning of the pandemic, academics who have the luxury of sitting in a comfortable university office behind a keyboard, torturing abstract data sets in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, decided that cutting to the front of this line was somehow constructive behavior. Having no real knowledge of the virus and its potential for harm, they insisted that there was nothing more to learn that might inform policymaking decisions. Economists, sociologists, and other “soft science” academics were willing to gamble with the health and lives of strangers. This torrent of garbage has never stopped.
We see this now in 2026, most recently an article in Wired Magazine titled “The Painful Truth About Long Covid”, in which a male religious studies professor tries to revive tired old medical myths around “hysteria” when it comes to Long COVID, an often-debilitating condition that disproportionately impacts women. Suggesting that harmful pseudoscientific scams such as “brain retraining” are the “way forward for Long COVID treatment - if only you were allowed to talk about it,” religious studies professor Alan Levinovitz completely discards a mountain of hard scientific evidence around the tangible impacts of COVID-19 on the brain.
It’s worth noting than Levinovitz has a new book coming out called Demons By Another Name, about…psychogenic illness, which Long COVID is absolutely not. Exploiting the crisis of Long COVID to sell his book, this is yet another tragic tale of a man who has no idea what he’s talking about it masquerading as an authority to make a quick buck. Everyone defending Levinovitz should be ashamed for treating this blatantly unethical profiteering as worth entertaining.
Sorry WIRED’s editorial staff, but I doubt the former Joe Rogan Experience guest & author of “Slaying the Chinese Jabberwock” has much to offer the millions of Americans still suffering without a real treatment or cure.
Closing Thoughts
We’ve had far too many willfully ignorant diatribes published in major outlets desperately trying to write off Long COVID as merely some form of mental illness, and it won’t be the last. The purpose of these articles is to stigmatize those suffering, absolve the ruling class of responsibility, and pretend that COVID-19 doesn’t remain an ongoing threat. If someone you know if suffering from Long COVID and isn’t getting better, it’s because there’s something wrong with them as a person and they simply don’t want to get better! It’s journalistic malpractice for Wired to have published this, but it’s also a grim reminder that American news media primarily operates as propaganda on behalf of the wealthy and powerful.
The work on SARS-CoV-2 and Long COVID’s impact on the brain has already been done by plenty of experienced, credentialed scientists, and the role of journalism is to not censor their work by instead giving the spotlight to a bunch of cranks who are in fact running the risk of actually harming those suffering. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown major flaws in our news media, and the importance of supporting independent journalism (such as the PAI, subscribe today!) that takes their responsibility seriously. We need a major refresh of how we assign value to supposed claims that upon critical review fail to be supported by hard evidence.
We don’t have to keep repeating the same mistakes.
