More than two thousand years ago the ancient Greek philosopher, Diogenes (413/403? – 324/321? BC) supposedly walked through Athens in broad daylight carrying a lantern, explaining that he was searching for an honest man. The story survives because the joke never becomes obsolete. Every civilisation believes itself more sophisticated than its predecessors, but the supply of intellectual honesty never seems to increase accordingly.
Filipe Rafaeli, writing for the Brownstone Institute, resurrects Diogenes for the Covid era. His question is deceptively simple. After six years of argument, accumulated research, revised scientific claims and discoveries about what governments and public-health institutions knew at different points in the pandemic, what would a brutally honest person now say? It is a much harder question than it appears.
Honesty is easy when it costs nothing. It becomes considerably harder when admitting the truth requires saying: I was wrong. I exaggerated. I trusted authorities too readily. I mocked people whose arguments deserved examination. I treated an uncertain scientific question as settled. Or, conversely, I believed something for which the evidence never became adequate. That is where Diogenes would need his lantern.
Rafaeli concentrates particularly on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, two drugs whose names became cultural markers during the pandemic. They ceased being merely pharmacological compounds and became badges of political identity. To mention ivermectin favourably was enough in many circles to identify someone as belonging to the wrong tribe. Hydroxychloroquine underwent a similar transformation. Late-night comedians mocked the drugs and those interested in them, while arguments over clinical evidence became inseparable from arguments over Donald Trump, public-health authorities and Covid politics. Whatever one's conclusions about either drug, that transformation should trouble anyone who believes science works through criticism.
A molecule does not know whether Donald Trump likes it. A clinical result does not vote Republican or Democrat. A statistical association is neither progressive nor conservative. The proper question was always whether a treatment worked, for whom, at what dose, at what stage of illness, for which outcome and with what degree of confidence. Those are scientific questions, yet during Covid scientific propositions repeatedly became political identities.
Once that happened, changing one's mind became socially expensive. To concede that an opponent might have been partly correct no longer meant merely updating a scientific judgement. It risked betraying one's political tribe, and that is a disastrous environment in which to conduct scientific inquiry.
Rafaeli points to a particularly interesting recent example. Oxford researchers have reported results from the COPCOV trial and associated analysis suggesting that hydroxychloroquine provided moderate protection against Covid when used prophylactically before exposure. This is not the same thing as demonstrating that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for seriously ill Covid patients, nor does it retrospectively validate every claim made for the drug in 2020. Different indications, disease stages and outcomes are different scientific questions. But neither is it nothing, and that distinction is precisely where intellectual honesty should begin.
The brutally honest critic of hydroxychloroquine should be capable of saying that the evidence did not establish many of the sweeping claims made for the drug, but this newer evidence suggests that one particular use may have had an effect and therefore deserves acknowledgement. The brutally honest hydroxychloroquine advocate should likewise say that evidence for one prophylactic application does not prove that every earlier claim about treatment was correct. That is what science is supposed to look like.
Rafaeli's discussion of ivermectin raises the same underlying problem. He examines the much-disputed observational study from Itajaí in Brazil, where ivermectin was distributed to large numbers of people. Importantly, Rafaeli actually concedes a significant criticism of that study. Population estimates used in analysing infection rates were problematic, and an observational study of this kind cannot by itself establish efficacy. Propensity-score matching can reduce confounding but cannot eliminate it. That concession is valuable because it demonstrates what the argument should have looked like from the beginning.
One can simultaneously believe that a study has serious methodological limitations and that its results deserve investigation. Those positions are not contradictory. Indeed, that is how preliminary scientific evidence normally works. An observational result generates a hypothesis and stronger research tests it. During Covid, however, uncertainty was frequently treated as intolerable.
People wanted binary answers. Masks work or they do not. Vaccines stop transmission or they do not. Lockdowns work or they do not. Ivermectin works or it does not. Hydroxychloroquine works or it does not. Real science is rarely so accommodating because effectiveness depends upon endpoints, populations, timing, dose, variants, background immunity and numerous other variables.
Evidence changes and confidence intervals matter. A treatment might produce a modest effect in one setting and none in another. An intervention worthwhile for an elderly high-risk patient may be pointless for a healthy 20-year-old. The honest answer is therefore frequently an irritating one: we don't yet know. Yet "we don't know" was perhaps the least fashionable sentence of the pandemic.
Politicians could not say it because frightened populations demanded certainty. Public-health officials feared that acknowledging uncertainty would reduce compliance. Journalists wanted definitive headlines. Social-media platforms needed classifications of true and false. Fact-checkers required propositions that could be stamped accurate or misinformation. Ordinary people, meanwhile, wanted to know which tribe contained the good people.
Into this world walks Diogenes with his lantern. He might begin with politicians. Did they honestly distinguish what they knew from what they merely hoped? Did they acknowledge when emergency measures rested upon modelling rather than observation? Did they revise policies quickly enough when evidence changed? He might then visit public-health authorities and ask whether uncertainties were communicated honestly, and whether legitimate scientific disagreements were represented as disagreements or inconvenient dissenters were sometimes treated as purveyors of misinformation before the underlying questions had actually been resolved.
Then he could visit pharmaceutical companies. Were benefits communicated with the same enthusiasm as limitations? Were commercial interests sufficiently separated from public-health decision-making? The media would require a particularly long visit. How often did journalists independently examine scientific evidence rather than simply report what an approved expert had said? How frequently did political hostility toward Donald Trump contaminate assessment of propositions that were logically independent of Trump? How often did ridicule substitute for argument?
Diogenes would also need to visit the dissidents because intellectual honesty cannot be demanded only from institutions. Critics of the Covid response sometimes made claims considerably stronger than their evidence justified. Suspicion of government could become automatic disbelief. Weak studies were sometimes treated as decisive because their conclusions pointed in the preferred direction. Predictions of catastrophe were made that did not eventuate. If institutional scientists must acknowledge their errors, their critics have exactly the same obligation. Otherwise, we are not searching for truth. We are searching for ammunition.
The most interesting part of Rafaeli's essay is therefore larger than the pharmacological dispute around ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. It concerns what happens when institutions become incapable of admitting error. Science possesses a formal mechanism for correcting mistakes. New evidence appears, hypotheses are revised and theories are discarded. But scientists are human beings operating within institutions, and they possess careers, reputations, grants, political loyalties and psychological investments. An institution can therefore proclaim its commitment to self-correction while making actual correction extremely costly for the individuals involved.
Imagine a prominent commentator who spent 2020 ridiculing anyone who mentioned hydroxychloroquine. What incentive does that person now have to discuss evidence suggesting some prophylactic benefit? Almost none, because acknowledging it risks reopening everything said six years earlier. Silence is much easier, and the same principle operates in politics.
Governments that imposed extraordinary restrictions have little incentive to sponsor investigations likely to conclude that some restrictions were unnecessary. Regulators have little incentive to announce that they were excessively confident. Newspapers have little incentive to publish front-page stories saying that yesterday's misinformation may contain a fragment of tomorrow's accepted science. Institutional self-preservation is powerful, which is why the Diogenes story remains relevant.
The philosopher was not merely searching for someone who refrained from telling obvious lies. That would be too easy. The deeper form of honesty is the willingness to strip away self-interest, reputation and social approval and describe reality as one actually finds it. A brutally honest account of Covid would probably satisfy nobody, and that may be precisely what recommends it.
Diogenes would probably recognise our problem immediately. We possess technologies he could never have imagined, scientific instruments capable of examining individual molecules, computers capable of analysing millions of medical records and communications systems capable of placing almost all human knowledge before us within seconds. Yet none of these inventions manufactures honesty, so the lantern remains necessary.
Perhaps Diogenes would wander through our universities, government departments, television studios, pharmaceutical companies, social-media corporations and scientific institutions asking the same question he supposedly asked in Athens. Not who was completely right about Covid, because almost certainly nobody was. The more demanding question is who is prepared, six years later, to tell us exactly where they were wrong?
The search for that brutally honest man continues, and Diogenes may need a larger lantern, especially if he wanders around parliament House Canberra.
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-would-a-brutally-honest-man-look-like/