Happy Thanksgiving weekend, welcome back to Tracing. Should your friends fall unwell, remind them to test for COVID. And to beware a flawed study claiming the antiviral Paxlovid causes rebound, which was debunked on TWIV 1062 at the 20:00 mark [link →].
In other news, Microsoft’s news network replaced human editors with AI language models, which can’t tell the difference between true and false. Since then its site MSN.com featured disinformation that “a conspiracy theory that the latest surge in Covid-19 cases is being orchestrated by the Democratic Party ahead of the election,” CNN reported.
The latest pandemic fraudster bought with COVID PPP money a Lamborghini car and a small island. He was caught and charged.
Onto today’s newsletter.
Contents:
Introduction
1
2
3
Coda
Intro: This section is written not to demonize author Michael Lewis, but to contrast him.
Though Lewis has stayed out of the press since Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted by a jury November 2nd on seven criminal counts including fraud and money laundering — qualifying him for a 115-year prison sentence1 – Lewis spent October promoting his book Going Infinite by defending the intent and character of its subject.
“I still like him” Lewis told PBS Newshour in mid-October of Bankman-Fried, after the latter had been arrested and extradited from the Bahamas2, after he’d had his bail revoked and been remanded from house arrest in Palo Alto, CA to a Brooklyn, NY jail for witness-tampering a second time3. “It’s not a Ponzi scheme” Lewis insisted of Bankman-Fried’s now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange corporation FTX to CBS’ 60 Minutes the day before Bankman-Fried’s trial started. “He genuinely thinks he's innocent.”4
So diffuse, and abundant, are stories of numeracy and corruption right now it’s plausible Lewis didn’t know every milestone in his own subject’s timeline5.
Lewis’ book, which took him a year to research & write, hit store shelves the day Bankman-Fried’s trial started, this October 2.
And fate played a cruel joke on humanity by scheduling the release of Joan Ryan’s book, which she took ten years to research & write, in April 2020, the month after coronavirus temporarily locked down much of life and forever bent our attention.
Ryan’s book Intangibles is in part a response to Lewis’ earlier book called Moneyball about the baseball analytics system coined in 1980 as “sabermetrics”.
I was alerted to the book when Ryan, a superstar sports reporter in this metropolitan area, who is now working as a media consultant for the San Francisco Giants, penned an Opinion-Editorial in the newspaper (my physical daily companion then) that first coronavirus March6. Ryan wrote about her sadness over the epidemic temporarily canceling sports. Being a sports fan is to be part of some superorganism, she seemed to be saying, and “in isolation, we suffer.”
I’ve revisited Intangibles, but still had to massage the points Ryan made to write up this newsletter, because she presents things so orthogonal to our world today. With today’s hybrid-work-quieted downtowns, and intermittent infection waves that keep a definitive, buoyant recovery dancing just beyond our reach, Ryan’s passages in 2019’s Intangibles are both refreshing and dated.
Some passages emanate sunshine is so discomfiting, I rush-read to get them over with:
Ryan got the idea for her book about team chemistry from “a story in the New York Times with the headline ‘The Love Hormone As Sports Enhancer’ about a neuropeptide called oxytocin.” (Oxytocin is not to be confused with the epidemically addictive pharmaceutical opioid Oxycontin, which has, since 2019, been the subject of exposé books and two dramatic streaming series on Netflix and one on Hulu.)
“This is the stuff that is produced in the brain and released in our bloodstream” Ryan said of oxytocin, produced as a byproduct when “we fall in love or when women go through labor or breastfeed, fostering strong feelings of trust and connection.” Added Ryan, “it can also triggered by meaningful touch.”
Intangibles is an enriching and thoroughly accessible book, notwithstanding her 62-item bibliography and the 187 people she names in her acknowledgements. Sadly, the publisher didn’t deem this gem popular enough to print copies in paperback.
Throughout, Ryan interviews scientists, team managers, psychologists and players to determine whether team chemistry exists.
The hilarious chapter on the closed-off teammates Barry Bonds and his mirror-opposite, Jeff Kent, shows off Ryan’s reporting chops. And her writing rips.
Ryan’s time on the sports beat dating back to the 1980s, as well as a San Francisco Giants media consultant through the 2010’s stuffed her reporting notebook for this topic to the hilt.
I counted four clear cases in the book where data myopia led team managers astray7.
In an under-told account, Ryan relays from up-close the mutiny Dustin Pedroia and a half-dozen Boston Red Sox players pulled in the fourth game of the 2013 World Series when their teammate Jonny Gomes’ statistics dropped him from the lineup. Despite Gomes’ dismal .143 batting average, manager John Farrell angrily acceded to their insubordination “Jonny Gomes is playing” they’d told him. Their mate rose to the occasion and hit a three-run homer over the left-field fence, pulling the Red Sox ahead in the series they went on to win.
Throughout Ryan’s investigation and attempt to define “team chemistry”, themes emerge that fracture today’s conventional wisdom.
First, Ryan argues with scientists that her reporting, her empirical evidence doesn’t yet count as “scientific” while they push back and say it’s enough to qualify as such. Second, in Ryan’s frustrated quest to distill team chemistry into quantifiable metrics by interviewing countless sources, she practices what esteemed U.C. Riverside Sociologist Richard Carpiano told me is “bootstrap epidemiology”.
Third and finally, Ryan verifies through ex-general managers, players and her own eyes, that team chemistry, which undoubtedly exists, can’t be predicted. In other words, which of Ryan’s deduced team-chemistry archetypes a player embodies (sparkplug, sage, kid, enforcer, buddy, warrior and jester) most often emerges after they’re surrounded by a new cadre of mates. And changes when they’re traded.
I recommend owning Intangibles in hardback.
Scroll on for three other public health teams I chose to highlight.
Team 1: Fentanyl Project Team at San Francisco Chronicle
When our newspaper published their four-part project covering the city’s illegal fentanyl trade on July 10th of this year, its special Sunday section was so elegantly presented I nearly threw it away without noticing. Lucky I caught it and read parts over the course of weeks. With distance and time, it’s clear that only a team from a standing newsroom with data reporters, layout specialists, advisors and reporting collaboration liaisons could have carried out this monumental investigation with as few resources as they had. And only a San Francisco outlet would have had the focus and will to follow through.
(The Chronicle’s new editor, the veteran journalist Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, started on the University of Maryland college newspaper when a young David Simon served as student editor. Simon was the reporter who went on to co-create “The Wire” for HBO.)
As we work to involve citizens in the debate whether to legislate facial recognition technology the way Illinois has, before it’s sold to every ambitious faction leader, like drug cartel dons or dictators in foreign lands, I had to highlight this team-reporting feat.
This type of achievement may be silently disappearing from under our nose if reporters can no longer live with a degree of public anonymity. “All told, 25 former or current dealers spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle team,” Garcia-Ruiz said in his introduction to the four-part series.
The project’s one reporter, Megan Cassidy and single photographer, Gabrielle Lurie traveled twice to Honduras to interview sources who sold drugs in San Francisco before deportation. Said one dealer to the Chronicle, “San Francisco is the most beautiful city in North America” explaining why he re-migrated north.
A proper diagnosis of a problem can bring a cure, the editor explained to readers:
“Last fall, when Mayor Breed mentioned in an interview that ‘a lot of people’ who sell drugs here are from Honduras, she was accused of being xenophobic and racist and had to apologize. We kept that reaction in mind throughout this investigation and recognize that this report may bring The Chronicle similar criticism. But for a democracy to function, citizens need to be well informed, and for San Francisco to solve the difficult challenges it faces, it needs its residents to be willing to grapple with the realities of things as they are.”
The project’s four parts, and editor’s introduction, are worth the price of a trial subscription (unfortunately no “gift links” were provided):
Jul 10 Editor’s Introduction: Why and how The San Francisco Chronicle told the story of open-air drug dealing (San Francisco Chronicle) - “Like many newcomers, I asked about all the signs of drug addiction I was seeing on my daily walk to work…Has anyone written that story? I asked.”
Jul 10 PART 1: This is the hometown of San Francisco’s drug dealers (San Francisco Chronicle) - Witness the photos of rising mansions in the Honduran village built on fentanyl sold in San Francisco’s streets. Festooning the front gates of these narcotic palaces are steel sculptures of the 49ers and Warriors professional sports team logos. Beautifully painted murals of bay area landmarks, even the dystopian Civic Center, adorn public-facing walls in Honduras’ Siria Valley.
Jul 10 PART 2: This is how San Francisco’s open-air drug dealers work (San Francisco Chronicle) - “They’d say, ‘Are you going to go back to Honduras poor?’” Marcio said of his 15-year-old son. “The other friends keep calling him, keep calling him, ‘Come, come, because the money is easier.’ And so, he fell.”
Jul 10 Profile 1: One mom’s path from Honduras to drug dealing in the Bay Area — and prison (San Francisco Chronicle) -
Jul 10 Profile 2: He’s known as the ‘OG.’ This is the man Honduran drug dealers say ‘opened the path’ to S.F. (San Francisco Chronicle) - “In the mid-1990s, Velasquez said, he was the first person from the tiny village of El Pedernal to sell drugs in San Francisco…‘If you drink water from San Francisco,’ he said, ‘you’ll go back to it.’”
The pictures are incredible as is the investigation. I urge anybody in public health, journalism or beyond to subscribe to see it for themselves.
Team 2: ‘Warp Speed’
Veteran finance reporters Joe Nocera and Bethany McClean, in their postmortem book on the pandemic called The Big Fail wrote a terribly flawed chapter excerpted in another magazine. But this chapter on the diverse team that got six corporations to research and develop and manufacture SARS-CoV-2 vaccines at an enormous scale in a record amount of time is excellent. It was excerpted in Vanity Fair’s November issue.
Nov 01 Operation Warp Speed: The Untold Story of the COVID-19 Vaccine (Vanity Fair) - “On a chilly day in mid-April 2020, Moncef Slaoui, the retired head of the vaccine department at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, was sitting by his unopened pool in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, when his phone rang. The hopeful hint of spring in the air belied the dark desperation that suffused the world as the COVID-19 pandemic raged and the world’s wealthiest country struggled to figure out a way forward.”
Shortly after I joined the testandtrace.com collaborative, I was awestruck by what a cross-discipline practice public health is.
The Vanity Fair article paints the cobbling-together of retired corporate vice presidents like Moncef Slaoui and Carlo de Notaristegani, with four-star general Gus Perna among others to fill out a team that put aside their political differences and procured the locations marshalled the materials and supported the coordinators that pulled off this forgotten triumph.
Slaoui shows to be the team’s sparkplug and Perna emerges as the enforcer.
An aside: the people I’m tracking who are bluntly agitating to torpedo long COVID research on social media and in the press – including a practicing oncologist8 and an think-tank epidemiologist9 – display a behavior pattern I can only call “anti-government influencing”.
This chapter excerpt drives home why that’s significant. “For me, the number one learning is that government alone cannot resolve a pandemic, and industry alone cannot,” manufacturing executive Carlo de Notristegani said. “You need to bring the two together.”
Team 3: TWIV
It takes a tablespoon of madness and a half-pinch of masochism to launch and sustain a five-day-per-week webcast hosting hour-plus shows featuring conversation after conversation among humans doing science with discernable joy.
I don’t know what Microbe.tv founder and host Vincent Raciniello was thinking, or what blowback he faced getting shows like This Week In Virology (TWIV) webcast in motion. But it had to have been substantial.
The best part of this network is how often humans reach different conclusions adhering to the discipline of science.
Most of the network’s shows are conversations “all about viruses” as Raciniello says in the opening bumper of TWIV proper and TWIV Weekly Update with Daniel Griffin. Other shows are variations like Immune or TWIP for the show about parasites.
All shows hosted on the Microbe.tv website are viewable through YouTube.
As I’ve said in this newsletter, the best immunity to misinformation is recurring interaction with quality information.
And Microbe.tv’s flagship show TWIV, instead of telling viewers what the scientific method is, shows the method in real-time. Host Raciniello and the recurring humans on the panel conduct, with a rotating guest, ad-hoc peer review of academic papers uploaded to the medical archive server or published in journals like Nature, Cell or BMJ. They’ll assert, riposte, and quiz each other toward a triangulated truth, touching consensus on occasion.
Science is an investigative conversation. This always-on network is a service so reliable people fail to acknowledge it. I shudder to think where we’d be today without it.
Coda
“[Jeff] Kent was a different breed of cat … With the Giants in 2000, he hit a grand slam to reach one hundred RBIs (runs batted in ) in four straight seasons, and the San Francisco fans shook the ballpark with a thundering ovation, demanding a curtain call. Kent didn’t budge from the bench. The cheering hung in the air like an unreciprocated handshake until the crowd sank back into their seats.”
- Intangibles
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