Crisis Science

Why public mistrust, not misinformation, is the real pandemic

If there was a dominate media narrative during the pandemic, it was “ignorance is a virus.” It was a story reinforced by journalists, demonstrators, and public officials who simply could not comprehend the Americans who refused to get vaccinated. Misinformation became the second pandemic, the so-called “infodemic,” appearing to lead people to believe things like “COVID shots contain tracking devices.” Seemingly needed most was the reassertion of science’s authority. President Biden distinguished himself on the campaign trail by saying, “I believe in science. Donald Trump doesn’t,” promising to “marshal the forces of science” in his victory speech.

Yet, for all the pandemic-era lecturing to “follow the science” and mocking of citizens who failed to do so, American public health seems worse off today. Kindergarten vaccination rates have dropped from 95 to 93 percent since 2020, a level that makes measles outbreaks now possible among the 250 thousand unprotected five-year olds. That 28 percent of Americans are now opposed to mandatory school vaccinations portends further declines. While COVID may no longer loom large as an existential threat, Americans’ growing vaccine skepticism will continue to wreak havoc on public health efforts.  

The authority of science can no longer be taken for granted. It relies on political support and public trust. This is Robert Crease’s and Peter Bond’s argument in The Leak: Politics, Activists, and Loss of Trust at Brookhaven National Laboratory. A philosopher at Stonybrook and a Brookhaven Lab (BNL) physicist, respectively, Crease and Bond recount the aftermath of what should have been a trivial tritium leak at the Long Island, New York research facility. They tell of an innocent nuclear research reactor being shuttered because, in the words of a Physics Today columnist, “politics and protest prevailed.”

There is certainly no shortage of political machination in Crease’s and Bond’s history. Neither New York’s junior senator, Alfonse D’Amato, nor the local district’s representative, Michael Forbes, came to the lab’s defense. Instead, they charged scientists with being “cavalier” and having a “public-be-damned” attitude. To Crease and Bond, the two Republican politicians’ sudden environmental concern was simple political opportunism. Incoming Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Bill Richardson, then a rising star with vice-presidential aspirations, seemed to have decided to shutter the research reactor in response to threats from Christie Brinkley and Alec Baldwin, then big-time Democratic Party donors turned anti-BNL activists.

That is not to say that the scientists and administrators at BNL were totally blameless. Crease points to “poor understanding of how to engage the public about scientific research”, alongside declining public enthusiasm for big science and increasing environmental sensitivities, to explain why a slow-moving and weakly radioactive underground plume of water almost led to the closure of BNL itself.  

While The Leak paints a deeply unsettling picture of how political power too often short-circuits the normal processes of governmental accountability, the book is a missed opportunity. Crease and Bond’s early concerns about public trust eventually dissipate as the story progresses. The book comes to narrowly focus on how “fanatical activists” pollute politics with misinformation and never truly wrestles with how experts could more genuinely rebuild trust with an angry public during a crisis. And that is a shame, because the incident at Brookhaven has a lot to teach us about what went wrong during the pandemic and about the challenges that lie ahead for the CDC.

Drip, Drip, Drip

When tritium was discovered in groundwater samples from BNL on January 8, 1997, no one anticipated how big the mess would be. But the hydrogeologist in charge recognized that “this is/could be a very tricky situation.”

The news broke in a tense environment. Environmental and anti-nuclear advocacy was at a peak on Long Island, having culminated in blocking the Shoreham nuclear power plant. People were already concerned about unusually high cancer rates on the island, though studies would disprove a connection to BNL. Colorful activists found receptive ears for extravagant claims and actions. Firebrand nuclear opponent, Helen Caldicott, implied in a speech that BNL was knowingly releasing radioactive material to the public and protecting their own employees with special pills. At the same time, the DOE was grappling with a legacy of lax environmental safety and increasing scrutiny of the laboratories they oversaw.  

BNL scientists settled on a straightforward remediation plan. Even though underground tritium concentrations were acceptable at the edge of the plume, water there would be pumped out and reinjected upstream. The tritium would decay and be diluted during the repeated runs downhill. Though simple, it was an expensive process, with costs eventually ballooning to $11.2 million. The expense forced the termination of scientific research, included the lab’s oceanography program.

DOE officials demanded administrative change. Since its early days BNL was managed by Associated Universities (AUI), a nonprofit organization with run by MIT, Harvard, and other east coast universities. DOE Secretary Peña terminated their contract, and recontracting was won by a partnership between Stonybrook University and the Batelle Memoral Insitute. Director Nicholas Samios stepped down during the crisis. Peter Bond (one of the authors) served as interim director until being replaced by John Marburger III. An assistant secretary in the Office of Environment, Safety, and Health, Tara O’Toole, later defended the DOE’s harsh treatment of AUI and BNL, saying “There was real pressure to close the labs.”

The source of the tritium was initially a mystery. But attention quickly coalesced on the High Flux Beam Reactor’s (HFBR), which produced neutron beams for investigating protein structure, dating ancient artifacts, and producing radioisotopes to treat cancer. Next to the reactor was a spent fuel pool, where temporary storage of nuclear fuel resulted in tritiated water. Detecting a leak was surprisingly complex. The pool had to be covered with plastic sheets and its level measured by laser under supervision of the lab’s particle accelerator technicians. They determined it had leaked 7 and 14 gallons a day for a dozen years, explaining why nearby tritium concentrations were up 30 times the EPA-designated limit.

High Flux Beam Reactor Site | Copyright: Brookhaven National Labs

Notably in this chain of events, the laboratory’s environmental health and safety processes worked as designed. An emergency meeting was held and plans drawn up to sink more monitoring wells, test pipes, and sewers around the HFBR to better understand the extent of the problem. Lab officials had prepared a remediation plan to within days. A 1998 report from the General Accounting Office vindicated BNL officials’ behavior as having fit within common practice and DoE procedures. The possibility of a leak had even been floated back in 1992, but the program to look for it was deprioritized by the DOE’s own system for evaluating hazards. Officially speaking lab officials were in line with similar facilities.

But mistakes were made. In 1987 lab officials agreed to conform to local and state public and environmental health regulations to which they were previously exempt. Yet they resisted demands that they double-line the HFBR’s spent fuel pool. A DOE working group at the time wrote that there was “no continuous and accurate way to measure leakage.” But they made no demands on BNL to remedy the situation.

By the time BNL officials agreed to drain the pool and line it with stainless steel, the HFBR had already become a symbol of everything that had gone wrong. DOE Secretary Peña announced that the decision to restart the reactor would await the results of an environmental impact statement (EIS), opening the process up to public participation.

Although Crease and Bond tend to paint all citizen opposition with a broad brush, subsuming all under the “activism” label, involved citizen’s groups were diverse. Some, like Friends of Brookhaven, were even lab boosters. Others, like Jean Mannhaupt and Nanette Essel, surprised lab officials with their ability to spot problems in environmental data. These two activists eventually formed a Citizens Working Group with BNL’s financial support. Still, Crease and Bond focus mostly on Standing for Truth About Radiation (STAR), which included Baldwin and Brinkley and often took the most extreme anti-BNL position.

In November of 1999, Secretary Richardson abruptly terminated the HFBR, before the impact statement could be completed. Members of the community advisory community formed by BNL’s new contractor were livid that they had not been consulted. Neither did he talk to BNL staff. While Crease and Bond imply that lobbying by STAR was the decisive factor, it is notable that neither Patricia Dehmer, the director in charge of the HFBR’s scientific programs, nor Martha Krebs, the head of the DOE’s Office of Energy Research, advocated for restarting the reactor.  

O’Toole would later describe the BNL event as an “organizational accident.” Oversights by several levels within both BNL and the DOE coalesced to damn the HFBR. Arguably most significant was the failure to engage the public.

Dealing with an Angry Public

More menacing than the tritium itself was the plume of mistrust that quickly seeped beyond laboratory property, through surrounding Suffolk County, and into the national imagination. As far as radioactive substances go, tritium is relatively harmless. It emits high power electrons (i.e., beta radiation) that can’t penetrate the skin, and must be ingested in high concentrations to be damaging. But the fact that it had leaked unbeknownst to BNL scientists for a dozen years shook residents.

Bernard Manowitz, an environmental scientist with the lab in 1948, had already recognized the special challenges posed by the facility’s location. The area was highly populated, and locals relied on wells drawing from a sole-source aquifer. Residents would understandably be on edge when it came to even small accidental releases. As Manowitz noted, “radioactive pollution does not have to be injurious to health to be socially undesirable.”

But later officials seemed to have forgotten the lesson. While the lab hosted both a media relations and a community engagement department, the two coordinated with one another poorly. Official statements focused on “correcting” misinformation about the leak, largely neglecting to reflect on why it was socially undesirable. Relearning Manowitz’s insights was a painful process.

The leak was detected after other toxic discoveries, which exposed the short-sightedness of previous ways of disposing of chemicals. The campus was dotted with underground plumes of volatile organic compounds, being declared a superfund site in 1989.

Mistakes accumulated. Lab officials had rebuffed county regulators’ demands to double-line the HFBR’s pool since the early 90s, because of the expense, the certainty of delaying research, and the belief that the pool wasn’t leaking. And early monitoring wells were not placed properly to be able to even detect a potential leak. Sixty thousand gallons of radioactive liquid were later discovered in the air ducts of another, albeit non-operating, research reactor. And plutonium of unknown origin was detected in the nearby Peconic River. These events reinforced the perception that scientists were incapable of responsibly managing nuclear material. As Crease and Bond note, given the circumstances, “Why should one believe…that the tritium leak was small and not dangerous?”

Mistrust was at such a level that honest public engagement efforts backfired. In response to VOC plumes, officials offered to hook residents to the local water utility for free. But many people interpreted this as an attempt to cover up the problem, that contamination was actually worse than BNL admitted. A local activist group, the Community Working Group, was offered unfettered access to lab information and staff, only to be seen by other activists as having been “compromised.”

In the words of Crease and Bond, BNL became a “fishbowl,” where every trivial misstep got blown up into a near catastrophe. The accidental irradiation of Saran Wrap, which released a tiny quantity of Chlorine 38, was reported as another “leak.” Scientists’ grappling with the unknowns of the leak was dutifully reported. Rather than seen as the normal unfolding of the scientific process of ongoing refinement, scientists looked to the public to be “floundering”, and differences in measurement suggested “cover-ups or incompetence.”

Steps in the right direction did occur, but happened much too late. BNL started making payments to local governments in lieu of taxes, giving the facility a positive constituency. The lab’s media relations department hosted a workshop by a risk communication specialist, which one scientist described as life changing. In their public engagements, scientists stopped harping on the data and acknowledged concerns, admitting that “[the leak] should never have happened” and acting as neighbors first, scientists second.

The new director, John Marburger III, demonstrated a similar knack for science communication when explaining why he trusted lab scientists’ assessments. Rather than resort to claims of authoritativeness, he instead pointed to the intellectual humility and persistence of his coworkers, a description similar to Harry Collins’ assessment of science as “craftwork with integrity.”

Journalists from Newsday, a local Long Island paper, were given facility badges and full access to staff and information. The embedded team produced a series of articles, which unlike previous tabloid-style reporting, showed that the leak was not a public health risk and fit BNL scientists’ actions into the broader context.

But these changes were too little, too late to save the HFBR.

“Activists”

The story ends badly, at least from the perspective of BNL scientists. This perhaps explains why Crease and Bond’s tone and understanding of the crisis changes in later chapters. Trust is initially their focus. Its absence explains why scientists’ reassurances about the leak came off as “condescending and uncaring,” largely falling on deaf ears. But by the end of the book, trust is replaced by misinformation as their history’s driving force.

Mistruths certainly abounded during the crisis. One particularly egregious incident was a 1998 episode of the Montel Williams Show, one of the many crude talk shows of the era, focusing on BNL. STAR members repeated several unproven claims about cancer levels on Long Island and insisted that BNL conducted weapons research. They even rolled out a young cancer-stricken boy named Kenny, whose cancer they presented as Brookhaven’s fault.

Crease and Bond depict the episode as a “downward and dangerous movement in the social standing of science.” That is, “if influencers on popular media programs could publicly denounce reputable institutions…they and their followers could doubt anything, believe anything and threaten a democracy that depended on the guidance provided by facts and expert advice.” Yet the social standing of science in this case looked to have been in doubt long before Montel got involved.

Crease and Bond fail to grasp the public’s role in scientific controversies. As political scientists Joseph Morone and Edward Woodhouse argued in The Demise of Nuclear Energy?, the place of ordinary citizens is not to understand complex science or technology. Rather, they are to respond to “cues and signals” about whether experts are credible and have their “act together.” Repeated failures not only drove citizens’ hesitancy to believe BNL scientists, but also made the claims of alternative experts more attractive. That many Americans sooner followed Alec Baldwin than lab scientists was not evidence of the power of misinformation but of how dismal the public’s view of BNL really was.

Despite beginning with a recognition of the limits of a media relations approach to public conflict, Crease and Bond’s history ends up feeling like scientific media relations. Because they confuse misinformation for a cause rather than a symptom, an initially complex story collapses into a tale of good versus evil, of “scientists” versus “activists.” The former are depicted as multifaceted, albeit flawed, human beings. But Crease and Bond carefully document the outrageous claims of Helen Caldicott and ceremonies and hunger strikes of Peter Maniscalco in order to paint the latter group as unambiguously ignorant, if not unstable.

Kenny on the Montel Williams Show | MIT Press

But as noted elsewhere in The Leak, some local activists weren’t agitating to shut down the lab or even the HFBR. Crease and Bond don’t make enough out of this diversity, because it doesn’t fit with the story that emerges in their book. They draw a seemingly straight line pointing from fanatical anti-science activists, the “loudest and most unrelenting voices” in Crease and Bond’s words, to Secretary Richardson’s fateful decision.

The book concludes with a fatalistic assessment of prospects for successful scientific public engagement. They quote an unnamed scientist, who presented potential solutions should a similar event occur. He nevertheless concludes, for unmentioned reasons, that none of the solutions were “implementable.” Ultimately, the political forces that lead to the HFBR’s shutdown figure as an insatiable beast in the story, holding “science” hostage to activists’ irrational anger, fear, and egotism.

Reconciliation

In The World Before Us geographer Jared Diamond tells a story that contrasts the western system of justice to that of Papua New Guinea. When a Papuan driver named Malo accidently struck and killed a young boy, Billy, he immediately surrendered himself to the police for his own safety and was escorted to his home village. Malo’s boss, Gideon, represented him in dealing with the boy’s family and sought the help of someone experienced in such matters to handle the negotiations. They arranged for a “say sorry” ceremony, where Gideon provided food as well as monetary restitution. He was also expected to express his sincere regret over Billy’s death at the hands of his employee.

A “traditional” society built on community relationships interwoven with differing tribal associations, serious transgressions can easily transform into blood feuds. The point of the ceremony was to facilitate the restoration of normal community relationships, for Gideon to demonstrate authentic remorse. During it he openly described the compensation of food and money as “mere rubbish,” a trifle in comparison to Billy’s life. The point wasn’t really “compensation” but rather relational reconnection. What mattered was that Gideon and his staff cried, grieved, and broke bread with Billy’s relatives.

As “modern” Americans, it is easy believe that we’re too rational for the passions animating the Papuans in Diamond’s story. We have courts and district attorneys to logically determine, based on the facts of the situation, what we owe one another. Judges can decide whether Malo had driven recklessly or had too little time to react. Harm only exists insofar as the law dictates, or at least in lawyers’ interpretation of it. And that interpretation is predicated on a liberal understanding of people as atomized individuals, as strangers, not as belonging to larger communities of relationships. 

This liberal understanding is clear in BNL scientists’ initial behavior after the leak. They just wanted to get back to having their traditional privileges, namely conducting their research without public meddling. They seemed to say, “Here are the facts. We’ve analyzed your worries and found them baseless. We’re right. You’re wrong. Now go home.”

Despite yearnings for rationalistic political and social relations, “modernization” remains an incomplete project. We and Papuans are very much the same. We too demand public displays of contrition. When male celebrities like Louis CK and Matt Lauer have abused their power to harass women, or when others run afoul of evolving norms for talking about race or gender, there is no careful weighing of harm and intent in deciding whether an offense has happened. Rather, the act itself is the transgression. And a sufficiently authentic mea culpa is presented as the path to regaining public confidence, even if in the era of online “cancellation” both the apologies and their reception rarely seems to be in good faith.

BNL lab officials failed to recognize the leak as not simply an environmental health incident but a serious social transgression. It wasn’t a matter for quantitative risk assessment, much less one solvable by more sensitive messaging and clearer scientific communication. Even if the leak didn’t physically threaten locals, it emotionally terrorized them with frightening uncertainties. Could BNL scientists be trusted with dangerous substances? Were they telling the truth? Residents’ homes were transformed from domestic refuges to potential hazardous waste sites. Parents probably looked at their children’s bathwater with trepidation. Were they safe on Long Island or would they become like the hapless victims of Love Canal?

Scientists’ insensitive response to the ongoing shattering of residents’ feeling of safety explains activists’ seemingly insatiable anger far better than misinformation does. The demand to shut down the HFBR or the entire lab was not a measured response to the quantifiable risks of tritium but rather a demand for vengeance. The leak was an offense that demanded genuine contrition in order to restore relational normalcy. But an authentic apology never seemed to be expressed by lab officials—at least in Crease and Bond’s telling. As a result, the relationship between BNL and local activists became more like a blood feud than a mere political conflict.

It is, of course, impossible to know things how would have played out had BNL officials acted more like Malo’s boss in Diamond’s account. Expressions of genuine contrition are frequently unthinkable in our legalistic culture, being too easily be transformed into admissions of guilt. American motorists, for instance, are advised to never say “I’m sorry” after a collision. And conveying authenticity can be challenging. British Petroleum’s efforts at an organizational apology after the 2010 Gulf Oil spill were initially successful until CEO Tony Hayward let his frustrations slip out, saying “I’d like my life back.” But it is precisely the difficulty of genuine contrition that makes it so relationally valuable.

Staying in Balance with Society

The best summation of what went wrong at BNL came from director Marburger, a perspective that Crease and Bond bury in one of The Leak’s appendixes:

What has changed for Brookhaven are the conditions of the society in which it functions…the very excellence of BNL’s science insulated it from those changes, and made it possible to continue to operate, at least for a while, as if they had not taken place. Society was willing to buy BNL’s argument, up to a point, that good science is the bottom line…But the laboratory was operating unwittingly in region of imbalance with its society. It was only a matter of time before a fluctuation would cause a catastrophic readjustment…What we need to do is analyze the actual conditions of the society in which we find ourselves, and create those conditions here at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The same perspective could come to the aid of public health post COVID. Like for the leak at BNL, even precautionary action backfired in an environment of mistrust. A “pause” on the Johnson and Johnson shot after reports of blood clots didn’t lessen worries but raised fears about vaccine uncertainties. Waffling on masks, a constantly moving target for herd immunity, the failure to provide Americans rapid tests, and other errors seemed to show that Anthony Fauci and the CDC didn’t have their acts together when it came to understanding or managing the pandemic. Even worse, recent disclosures show that Fauci and then NIH head Francis Collins coordinated to try to squash talk about COVID potentially emerging from a Wuhan laboratory, helping to turn it into “conspiracy theory.” Should we be surprised that more and more Americans are galvanizing behind vaccine-skeptical presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., despite public health experts’ warnings that he spreads misinformation?

Former CDC Head Rochelle Walenksy (credit Dean Winslow, CC 4.0)

That a CDC overhaul plan focuses mainly on faster publication of data, emergency staffing, and simplifying the language of public health guidance suggests that the agency has yet to grasp the social conditions that they struggle against – namely growing mistrust. In interviews with public health officials, one finds the incomprehension expressed by BNL scientists in the aftermath of the leak. Anthony Fauci acknowledges being surprised by the course of events and getting a few things wrong but blames vaccine resistance on American’s “independent streak” and “smoldering anti-science feeling.” CDC director Walenksy has only admitted that the agency failed to “reliably meet expectations,” which is about as weakly apologetic as mea culpas come.

But the operating conditions for society didn’t really change during the pandemic so much as that scientists, politicians, and bureaucrats chained themselves to a fictitious version of them. News pundits happily echoed this fiction. They told of courageous and patriotic Americans lining up to take the polio shot, simply because, in the words of Tom Nichols, “it was a good thing to do.” Yet three quarters of people were vaccinated for COVID within two years, while achieving the same polio coverage among people under 40 took six. Contra the nostalgic narrative, most adults actually neglected to roll up their sleeves. And even at-risk youth had to be enticed by “Salk hop” dances, among other strategies.

In any case, the cause of scientific crises continues to be the refusal to face the conditions of society as they really are. When Anthony Fauci and vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer didn’t enjoy complete trust and authority, the problem became “politics” or that immoral and misinformation-addled citizens couldn’t recognize a catastrophe unfolding before their eyes. Public health officials portrayed themselves and science itself as powerless in the face of a wave of ignorance, denying that their own decisions had played a role.

Despite uncovering the importance of mistrust in the demise of the HFBR, Crease and Bond also can’t seem to let go of the story of science as a helpless victim of politics. They describe their book as exposing the “dangers that US science faces now,” especially in “a period of social and political uncertainty when the value and authority of science are urgently needed.” They favorably cite a Newsday journalist who described the shutdown as the “canary in the coal mine” for climate and vaccine denial.

Maintaining science’s legitimacy during a crisis requires more than just honestly facing up to the requirements for earning the public’s trust. It also means navigating the challenges of communality, those relational demands that the process of liberal individuation has yet to successfully snuff out.

Chemical spills need not turn into political debacles. Pandemics need not erode public support in childhood vaccinations. The question is: Are large scientific organizations prepared to offer the honesty and humility that averting disaster requires?

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