he’s an international leader in fighting antibiotic resistance, was inducted into the order of canada and now chairs an expert committee that advises the world health organization on covid-19 infection control.
but when the university of calgary professor downplayed the role of airborne transmission of the virus during a panel discussion last month — then was the subject of an unflattering news story — the response was harsh.
social media attacks compared conly and like-thinking colleagues to auschwitz doctor josef mengele , called him stupid and a quack, and suggested he was responsible for “millions” of deaths.
the dispute revolves around what once might have seemed like an esoteric question: how exactly does sars-cov-2 spread from person to person. the conventional wisdom points to close contact and heavy “droplets” that fall quickly to the ground, but a growing and vocal alternative school of thought asserts that it is largely via tiny aerosol particles that can stay airborne and travel longer distances.
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who’s right has important implications for the ways we combat covid-19 — at least until vaccination is widespread. the disagreement, in the meantime, is heated.
an australian emergency physician active on twitter castigated the study as being so unethical it was “full nazi.” other health professionals have urged funding agencies to shut the trial down and have the lead investigator “apologize” to subjects.
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linsey marr, the virginia tech engineering professor who is at the forefront of the airborne-transmission movement, sees another reason for the rancour. the experts most attached to the close-contact/droplet theory of spread tend to be infectious disease doctors long steeped in the droplet theory, she said.
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as evidence, they cite outbreaks that seem hard to explain with the droplet theory, like the scores of passengers on the diamond princess cruise ship infected while mostly holed up in their cabins, people in quarantine hotels who contracted covid despite having no direct contact with the infected person next door, and choir practices where multiple, well-separated vocalists were infected by a singing index patient.
the proof may not be definitive but it actually surpasses the science backing up the droplet idea and is more than enough reason to take action, asserts dr. raymond tellier, a mcgill university medical microbiologist.
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in fact, after some vocal protests, both the who and cdc have revised their online messaging about covid-19 transmission, acknowledging a significant role for aerosols.
or maybe not. other experts argue there is still much uncertainty .
in the pandemic’s first wave, limited testing that disproportionately targeted health-care workers made it difficult to assess their relative risk, said mcgeer. but a public health ontario study found that by last september, as testing broadened, those staff were no more likely to catch the virus than the general public. yet the province’s protocol was for workers to wear surgical masks and face shields, donning n95s only for “aerosol-generating” procedures like inserting breathing tubes, or if deemed necessary by workers’ own personal risk assessment.
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in the online seminar, conly — a respected clinician and scientist, whose role as chair of the who’s infection control and prevention research working group is unpaid — suggested additional research is needed on airborne transmission. he responded to a call for more widespread n95 use in part by suggesting the tight-fitting masks had drawbacks, including causing acne. a later cbc story portrayed him as a powerful, out-of-touch force preventing the who from seeing the light on aerosols.
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another referred to a paper he and others wrote that proposed a pyramid of different levels of evidence for determining how covid is spread, where the top would be deliberate, experimental infection of subjects. they didn’t actually advocate such research. but the twitter user referred to it as “mengele’s pyramid,” after the doctor who conducted cruel experiments on children and other prisoners at the auschwitz concentration camp.
the post was re-tweeted by david fisman, a university of toronto epidemiologist, who referred to conly and his co-authors — two of whom are women — as “a group of sulky men on the wrong side of an argument.”