Tufekci is a strikingly sensible sociologist who was early about the importance of masking. “Yes, this is a really difficult question because I ended up writing an op-ed essentially criticizing CDC and the WHO on masks in March 2020. At the time, people were still saying masks could infect you, make things worse. Never in a million years I thought I’d start my own personal pandemic, criticizing global health authorities or the CDC. That was a really weird situation.”
“And I have a lot of friends, especially junior people. Some of them are aghast but cannot speak up, and because I don’t have as much to lose, I can write things, in a way, that sometimes they can’t. That’s really made me think we need a mechanism for that to be possible for the scientists in the field. Medical fields are very hierarchical, and there’s some positives to that. You don’t want quackery there, but when they need to be challenged, there’s no mechanism to challenge them.”
“I feel the same way about the pandemic now. I feel like it was a stress test, and I think there’s going to be a first crop of books that put most of the blame on Trump’s lap, which is not unjustified. That administration has a lot to answer for, but I think the things that it has shown us are much bigger than one administration’s admittedly very real failings. I’m thinking maybe, just maybe, there is space for a book that looks at some of the things you were talking about, which is, we have to revitalize how our society works. We haven’t come to grips with this.”
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“I’m going to go back to the sociology fallback, which is that people don’t exist as independent atoms. The person to convince that person is a friend, an acquaintance, or somebody else from Staten Island. The way you want to deploy these convincing is — and we have this from so much sociology. If I come to you and say, “Your field is terrible, and you’re wrong about everything,” you’re not going to all of a sudden like me, right?
If we want to convince people, we need to deploy the people on the ground that we have, wherever it is, who’s closest to those people. If you want to convince people on Staten Island, you’ve got to send people who live on Staten Island who can work for this, or whatever community it is.
Instead, we’re lecturing at them. Nobody likes being lectured. Even if the lecturing is all correct, it just doesn’t work. I would try to say, “Hold on, my Staten Island friend, I’m going to find you somebody that you relate to, who’s going to tell you why you should get vaccinated.””