Why Talk About COVID?

Bringing Clarity

Numerous people have asked me… Why talk about COVID-19? In retrospect I was gaining popularity and respect in the evidence based nutrition community, my following was growing quite steadily, and I was on my way to cashing in on my expertise. However, something didn’t feel right, as the pandemic raged on this deeply infected the fitness community. Social media coaches you would go for training and nutrition advice suddenly became experts in health policy, economics, epidemiology, infectious disease, and more recently vaccines.

I hope my last sentence denotes my sarcasm, but since the pandemic began I’ve tried to debunk some misconceptions surrounding nutrition and COVID-19. Many charlatans latched on to pandemic as an opportunity to sell their diets, supplements, and nutrition advice as unproven cures for this novel virus.

My efforts to debunk felt in vain considering many seemingly intelligent individuals were falling for it. I continued to share information from trusted resources, experts, and accounts but it still didn’t feel good enough. I came to the conclusion debunking is worthless when I considered the reason people believed bullshit pertaining to nutrition, the virus, or any other fact based topic. The reason for believing this bullshit in the first place had to do with psychological needs, social identity, and tribalism. In order to protect people from misinformation and disinformation we should give them the tools to think better.

Science By Jae was a culmination of my frustrations, new mission, growing interest in the philosophy of science/critical thinking, and my own journey.

At the age of two I wanted to be a paleontologist, I knew all the dinosaurs names in my collection and read about them constantly. As a grew a bit older my interest shifted from dinosaurs to animals that were a bit stranger and more deadly. I would pour through books and videos about spiders, snakes, sharks, and bats. As I hit middle school and high school my interest in science waned, as most teenagers I was preoccupied with friends and fitting in. Towards the end of high school I became interested in the deadliest most complex animal in known existence, humans. I fell in love with psychology but I denied this love to study computer science at university. Had to fail my first semester of college to live out that love. Along the way I became fascinated by philosophy so I studied that as well. Nevertheless, I unexpectedly became interested in nutritional science because of social media… that was how “Mr.Cogfit” (my previous social media persona) was born.

Okay, but how does any of this resolve the initial question. Why am I talking about COVID? It is the same reason I sort of gave for talking about nutrition:

This is a highly misunderstood area by both lay people and expert alike. I want to understand this area of science better in order to help clarify the facts and refute the bullshit. Vaccinations and public health are fact based issues that should not be dependent on political affiliation, ideology, or emotive narratives. However, these topics are impacted by political affiliation, ideology, or emotive narratives.

In order to get towards the truth of these topics we have to consult the relevant experts. Most of us are too incompetent to understand the basics of infectious diseases so the unfounded confidence pertaining to the subject matter is unwarranted. There are experts in the domain of infectious disease and public health for a reason , as a non-expert (most of the internet) we should defer to the evidence they produce, the data sets they use, and the advice they give.

I never claimed to be an expert on vaccinations, epidemiology, public health, or COVID-19, but I will defer to these experts and convey the evidence they give when necessary as I’ve done with nutrition and fitness. I ask you all to do the same, defer to actual experts with credentials and publications on these related topics, try to read the primary research on these topics, and if you can’t understand the research chances are you shouldn’t make grand claims about the virus.

Here are some awesome experts and science communicators for understanding COVID-19:

Nini Munoz: @niniandthebrain (Instagram)

Dr. Elisabeth Marnik: @sciencewhizliz (Instagram) & elisabethmarnikphd.com (blog)

Dr. Kristen Panthagani: @kmpanthagani (twitter) & youcanknowthings.com (blog)

Edward Nirenberg: @deplatformdisease (instagram), @ENirenberg (twitter), & deplatformdisease.com (blog)

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina: Your Local Epidemiologist (substack)