"Scientists Say WHO Ignores The Risk That Coronavirus Floats In Air As Aerosol"

[NNadir]

19. You know, a perspective on aerosol transmission was published in Science recently.

I discussed it in the Science forum on this website: Reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2

The perspective therein to the article in one of the world's most prestigious science journals is here: Reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (Kimberly A. Prather1, Chia C. Wang2,3, Robert T. Schooley4 Science 26 Jun 2020: Vol. 368, Issue 6498, pp. 1422-1424)

There are almost certainly tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of scientists who work for the World Health Organization. It is highly improbable that every scientist reading this perspective article ignored it.

Here's how science interfaces with policy intelligently, which obviously excludes policy in the US where policy is prevented from intelligent interaction with science: Many scientists publish papers, and high level scientists in an intelligently run policy organization - placed in that position by demonstration of competence - review the literature carefully.

This means that a few papers published by a subset of scientists, irrespective of their quality - which may be high - are not sufficient to immediately change policy, because decisions that may impact millions or even billions of people require careful consideration lest they do more harm that good, do not take place instanteously.

It takes some hubris I think for any scientist, or even a small group of scientists, to claim that all of the scientists in an international organization are ignoring their considerations. By what qualifications do any scientists claim that all scientists are ignoring any topic?

The perspective certainly raises questions, which is why I took the time to post it. However it is not immediately worthy of vast policy changes.

The most likely case is that the journalist publishing this news headline is clueless, and are putting words in the mouths of the scientists or taking them out of context.