> TWIW has kind of painted themselves into the corner by insisting that anything except biological evidence is irrelevant.
I definitely don't know enough about this topic to say you're right, but as an avid layman listener of TWIV for 8+ months now, I've recently started thinking along the same lines.
With the greatest of respect, Vincent Racaniello, while being clearly a true expert in the field, tends to take a very quick and polarised view to newly presented evidence, and can often sound like he's being overly dismissive to my layman's ears. To the degree where I end up thinking, "it can't be that black and white".
I get the sense that sometimes the co-hosts would likely go for a more nuanced perspective, and often they do try to soften the edges around some of his opinions, but the podcast is very much his domain.
By the same token, I've often heard him admit that he was wrong. The sign of a good scientist! So there's that.
Being in the UK, and having received head-on the full barrage of "communication" from our Government during COVID, I have learnt to be sceptical of the messages they put out, and defaulted to "cynical" when first hearing their report of the new variant at the end of a recent press conference. The more time goes on though, the evidence does seem to be mounting that we should be looking at this very closely and not dismissing it out of hand.
> The problem is that action now is way more valuable than action in 1-2 months.
Completely agree. We have to use a balance here of scientific evidence, but also strategic thinking - which may not be 100% scientific - and the strategy may be that it's safer to assume this variant is more easily transmissible, and act accordingly, rather than wait for the science to catch up and prove it 100%.
All of that said, re. TWIV - it has been a game-changer of a podcast for me during this pandemic. I thoroughly enjoy listening to the hosts, all of whom are generally good natured, clearly very experienced, and doing a good job overall of science communication. No view on COVID is going to be perfect, and in my view their output is a net positive (by far) even despite the above.