An abuse of science

Here's an interesting column noting that the World Health Organization apparently flubbed one of the most basic questions about epidemiology, the question of transmission and whether airborne transmission is a thing.  Now this is really a question, in my view, of "which hypothesis gets assigned as the null hypothesis?", and there's a corollary question of "if history doesn't strongly suggest one side of the argument as the null hypothesis, what do you do statistically?".  

For the uninitiated, the null hypothesis is the base--the idea you keep if you don't find sufficient evidence to reject it.  If you do not perform a test with adequate statistical strength, you will almost always retain it, even if it's false.

In this case, it was well known that coronavirii transmit through aerosols already, and hence I'd argue that the null hypothesis ought to have been that to some degree, COVID-19 would be transmitted that way.  WHO's estimate that this was false appears to have driven any number of wrong interventions against the disease, sadly, and it's an appraisal that seems to be strongly linked to the reasons why mask mandates (and even masks, H/T Powerline), lockdowns, contact tracing, and the like do not seem to have been effective at slowing or stopping the spread of the disease. 

If it's an aerosol transmission, then you can get it from any number of places and have absolutely no clue about why or where you got it.  That certainly was my family's case.  It also illustrates why admitting COVID patients into nursing homes was so deadly--no matter what precautions you took, it was going to spread simply due to the shared HVAC systems.

The one good thing about this is that it is a good illustration of how irresponsible researchers can "bend" research to their own ends by playing games with which notion is the null hypothesis.  I've seen it a fair amount, obviously most strongly where the taxpayer is paying the bill for the work.