Back on March 14, Wired published an article with a very clever headline: “They Say Coronavirus Isn’t Airborne — but It’s Definitely Borne By Air.”

To bother with technical numerical precision, there were 112 days between that piece and the publication of a July 4 New York Times article about “239 Experts with One Big Claim: The Coronavirus is Airborne.” It turned out to be a language issue. The New York Times described scientists who disagreed with the World Health Organization’s “rigid” preset technical definition of “airborne” that coronavirus transmission didn’t slot well into. The WHO had just broken with many of its own individual scientists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and falsely “said airborne transmission of the virus is possible only after medical procedures that produce aerosols, or droplets smaller than 5 microns.” The piece described how “several experts criticized the W.H.O.’s messaging throughout the pandemic, saying the staff seems to prize scientific perspective over clarity. ‘What you say is designed to help people understand the nature of a public health problem,’ said Dr. William Aldis, a longtime W.H.O. collaborator based in Thailand. ‘That’s different than just scientifically describing a disease or a virus.’”