Charles Chapin on Airborne Infection

The unwillingness to acknowledge the likelihood that aerosols are a major means of COVID-19 transmission can be traced to Charles Chapin (1856-1941), an American public health researcher.

Charles Chapin writes in The Sources and Modes of Infection that:

In reviewing the subject of air infection it becomes evident that our knowledge is still far too scanty, and that the available evidence is far from conclusive. ¹

While Chapin admits that he knows too little about airborne infection he firmly belives in contact infection.

If it should prove, as I firmly believe, that contact infection is the chief way in which the contagious diseases spread, and exaggerated idea of the importance of air-borne infection is most mischievous.²

Chapin is so sure that he is right that he writes:

While it is not possible at the present to state with exactness the part played by aerial infection in the transmission of the different infectious diseases, we are by the evidence forced to the conclusion that the current ideas in regard to the importance of infection by air are unwarrented. ³

Chapin feels great satisfaction with his conclusion:

It will be a great relief to most persons to be freed from the specter of infected air, a specter which has pursued the race from the time of Hippocrates… ⁴

And now, 110 years later, aerosol transmission is no longer such an exaggerated idea.

Notes:
¹ Charles Chapin, The Sources and Modes of Infection (Wiley & Sons, 2nd Ed., 1912), p. 314.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.