I’m not a virologist, so this is a guess from the outside.
Most of modern science works on question substitution. You want to know whether A causes B, but this is hard to measure, so you look at whether A and B are correlated in observational studies. You want to know whether or not A is related to B, and so you look at the probability of observing what you did if they were not related, and conclude they are if that probability is sufficiently low. And so on.
As well, most of modern science is determined by a three-sided market, where both grant-makers need to like a proposal enough to fund it, scientists have to consider a study interesting/rewarding enough to run it, and journals need to consider a study interesting enough to publish it. Would a straightforward experiment as you describe gotten funded, run, and published?
In that background, my main hypothesis is: they already had an answer to a question that seemed related enough that they pretended the questions were the same and thus the answers were the same. [See this article; it wasn’t until during the pandemic that someone traced down why virologists believed what they believed about airborne transmission, and also details the difficulties getting published of someone trying to fix broken beliefs about this sort of basic science.]
I’m not a virologist, so this is a guess from the outside.
Most of modern science works on question substitution. You want to know whether A causes B, but this is hard to measure, so you look at whether A and B are correlated in observational studies. You want to know whether or not A is related to B, and so you look at the probability of observing what you did if they were not related, and conclude they are if that probability is sufficiently low. And so on.
As well, most of modern science is determined by a three-sided market, where both grant-makers need to like a proposal enough to fund it, scientists have to consider a study interesting/rewarding enough to run it, and journals need to consider a study interesting enough to publish it. Would a straightforward experiment as you describe gotten funded, run, and published?
In that background, my main hypothesis is: they already had an answer to a question that seemed related enough that they pretended the questions were the same and thus the answers were the same. [See this article; it wasn’t until during the pandemic that someone traced down why virologists believed what they believed about airborne transmission, and also details the difficulties getting published of someone trying to fix broken beliefs about this sort of basic science.]