Thumb on the Scale Public trust in science is eroding, thanks to the scientific establishment’s recent forays into partisan politics. By Joel Zinberg M.D.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/waning-public-trust-in-science
Americans’ trust in the scientific establishment took another hit last week with the revelation that a prominent advocate of adolescent transgender treatments had suppressed the findings of her federally funded research showing that puberty blockers did not improve mental health in children with gender distress. Johanna Olson-Kennedy worried that the study’s findings would be “weaponized” by opponents of the transgender treatments she promotes. This reinforces suspicions that scientists and their publications are less interested in the search for truth than they are in promoting progressive political causes.
This advocacy extends to partisan politics itself. In only the second presidential election endorsement in its history, Scientific American urged readers to “Vote for Kamala Harris to Support Science, Health and the Environment.” Two months earlier, Nature, the prestigious British science publication, extolled Harris’s background as the daughter of a scientist and her support for diversity initiatives in STEM, a single-payer health insurance program, abortion rights, and climate change, enthusing that her candidacy has “stirred optimism among scientists.”
Both publications broke with their traditional nonpartisanship in 2020 when they endorsed Joe Biden. Similarly, the normally nonpolitical New England Journal of Medicine published an October 2020 editorial castigating the Trump administration and unfavorably comparing its pandemic response to that of China, which “chose strict quarantine and isolation.” Trump administration officials, the editorial alleged, were “dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”
Never mind that it was already known, from countries such as Sweden, that lockdowns were unnecessary and that Chinese officials suppressed information about Covid’s outbreak and underreported cases and deaths. In fact, a study I coauthored found that U.S. states that adopted the lockdown strategies the New England Journal of Medicine and other publications promoted had no better health outcomes than states that rejected them—and had far worse economic and educational outcomes. Despite the approval of Covid-19 vaccines in December 2020, deaths due to Covid-19 were higher during 2021 (460,513), Biden’s first year in office, than during 2020 (384,535), when Trump officials lacked a vaccine.
It’s remarkable that these scientific journals have returned to politics as two major newspapers—the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post—have announced they will not endorse a candidate this year. Similarly, in a marked departure from labor unions’ traditional Democratic political advocacy, the International Association of Fire Fighters and the Teamsters announced they will not endorse either presidential candidate this year. But the science journals seem determined to push their political agenda—facts, propriety, and consequences be damned.
These political forays have undermined Americans’ confidence in the objectivity of scientific research. A survey conducted during the pandemic found that people believed scientific research and recommendations were politically motivated. Nature’s 2020 endorsement did little to change views of Biden or Trump, but it did reduce trust in the publication and others, as well as scientists in general. Nor are Trump supporters the only ones whose trust is falling. A Pew Research Center survey found that the erosion in public confidence in science and medical scientists has continued among both Republicans and Democrats after the pandemic.
Scientists and their publications should stick to objective science and leave the political science to others.
Joel Zinberg is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, director of the Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well Being Initiative, and an associate clinical professor of surgery at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
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