When medical and scientific journals wave their progressive flags, half the country loses trust.
When medical and scientific journals wave their progressive flags, half the country loses trust.
W hen the actor Christopher Reeve, who’d been gravely injured in a horse-riding accident in 1995, died in 2004, Democrats wasted no time turning the actor’s paralysis into a political talking point.
“If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we can do when [John] Kerry is president,” said vice-presidential nominee John Edwards in Iowa, “people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
At issue was stem-cell research, which Democrats were praising as the cure-all for every malady known to humankind. President George W. Bush had been the first chief executive to approve federal funding for stem-cell research, but he set some limits on fetal stem cells, leading candidates like Kerry and Edwards to claim that Bush was “banning” stem-cell research. In a radio address, Kerry even falsely suggested that stem cells could have been used to cure the Alzheimer’s disease of former president Ronald Reagan, who had also died that year.
“In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery,” wrote columnist Charles Krauthammer, himself wheelchair-bound, at the time. “Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately raising for personal gain false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable,” he wrote. (Unfortunately for Edwards’s wife, there was no cure for a husband who fathers a child out of wedlock while she suffered from a cancer that took her life.)
For years, there was an understanding that people who studied “science,” especially medical procedures that saved lives, had a responsibility to take great care in how they handled their political affiliations. Science itself was treated as beyond a matter of mere opinion; trials are run, evidence is gathered, and cures are developed. Partisan conjecture didn’t lead to Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine, and the engineers who created space travel didn’t master physics by bickering over politics. These were serious people with a focused vision: to save lives and advance the boundaries of the human experience.
But many of those engaged in scientific research no longer value the trust placed in them by regular citizens. This week, Scientific American once again endorsed the Democratic candidate for president, saying that Kamala Harris “pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy,” “supports education, public health and reproductive rights,” and “treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.”
The magazine tried to pitch this endorsement as a historical event, noting that during its 179-year history, it had backed only one candidate before. But that candidate was Joe Biden in 2020, leaving readers to wonder whether the magazine has undergone a permanent structural change, not whether society has.
In making this endorsement, Scientific American follows Nature in stepping out and getting political. But as Christine Rosen noted last year in National Review, Nature’s 2020 endorsement of Biden had more of an effect on the public’s view of the magazine than it did on the election.
That is because people don’t care which candidates the editors of science magazines are voting for, and they care even less which ones those magazine editors want them to vote for. But people do care about the bias they are getting in the periodicals they read. A study conducted by Floyd Zhang showed that trust in Nature’s impartiality plummeted among Trump supporters after the magazine endorsed Biden.
“This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered,” wrote Zhang. He ultimately found that “political endorsement by scientific journals can undermine and polarize public confidence in the endorsing journals and the scientific community.”
In the past few years, America’s battle with Covid saw Republicans’ faith in science collapse. According to Gallup, in 1975, Republicans actually trusted science more than Democrats did, 72 percent to 67 percent. But after seeing the politicization of the Covid virus, Republicans’ confidence in science had dropped to 45 percent by 2021.
It certainly doesn’t help that important voices in the research community alter their positions based solely on politics. As the Covid virus ravaged America, scientific professionals condemned schools trying to keep their doors open and criticized businesses that attempted to keep enough cash coming in to stay alive. And yet, as hundreds of thousands of people crammed American streets to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, hardly a scientist could be found to offer any condemnation of these mass gatherings.
Some of the young protesters probably had elderly family members at home for whom the virus could be fatal — and yet these potential “superspreader” events were not only allowed but often encouraged by medical professionals.
Some of the science promoted by progressives has ventured into the needlessly weird. A few years ago, gender activists formed a group called the “Trans Doe Task Force” which argued that modern archaeologists should not assign a gender to the human remains they find because they did not know how that individual identified thousands of years ago. The group’s goal was to “explore ways in which current standards in forensic human identification do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.”
Further, in 2022, Jennifer Raff published Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, in which she argued that there are “no neat divisions between physically or genetically ‘male’ or ‘female’ individuals.” The University of Kansas professor argued that researchers cannot discern the gender of a 9,000-year-old biologically female Peruvian hunter because they don’t know whether said hunter identified as male or female — a “duality” concept that was, she says, “imposed by Christian colonizers.”
And, of course, those constantly bleating on about their belief in “science” are more than happy to wear ideological blindfolds when advances in science skew the public in favor of a more conservative position. New technologies have shown us, for instance, that at 20 weeks of development, an unborn child can recognize the voice of his mother and can have dreams. In some children, teeth have begun to form, and the child can suck her thumb. By the fourth month, the baby can yawn, hiccup, stretch, and make faces and has developed eyebrows, eyelashes, nails, and reproductive organs. Even as early as two months, bones have developed, as well as facial features, ears, eyes, arms, legs, toes, and fingers.
These facts have pushed the public into roundly opposing abortion for late-term babies, who are just as much a human being inside the womb as they are outside. Once they pack their bags and make a one-foot move into the arms of the obstetrician, they are fully born humans. And yet many people who believe in “science” are still adamant that such babies are still not human and a mother should be able to choose to abort them up until birth (a position, as far as we know, that Kamala Harris still holds).
Scientific American’s reasons for favoring Harris don’t even hold up. The magazine supports her, for instance, because it wants to keep Medicaid going. But a 2008 study in Oregon showed that people with Medicaid were not necessarily healthier. The study did show some changes in health-care utilization and some small benefits in diabetes detection, help with depression, and small improvements in a few other areas; but for the most part, the general health of the respondents after two years didn’t change. This was an actual study, ignored by the people who conduct such studies, because it didn’t comport with the incentives brought on by their politics.
For now, progressives will continue to hold their vague marches in favor of “science,” listening to television scientists like Bill Nye (who is evidently taken seriously because his name rhymes with “science guy”) who suggest punishments for parents who have too many children. (One March for Science was emceed by Crazy Ex-Girlfriend director and star Rachel Bloom, who once visited Nye’s show to perform a song titled “My Sex Junk” that encourages “butt stuff.” Historians believe this ditty was first performed by Galileo in 1589, but records are unclear.)
One thing we do know, however, is that when science is politicized, it will immediately turn half of America’s population against it. Sure, Donald Trump’s inane ramblings about injecting disinfectant to treat Covid or suggesting unproven drugs as cures fed into vaccine skepticism, but so did misinformation on the left about the need to keep schools closed, keep toddlers in masks, and keep six feet away from people in the park.
There is no monopoly on “science,” only real researchers doing the best they can with the information they have. And if we can no longer trust those people, scientific advancement and medical progress will cease.