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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNow, the president suddenly needs science.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/367/6483/1169Do us a favor
H. Holden Thorp
Science 13 Mar 2020:
Vol. 367, Issue 6483, pp. 1169
DOI: 10.1126/science.abb6502
Do me a favor, speed it up, speed it up. This is what U.S. President Donald Trump told the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference, recounting what he said to pharmaceutical executives about the progress toward a vaccine for severe acute respiratory syndromecoronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Anthony Fauci, the long-time leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been telling the president repeatedly that developing the vaccine will take at least a year and a halfthe same message conveyed by pharmaceutical executives. Apparently, Trump thought that simply repeating his request would change the outcome.
China has rightfully taken criticism for squelching attempts by scientists to report information during the outbreak. Now, the United States government is doing similar things. Informing Fauci and other government scientists that they must clear all public comments with Vice President Mike Pence is unacceptable. This is not a time for someone who denies evolution, climate change, and the dangers of smoking to shape the public message. Thank goodness Fauci, Francis Collins [director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)], and their colleagues across federal agencies are willing to soldier on and are gradually getting the message out.
While scientists are trying to share facts about the epidemic, the administration either blocks those facts or restates them with contradictions. Transmission rates and death rates are not measurements that can be changed with will and an extroverted presentation. The administration has repeatedly saidas it did last weekthat virus spread in the United States is contained, when it is clear from genomic evidence that community spread is occurring in Washington state and beyond. That kind of distortion and denial is dangerous and almost certainly contributed to the federal government's sluggish response. After 3 years of debating whether the words of this administration matter, the words are now clearly a matter of life and death.
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I don't expect politicians to know Maxwell's equations for electromagnetism or the Diels-Alder chemical reaction (although I can dream). But you can't insult science when you don't like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can't give on demand. For the past 4 years, President Trump's budgets have made deep cuts to science, including cuts to funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH. With this administration's disregard for science of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the stalled naming of a director for the Office of Science and Technology Policyall to support political goalsthe nation has had nearly 4 years of harming and ignoring science.
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Now, the president suddenly needs science. (Original Post)
G_j
Mar 2020
OP
Fyrefox
(300 posts)1. Luddites, all...
Trump and many of his rabid followers have long relished in a variety of anti-scientific notions, including fringe beliefs such as vaccines causing autism, and windmills causing cancer. Science presents to the Trumpers inconvenient truths, and truth is something that they would pick and choose at will, regarding anything else as a "hoax," or a fabrication of the "liberal media." This is an anti-science, anti-education administration...
These OPs are providing so much cannon fodder for our presumptive nominee Joe Biden to blister the orange anus with in the months ahead. .... Four years of intentionally harming and ignoring science, and now he suddenly wants science to do me a favor, speed it up, speed it up.