These doctors wanted to get schools back to normal. Their botched effort may backfire.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/01/doctors-urgency-normal-toolkit-schools-covid-normal-botched-effort-backfire/

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First, let’s talk about the toolkit format. The idea of prepared talking points isn’t new, of course, but it seems to be having a moment. Consider the remarkable success of the conservative special interest groups that, for the past year, have been making slide decks to help parents take on their local school boards. Across the country, during open comment periods, meeting attendees have used the templates to voice concerns, mostly about pandemic health measures and discussions of race in the classroom. The groups’ talking points have been effective not only in sowing chaos at school board meetings, but in radicalizing parents.

Such efforts also have a way of taking on lives of their own: Once they’re unleashed, the original intentions of their creators don’t really matter. This Frankenstein effect is a terrifying possibility for the Urgency of Normal toolkit, which could be marshaled by groups with fringe anti-scientific views. It’s already happening. Just yesterday, a holistic pediatrician with a track record of downplaying the benefits of vaccinating children against Covid shared the toolkit with more than 55,000 followers. Smith, the George Washington University epidemiologist, said she learned of the toolkit from school board members who’d had it sent to them by riled-up parents. “This has the veneer of certainty and near perfect professionalism and correctness,” Smith told me, adding that she’s concerned the toolkit could “lead you to incorrectly make your own risk benefit analysis.”

But there is a more subtle, and depressing, potential outcome, a result whose ramifications could extend beyond the debates over mask mandates and, indeed, the pandemic itself. When a group of renowned physicians misrepresents science to further a cause, the public trust in science is further degraded—especially in the eyes of people who, because of misinformation they’ve encountered previously on social media, have grown skeptical of settled science. “The same mouth that says ‘you must take your vaccines’ is saying kids must go back to school,” notes Black, the UBC psychiatrist. “And if the evidence for kids must go back to school is that poor, what does it mean about your statements about kids taking vaccines?”

When scientists champion flawed data, they endanger other scientists. We’re already seeing an erosion of confidence in the scientific community thanks to powerful anti-science advocates, including Republican lawmakers and right-wing media personalities. Researchers who once worked in relative obscurity face death threats. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist with Baylor College of Medicine who has written and spoken extensively about what he calls anti-science aggressors, led an effort to develop the first low-cost, patent-free Covid vaccine. He nevertheless found himself “under unrelenting attacks from far right extremists,” he tweeted last year.

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