The real reason people don’t trust science has nothing to do with scientists

The real reason people don’t trust science has nothing to do with scientists

By Dan Vergano edited by Jeanne Brner

“We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” said the hot dog–costumed protagonist from a 2019 comedy sketch, pretending not to know who had crashed a car shaped like a hot dog.

In the sketch shot popular memepassers-by did not believe his story. Scientists, and the rest of us, might well follow their example now, considering The November annual Pew Research Center survey of public confidence in science.

The Pew survey found that 76 percent of respondents express “a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest.” That’s slightly more than last year, but still down from pre-pandemic measurements, suggesting that one in ten additional Americans have lost trust in scientists since 2019.

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For what? Pew’s statement and many reporting on the findings somehow missed the obvious culprit: four-plus years of propaganda. campaign by Donald Trump’s allies to change the fault of the scientists for his the first administration is disastrous, botched management of the COVID pandemic who has so far killed at least 1.2 million Americans.

Even the hot dog guy would turn white transparency of the scapegoat. It was obviously undertaken to vaccinate Trump of voters are blamed for the pandemic. Propaganda started four years ago with a cheeky USA TODAY screed of his administration’s economic advisor, Peter Navarro (later sent to federal prison on unrelated costs). Navarro wrongly blamed Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for the administration’s myriad failures in responding to the pandemic. Similar inanities followed by the Trump White House, leading to years of right-wing nonsense And surreal audiences which ended last June with the Republicans pandemic committee members do everything but wear hot dog costumes during interrogations Fauci. Intimidation a scientific leader behind Covid vaccines who saved millions of lives has a combative audience proven as lying as shameful.

The results of the Pew survey, however, show that this propaganda worked on some Republican voters. The drop in public trust in science reported by the survey is almost entirely contained within this circle, plunging from 85 percent approval. among Republican voters in April 2020 to 66 percent now. It barely moved for those who weren’t treated to nightly doses of revisionist history in an echo chamber – where the media claimed that masking, school And trade restrictions, And vaccineswere not necessities to ward off a deadly new disease. It’s no wonder that Republican voters excess mortality rates were 1.5 times those among Democrats after the advent of COVID vaccines.

Instead of noting the role of this propaganda in their numbers, Pew’s statement about the survey only highlights the perception that scientists are not “good communicators,” shared by 52 percent of respondents, and 47% who said: “scientific researchers feel superior”. to others” in the investigation.

This explanation echoes the “kick me” sign that scientific institutions have stuck on their behinds out of distrust at least since 1985, when the UK’s Royal Society warned against “the hostility, even indifference, towards science and technology”, in a report: Public understanding of science. “Scientists must learn to communicate better with all segments of the public,” he concludes.

That prescription fits with scientific responses to the Pew survey results, said Marcia McNutt, head of the National Academy of Sciences. the Washington Post: “This gives us an opportunity to re-examine what we need to do to restore trust in science. » And that corresponds to the advice for the month of December NASEM report on scientific misinformation: “Scientists, medical professionals, and medical professionals who choose to take on leadership roles as public communicators of science should understand how their communications can be misinterpreted lack of context or in the wrong context. » This completely ignores the deliberate misinterpretation of science to promote political goals, the main type of scientific misinformation dominating the modern public sphere.

What is happening is no secret: Lawmakers funded by the oil industry and other beaks have climate scientists have been equally vilified for decades to avoid paying the price of global warming. A study published in 2016 in American Sociological Review concluded that the slow erosion of the American public’s trust in science between 1974 and 2010 was almost entirely due to conservatives. These conservatives had adopted “limited government» politics, which conflicts with science advisory role of the “fifth branch” in setting regulations – as most clearly demonstrated by the FDA’s resistance to Trump’s calls for wholesale approval of dangerous drugs to treat COVID. This political flavor has led scientists to be wary of the collateral damage of a half-century-old attack on regulation. The complete failure of an unscientific and limited government response to the 2020 pandemic has only amplified this resentment – ​​stoked by hate targeting Fauci – to reduce the trust in science we see today.

“Surveys are well suited to measuring attitudes and describing changes in views over time. They are less well suited to analyzing potential causal factors,” says the survey’s lead author, Alec Tyson, when asked why Pew refrained from making this obvious connection. “While it is beyond the scope of this particular effort, we share an interest in scholarly efforts to understand the role of partisan rhetoric and the broader information environment in shaping opinions. »

Their dislike doesn’t mean we all have to pretend we know where distrust of science comes from: politics. Perhaps the clearest sign of the propaganda campaign is that Republican politicians have been getting high on their own stock of anti-science bullshit. As Trump returns to the White House, his unqualified choice for head of the Department of Health and Human Services is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., including anti-vaccine advocacy contributed to 83 deaths from measles in American Samoa in 2018. For the National Institutes of Health, he chose Stanford University Jay Bhattacharya, one of the three authors of a fatally misguided 2020 plan—pushed then on the Trump White House—to stimulate the coronavirus infections this would have caused “the serious illness and preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people”, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. None of these hot dog choices should be allowed near our vital health agencies.

“It’s obviously that guy, isn’t it,” the cops say at the end of the hot dog guy sketch, before setting off in pursuit. Making the same call to recognize where distrust in science comes from today is just as simple.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the opinions expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily those of Scientific American.