Trump lashes out at findings of studies that contradict him

President says scientists undermining his efforts to ease restrictions

WASHINGTON—“A Trump enemy statement,” he said of one study. “A political hit job,” he said of another.

As U.S. President Donald Trump pushes to reopen the country despite warnings from doctors about the consequences of moving too quickly during the pandemic, he has been lashing out at scientists whose conclusions he doesn’t like.

Twice this week, Trump has not only dismissed the findings of studies, but suggested — without evidence — that their authors were motivated by politics and out to undermine his efforts to roll back coronavirus restrictions.

First, it was a study funded in part by his own government’s National Institutes of Health that raised alarms about the use of hydroxychloroquine, finding higher overall mortality in coronavirus patients who took the drug while in Veterans Administration hospitals.

Trump and many of his allies had been touting the drug as a miracle cure, and Trump this week revealed that he has been taking it to try to ward off the virus — despite an FDA warning that it should only be used in hospital settings or clinical trials because of the risk of serious side-effects, including lifethreatening heart problems.

The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and most well-respected medical journals, published a new study Friday that echoed those findings. “If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, they were giving it to people that were in very bad shape. They were very old, almost dead,” Trump said Tuesday. “It was a Trump enemy statement.”

He offered similar pushback Thursday to a new study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. It found that more than 61 per cent of COVID-19 infections and 55 per cent of reported deaths — nearly 36,000 people — could have been been prevented had social-distancing measures been put in place one week sooner. “Columbia’s an institution that’s very liberal,” Trump said Thursday. “I think it’s just a political hit job, you want to know the truth.”

Trump has long been skeptical of mainstream science — dismissing human-made climate change as a “hoax,” suggesting that noise from wind turbines causes cancer and claiming that exercise can deplete a body’s finite amount of energy. It’s part of a larger skepticism of expertise and backlash against “elites” that has become increasingly popular among Trump’s conservative base.

But undermining Americans’ trust in the integrity and objectivity of scientists is especially dangerous during a pandemic when the public is relying on its leaders to develop policies based on the best available information, said Larry Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor who is an expert in public health.

“We have every right to expect that our leaders will use the best science to keep us safe and protect us,” Gostin said. “And so the idea that you reject objective scientific information that could inform policies that have life-or-death consequences is unfathomable.”