Does it all come out in the wash? Trump’s disinfectant riff latest of many science clashes
What US President Donald Trump says and does often flies in the face of mainstream science. Coronavirus and the idea of injecting disinfectants is only the latest episode.
When a rare solar eclipse happened in 2017, astronomers and eye doctors repeatedly warned people not to stare directly at the sun without protection. Photos show Trump looked anyway. He later donned protective glasses.
For decades, scientists have called climate change a pressing issue, pointing to data, physics and chemistry. Trump regularly called it a hoax until recently. He also claims noise from wind turbines — which he refers to as windmills — causes cancer.
When Trump wanted to defend his warning that Alabama was threatened by Hurricane Dorian last year, he displayed an official weather map altered with a marker to extend the danger areas. Alabama National Weather Service meteorologists were chastised by their agency chief when they issued tweets to reassure worried residents they were not in the path of the hurricane.
On Friday, Trump raised the idea of injections of disinfectant to fight the coronavirus, which health officials warned would be dangerous. The president later claimed he was being sarcastic. Trump also suggested ultraviolet light, even internal light, could be a possible preventative measure, contrary to scientific advice.
On Saturday, as the recorded US death toll passed the 50,000 mark, the Food and Drug Administration issued an alert about the dangers of using a malaria drug Trump has repeatedly promoted for coronavirus patients.
“When he starts to air things like that [injection], it’s definitely a danger to the public because some people
We’ve seen daily statements that run counter to reality. Granger Morgan
might actually do that,” said Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu, energy secretary in the Obama administration.
“This isn’t science. This is something else.”
“Our president certainly has high confidence in his beliefs,” said Chu, chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.
Trump seems to put science, medicine and controlled studies on equal footing with rumour and anecdotes, said Sudip Parikh, a biochemist and CEO of AAAS.
Mixing those two up when talking to the public is “terrible for communication,” Parikh said.
White House spokesman Judd Deere said “any suggestion that the president does not value scientific data or the important work of scientists throughout his time in office is patently false.” Deere pointed to “data-driven” decisions on the virus, such as limiting travel from highly infected areas, expediting vaccine development and issuing social distancing guidance.
Presidents of both parties often put politics before science, and Trump is not unusual there, Granger Morgan, a Carnegie Mellon University engineering and policy professor who has advised Democratic and Republican administrations, said. But
this administration has regularly contradicted science and doctors.
“We’ve seen daily statements that run counter to reality, and science is about physical reality,” Morgan said. “Science matters.”
Both Morgan and Chu said Thursday’s ultraviolet and disinfectant comments could end up hurting people. They pointed to a case in Arizona where a couple misinterpreted Trump’s promotion of the malaria drug and wrongly used related chemicals; one died.
Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Centre for Science and Democracy, said the actions of Trump and his administration “have ignored science, censored science, manipulated science across agencies.” “It’s a different beef than we’ve seen in past administrations,” Goldman said. “This administration, there’s a lot of disinterest and disrespect for science and the process.”
Meteorologist Ryan Maue, a conservative scholar, said he and other conservatives like Trump’s policy agenda of deregulation, including pulling out of the Paris climate agreement.
But when it comes to communicating science, Trump “is a mess,” Maue said. He’s trying to be funny and folksy “and it doesn’t work and the media is eating that stuff up alive. And I think that’s fair.”