Our View: Trump denies science, but science won’t be denied
It is perhaps fitting that, as President Donald Trump prepared to address the Republican National Convention on Thursday night, a Category 4 hurricane crashed into the Gulf Coast, wildfires were burning in California and the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 topped 180,000.
Science can be ignored, denied, spun and politicized. But in the end it will make itself heard. It is being heard loud and clear in these catastrophic, or potentially catastrophic, occurrences.
It’s almost as though nature is punishing America for two of its worst instances of escapism, denialism and repeated policy failure.
One is inaction on climate change, which is helping to spawn hellish Western wildfires, drought and decreasing snowcaps in the Rockies, frequent sunny-day flooding in coastal zones, and anomalous weather events like twin tropical storms in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Laura’s rapid intensification was fueled by unusually warm waters in the Gulf.
The second instance is an ungainly, profit-driven health care system that was ill prepared for a pandemic to begin with. The response has been made worse because the president has been misstating facts, pitching miracle cures and desperately trying to spin some kind of political gain out of morbid and macabre events.
The pandemic doesn’t care about the presidential election, and it won’t be used as a stage prop. If public officials don’t use science to full effect as a countermeasure, it will continue to take human lives with indifference. Likewise, the climate will only get warmer if action is not taken, unimpeded by the the glib deniers on cable television and in government.
The warming globe and the horrific scope of the pandemic in the USA are both consequences of the belittling of science. It should not come as a surprise that an administration so into denying climate science would also botch the response to the pandemic.
The Trump administration failed to listen to doctors on the severity of the crisis early on, and it was late to promote the wearing of masks and to prioritize testing. Now the White House has its sights set on making a big announcement on vaccines or treatments before Election Day.
To that end, Trump and his team of senior health officials misstated facts, misrepresented data and made unsupported statements last weekend on the efficacy of an experimental COVID-19 treatment that received an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration.
The treatment, which involves extracting antibody-rich blood plasma from recovered patients and injecting it into the bloodstream of sick ones, holds considerable promise. But administration officials pulled out a small subsample from a Mayo Clinic study on plasma treatment to claim that it reduced deaths by 35%, a claim that both bewildered and troubled the study’s authors.
Everyone wants to see effective treatments. But to politicize scientific announcements is to raise suspicion that corners are being cut. It could also prompt Americans to distrust government just when trust is needed to promote vaccinations.
In any event, science and nature will have the last word.