“Follow the science.”
That phrase was invoked endlessly during the last several years. Unfortunately, far too often it was employed to justify unprecedented and sometimes draconian policies. Worse, it was used to censor, silence, and smear skeptics and dissenters. It was even utilized to advance some decidedly unscientific concepts for making major policy decisions, including one the Trump administration is working to repeal.
In what could be considered the first implementation of President Trump’s Restoring Gold Standard Science executive order, the Department of the Interior (DOI) declared it was beginning the process of reversing a Biden administration policy that cut off about 13 million acres of land in Alaska from oil and gas leasing. One of the justifications then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and the Biden team had used for revoking leases in these regions of Alaska was the “recognition of the Indigenous Knowledge of the original stewards of the area.”
The Biden administration acted early in its tenure to “formally recognize” and incorporate “indigenous knowledge” into federal research, policy, and decision making. This allowed it to pander by explicitly denigrating “Western science” and its “methodological dogma” (AKA “the scientific method”) as “a tool to oppress Tribal Nations and Indigenous Peoples.” With respect to the Alaska decision, they chose to elevate the indigenous knowledge of those who supported the administration’s position over the indigenous knowledge of the Native Alaskans who opposed it.
Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT) responded to this application of the very unscientific concept of indigenous knowledge as a basis for such a profound policy change by filing a scientific integrity complaint with both the Department of the Interior and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, one of a dozen such complaints PPT filed during the Biden years.
Incorporating indigenous knowledge represented just one of the ways that, despite their lofty rhetoric, the Biden administration’s energy and climate policymaking veered sharply from sound science. PPT also filed a complaint with the Department of Commerce regarding deficiencies in the data and analysis of the “Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters” project of the department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). After receiving the complaint, NOAA informed PPT it was conducting an investigation. In recent weeks the Trump administration announced it was no longer collecting data for this project, effectively canceling it. The “Billions Project,” as it was called, and the Representative Concentration Pathway scenario 8.5 (RCP 8.5) discussed in the Restoring Gold Standard Science EO are two of the pillars that drove worst-case, alarmist ideology and led to wild and unsupported statements, such as John Kerry’s declaration, presented without evidence, that 15 million people per year die from climate change.
Some of the worst distortions of science occurred in the health care space. Within weeks of President Biden’s inauguration in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was allowing the teachers unions to re-write parts of their school reopening guidance. By outsourcing its work to one of the Biden administration’s most powerful constituencies, CDC prolonged a disastrous policy – one whose damage many then-supporters now admit will be felt for decades.
Unfortunately, this merely continued a calamitous trend of abusing science during COVID. I first realized something was amiss with our public-sector science as an appointee in the Department of Education in 2020. I helped organize calls joined by thousands of local school, district, and higher education officials looking for guidance from CDC staff on opening their schools during COVID. When subjects like social distancing came up it was clear to me from the CDC employees’ responses (Three feet? Six feet? Ten feet?) that they had no science to back up their recommendations and were at best merely guessing.
That trend carried through the Biden administration. PPT documented a number of alleged scientific integrity violations contradicting that pledge.
An August 2021 CDC press release declared, based upon a two-month study exclusively of residents of Kentucky that vaccination offers higher protection than previous COVID infection. Then-NIH director Francis Collins, citing this study, declared in an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, “Yes, Bret, I can say that [the vaccine provides better protection than the antibodies that you get from actually having had Covid-19].”
As reported in the New York Times, CDC officials withheld data about the effects of the COVID-19 vaccines on people aged 18-49 years old because they believed members of the public couldn’t handle the truth. The CDC also conspicuously omitted serious vaccine side effects – including anaphylaxis and myocarditis/pericarditis – from the v-safe system for tracking COVID-19 vaccine side effects, rendering it impossible to track all but minor flu-like symptoms.
A presentation prepared by CDC doctors allegedly misreported COVID mortality in children and the agency refused to make corrections after the errors were identified and brought to the agency’s attention. CDC also recommended COVID vaccines for children from six months to four years even though it appeared the agency’s own data suggested that the vaccines could be viewed as little better than a placebo.
HHS Secretary of Health Rachel Levine constantly declared that “gender-affirming” care was “medically necessary, safe, and effective.” Yet, in response to our Freedom of Information Act request for the scientific basis for such claims, HHS produced a single two-page brochure.
It’s difficult to overstate the audacity of government exhortations to “follow the science” when, as PPT has repeatedly shown, the government was making science follow everything else. President Trump’s executive order Restoring Gold Standard Science represents an opportunity to change direction and restore trust in public-sector science.
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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