Pop quiz: If science is now under siege from populism, is it the fault of populists, or science? Answer: The Economist whinges that “In America science-sceptics are now in charge” and promptly shows why by adding “The Trump administration seems to want less clean energy and more preventable diseases”. Boo Trump administration. Evil genius-dolts. Yay science. Left-wing saviours. To assert that the Trump administration wants diseases, rather than arguing that it holds a mistaken view of what makes for health, is precisely the kind of nasty ad hominem question-begging belligerence that has brought “science” into disrepute. (And furnishes a classic illustration of Thomas Sowell’s thesis in A Conflict of Visions about the tendency of the left to emphasize motives over methods and in consequence turn ugly fast.) As we have quoted Roger Pielke Jr. on this point, “What Did We Expect Would Happen?” from the politicization of science including dragging it down to the rhetorical gutter? And as we then asked and ask again, “now that the predictable has arrived, have they learned any lessons that might help make it stop?” And hollering that those orange vandals hate clean energy because they are evil instead of acknowledging doubts about its reliability or its actual green credentials, or the ways in which making science a government enterprise necessarily corrupts it, is to invite the public to regard scientists as just politicians in lab coats. In which case what do you expect to happen?

Including on diseases and the resurgence of some troubling ones in the face of growing vaccine skepticism. We ourselves do not want more preventable diseases. (Or the other kind, in case it needs to be said, although it’s not entirely clear what diseases are not at least in part preventable.) But we do want more rational debate about science and less hyperaggressive gatekeeping and enforcement of orthodoxy. Including about the fact that some vaccines work better than others; “vaccine” is not a category that includes a large number of identical things. And that very few vaccines are perfect; the actual argument in favour is that a great many of them offer benefits that far outweigh the risks.

Since the topic here is the Trump administration, let’s be clear at this point that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is, and let’s be fair to him, a crackpot. Many of his views on medicine are not just weird, they’re downright dangerous. And in a world where public discussion was more rational he would not be an important figure. But if you accept that view, especially the last part of it, it follows necessarily that the reason he is an important figure is that public discussion is conspicuously irrational nowadays. Which isn’t his fault but that of his critics, just as those who can’t out-argue opponents they insist are ridiculous dolts indict themselves, especially by overlooking that obvious point.

When it comes to vaccines, the reason more and more people are skeptical of them isn’t that RFK Jr. is a crackpot. Crackpots are a dime a dozen, and most get the attention they deserve. The problem here is that that the Establishment, scientific, political, and journalistic, took wildly unreasonable conflicting positions on COVID vaccines in particular, and did it with an air of viciously intolerant certainty. To this day they bitterly resist any investigation of its origins, lest they be caught suppressing the lab leak theory for wildly unscientific reasons including inexplicable sympathy for Communist China and its biowarfare research. And if you actually go back and listen to what we were initially told about the vaccines, that they would 100% prevent you from getting COVID, and we were told that, over and over, including by the President of the United States without a murmur of scientific dissent, it’s clear they were not just wildly untrue, they were based on nothing beyond a frantic urge to compel compliance.

Indeed, look at this AP “Fact Check” of Biden’s claim that “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” They offered:

“THE FACTS: Again, he painted with too broad a brush as he described in stark terms the disparity between those who got their shots and those who haven’t. The disparity is real, but a small number of breakthrough infections happen and health officials say they are not a cause for alarm.”

It sounds exactly like the kind of sober analysis we’re calling for. But actually it’s nothing of the sort, because this “small number of breakthrough infections” was actually extremely large even if you got six boosters in rapid succession, something real vaccines do not require, and “health officials say they are not a cause for alarm” is pure state propaganda. If COVID were half as serious as they said, why would getting it not be cause for alarm? And if getting it were not cause for alarm, why did we spend months proving we’d been “vaccinated” to go to restaurants or on airplanes? And why only for COVID? Surely a person with active yellow fever or polio or tuberculosis or HIB or pertussis should be turned away, yet nobody ever asked anyone that question and they still don’t. Why not? No rationale was ever offered, just threats of severe penalties financial, social and even custodial.

You may mock the threat of yellow fever in our day and age. But actually, as we ourselves were surprised to discover in preparing to go to Senegal to film our In the Dark documentary, many vaccines we had received in childhood and confidently believed furnished permanent protection actually wear off, some with surprising speed.

The actual reason there are not many cases of such horrors in advanced societies is that “herd immunity” of young people in particular, so the disease can’t get a foothold, allows a lot of older folks who actually could get them to wander about blithely unaware that they’re not shielded, they’re just not exposed.

Seriously. Check your records, then talk to your doctor. Because our response was not to drink homeopathic soup, it was to find out the scarily long list of ones that had lapsed and get updated vaccines.

A great many of them work extremely well. Which is not to say there are no potential side effects, just that any rational person on calculating the odds would far rather take that risk (probability times severity if it happens) than the risk of getting the disease (ditto). But for people to bellow that vaccines are like magic, or to claim that feeble ones like the COVID vaccine are better than the best thing ever, brings the whole enterprise dangerously and irresponsibly into disrepute. What did they think would happen? And whose fault do they think it is?

The same can, of course, be said for the heavy-handed enforcement of rules about wearing cloth masks that no doctor who should not instantly be expelled from the profession would dream of putting on to enter an operating room or visit a patient with a dangerous airborne illness. And lockdowns that sneered at any of the pernicious mental or physical side-effects of being confined to our homes and denied social interaction or exercise for months and, crucially, still resist any meaningful inquiry into this ham-fisted, block-headed, iron-booted response.

Then there’s the food pyramid. Over half a century ago, driven in large part by Sen. George McGovern, the U.S. government began insisting that carbs were healthy and nearly everything else humanity had been eating since the invention of agriculture, or possibly fire or even teeth, was toxic. It was crazy on the face of it, and resulted in an epidemic of obesity as people shunned bacon for muffins which are basically doughnuts in disguise. And because it is chic to hate the United States, governments everywhere um uh fell into line including the Canadian, which began actively propagandizing including in state schools for a diet pretty much guaranteed to undermine your health.

Remember when eggs were white ovals of death, fettuccini Alfredo a heart attack on a plate, and red meat a suicide attempt? Of course it should not have taken someone like Kennedy to challenge this taboo. But it did, and again, that strange situation isn’t his fault. It’s the fault of the reputable who insisted on shouting nonsense at us. As we say to Trump critics more generally, if he’s so awful, why are you not easily able to defeat him in debate?

Of course some simply despair of the rationality of their shabby fellows and tacitly reject self-government for thinly-concealed authoritarian technocracy. Which oddly seems to further enflame populist sentiments. For some reason people hate being treated like vulgar morons. Proving, to others, that they are exactly that.

Consider the end of that Economist article:

“The most troubling scientific consequence of the Trump era, however, lies beyond any one research area. The president has shown that expert panels and funding, like many other things over which the executive branch holds sway, can be wielded as a partisan cudgel. This may foster exactly the sort of mistrust of America’s scientific bureaucracy that he and his allies have long harboured. This time, tragically, the mistrust would be justified.”

This time? Are we really to believe, and should we not be shocked that the author believes, that under Democratic presidents expert panels and funding were not sometimes wielded as a partisan cudgel? That Donald Trump invented it? What of Eisenhower’s warning about federal money corrupting research, issued in 1960? People now seem to think it normal for politicians and bureaucrats to lay down the party line on science, often in great detail but, as the Manhattan Contrarian retorts, it’s not.

Moreover, it doesn’t represent “following the science”, it constitutes leading it, and instead of raising the reputation of politicians to the level once enjoyed by scientists, it drags the latter down into the slime. As we commented in that earlier item:

“we do not say that what Donald Trump is doing is wise…. But we do say that if ‘science’ finds itself under attack in the United States for being politicized, dogmatic and loony-left, the best response would be to prove that it’s not, rather than striving to confirm the critics’ claims.”

One of our rules for public debate is that if people suspect you’re a clown, don’t show up in a fright wig. It seems so basic. Yet evidently the Order of the Big Red Nose is still marching proudly about ridiculing Trump.