Science is supposed to be a constant learning process – an evolution of theories, reasoning, and tests that blazes new trails and opens new horizons of information. Science impacts nearly everything in our world and is responsible for massive breakthroughs throughout history. Due to scientific advancements and inventions, the globe’s population is by and large healthier and better off than a century ago. One such invention is the vaccine, a revolution of health that has saved 154 million people in the last 50 years. This established science, however, is under threat from the American right. Instead of learning, the Republican Party has turned to ignorance — a practice that will cost the country dearly.
Last February, when Donald Trump’s second presidency was still new and freshly horrifying, I wrote about the perils of confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr to the position of Health and Human Services Secretary. Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, has lived up to those fears, dismissing the entirety of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccine advisory board and causing chaos in the agency — he fired the most recent director, Linda Monarez, after only a month in charge. In March, a measles outbreak emerged in Texas that resulted in the deaths of two children, and Kennedy downplayed the severity of the issue.
Yet Kennedy’s travails are merely a symptom of the disease plaguing American health today. Kennedy is part of a broad anti-science shift on the right that seeks to replace facts with conspiracies and impartiality with politics. For years, conservatives’ trust in science has been declining. The Make America Healthy Again movement, an offshoot of Trump’s own MAGA slogan, has built a brand off questioning the science on vaccines with baseless accusations. False accusations that vaccines cause autism have been pushed for years among conspiracy theorists on the right.
The actions of Republican officials reflect those fact-free lines of thinking. Take, for example, Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who is attempting to end all of Florida’s school vaccine mandates. In an interview with CNN, Ladapo said that he had not done any analysis before announcing the new policy, instead focusing on the idea of “parent’s rights.” Removing the mandate goes against decades of research showing that vaccine requirements in schools are the best way of preventing dangerous infectious diseases in children. The merits of the decision are so bad that even Trump, an expert on making choices without evidence, questioned Ladapo’s thinking. Clearly, however, a little pesky science isn’t going to get in the way of trying to earn the right’s favor.
The anti-science phenomenon extends to more than just vaccines and medicine. The Trump administration has also been ignoring the science on climate change and the environment, rolling back protections and doing away with regulations. Similarly to the vaccine debate, Republicans have often advanced false narratives that climate change and global warming are not something to be worried about. Trump himself has claimed over the years that climate change is a “hoax.” Reflecting this view, the government announced in July that the Environmental Protection Agency was rescinding its Endangerment Finding, meaning that the EPA is no longer required to protect people from the effects of climate change. More recently, Trump announced the reversal of a Biden-era decision that would have protected public lands from industrial development. Despite the increasing severity of climate change and the urgency of addressing environmental problems, the Trump administration is turning a blind eye and ignoring the science.
The erosion of scientific facts leads to the question of what can be trusted. Paradoxically, by claiming science has been politicized and rapidly changing long-held government policy, Republicans have made themselves a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because of the right’s own efforts to shift science to their positions, government institutions such as the CDC have seen decreased levels of trust. The turnover at the agency and general dysfunction under the Trump administration has made it clear that improving public health is far from the goal – rather, the intention is to advance the agenda of anti-vaxxers like Kennedy and Ladapo.
If the CDC and other government organizations under the umbrella of HHS cannot be trusted to have the health of America top of mind, nothing can. If states decide, as Florida has, to do away with vaccine mandates in schools, nothing can replace that. If the government rolls back environmental protections, nothing can undo the lasting damage such actions will cause. The great peril of ignoring science is that it cannot be ignored. You might think that only five years after the worst worldwide pandemic since the Spanish flu of the 1920s, we might all be more attuned to scientific recommendations. Instead, Republicans have taken the opposite lesson, and we are all going to be worse off for it.