SCIENCE MAG: do us a favor, Mr President If you want something, start treating science with respect

[kpete]

Do us a favor
H. Holden Thorp

Science 11 Mar 2020:


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While scientists are trying to share facts about the epidemic, the administration either blocks those facts or restates them with contradictions. Transmission rates and death rates are not measurements that can be changed with will and an extroverted presentation. The administration has repeatedly said—as it did last week—that virus spread in the United States is contained, when it is clear from genomic evidence that community spread is occurring in Washington state and beyond. That kind of distortion and denial is dangerous and almost certainly contributed to the federal government’s sluggish response. After 3 years of debating whether the words of this administration matter, the words are now clearly a matter of life and death.

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Now, the president suddenly needs science. But the centuries spent elucidating fundamental principles that govern the natural world—evolution, gravity, quantum mechanics—involved laying the groundwork for knowing what we can and cannot do. The ways that scientists accumulate and analyze evidence, apply inductive reasoning, and subject findings to scrutiny by peers have been proven over the years to give rise to robust knowledge. These processes are being applied to the COVID-19 crisis through international collaboration at breakneck, unprecedented speed; Science published two new papers earlier this month on SARS-CoV-2, and more are on the way. But the same concepts that are used to describe nature are used to create new tools. So, asking for a vaccine and distorting the science at the same time are shockingly dissonant.

A vaccine has to have a fundamental scientific basis. It has to be manufacturable. It has to be safe. This could take a year and a half—or much longer. Pharmaceutical executives have every incentive to get there quickly— they will be selling the vaccine after all—but thankfully they also know that you can’t break the laws of nature to get there.

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But do us a favor, Mr. President. If you want something, start treating science and its principles with respect.

THE REST:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/11/science.abb6502

[Chainfire]

1. The only thing that I have seen Trump respect

Are despots. He knows more about science than the scientists, he knows more about the military than the generals, and he knows more about medicine than the doctors. We are blessed to have such a genius running the nation.