Republicans are anti-science morons.

AAAS

Science

EDITORIAL

It's just louder this time

H. Holden Thorp

October 30, 2020

As if there were any doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump has no respect for scientists, he now refers to public health scholars as “Fauci and all these idiots.” That's how he's describing experts in virology, immunology, epidemiology, and infectious disease. Never mind that after recovering from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Trump suddenly became excited about future vaccines and “Regeneron,” which is what he calls monoclonal antibodies in general. (Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is probably thrilled to have achieved the product-brand status of Xerox and Kleenex, but Eli Lilly also has developed promising monoclonals, and more are in clinical trials.) Apparently, no one told the president that scientists from these same fields—many of whom live in “Democrat-run cities” or college towns and are immigrants who wouldn't be here under his policies—created these drugs and carried out the decades of science that made them possible. This paradox of loving the drug but hating the science is nothing new. It's just louder this time.

Republican presidents were not always rhetorically hostile to science. As described earlier this year on this page, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, James Morton Turner and Andrew Isenberg carefully traced how the United States got to this point. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon worked hard to pass important pieces of public health and environmental legislation that were approved with large bipartisan majorities in Congress. Then, when Ronald Reagan arrived as a candidate in the 1980 election, he advocated teaching creationism in public schools and mocked environmental science and regulation. In his brand of conservatism, the free market and American exceptionalism could not coexist with a shared responsibility for caring for the planet or its inhabitants.

Vice President Mike Pence is carrying on Reagan's tradition. In a widely viewed speech on the House floor when he was a member of Congress, Pence extolled “intelligent design.” He cited a then-recent study of new fossils, which enhanced our understanding of how human life unfolded on Earth, as evidence that evolution was invalid because scientists were always changing theories when new data were obtained. He was criticizing scientists for doing science, as my colleague Jon Cohen recently tweeted. If Pence thinks we can't change our understanding with new data, then we'd have to go back to breathing phlogiston and being orbited by the Sun.

The paradox has played out for years. Many Republicans in Congress have been strong advocates for science funding, especially for the National Institutes of Health, although some simultaneously espouse antiscience views and embrace creationism. Biology is the study of evolution, and biomedicine is applied evolution. Why would creationists spend money to study and apply this heresy? Because they want their new medicines. They want to tell their constituents that they are fighting diseases that are harming their families. Arguing for science funding by promising new cures has been a winning political strategy for the 75 years that the United States has had federally funded science.

A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that only 20% of the political right has “a lot” of confidence in scientists. Yet when folks at this end of the political spectrum get sick, they want the best treatments that secular academic medicine can provide. The consequences of this are profound and especially apparent in the COVID-19 crisis. The same politicians who are criticizing public health guidance are praising vaccines and antibodies without acknowledging that they come from the same principles and researchers as masks and social distancing.

When the presidential election is over, science will face an important choice. Should the scientific community try to get the missing 80% of the ideological right to understand its people and its methods? Or should science write it off as a lost cause and continue to take the funding while providing the outstanding new medicines?