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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-real-reason-people-dont-trust-in-science-has-nothing-to-do-with/>
"“We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” said the hot-dog–costumed
protagonist of a 2019 comedy sketch, pretending not to know who had crashed a
hot-dog–shaped car.
In the sketch turned popular meme, bystanders didn’t buy his story. Scientists,
and the rest of us, might well follow their lead now, in contemplating
November’s annual Pew Research Center survey of public confidence in science.
The Pew survey found 76 percent of respondents voicing “a great deal or fair
amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.”
That’s up a bit from last year, but still down from prepandemic measures, to
suggest that an additional one in 10 Americans has lost confidence in
scientists since 2019.
Why? Pew’s statement and many news stories about the findings somehow missed
the obvious culprit: the four years and counting of a propaganda campaign by
Donald Trump’s allies to shift blame to scientists for his first
administration’s disastrous, botched handling of the COVID pandemic that has so
far killed at least 1.2 million Americans.
Even the hot dog guy would blanch at the transparency of the scapegoating. It
was obviously undertaken to inoculate Trump from voter blame for the pandemic.
The propaganda kicked off four years ago with a brazen
USA TODAY screed from
his administration’s economic advisor Peter Navarro (later sent to federal
prison on unrelated charges). Navarro wrongly blamed then–National Institute
for Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci for the
administration’s myriad pandemic response screwups. Similar inanities followed
from Trump’s White House, leading to years of right-wing nonsense and surreal
hearings that ended last June with Republican pandemic committee members doing
everything but wearing hot dog costumes while questioning Fauci. Browbeating a
scientific leader behind COVID vaccines that saved millions of lives at a
combative hearing proved as mendacious as it was shameful.
The Pew survey’s results, however, show this propaganda worked on some
Republican voters. The drop in public confidence in science the survey reports
is almost entirely contained to that circle, plunging from 85 percent approval
among Republican voters in April of 2020 to 66 percent now. It hardly budged
for those not treated to nightly doses of revisionist history in an echo
chamber—where outlets pretended that masking, school and business restrictions,
and vaccines, weren’t necessities in staving off a deadly new disease. Small
wonder that Republican voters’ excess death rates were 1.5 times those among
Democrats after COVID vaccines appeared.
Instead of noting the role of this propaganda in their numbers, Pew’s statement
about the survey pointed only to perceptions that scientists aren’t “good
communicators,” held by 52 percent of respondents, and the 47 percent who said,
“research scientists feel superior to others” in the survey.
That explanation echoes the “kick me” sign that scientific institutions have
taped to their backsides over distrust at least since 1985, when the U.K.’s
Royal Society warned of “[h]ostility, even indifference, to science and
technology,” in a report,
The Public Understanding of Science. “Scientists
must learn to communicate better with all segments of the public,” it
concluded.
That prescription matches scientific responses to the Pew Survey results, with
National Academies of Sciences chief Marcia McNutt telling the
Washington
Post: “[T]his gives us an opportunity to reexamine what we need to do to
restore trust in science.” And it matches the advice in a December NASEM report
on scientific misinformation: “Scientists, medical professionals, and health
professionals who choose to take on high profile roles as public communicators
of science should understand how their communications may be misinterpreted in
the absence of context or in the wrong context.” This completely ignores the
deliberate misinterpretation of science to advance political aims, the chief
kind of science misinformation dominating the modern public sphere."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
