The wrongly named "Christian Right" has been at war with science for many decades because scientific fact is all too often at odds with the so-called "deeply held" religious beliefs of this falsely pious set. Hence the effort to have creationism taught in public schools and to stamp out the science based theory of evolution (a war that been going on for 100 years or more). Hence the rejection of medically and science based knowledge of human sexuality and sexual orientation which threaten the right's manufactured myth that the bible only allows marriage between one man and one woman, even though polygamy was the actual norm in the Old Testament. Anything that challenges this group's belief in myths and Bronze Age writings or their feelings is to be rejected. Now, with white Christian nationalists now controlling the Republican Party and Project 2025 - a road map to take America backwards in time to an imagined golden age of white Christian privilege - science and fact based reality are under renewed assault and governmental organizations that once championed science based medicine ,are being censored or seeing personnel intimidated at best and fired at worst. As a former New York Times columnist lays out, the consequences will likely prove deadly and America's already falling life expectancy compared to other advanced nations will likely worsen. Here are highlights:
In a better world Donald Trump’s musings about taking back the Panama Canal would lead him or people around him to study the canal’s history. They won’t, of course. But if they did they’d learn some important lessons.
One is that America gave up the canal, not out of a spirit of generosity or wokeness, but because U.S. occupation of the Canal Zone had become a strategic liability rather than an asset.
But there’s also a lot to be learned by asking how we managed to build the canal in the first place. Yes, it was a spectacular feat of engineering. But even more important, it was a triumph of medical science and science-based policy. To build the canal, America first had to conquer yellow fever and malaria. This meant understanding how these diseases were spread, then implementing widespread preventive measures that ranged from isolating infected patients with mosquito netting to eliminating sources of standing water in which mosquitoes could breed.
The success of these measures was an extraordinary achievement. But then, for much of the 20th century America led the world both in medical research and in the application of that research to public policy. This one-two punch of knowledge and knowledge-based action led to an incredible decline in the rate of death from infectious disease
But that was the America that was.
Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who rejects vaccines in particular and medical science in general, is on track to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality.
I don’t know this for sure, but my prediction is that the current purge of language will eventually turn into a purge of people, with the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.
And all of this is highly likely to lead to many preventable deaths — hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.
How did this happen? Gradually, then suddenly.
But back to science in general: Because it’s a method rather than a set of declarations from on high, you can’t consume it a la carte, rejecting scientific results you dislike for political, cultural or religious reasons. Reject evolution, and you undermine the basis for much of biology, and hence medical science. Reject the case for climate change, and you undermine the physics and chemistry that underlay that case.
And Republican politicians have been rejecting science they don’t like for a long time. Remember that Ronald Reagan called for schools to teach creationism alongside the theory of evolution. He also initially rejected the scientific consensus on the causes of acid rain, and prohibited the National Academy of Sciences from studying the issue. In the first case he was catering to the religious right, in the second to industry groups, but in both he was saying that he wouldn’t accept science he didn’t like, an attitude that is now almost universal on the right.
In addition to rejecting science he didn’t like, Reagan did all he could to undermine belief that government can be a force for good. This is a real problem for health policy, because most of the long-term decline in deaths from infectious disease has been the result of collective action, from ensuring access to clean water to promoting childhood vaccination at rates sufficient to prevent diseases from spreading.
Notably, the Reagan era is also when U.S. life expectancy began falling significantly below life expectancy in other advanced countries.
[T]here are presumably multiple reasons for high U.S. mortality, including high rates of death from both guns and motor vehicles. But refusal to believe in medical science, which should be seen as part of the rejection of science in general, was probably a factor even before Covid.
And then Covid came. Until vaccines were developed, all we could do involved precautionary measures, especially masking. And the thing about masking was that while masks can to some extent protect the wearer, what they mostly do is protect other people. Yet the modern Republican party is deeply hostile to the idea of making sacrifices, or even incurring some minor inconvenience, in order to help others.
Then came the vaccines, which were a medical miracle. But who was telling you that vaccines could save your life? Why, scientists and government officials — two groups that the modern right has been told never to trust.
The result was that many Americans refused to be vaccinated, and a large number — perhaps several hundred thousand — died unnecessarily.
Where does RFK Jr. fit into all of this? The political scientist John Sides, drawing on work by Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, argues that the deepest divide in America isn’t between left and right, it’s between “rationalists” who focus on facts and reason, on one side, and “intuitionists,” who rely on their feelings, on the other.
What comes next? As far as I know, there are no examples of modern nations turning their backs on medical science. But there’s every reason to expect the consequences to be ghastly. We can expect to see a resurgence of infectious diseases like measles and polio that had almost been eliminated. When — not if — the next pandemic strikes, we can expect the federal response to be even worse than it was when Trump confronted Covid.
The thing is, not all Republican senators are stupid. Some of them have to know that putting a crank like RFK Jr. in charge of public health will effectively condemn many of their fellow citizens to unnecessary death. Yet they’ll vote to confirm him anyway, out of sheer personal cowardice. And when they do, they’ll have blood on their hands.
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