S E E D E D C O N T E N T
On May 23, President Trump But even the principles themselves are open enough to interpretation that their implementation will matter. It's more than slightly ironic to call for more reproducibility at a time when budgets for even original research are being slashed severely, meaning that any money that goes to reproducing prior results will need to be met using a vanishing research budget. And, in the first Trump administration, "transparency" was used as a way to avoid using unpublished company data as part of considerations regarding whether the company's products needed to be regulated .
The executive order also calls for agencies to form policies that "provide for consideration of different or dissenting viewpoints" and "protect employees from efforts to prevent or deter consideration of alternative scientific opinions." Which again, don't sound problematic but are coming from an administration filled with people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wouldn't accept scientific evidence unless it were delivered in the corpse of a bear . It's notable that many non-scientific arguments about topics ranging from climate change to pandemic responses have been presented as simply "alternative scientific opinions." So this is definitely subject to potential abuse as well.
Finally, there's the enforcement of these rules—and thus final say on what actually constitutes gold standard science—which involves each agency naming a single political appointee to make the decisions. There's the potential for honest misunderstandings; how could any one individual understand everything going on at a place like the National Science Foundation, which funds everything from evolutionary biology to high-energy physics? But there's also the potential for abuse along the lines of what we've seen in authoritarian governments. That potential has already been widely recognized . And this weekend, we got a clear example of what it might look like in practice.
Makary appeared on the news program Face the Nation over the weekend and showed exactly how this emphasis on gold standard science can be abused. The host, Margaret Brennan, challenged Makary on his recent participation in an announcement that would make it harder to get COVID vaccines during pregnancy, even though he had earlier helped pen an editorial that placed pregnant people in a high-risk category. Brennan also highlighted a meta-analysis of 67 different studies of COVID vaccines given during pregnancy. Collectively, these studies included over 1.8 million women, a large enough population to enable even rare side effects to emerge from the statistical murk.
"COVID-19 vaccines are effective in preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection and related complications in pregnant women," the authors of the meta-analysis conclude. "Unvaccinated pregnant women are more likely to experience hypertensive disorders and caesarean sections, and their neonates are more likely to be admitted to a neonatal unit."
That seems pretty clear. But Makary dismisses all of that data with a single short sentence: "There's no randomized control trial, that's the gold standard."
In this, Makary is following a strategy adopted earlier by congressional Republicans, who desired to conclude that SARS-CoV-2 had been the product of a lab leak. So, they switched standards of evidence as needed, tightening the rules to exclude inconvenient information, while accepting studies without relevant empirical data in others. That congressional report now serves as the primary source for the Trump administration's covid.gov website, in case there was any doubt that this strategy is appreciated by the people running the government.
The reality of science is that there are different qualities of evidence; some approaches produce data that can speak more definitively than others. When scientists talk about things like the weight of the evidence, they take these uncertainties into account. A sufficiently large and diverse collection of uncertain evidence can often outweigh a single result that appears definitive. In fact, the executive order at issue prominently describes how important it is to communicate scientific uncertainties clearly, one of its positive aspects.
Makary is not at all interested in discussing uncertainties. Instead, he's using uncertainty as a tool, one that allows him to dismiss any evidence that runs against his preferred narrative. And there's no reason to think that he'll be the last member of this administration to use "gold standard science" in this way.
The only favors Makary is doing for the public is making it easier to see how the fine-sounding principles of gold standard science can so easily be abused.
The
RepublicanFascist Party's misuse of the English language goes back at least to Lee Atwater's "nigger, nigger" comment in 1981. Abuse of vocabulary to "win" debates has been a staple for a long time - we see it every day, here on NT, with the Usual Suspects saying things that are false, sometimes outlandishly false.So when the
RepublicanFascist Party says "gold standard science"... beware!