According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, science is "any system of knowledge that is concerned with the physical world and its phenomena and that entails unbiased observations and systematic experimentation."
I like the inclusion of the word “unbiased” in that definition. Why? Because for some time now, there hasn’t been a lot of objectivity in science. For decades, we’ve been told that a climate catastrophe was just around the corner, and decade after decade said catastrophe has never materialized.
There has long been skepticism of the motivations of our nation’s scientists and health officials, but few things contributed more to the widespread mistrust in them than the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Pew Research Center recently conducted a survey polling 8,842 American adults, and it showed just how much the pandemic eroded the nation’s confidence in its scientists. In January 2019, a year before the pandemic hit, 73% of Americans believed that "science has a mostly positive effect on society." By November 2021, nearly three years later, that number dropped to 65%, and as of last month, only 57% of Americans view science positively in its impact on society.
I’m not sure how I’d answer that question for a poll. Technically, it’s not science I distrust; it’s the scientists and health officials who are motivated by a political agenda rather than the pursuit of knowledge regardless of where the facts lead. Scientists themselves experienced a significant hit in the poll as well, with trust in scientists now 14 points lower than it was pre-pandemic, and those indicating they have a “great deal” of confidence in scientists declined from 39% in 2020 to 23% in 2023.
NEW: The share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive effect on society has fallen and there’s been a continued decline in public trust in scientists (🧵⬇️).
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) November 14, 2023
Dig into the full report here: https://t.co/587ZUBSwZz
It should come as no surprise that distrust in science and scientists varies by political ideology. "Declining levels of trust in scientists and medical scientists have been particularly pronounced among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents over the past several years,” explains Brian Kennedy and Alec Tyson of the Pew Research Center. "In fact, nearly four-in-ten Republicans (38%) now say they have not too much or no confidence at all in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. This share is up dramatically from the 14% of Republicans who held this view in April 2020. Much of this shift occurred during the first two years of the pandemic and has persisted in more recent surveys."
Trust in scientists has also declined among Democrats, albeit by a smaller margin. And a significant majority of Democrats, 69%, still say that science has had a mostly positive effect on society.
Though not accounted for in the survey, I suspect the explosion of transgender ideology, which has influenced once-trusted health organizations to say that men can get pregnant or refer to women as “bodies with vaginas” rather than endure the ire of the transgender cult. Don't forget the way money has corrupted psychologists to green-light the transitioning of children and surgeons to butcher otherwise healthy bodies despite there being no logical or scientific evidence that people can be born in the wrong body.
The fact is, whether it’s climate change, COVID-19, or transgender ideology, there are ample reasons to be skeptical of the so-called experts because they have demonstrated that they will do anything to advance their agenda. We’ve covered stories of scientists manipulating data to get the results they want, then publishing bogus papers to give activists cover for pushing radical policies.
We’ve covered the CDC ignoring its own studies in order to continue to push masking and universal COVID vaccination. One of the bigger stories of the pandemic was the smear campaign against hydroxychloroquine, an out-of-patent anti-malaria drug that has proven to be an effective therapeutic treatment for COVID, in favor of vaccines that require regular boosters and don’t seem to provide immunity.
I don’t take pleasure in my skepticism of scientists and health officials, but they’ve truly given me no other choice. When politics is taken out of science, I’ll gladly come home.
