President Donald Trump’s new executive order on establishing higher standards for government-funded scientific research should not be necessary. Unfortunately, it is.
Even a cursory look back at the public health bureaucracy’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic shows how badly needed this order is. Lockdowns, school closures, masking, social distancing, mandatory vaccines – so much of what the public endured during the pandemic resulted from experts disregarding sound scientific principles.
The president’s order directs government agencies to adhere to “Gold Standard Science” principles. Scientific findings must be:
- Reproducible, transparent, and falsifiable
- Subject to unbiased peer review
- Clear about errors and uncertainties
- Skeptical of assumptions
- Collaborative and interdisciplinary
- Positive about negative results
- Free from conflicts of interest
These are pillars of the scientific method. Together, they call for an open process conducted with honesty and humility – virtues that were sorely lacking from our public health officials during COVID. Those character traits are the minimum standard we should expect from public servants concerned with science. But that is certainly not what people experienced from the Department of Health and Human Services and its subsidiary agencies during the pandemic. Those organizations discarded just about all these principles at one time or another.
We now know that evidence for masks was dubious at best. Indeed, subsequent studies show that masks were mostly ineffective in controlling the virus’s spread. We know that the surgeon general’s advice on social distancing – which contributed to schools remaining closed – wasn’t based on scientific evidence. We know that children and young people weren’t a high-risk group and that lobbying from teachers unions played an outsize role in closing the schools. We’re still learning and living with the negative consequences of blanket lockdowns, which proved ineffective at stopping COVID’s spread.
Using flimsy or unsound science to make policy decisions starts a snowball of further violations and consequences. To paraphrase Lord Acton, corrupt data corrupts. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the health bureaucrats maintained they and their science were above question. The problem here? All science should be open to debate and critique.
There were plenty of epidemiologists skeptical of the lockdown regime and the assumptions of the health bureaucracy. As early as October 2020, a group of eminent doctors published the Great Barrington Declaration, in which they advocated “focused protection.” They maintained that debate was necessary to the scientific process, but they were ignored and even maligned as wanting to let COVID run rampant.
Meanwhile, there was growing evidence that the government’s draconian measures weren’t just burdensome but possibly counterproductive. Sweden’s much more measured response was far more successful.
But in its arrogance, the health bureaucracy enlisted federal law enforcement to lean on social media outlets to silence dissent. Just this week it was reported that the Biden White House labeled vaccine skeptics and opponents of mandatory vaccination “Domestic Violent Extremists.” That’s not something people confident in their science and their credibility do.
Anyone who dared to question the administration’s chosen theory of the virus’s origins was also attacked. Fauci called the lab leak hypothesis a “conspiracy theory.” But it wasn’t. The evidence strongly suggests that the virus didn’t come from bats or from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, as health bureaucrats maintained, but from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was here that gain of function research was being conducted, possibly with U.S. funding. The FBI, CIA, and Department of Energy have now concluded, along with a House committee, that this was the most likely scenario.
Again, a dose of humility could have prevented an awful breach of trust in our government. The people understood that something unprecedented had happened, and realized the response would not – could not – be perfect from the starting line. “We don’t know yet” buys a lot of public grace. But it doesn’t take long for people of goodwill to understand that they’re being manipulated – “gaslighted” to use the popular phrase.
There were scientific integrity standards in effect during the first Trump administration and also the Biden administration, but it’s clear that the public health bureaucrats ignored them. We are hopeful that these gold standards, in combination with the much-needed reform of HHS that is currently underway, will reinforce ethical behavior and allow the public health agencies to begin re-earning the public trust.