"After 50,000 Covid-19 deaths, enormous job losses and and more than a month under lockdown, stunned Americans are looking for signs of hope. And President Donald Trump has been trying to provide them.
But Trump's evening briefings at the White House have instead produced a string of uncomfortable collisions between politics and science -- not least his suggestion Thursday that injecting disinfectant into the body could potentially kill the virus.
In another of his remarkable comments, the President had earlier touted the benefits of an unproven drug in fighting Covid-19, a fact he downplays now that research has suggested it may not work. The nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, had urged caution on the drug, hydroxychloroquine, and another prominent government scientist alleged this week that he was reassigned after refusing to join in promoting its use.
In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait warned that when politics steers science, you can wind up with the grotesque example of the Soviet Union's Trofim Lysenko under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin. Real scientists were silenced as the regime empowered Lysenko to dispute the proven laws of genetics, Chait wrote earlier this month. Lysenko even claimed, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produce seeds of rye, which is equivalent to saying that dogs living in the wild give birth to foxes."
"Lysenko genetics" has long been a laughingstock. Science proceeds on its own terms and timetable; it can't be counted on to provide the solutions public officials desperately want, when they want them."
(THIS NEXT PART MAY BE INTERESTING TO ISLAND BUC)
""For weeks, Trump and Fox News hosts and guests incessantly repeated unproven claims about hydroxychloroquine," wrote Frida Ghitis. "Trump and everyone else who magnifies the President's most irresponsible exhortations bears guilt in this disaster."
(AND HERE IS THE BIT ABOUT GOP/TRUMP/FAUX NEWS ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM)
"Distrust for science
"Trump didn't invent any of this," Jill Filipovic observed. "A Republican Party that sowed distrust in science because the reality of climate change was financially inconvenient for fossil fuel companies, and determined that conservative, patriarchal Christian morality should take precedence over public health in how we teach our kids about sex and the human body, is exactly what brought us Trump in the first place," Filipovic wrote.
(AND GEORGIA)
Trump has encouraged governors and protesters to push for the rapid reopening of America even when such moves violate the guidelines laid down by his own scientific advisers. And Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp proved eager to respond, ordering that many businesses could reopen Friday. Trump at first welcomed the move, but as criticism grew, he said he was "not happy with Brian Kemp," particularly for allowing spas, nail salons and tattoo parlors to be among those reopening.
In 1918, a premature reopening by the city of Denver produced a severe outbreak of the deadly influenza, John Avlon pointed out. "Kemp seems more intent on playing to the base than listening to scientists," he wrote. "He was late to the lockdown and now wants to open up early. But then again, he's the same governor -- of the CDC's home state -- who said it was news to him that asymptomatic people could spread the disease, two months after it was common knowledge."
