January 6, 2025
5 min read
The Real Reason People Don’t Trust in Science Has Nothing to Do with Scientists
Propaganda works, is the real upshot of a survey showing lingering post-pandemic distrust of science
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks as U.S. President Donald Trump looks on in 2020.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
“We’re all trying to find the guy who did this,” said the hot-dog–costumed protagonist of a 2019 comedy sketch, pretending not to know who had crashed a hot-dog–shaped car.
In the sketch turned popular meme, bystanders didn’t buy his story. Scientists, and the rest of us, might well follow their lead now, in contemplating November’s annual Pew Research Center survey of public confidence in science.
The Pew survey found 76 percent of respondents voicing “a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests.” That’s up a bit from last year, but still down from prepandemic measures, to suggest that an additional one in 10 Americans has lost confidence in scientists since 2019.
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Why? Pew’s statement and many news stories about the findings somehow missed the obvious culprit: the four years and counting of a propaganda campaign by Donald Trump’s allies to shift blame to scientists for his first administration’s disastrous, botched handling of the COVID pandemic that has so far killed at least 1.2 million Americans.
Even the hot dog guy would blanch at the transparency of the scapegoating. It was obviously undertaken to inoculate Trump from voter blame for the pandemic. The propaganda kicked off four years ago with a brazen USA TODAY screed from his administration’s economic advisor Peter Navarro (later sent to federal prison on unrelated charges). Navarro wrongly blamed then–National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci for the administration’s myriad pandemic response screwups. Similar inanities followed from Trump’s White House, leading to years of right-wing nonsense and surreal hearings that ended last June with Republican pandemic committee members doing everything but wearing…
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