A prosecutor has sent a letter to scientific journals demanding to know what they do with “alternative views”.
It’s no secret that the US is spiralling into a bankrupt anti-democratic fascist hell hole. After all, the Trump administrations calls to jail reporters, jail all political opponents, the disappearing of people daring to express view points the Trump administration doesn’t like, the push to detain and deport American citizens for doing the same, and stock market crashes becoming so frequent, that the media is increasingly no longer seeing the economic chaos as a novelty and more of a fact of every day life, all the signs are certainly there that America is currently in a state of massive decline.
While American’s are finding it increasingly difficult to live their lives, the widespread breakdown of the institutions that built America isn’t even close to deterring the Trump administration from continuing to wreak havoc on the country. One target the Trump administration has set their collective eyes on for political retribution is the scientific community. Already, the Trump administration has been making drastic cuts to NOAA and the CDC, continuing to push the disinformation that there is no scientific consensus that the world is literally on fire from climate change as well as pushing the disinformation that vaccines are inherently dangerous. This by, in part, using the poisonous terminology of “alternative viewpoints”.
The reality is that science doesn’t work on the basis of one person having a personal belief and that whoever can debate their way through wins out. Instead, it is generally through facts, testing theories, and gathering data on hard evidence so that the community can get another step closer to what is objectively fact. So, when some nutcase shows up and says that vaccines cause autism, the response is either the fact that the claims have long been debunked or asking for the evidence to support such claims. In pretty much every case, the person making those claims doesn’t have any evidence, but ‘a good strong gut feeling’. Obviously, that is not enough for the credible scientific community and the claims get dismissed outright. What’s more, trying to insult the scientific community for rejecting your “personal beliefs” is a way to get yourself kicked out of the conversation just that much faster as you are proving to be a complete waste of time.
Naturally, the Trump administration doesn’t see it that way. Instead, they want those people with “deeply held personal beliefs” to have just as much scientific weight as those offering actual scientific fact and research backed evidence. Anything short of that is, in the eyes of the Trump administration, a major Liberal conspiracy to “censor” the viewpoints of others. In fact, the Trump administration has shown that they are willing to use the full weight of the law to go after the scientific community to get them to compromise their principles.
That sort of thing has recently happened after the Trump administration sent a prosecutor to go after the scientific community with a letter demanding to know what the scientific literature has to say about “competing viewpoints”. From TechDirt:
Another day, another new bit of ugliness from the Trump Administration. What was first reported by MedPage Today appears to be the initial wave of attacks on medical journals for preferring scientific rigor to splashing around in the swampier parts of the marketplace of ideas.
A federal prosecutor sent a letter to a medical journal editor, probing whether the publication is “partisan” when it comes to “various scientific debates.”
Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a list of questions to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, asking how the journal handles “misinformation” and “competing viewpoints,” among other things.
MedPage Today has learned that at least two other journals have received similar letters.
The language is coded, but definitely not clever. Composed by a DOJ prosecutor perhaps best known for his hundred-plus appearances on Russian state-owned media outlets, the letter [PDF] is full of phrases that make it clear at least one federal prosecutor is interested in deterring scientific rebuttals to the parade of horrors that will be emanating from RFK Jr.’s Dept. of Health and Humans Services over the next few years.
Martin’s letter claims “more and more” scientific journals and publications are “conceding they are partisans in various scientific debates.” He alludes to possible federal crimes being committed by these journals if they are “advocating due to advertisement” (which Martin links to the postal code) or sponsorship (which Martin pretends might have something to do with federal fraud laws). In order to find targets for his prosecutorial attention, Martin asks every journal receiving this letter to respond to the following questions:
How do you assess your responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation?
How do you clearly articulate to the public when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relationships with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?
Do you accept articles or essays from competing viewpoints?
How do you assess the role played by government officials and funding organizations like the National Insitutes of Health in the development of submitted articles?
How do you handle allegations that authors of your work in your journals may have misled their readers?I am also interested to now if publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their method of acceptance of competing viewpoints. Are there new norms being developed or authored?
To put it simply, this is completely fucked up. Have there been instances in the past where fake scientific journals have been set up to push advertising from drug companies in the past? Yes. We’re not saying things are absolutely peachy and perfect in the scientific literature. At the same time, this is very obvious government interference hitting the scientific community. Not just that, but interference from an administration that has no problem turning Federal information pages regarding COVID-19 into an anti-science conspiracy theory website:
But the fact is that hundreds of Americans are still dying of this disease every single week, with even more hospitalizations for it as well. The point is that this is still a health issue that healthcare providers, and the public, can benefit from guidance on. Guidance that was, in part, found at www.covid.gov, which earlier this month offered up information on treatments, vaccinations, testing, strategies to avoid infection, and so on.
But now that page is gone. Instead, it redirects to a White House site that appears to be someone’s interpretation of a Donald Trump personal vendetta and conspiracy blog about the origins of the virus and how much Anthony Fauci sucks and just might be the devil.
This while a Trump loyalist, RFK Jr., is floating the idea that people should respond to the measles outbreak by taking, I kid you not, Vitamin A and cod liver oil:
The measles outbreak is not going away and RFK Jr. is making it worse. There is no need for equivocation in that statement. The facts are plain for all to see. Through a combination of half-hearted statements on getting the MMR vaccine followed up first by a pivot to nutrition, then another pivot to purposeful exposure being the best course, only for there to be another pivot to so-called “alternative treatments” for measles such as Vitamin A and cod liver oil, the Secretary for Health and Human Services is on a course to make the humans under his care less healthy.
That is the kind of people going after the scientific community right now, demanding that “alternative viewpoints” should be given equal weight to scientific fact and evidence. The scientific process – especially those in the health sciences – should not be subject to political pressure to push right wing quackery and lunacy. Yet, that is exactly what is happening here. It should go without saying that these kinds of tactics could very easily put lives at risk as scientific progress is knee-capped by an anti-science government hell bent on pushing nonsense and fake miracle cures. It’s as much of a free speech issue as it is a human health issue.
It’s well known that anyone who says anything that the Trump administration doesn’t like is considered an “enemy” that must be defeated. This regardless of evidence that such an “other” person might have. In fact, laying out evidence gives the Trump administration reason to double down with whatever thing they happen to be wrong on this time as they try and bully others into silence. We’ve seen plenty of this in the journalism community and the exact same crap is being pulled on the scientific community as well.
