How "the science" has betrayed America
It's a bitter pill to swallow for those who've devoted their lives to the scientific pursuit of truth.
This week, Public reported that early in the COVID pandemic, a Chinese source trusted by the FBI asserted that COVID leaked from a Wuhan laboratory. This is just the latest data point on a growing mountain of evidence that suggests zoonotic spillover is far from the only rational explanation for the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus at the heart of the COVID pandemic. While this current revelation is not an obvious smoking gun, given the vagaries of intelligence gathering from adversaries, it’s also not easily ignored.
A few months ago, I wrote about why 21st-century science is in trouble. This column is, far and away, the most read column here on Howlin’. It particularly struck a nerve with many of my generation's peers who believe that science, which the American public once largely trusted, is in decline—almost entirely as a result of self-inflicted wounds. The degree to which this pains me personally is difficult to overstate.
How in the world did we get to a point where roughly a quarter of Americans now have little or no confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests? I can cite numerous examples of why I think that this is so, but I’ll focus on three: COVID, gender identity, and climate change. These three epitomize how our government, higher education, and many scientific organizations have come to ignore sound science and, in some cases, actively seek to suppress it in order to promote ideological agendas.
Let’s begin with COVID. Thanks to extensive reporting by Racket News, Public, and The Free Press, along with the information revealed in the Twitter Files (and an exceedingly small amount of grudging reporting from legacy media), it is now beyond evident that ground zero for the most potent COVID misinformation came not from crazies on the Internet but from our own government and their enablers in the media.
Though misinformation concerning the origin of COVID and the effects of masking, social distancing, disinfectants, the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, and the potential side effects of rapidly developed and tested vaccines came from all over the place, it was nowhere more troublesome than from our own government. I don’t expect that I should trust most of what I encounter on unscientific, non-peer-reviewed Internet sites. But I should be able to have some confidence in the science and public health information provided and disseminated by the government.
Unfortunately, that ship appears to have sailed.
I understand and am sympathetic to the confusion and desperate search for answers that defined the initial stages of the COVID pandemic. What I’m far less sympathetic about was the stubborn refusal to change course or messaging when emerging facts dictated that we should have. The censorship and defamation that accompanied this were simply beyond the pale. I contend that there were many factors that contributed to this, but science was far less important than ideology among them.
Zoonotic spillover or lab leak? The jury may still be out, but the latter is far from the tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory it was initially made out to be. Masking? Ineffective beyond surgical-grade masks. Sunlight effective in killing coronaviruses? Not particularly. Disinfectants? Ineffective in slowing the spread of coronaviruses. Social distancing? Minimally effective with catastrophic collateral consequences. Hydroxychloroquine? Ineffective. Closing schools? Did almost nothing to improve public health but wildly effective at impacting children with learning losses that will be felt for decades.
With regard to the virus itself, almost everything that we initially thought we knew about SARS-CoV-2 turned out to be wrong in the fullness of time. There are a variety of reasons for this, and not all of them are indicators of scientific malaise or failure. The pandemic was a deadly serious international problem that came out of nowhere and went from zero to one hundred in a very short amount of time. Confusion was inevitable.
It was what came after the initial confusion that was alarming: multiple attempts by our own government and their allies in the media to suppress accurate information about the pandemic that ran counter to official narratives. The censorship and suppression of qualified skeptics and critics—many of whom were far more correct in their assertions than their censors.
For the most part, the would-be gatekeepers of information in government and the media didn’t even bother to effectively cover either their tracks or motives. The battle against “disinformation,” as they saw it, was for the public good—at least the part of the public with which they were ideologically aligned. I’ll spare you the parallels to recent historical examples of descents from freedom into totalitarianism and fascism, but they aren’t difficult to find on your own.
A theme that runs throughout good science is peer review. Peer review means that those who share your qualifications get to weigh in on your ideas. Effective peer review is simply not possible without skeptics and critics. As annoying as it is to have to put up with flat-earthers when discussing Newtonian gravity (hint: there’s a reason that it’s spherically symmetric), you must be willing to answer critics, even particularly annoying ones, as part of peer review. Suppression of criticism is about as anti-science as it gets.
Yet that’s almost exactly what Anthony Fauci and his fandom did during the pandemic, when they claimed that attacks on Fauci were attacks on science itself. Nothing could be further from the truth. Confusing one for the other is a phenomenon more closely associated with the cult of personality than science.
Worse, when the COVID information mafia couldn’t censor, deplatform, or shout down critics, they smeared them. Nowhere was this more evident than the claim that the “lab leak” scenario pertaining to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 was a conspiracy theory and that anyone who wanted to discuss it was a conspiracy theorist. In the world of science, this is a very potent derision. It derailed more than a few careers.
As it turns out, not only was there compelling statistical data available very early on that suggested that a lab leak was a plausible explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, but there were other indicators as well. Many experts in Fauci’s own circle of advisers initially thought that SARS-CoV-2 showed signs of having been engineered for gain of function.
Yet, within days, many of the same experts published the controversial paper, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 which strongly suggested that anyone not enamored of zoonotic spillover existed alone in some weird, elliptical orbit that just occasionally grazed Earth’s atmosphere.
All of this despite the fact that coronaviruses, the subject of extensive study, are not known to jump from bats, from which they originate, directly to humans. They require an intermediate species. Even now, four years later, that intermediate species has not been identified. That leaves a large gap in the zoonotic hypothesis.
Add to that new forensic and intelligence evidence suggesting that ground zero for the outbreak was at the Wuhan lab, where coronaviruses were being studied, and the zoonotic hypothesis begins to look less and less unassailable.
I don’t know how SARS-CoV-2 originated. And outside of possibly China, I doubt that anyone else does either. All that I and others have maintained from the start is that it’s up for legitimate debate. And we should debate it. We should know where the virus that killed millions worldwide and wreaked havoc on those left alive came from. That is not at all an unreasonable desire. What is unreasonable is why so many seem disinterested in, perhaps even afraid of, the truth.
The gender identity movement is another paradigm where ideology has supplanted science. This is even more distressing to me than the shaky science that informed much of our COVID response, since it’s based on the evidence-free assertion that gender, which is asserted to trump sex, exists along a continuum that is self-selectable. This is clearly nonsense.
If I want to become a woman tomorrow, as the current thinking goes, it’s a realistic and biologically valid option for me. This is, of course, absurd and flies in the face of biology and anthropology. It’s pseudoscience on the same level as Bigfoot and 911 truther stuff. Nonetheless, this lunacy has gained traction in government, law, education, and with many professional societies in the fields of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry.
Transgender advocates use the same anti-scientific tactics against skeptics and detractors as the COVID information mafia: censor, deplatform, shout down, or smear detractors with defamatory epithets.
The reason that transgender lunacy is such a unique blow to science is that one does not have to be an expert in something esoteric like gene splicing techniques to understand it. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand the differences between men and women and why most of the claims about transgenderism vs. biological sex are bogus.
For what it’s worth, I believe strongly that every human being has a right to be what they want to be. This includes gender transformation. If you are an adult and make an informed choice, I think that you have every right to pursue whatever you think will help you live a happy life. I, personally, would value you no less for this decision.
But a biological male cannot be made into a woman, or vice versa, no matter what regime of drugs or surgery is employed. One may, I suppose, change their gender (as it is currently defined), but they cannot change their sex. To insist otherwise, for the purposes of competition, accommodation, or most anything else, is absurd.
Now, what I happen to think is absurd is exactly one data point. If you want to convince me or the rest of the world otherwise, you should be willing to engage in scientific debate, which is the last thing that transgender activists want. This is the best indicator of how poor their facts happen to be. If they had the goods, they’d be interested in robust debate instead of name-calling and cancellation.
The subject of climate change has been giving science some trouble for several decades. Much of this is undeserved, but some of it is not. For the record, I taught astronomy and meteorology for decades at the university level. I conclude that the evidence for the current epoch of rapid global warming and its anthropogenic origins is overwhelming.
There are very few scientists who debate this. There are some interesting arguments on the other side of this debate, but the data is poor and not generally supported by observations.
What I do not accept are many of the apocalyptic predictions about what’s likely to happen in the near future as the result of a warming planet. Is climate change a problem? I think so. Are the green solutions to it viable? I think there are many substantial questions about that.
I’m not completely sure that we are even measuring the current rate of temperature change accurately. We could well be either overestimating or underestimating the rate of change. Precise global temperature measurements come from techniques that have been developed only recently. Before that, temperature data consists of anecdotes and palaeoclimatological data. There is some uncertainty in what we are attempting to extrapolate into the future. That strikes me as something that ought to be of concern.
But that is not slowing down the green movement, which is attempting to foist bad cars, bad appliances, bad economics, and ruinous energy policies on the rest of us based on what amounts to guesses as to what our climate future is likely to be. Paradoxically, the one thing that I’m sure would help us reduce our carbon footprint and slow down warming, nuclear energy, is still taking a back seat to renewables, which I’m sure cannot.
So, there you have it. Those are my arguments for why science has shot itself in the foot as of late. Too much advocacy, opinion, and name-calling—not enough robust scientific debate. All of this has left an unreliable mess in the eyes of the public. Trust is based on consistency. Science has become anything but.
So here we are. Two decades into the 21st century, science, which has inarguably served to make the world a much better place for over a millennia, is losing public trust. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for anyone who cares about science and values its capabilities. That would be me and those like me.
I devoted my career in physics to teaching and to debunking bad science, pseudoscience, and junk science. I argued against Bigfoot, homeopathy, chemtrails, 9/11 truthers, and the alien origins of UFOs. I argued for nuclear energy (and sound energy policies) and for science to have a seat at the table when big decisions were being made. I paid the price too. Academic colleagues are not fond of being called out for poor scholarship.
In decades of advocating forcefully for my beliefs, I never wanted to censor or deplatform any of my opponents (although, I must admit, the flat-earthers and others of their ilk provide wonderful opportunities for both amusement and edification in countering their arguments). I wanted to debate them. I’m a big proponent of the axiom that the truth will set you free. I also never thought that science should supplant economics or other sociological factors in political decision-making either. I thought it deserved a seat at the table, not the only seat.
So imagine my bitter disappointment when, after a lifetime of sticking up for good science, I, among many others, have been censored, de-platformed, and defamed for things like questioning the suppression of the lab leak hypothesis as a potential origin for COVID; questioning the science behind transgender ideology; and questioning the wisdom of making monumental economic and social decisions pertaining to the COVID pandemic and climate change based on incomplete scientific data.
I can explain my disappointment in no uncertain terms: It’s like watching someone burn a book that you spent your entire lifetime writing. You bring up amnesty for all of this with me at your considerable peril, especially within arm’s reach.
Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com
What always frustrated me about gender-benderism, CRT, DEI and “green solutions” is how they were imposed on us, even in academia, without any rational debate or collegial discussion but entirely by ham-fisted fiat. “You WILL learn and respect your students’ preferred pronouns! You WILL respect their cultural sensitivities!” What the administrations in effect did was to weaponize student special pleading and whining against their instructors. Just as Mao unleashed the anger of Chinese youths upon their teachers and elders. Suddenly at ISU the religious sensitivities of Muslim students became absolute while it remained “open season” upon the sensitivities of Christian or Jewish students. OBEY!! COMPLY!! OR ELSE - so much for protections of intellectual freedom!