Expertise Under Assault

Introduction

Protesters in Los Angeles rally against the COVID-19 vaccine, mask mandates and lockdowns in January. The questioning of the pandemic's seriousness is part of a broader skepticism toward scientific expertise. (Getty Images/Los Angeles Times/Irfan Khan)

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Overview

When the state of Massachusetts starts offering the COVID-19 vaccine to the general population this spring, Tyler Andresen, a 45-year-old sport-fishing captain in Falmouth, says he will not be lining up for it.

“I believe the development of the vaccine was rushed, they don't really know what the long-term side effects are going to be and I'm healthy,” he says, “so I don't feel I need the vaccine.”

Everybody Andresen knows who got sick from the virus made a full recovery, he adds. “That tells me this thing isn't the deadly killer the media wants us to believe it is.”

Reluctance to take the coronavirus vaccine is only the latest expression of a distrust among the American public of scientific experts — a distrust that extends to the media and government sources that convey their messages. The trend is being driven by a falling trust among conservatives that began in the 1990s, according to social scientists, while liberals' trust in scientists has remained stable or ticked up.

A pro-Trump crowd, which included QAnon supporters, gathers in Washington on Jan. 6 seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election results — and later attacks the Capitol. A mistrust of expertise has created new intersections online among anti-vaccination groups, Trump supporters claiming voting fraud and proponents of alternative medicine. (Getty Images/Spencer Platt)

The factors fueling Americans' skepticism toward expertise include growing partisan divisions over controversial policies in scientific realms, such as climate change or the pandemic, and the rise of populism, typified by hostility toward expert elites in government and science. The Trump administration's attacks on science and the mainstream media, meanwhile, have made it increasingly difficult for the public to agree on what is truth. And it is becoming easier for people to share fringe ideas in a Twitter-and-Facebook world, where algorithms amplify those ideas by filtering users into isolated and sometimes extremist bubbles.

This mistrust of science could have dangerous consequences, experts warn, most ominously in the efforts to discredit COVID-19 vaccination campaigns.1

“What does it look like if we don't have a shared sense of reality?” said Claire Wardle, U.S. director of First Draft, an international nonprofit that tracks and combats misinformation online. “We've seen more conspiracy theories moving mainstream. There's an increasing number of people who do not believe in the critical infrastructure of a society. Where does that end?”2

Mistrust of expertise has created new intersections online among anti-vaccination groups, Trump supporters claiming fraud in the 2020 presidential election and proponents of alternative medicine more typically aligned with liberal politics, according to groups that track misinformation on the internet.

The anti-vaccination movement, which has grown from long-disproved claims that childhood vaccines cause autism, helped feed public distrust of COVID-19 vaccines on social media in recent months. In November, about two-thirds of websites posting false information about the presidential election also posted misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, according to NewsGuard, a company that rates the accuracy of websites.3

Doubts about the seriousness of the pandemic and resistance to scientists' social distancing and mask-wearing precautions became a mark of loyalty to former President Donald Trump, who expressed his skepticism about these things early in the pandemic. The belief stoked by Trump that the election was stolen from him through fraud culminated in the violent mob attack on the Capitol Jan. 6. Conspiracy theories ranging from supposed plots to steal the election to schemes to implant microchips in vaccines have proliferated online.

“Whether it is COVID vaccine hesitancy or QAnon zealots storming the Capitol, recent events are a potent reminder that conspiracy theories threaten not only societal cohesion, but our collective well-being,” cancer researcher David Robert Grimes wrote recently in the Financial Times. (QAnon is an umbrella term for internet conspiracy theories that claim, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, including President Biden and Hillary Clinton, and that military generals recruited Trump to run for president to break up this criminal conspiracy.)4

Yet past skepticism about the science purveyed by government has also led to positive social movements, such as AIDS patients protesting the lack of treatment in the 1980s or environmentalists demanding that the government clean up the nation's air and water, says Gil Eyal, professor of sociology at Columbia University and author of The Crisis of Expertise.

Eyal distinguishes between science as taught in elementary and high school, where he sees “no lack of trust,” and regulatory science — such as clean air regulations imposed on industry. “When it comes to regulatory science, you could say we are in the midst of a more evident episode of explosion of distrust in expertise,” says Eyal. But he cautions, “We may be more aware and discussing distrust more because it's coming from the right and conservatives” in contrast to the 1980s, when it came from the left.

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says distrust of expertise is not new. “What is new,” he says, “is the ability of people to increasingly isolate themselves socially in worlds where conventional experts don't penetrate, where people don't believe facts and act on that basis politically.”

Rauch points to Facebook groups and Twitter feeds divided by ideology, as well as polarized politics and social groups. In the past, he says, even though Americans disagreed, “what we did mostly agree on was how we figure out what's true: That involved networks of professionals and experts who would test viewpoints and come out with results that were reliable enough.”

Nevertheless, the long-held belief that giving people more scientific information would increase trust in science and adherence to medical advice is not borne out by research, according to social scientists.5

What may be more effective is listening to the concerns of parents who have had upsetting experiences with their children's reactions to vaccines. The inconsolable crying of boat captain Andresen's daughter after her MMR vaccinations was the impetus for his decision not to give any more vaccines to his 3-year-old daughter or his 1-year-old son. Simply dismissing stories like Andresen's as nonsense just makes parents and others more distrustful of experts, says Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who has spent years advising the United Nations on vaccination campaigns around the world.

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“I think some people resent that scientists dismiss their anecdotal experiences as not scientific. To them it's a kind of evidence. We have to depolarize this scientific expert from the experience expert,” she says. “We need to humanize the expert.”

In line with Larson's advice, the United Nations is taking a leaf from the anti-vaccination movement, with its emotive images of worried mothers and its receptive communities sharing experiences on social media. The U.N.'s COVID-19 vaccine campaign is posting videos on TikTok and Twitter in which young doctors sympathetically address the false rumors about the vaccine — such as fears that it causes infertility or has deadly side effects.6

Some scientists say their fields of study suffer from a credibility crisis, pointing to the inability to replicate some influential experiments in areas such as social psychology. (See Pro/Con.) Competitive pressure among scientists to publish unexpected or noteworthy findings in prestigious journals leads some to massage the data to get the results they want, some scientists say.

“People are trying to publish implausible findings and rushing to publish,” which may explain why many published findings do not hold up and have to be retracted later, says Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University who co-founded the Group on Best Practices in Science to study this phenomenon. “Science is either operating incredibly inefficiently or publishing a vast majority of findings that are false,” he has written.7

However, other scientists counter that while retracted articles may have increased in recent years, the overall retraction rate for fraud is less than 1 percent of all articles published and that the problem seems concentrated in just a few fields, such as biomedicine.8

For Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes, of greater concern are the business interests from tobacco to oil that have been funding scientists for years to cast doubt on findings that smoking causes cancer or that climate change is occurring. Oreskes documented the role of business in a 2011 book.9 This kind of “doubt-mongering,” she has written, “undermines public trust in science and it has the potential to undermine science itself.”10

According to polls by the Pew Research Center, Americans hold scientists in high regard, on a par with the military and well above the news media, business leaders and elected officials. In 2020, 87 percent of American adults said they had a great or fair amount of confidence that scientists act in the public interest, up from 76 percent in 2016.

But those views diverge sharply by party: More Democrats (52 percent) have a great deal of confidence in scientists than Republicans (27 percent). Most Democrats (75 percent) say scientists should take an active role in scientific policy debates, while a majority of Republicans (55 percent) say scientists should “focus on establishing sound scientific facts” and stay out of such debates.11

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Lately, research and surveys suggest that populist movements are driving the levels of distrust in the United States and Europe. These movements appeal to voters who have been economically left behind, while attacking more prosperous, college-educated elites. A 2019 study of 14 European countries found the percentage of people who believed vaccines were not important or effective correlated with the share who voted for populist parties.12

In the United States, stagnant economic prospects for white voters in rural areas where jobs and college degrees are declining have led to a “wariness and distrust” of mainstream sources of information from the media and universities, says Will Wilkinson, a former vice president for research at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank in Washington. Politicians on the right have been amplifying that distrust, he says, “no one as successfully as Trump.”

The former president “masterfully inflames polarization and leverages negative partisanship to turn supporters into a captive audience hostile to credible sources of information,” Wilkinson wrote.13

Self-identified conservatives in the United States and Canada tend to have lower trust in science than liberals and less intention to follow COVID precautions such as wearing masks, according to a new international survey led by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This is a distinctly North American attitude: In 19 other countries in Europe, Asia and Australia, conservatives were as likely as liberals to trust science and to follow COVID recommendations, the unpublished survey found.

“Trust in science and COVID doesn't seem to be politicized” in the same way in these other countries, says co-author Bernhard Leidner, associate professor of social psychology at the University of Massachusetts.

Mistrust of science as a litmus test for conservativism may be unique to the United States, writes Eyal. For example, in Europe, mistrust depends on the topic at hand: People on the left often distrust scientists working on genetically modified foods or pesticides.14

Here are some of the questions about science and expertise that are being asked in academia, government and groups tracking social media:

Are we seeing greater mistrust of scientific experts than in the past?

In 1973, Republicans trusted science more than religion while Democrats had more confidence in religion. Today, polls show the reverse: Democrats express more confidence in science, while Republicans say they trust religion more.15

Counterprotesters in San Ramon, Calif., in 2019 confront activists calling for action on climate change. Scientists' assertions about climate change and its causes have spawned fierce pushback from skeptics. (Getty Images/Smith Collection/Gado/Contributor)

That dramatic shift has been the driving force behind polls showing a slight overall decline in Americans' trust in the scientific community since the 1970s, according to social scientists. While the share of Americans who have “a great deal of confidence in the scientific community” has remained relatively stable at a bit over 40 percent in recent years, and scientific experts enjoy relatively high levels of trust compared with other groups, that is “masking polarization” between conservatives, whose confidence has dropped, and liberals, whose trust has edged up or remained stable, says Matthew Motta, a political scientist at Oklahoma State University.16

That divide stems largely from the partisan polarization over controversial policies in areas such as climate change, Motta says. “If you are a small-government, free-enterprise conservative and you learn that climate scientists recommend additional regulations on what companies can do about emissions or what types of cars can be manufactured, that puts political ideology at conflict with science,” he says.

By contrast, in the 1950s, “science was associated still with winning the Second World War” and with the military, says Timothy O'Brien, a sociologist at University of Wisconsin, Madison, who traced the historical flip in attitudes between Republican and Democrats in a recent co-authored article. Starting in the late 1970s, growing regulations spurred by social movements around the environment, consumer protection and workers faced resistance from Republican business owners, and politicians attacked the science behind them. “Long-haired environmentalists” became symbols in a new culture war.17

“The rank-and-file conservatives — the everyday voters — are slowly turning away from science as a different front of the culture war, where science becomes a manifestation of modern cultural values,” O'Brien says.

Yet when it comes to an issue such as global warming, which has been called a “hoax” by Trump, popular opinion does not necessarily reflect the party polarization of politicians, according to experts. In 2020, 74 percent of Americans trusted what scientists said about the environment — a share that has not changed much over the last decade and a half — and majorities of both parties since 1997 have believed the Earth was warming, according to surveys by Stanford University's Political Psychology Research Group.18

“I don't think there's a crisis of public confidence in science,” says Stanford's Krosnick, who directs the survey group. However, support has been declining among Republicans: The partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans on whether global warming is happening and is at least partly human-made has grown from 8 percentage points in 1997 to 26 points in 2020. “What happened is, former Republicans who trusted scientists have abandoned the Republican Party,” says Krosnick, leaving a party that is more “hard-core” in its skepticism of science.

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Dana Fisher, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, says there is a disconnect between most Republican voters, who tend to believe in human-caused climate change, and Republican leaders, who insist there is scientific disagreement about whether climate change is happening and is man-made. Her research found that congressional Republicans get their information from a small group of scientists who deny climate change is caused by human activity. “It's not coming from constituents who say that,” Fisher says.

Surprisingly, the more educated a conservative, the more likely he or she is to be distrustful of science, surveys find. Educated conservatives are more politically sophisticated than their lesser-educated counterparts and take their cues from party leaders, according to Motta. “If there's one thing social science tells us, it's that our partisan identity determines so much of how we see the world,” he says.19

The importance of partisan labels, Motta continues, was on view in the shifting willingness to take the COVID vaccine in polls of Democrats and Republicans: about equal in both parties at the beginning of the pandemic; declining among Republicans over the summer as Trump pooh-poohed the seriousness of the pandemic; then dropping among Democrats after vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris expressed doubts about a Trump administration-approved vaccine; and finally rebounding among Democrats but declining among Republicans after Joe Biden's presidential win.

Columbia sociologist Eyal says the mistrust aroused during the pandemic “is not surprising and is in fact quite rational,” given the changing recommendations around mask wearing, for example, stemming from fast-changing science and debates among scientists that usually take place “backstage” but were in the public eye this time.20

Debates on social media about the benefits of mask-wearing have been surprisingly sophisticated, with skeptics marshalling scientific studies and discussing the quality of scientific evidence, says Kate Starbird, an associate professor in human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington. Her research on that traffic found mask opponents to be “interesting and smart people assembling the scientific evidence to fit their viewpoints.”

Ultimately, however, Eyal says he is skeptical of most surveys that try to measure trust. He has argued that trust toward experts is not a fixed attitude but is usually conditional, depending on the topic, and can quickly turn to mistrust. It is like the command: “Trust me!”

“The moment you hear it, doubt and mistrust creep into your heart,” he said.21

Is social media to blame for the current crisis of mistrust of experts?

In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, the power of social media was on full display, with a flood of tweets from Trump and his supporters first predicting, then falsely claiming election fraud. Proof from election officials and state recounts confirming Biden's victory did little to cool the “Stop the Steal” movement that culminated in January's violent protest in Washington.

Then-President Trump, labeled a top five Twitter “superspreader” of misinformation by a group that tracks misinformation online, tweeted this false claim to his followers on Nov. 11. (Screenshot)

Trump was among the top five Twitter “superspreaders” of false information about the election: 21 of his tweets pushing false claims were retweeted over 1.9 million times, according to Starbird, who co-founded the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, which tracks misinformation online.

Starbird says Trump's top-down influence stoked “a bottom-up element where people went into their voting booth taking photos of things they thought were out of place…. They're being deceived by this campaign that helped them interpret the world as if they were being cheated.”

Twitter, Facebook and other major social media platforms use algorithms that offer users more extreme versions of the content they are already viewing and lure them into like-minded groups that often reinforce conspiracy theories, critics in Congress and consumer groups charge. Because the platforms earn money from the number of “eyeballs” or clicks on ads, they have a monetary incentive to lure users into spending more time on their platform.

Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, an advocacy group focused on accountability in social media, charges that the social media platforms “design algorithms that amplify the extreme and the outrageous, push people into echo chambers and constantly are feeding people more and more radical content.”

In the past, Lehrich says, newspaper editors selected stories for their accuracy and featured academic experts with a record of expertise in their field.

“Now there's no editor choosing,” he says. “The algorithms function so the content rising to the top might be a random QAnon believer — it's a game to produce content that goes viral. Getting 5 million views on YouTube doesn't mean the underlying information is based on fact.”

First Draft's Wardle sees a more complex picture. She says the real impetus for distrust in mainstream information stems from larger societal changes over the last 30 years, which have made people “feel they were forgotten” by forces beyond their control — such as the 2008 financial crisis and job loss from globalization. The Stop the Steal movement was stoked as much by Fox News and talk radio as by social media, according to Wardle. “The platforms play a part in it. But they didn't create it from nothing.”

Still, Wardle shares the concern about algorithms, combined with other media. The constant drip of misinformation apparently reached a wide cross-section of Americans, as demonstrated by the Jan. 6 protest that turned violent: “It was not just QAnon extremists,” she says. “You had dads in golf shirts and grandmas who absolutely believed the big lie because over time they had been inside an echo chamber that was only talking about the fact the election was stolen.”

However, a 2018 research review published by the Knight Foundation, which studies and supports journalism, found that selective exposure to like-minded political news online or from other media is less prevalent than believed. Only a minority of Americans have heavily skewed partisan news diets. Even among those who consume political news, “most do not get all or even most of it from congenial media” and some even seek out political news of a different persuasion, the study found.22

During the 2020 election campaign, only a quarter of Democrats and Republicans consistently turned to news outlets aligned with their political views, according to the Pew Research Center.23

Several studies, including analyses of internet traffic data, have found interpersonal relationships with like-minded family and friends to be a more likely source of echo chambers than online news.24

The perception of how many Americans get news from social media may be exaggerated, the authors of the Knight Foundation research review noted.

About half of U.S. adults (53 percent) say they get news from social media but only 23 percent do so “often.”25

When it comes to political and election news, the 18 percent of American adults who say that social media is their most common source tend to be young — almost half are under 30. Both Democrats and Republicans are more likely to express distrust of social media in this arena; 59 percent of adults said they distrusted Facebook as a place for political news.26

As for algorithms, co-author Ben Lyons, assistant professor of communication at the University of Utah, says it is hard to know their true effect, “because so much of it is black-box data that we don't have access to as researchers.” Facebook and other platforms keep that data proprietary.

But he adds, “It's wrong to say that social media is the only driver of misinformation and mistrust. We see long-term trends of mistrust of experts that predate the rise of social media both in Europe and the U.S.”

For example, he says, conservative politicians have expressed distrust of mainstream news media since at least the 1970s, dating back to Republican President Richard Nixon, who bitterly criticized the press.27 And he says network TV and talk radio also have a huge audience.

Yet in a prophetic statement, the researchers in the Knight Foundation essay concluded that even a minority immersed in echo chambers can still have an outsized influence: “The danger is not that all of us are living in echo chambers but that a subset of the most politically engaged and vocal among us are.”28

Is mistrust of science dangerous for society?

Trust in science is a fundamental requirement of democracy, argues Philip Kitcher, professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University, and author of Science in a Democratic Society. “People have to have well-grounded views to cast their votes in ways that will promote what they most deeply want,” something we do not have at the moment, he says. “Without a well-informed electorate the way is open for the con man.”

Yet general popular trust will only come when people feel that everyone in society is being looked after, Kitcher says — for example, that all will have free access to a safe COVID vaccine, the kind of trust that existed in the New England town meetings of America's early democracy but which seems to be waning now. That mutual understanding “breaks down when there's a lack of community and acute levels of inequality,” he argues. “People will resist information if they think accepting what others want them to believe is likely to wreck their lives.”

Columbia sociologist Eyal takes a different perspective, writing that the “death of expertise” — the title of a 2017 book by U.S. Naval War College professor Tom Nichols bewailing the trend — is an exaggeration. There has never been a society more reliant on expertise than the United States' postindustrial society, he writes — whether stepping trustingly onto an airplane or driving down a highway.29

The suspicion of expertise tends to come only in those scientific fields that are highly contested, Eyal argues, such as vaccines, genetically modified foods or climate change. Sometimes, active mistrust of expertise is a sign of democracy, he writes, as in the patients' groups formed in the 1970s that argued the medical establishment and regulatory agencies were ignoring patients' experiential evidence. Public health officials responded by putting patients onto advisory committees as lay experts — a form of “participatory science.”

A memorial for those who died from COVID-19 greets visitors to the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, N.Y., on May 27, 2020. Some analysts say the suspicion of expertise tends to come in those scientific fields that are highly contested, such as vaccines. (Getty Images/Spencer Platt)

“Blind trust of experts is very dangerous to society,” Eyal says. “Experts have made a lot of mistakes.” For example, experts long ignored pollution as the root cause of high rates of asthma in minority neighborhoods. It took advocacy groups working through social media to gain recognition of their neighborhoods' disproportionate truck traffic and industry. “We are no longer clear what it means to trust responsibly,” he says. “That's what's dangerous.”

Complicating trust, corporations have abused participatory science, with pharmaceutical companies funding and recruiting patients to “highjack the [Food and Drug Administration's] consultative process,” Eyal writes. The internet handed a megaphone to “charlatans and peddlers of outlandish theories.” Such developments have curtailed experts' ability to persuade, he has argued.30

“You want a truth-friendly society … to sort truth from falsehood, which requires professionals and training,” says Rauch of Brookings. The past 30 years have seen a concerted attack on how to arrive at truth — of which “Trump is the epitome,” he says.

Trump's attacks on authority figures in science, such as the country's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, have created cynicism among the public and the belief that everyone is a liar, Rauch says. “Trump used Russian-style disinformation tactics” — flooding social media with false information — “and brilliantly adapted them to a U.S. context,” Rauch says. “He is a very sophisticated and effective disinformation operator.”

Climate scientist and National Academy of Sciences member Peter Gleick says climate change deniers funded by fossil fuel interests have misused the way scientists talk about uncertainty — estimating a range of possibilities — to mislead the public into thinking there is more uncertainty about climate change findings than there really is.

“Scientists are human beings,” too, Gleick says. “We have opinions, we have biases. But good science isn't influenced by politics.” On the other hand, he says, “my political opinions can be influenced by what science tells us.” In his case, “I feel very strongly that the science says we have to cut carbon emissions, but I don't honestly know what is the best way.” When it comes to the costs and benefits of a carbon tax versus subsidies for renewables, for example, Gleick says, he defers to policy experts who know more about what would be effective.

But some conservatives argue that scientists are not always deferential about who should make policy decisions and that liberals often parade science as the rationalization for policies they want anyway.

“For liberals, especially blue-state politicians and officials, the failure has more often involved invoking capital-S Science to evade their own responsibilities: pretending that a certain kind of scientific knowledge, ideally backed by impeccable credentials, can substitute for prudential and moral judgments that we are all qualified to argue over, and that our elected leaders, not our scientists, have the final responsibility to make,” wrote opinion columnist Ross Douthat in The New York Times.

For crucial decisions regarding the pandemic in the past year, the slogan “‘trust the science’ didn't get you very far,” Douthat argued, because decisions about how much to speed up vaccine approval or who should get the vaccine first are fundamentally political decisions. Looking back on the pandemic era, he wrote, “one of the signal failures will be the inability to acknowledge that many key decisions — from our vaccine policy to our lockdown strategy to our approach to businesses and schools — are fundamentally questions of statesmanship.”31

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Background

American Roots of Anti-Intellectualism

The United States has a long history of hostility toward intellectuals, perhaps not surprisingly, since the country was settled “by men and women who repudiated European civilization for its oppressiveness or decadence,” observed historian Richard Hofstadter in his landmark 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. 32

Hofstadter traced this hostility to evangelical Protestantism, with its suspicion of an educated professional clergy, and to a preference for the “wisdom” of intuition and the wish to get back to nature in man, exemplified by such hardy frontier figures as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.33

That preference “has been a force in American politics, and its effects have been visible in the public images of figures as diverse as Andrew Jackson, … Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower,” he wrote. “Intellect in America is resented … as a quality which almost certainly deprives a man or woman of the common touch.”34

At the same time, U.S. presidents from the beginning have insisted upon an educated citizenry as a necessity for a republic. President George Washington, in his Farewell Address, urged the establishment of “institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” calling it “essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”35

And most schoolchildren have grown up with the image of a young Abraham Lincoln reading by the light of a log fire in a humble cabin.36

Although states eventually created public school systems, taxpayers have long balked at giving them adequate support. By the mid-19th century, prominent educational reformers such as Horace Mann were complaining of teachers who were underpaid and ill-educated. Things did not improve much over time, according to historians. Hofstadter, writing of schools in the 1960s, cited overcrowded classrooms, “the cult of athleticism” that prized sports over learning, inferior schools in African American neighborhoods and “the failure to educate in serious subjects.”37

The New Deal

The term “expertise” first became the subject of controversy during the struggle over President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies, which sought to end the Depression. New Dealers wanted the deliberations of expert agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission to be exempt from judicial review, maintaining they should be accorded the same status as expert witnesses, whose judgment courts typically did not question.38

However, conservative opponents of the New Deal, along with business interests opposed to the agencies' new regulations, questioned this, arguing that a commission's rate-setting authority did not justify exemption from judicial review. The argument foreshadowed today's debate over how much of a government's decision is expertise-based and how much is a matter of economic and political opinion.39

Liberal Democrats' two decades in power ended when Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency in 1952. Political developments of the 1950s and the intensifying of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union produced contradictory pressures on science and expertise. On the one hand, the decade gave rise to McCarthyism, a movement led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., that created a climate of fear through allegations that communists had infiltrated government and other institutions, including universities.40

Describing the “paranoid style” of the McCarthyites, Hofstadter wrote that the long-standing opposition of businessmen to changes wrought by New Deal regulators had “spilled over into a resentment of intellectuals and experts.”41

Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., leads a 1954 hearing investigating what he alleged was communist influence in the government and other institutions. McCarthy's attacks, along with hostility to the New Deal, “spilled over into a resentment of intellectuals and experts” in the 1950s, according to historian Richard Hofstadter. (Getty Images/The LIFE Picture Collection/Hank Walker)

But after the Soviets launched the world's first space satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, Americans were seized by a fervor for science as the stakes were raised in the Cold War space race. Science continued to be associated with nationalism into the presidency of John F. Kennedy, who made landing astronauts on the moon a national goal.

The 1960s, meanwhile, saw the rise of consumer movements built on the research of Rachel Carson on pollution and Ralph Nader on unsafe cars. These movements led to greater government regulation of industry and growing pressure to clean up the environment.

In the 1970s this drive for more regulation helped stiffen business against the regulatory state. And as industry's perspective gained prominence in the Republican Party, deregulation and limited government became rallying cries for conservatives. Conservative think tanks emerged, producing papers that opposed the scientific establishment on the environment, tobacco smoking, safe driving and other issues. The tobacco industry, which refused for decades to accept the scientific evidence that smoking causes cancer, paid scientists to engage in research whose purpose was to distract attention from tobacco's dangerous effects, according to Harvard's Oreskes.42

“Doubt is our product,” an internal 1969 tobacco industry memo explained.43

The rise of the evangelical Christian movement in the 1970s and 1980s was a major reason for shifting views that saw Republicans become more trusting of religion than science, while the opposite happened among Democrats, according to O'Brien.44

Although white Southern Democrats were just as likely to be religious as Republicans in the 1960s, by the 1980s many had defected to the Republican Party in the wake of the civil rights era. Increasingly, in areas such as the teaching of evolution and sex education, science and religion were diametrically opposed.

“That conflict between science and religion that people take for granted in the U.S., you just don't see in other parts of the world,” says O'Brien. “In the U.S., they're seen as competitors because they've been leveraged as fronts in the culture war. It's about the broader divide between modern and traditional cultural values.”

In 1981, Republican Ronald Reagan, a highly influential voice in American conservatism, became president. Reagan, who believed that a free market would best solve the nation's problems, advocated reducing government spending and regulations on industry. But environmentalists and others criticized his eight-year administration for allowing business interests to overrule experts.

In 1981 Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., published a “hit list” used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of scientists flagged by industry as hostile. The EPA replaced several dozen scientists on science advisory panels with those who worked for industry or had reputations as political conservatives. Speaking in 2018, Hart said he saw a parallel in the way Trump's EPA was remaking its advisory boards to favor industry representatives.45

Legal Evolution of Expertise

An explosion of civil damages litigation in the final decades of the 20th century gave rise to new debates about what constituted an expert for purposes of court testimony. The common rule that had been in force since a 1923 federal court decision in Frye v. United States instructed courts to ask whether an expert witness enjoyed “general acceptance in the particular field,” leaving vetting to professional associations.46

But lawsuits about dangerous drugs and industrial defects tended to pit one group of experts against another, with charges of “junk science” flying back and forth.

In the 1990s, the Frye standard was replaced by the U.S. Supreme Court's Daubert ruling, based on three Supreme Court decisions in 1993, 1997 and 1999. In the initial case, Joyce Daubert contended that the morning sickness drug Bendectin had caused birth defects in her son, and she marshaled a team of experts contesting the drug manufacturer's science. Daubert guidelines empower judges to determine for themselves whether an expert witness' methods meet scientific standards, such as publication in a peer-reviewed journal.47

The Daubert rule also established the legal framework for any party to challenge an expert's qualifications or opinions. A majority of states have adopted Daubert in some form.48

Clashes between scientists and conservatives re-emerged in the administration of Republican George W. Bush, who became president in 2001. Shunting aside scientists' advice, Bush resisted approval of a human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) to protect against sexually transmitted diseases, opposed the teaching of any sex education other than abstinence and banned federal funding for most research on human embryonic stem cells.49

At the time, the science advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists said the Bush administration posed the biggest threat to health and safety of any president, with 98 attacks on science. These included censoring federal scientists about their work, altering scientific information in reports, downplaying the effects of climate change and disbanding scientific advisory committees.50

Bush, who became a born-again evangelical Christian in 1985, often aligned his policies with those of evangelical right, with its moral opposition to any sex education that contemplated sex before marriage or vaccines to prevent sexually transmitted diseases such as HPV. In his 2001 speech banning federal funding for most embryonic cell research, he stressed his belief that human life is “a sacred gift from our Creator.” Bush warned that discoveries of modern science pose “vast ethical mine fields,” saying the society depicted in Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World had already arrived, in that human beings could now be created in test tubes.51

Democratic President Barack Obama took office in 2009 pledging to “restore science to its rightful place.” In a 2016 assessment, the science journal Nature said that during Obama's presidency government researchers had experienced more freedom and less political meddling than under Bush on subjects from stem cells to climate change. In his first year in office, Obama reversed Bush's 2001 ban on federally backed stem cell research. However, Obama had also exerted political influence: In 2011, for example, he directed the EPA to withdraw a plan proposing stricter limits on ozone pollution, calling them too costly as the economy was recovering from a recession. Eventually, science won out: EPA approved stronger ozone standards in 2015.52

The Trump Years

In 2016, Trump was elected president, running on a platform that included promises to end U.S. participation in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change and to restore coal industry jobs by rolling back environmental regulations.53

Just three months into his presidency, on April 22, 2017, more than a million people around the world took to the streets for the March for Science, an event partly inspired by the anti-science stance of the Trump administration.54

The University of Maryland's Fisher, who interviewed marchers in the United States, says 93 percent came because of the environment and climate change, with protests against Trump as the second-biggest motivator. At the time, she says, some well-known scientists publicly announced they were leaving the administration to avoid being silenced, and leading scientific organizations and scientists participated in the march.

More than 1 million people worldwide, including this group in Tucson, Ariz., participated in the March for Science on April 22, 2017. Many were protesting what they called the Trump administration's anti-science rhetoric and policies. (Getty Images/Wild Horizons/Universal Images Group/Contributor)

However, public opinion surveys before and after the march found that attitudes toward scientists became more negative after the event among conservatives and moderates, while liberals felt more warmly toward scientists. The University of Oklahoma's Motta, who conducted the surveys, speculates that conservatives soured on “the politicization of scientists wading into political controversies.” The march, he says, “took its toll in the court of public opinion.”55

By May 2019, Trump had attacked science 100 times, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, more attacks in his first two and a half years than any other administration, including that of George W. Bush in its entire eight years. The scientists cited Trump's rollback of protections from dangerous chemicals, ignoring scientific evidence about workplace injuries in poultry plants and sidelining epidemiological evidence about air pollution's health effects.56

By December 2020, the scientists' list of Trump's assaults on science had grown. Most visible were the administration's interference with federal experts over the coronavirus pandemic, after the first official case in the United States was confirmed on Jan. 21, 2020, in a patient who had returned from Wuhan, China.57

Looking back, mainstream media reported that Trump had repeatedly lied in his effort to downplay the pandemic, contradicting the information he was getting from top scientists such as infectious disease expert Fauci. The pandemic is “going to disappear,” Trump said in February 2020; “it's fading away,” he asserted in June; and he said in July that the pandemic is “getting under control” even as the country's daily cases doubled.58

The White House installed political operatives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to control information released about COVID-19 and blocked a CDC draft order requiring the wearing of masks on public transit, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.59

Experts were especially upset when Trump, at a televised press briefing in April, suggested injecting disinfectant into people as a coronavirus treatment, turning to Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator: “Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

Injecting a disinfectant like bleach would risk poisoning and death, scientists warned.60

Then, in the final days of his administration, Trump pushed through last-minute rollbacks in environmental protection: He authorized the sale of oil leases in Alaska, announced the federal government would no longer fine or prosecute companies whose actions caused the death of migratory birds and made it harder to enact protections for habitat. Those were among more than 100 environmental rules he reversed or weakened during his term, according to The New York Times. 61

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Current Situation

Biden Policy Changes

President Biden is moving quickly to highlight the role of science in his administration and to reverse Trump's environmental orders. Biden elevated the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to Cabinet status, named the first-ever national climate adviser, Gina McCarthy, and gave her an office in the West Wing. He also named former Sen. John Kerry to be the U.S. special envoy for climate.62

“Science will always be at the forefront of my administration — and these world-renowned scientists will ensure everything we do is grounded in science, facts and the truth,” Biden said.63

On his first day in office, Biden issued 17 executive orders and other directives. He signed a letter to re-enter the Paris climate accords and reversed several of Trump's environmental orders. He reinstated a moratorium on oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and reversed rollbacks to vehicle emissions standards.64

Signaling a more aggressive approach to the pandemic, Biden appointed a COVID-19 response coordinator reporting directly to the president, made masks mandatory on federal property and reinstated ties to the World Health Organization, which Trump had severed after blaming the U.N. agency for the pandemic's spread. Biden also ordered a freeze on all last-minute regulations put in motion by Trump — so-called midnight regulations — to give the administration time to evaluate them.65

Social Media Developments

In the days following the mob attack on the Capitol, Twitter and Facebook banned Trump from their platforms, with Facebook accusing him of “actively fomenting a violent insurrection.”66

Critics of the platforms said it was too little, too late. Some urged Congress to consider amending Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives internet platforms broad immunity from legal liability for user-generated content.

“If an armed siege of the Capitol that was in large part fomented and planned on social media platforms is not enough to get the platforms to take sweeping reform, then I think it's clearly the case that we need to fundamentally change the incentive structure and change the regulatory regime,” says Lehrich of Accountability Tech.

However, executives of major social media platforms object to changing the law's provisions shielding them from lawsuits, including legal protection for their decisions about whether to remove objectionable content.

“Section 230 is the most important law protecting internet speech,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said at an October Senate hearing, warning that eroding Section 230 would “collapse how we communicate on the internet.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies virtually to a Senate committee hearing on Oct. 28, along with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other tech chiefs. The hearing debated whether Congress should revise a law protecting tech companies from liability over content on their platforms. (Getty Images/Michael Reynolds)

Without Section 230, “platforms would likely censor more content to avoid legal risk,” said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the same hearing. However, Zuckerberg surprised some industry observers by saying, “We support the ideas around transparency and industry collaboration that are being discussed in some of the current bipartisan proposals.” While he did not name a specific bill, his statements most closely matched the bipartisan Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency Act, which would require companies to disclose their standards for moderating content and establish a formal appeal system for takedowns of content, according to Verge, a tech publication.67

Congressional Democrats and Republicans have called for changing or even repealing the law — but for different reasons: Democrats want social media platforms to face new requirements to delete inaccurate and incendiary posts; Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, charge that the platforms have been too interventionist in banning conservative speech.68

Biden, in a 2020 interview, said Section 230 should be revoked, and Democrats have said they will introduce bills to curb the power of social media companies and to address hate speech. However, any such legislation could face strong opposition from the powerful high-tech industry, as well as groups concerned about free speech. In January, 75 social justice groups sent a letter to Biden warning against any sweeping changes to Section 230, saying it would “silence marginalized people,” such as sex workers.69

Reps. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., and Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., introduced a bill in the last Congress that would end platforms' protection from lawsuits for “harmful, radicalizing content that leads to offline violence.”70

The bill was supported by Accountable Tech but opposed by the tech industry. NetChoice, a tech industry trade association, said social media sites would be “forced to take down legitimate speech” such as posts by Black Lives Matter. The legislation died in the previous Congress, but Malinowski has said he will reintroduce it in the current session.71 The Wall Street Journal has counted more than 20 proposals on both sides of the aisle making some kind of change to Section 230.72

Even some social media critics are leery of changing Section 230. First Draft's Wardle points to Germany's 2018 law fining large platforms for hate speech and “fake news.” The law's passage made the platforms “so nervous about being fined that they ended up taking down a lot more speech that was actually fine,” she says. “It had a chilling effect on speech.”

Steven Brill, co-CEO of NewsGuard Technologies, a company that puts a red icon next to unreliable websites when they show up in search results, says, “The only thing Twitter gets from shutting Trump down is it makes him more of a martyr and more of a talking point. The way to deal with misinformation and disinformation is not to censor it but to mitigate it by posting the truth next to it.”

When it comes to addressing problems around Section 230, Twitter's CEO Dorsey said Feb. 9 that he favored a “market-driven” approach, giving more people choice around what algorithms they are using.73

Vaccine Hesitancy Declining

The latest polls show that growing numbers of Americans are expressing a willingness to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Still, not enough of them say they will get the shot to reach the level of herd immunity needed to stop the pandemic — estimated at 60 to 80 percent of the population vaccinated.

Almost half of American adults say they want to get vaccinated as soon as possible or already have been vaccinated, up from one-third in December, according to a January poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.74

“We see significant numbers of people who know other people who have gotten vaccinated; they've seen reports on the news of people vaccinated,” says Liz Hamel, Kaiser's director of Public Opinion and Survey Research. Compared to December, when the vaccine was not yet available, “it's a whole different ballgame,” she says.

This change may also help explain why willingness, although low, has also risen in the African American community. Kaiser's most recent poll finds 35 percent of Black adults want the shot as soon as possible, compared with just 20 percent in December, with 43 percent saying they will “wait and see.”75

That increase is significant, according to former Washington, D.C., Public Health Commissioner Reed Tuckson, founder of the Black Coalition Against COVID-19, a D.C.-based organization of Black community leaders and doctors. Early in the pandemic, 60 percent of the Black community said they would not get the shot. (Those who “definitely” would not take the shot — or only if required — has dropped to 21 percent in Kaiser's recent poll.)76

Tuckson says he expects willingness to keep rising. “The message is being delivered by trusted intermediaries; that's part of what's turning the tide,” he says, pointing to Black doctors, nurses and ministers spreading the word. The coalition's virtual town halls featuring Black scientists and health experts are attracting around 300,000 people, he says.

Yet making further inroads in the Black community may be difficult, some experts predict. “Vaccine reluctance is a direct consequence of the medical system's mistreatment of Black people,” wrote two African American emergency doctors in The New York Times in December, citing “the culture of medical exploitation, abuse and neglect.”77

Exemplifying that history is the 40-year Tuskegee syphilis study. In 1932, it enrolled about 400 Black men in Alabama who suffered from syphilis without informing them of their diagnosis — or treating them with penicillin after it was found to be a reliable cure. By 1972, 128 men had died of syphilis, 40 wives had been infected and 19 children had congenital syphilis.78

Going further back, J. Marion Sims, considered the 19th-century father of modern gynecology, performed surgery on enslaved Black women without anesthesia or their consent.79

And mistreatment is not just in the past. In December, a Black female doctor, Susan Moore, died of COVID-19 after complaining of racist treatment she said she received in a suburban Indianapolis hospital.80

But Tuckson says some of the initial reasons people did not want to take the vaccine — such as “I don't want to be a guinea pig” or fear of bad side effects — have evaporated now that more than 40 million people have been vaccinated and side effects have been mostly minimal.

Tuckson also hears people saying, “‘I'm tired of postponing my life…. I want to go on vacation.’ People are now realizing if I don't get this vaccine, I don't get to do it.”

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Outlook

“A Reckoning” Ahead

As the COVID-19 death toll continues to mount, many experts agree that the public's trust in science will help determine how soon the pandemic will end. If public mistrust in the vaccine continues at current levels, it may be difficult for the country to soon reach the immunity level that public health officials say is necessary to curtail the coronavirus' spread.81

A continuing death toll this winter will make it harder for Americans to deny that COVID is real and dangerous, says sociologist Fisher. “There's going to be a reckoning,” Fisher says. “I think science will win, but we're going to swallow a bitter pill in the process to get there.”

However, some experts are optimistic that the 31 percent of American adults who want to “wait and see” others vaccinated before they get the shot will eventually be persuaded to get vaccinated. If so, that could bring the total share of vaccinated adults to well over 70 percent.

“We need to go straight to the swing vote,” says anthropologist Larson of this group, “not in a pushy way but in trying to understand what the issues are.”82

With new, more-contagious variants of the virus emerging from Britain and South Africa, people are asking whether vaccines will still protect them, and some are worrying, “Will we have a new pandemic next year which no one has been exposed to?” Larson says. Amid the constantly evolving science, “we need empathy with questioning publics,” she emphasizes.

What remains unclear is the impact on public opinion of the Trump administration's attacks on science. For example, in a last-ditch effort, Trump administration officials published some papers online denying climate change just days before Trump left office.83

“Publishing a few long-discredited anti-science arguments will have no effect” on the climate science field, says climate scientist Gleick. “More worrisome is the general effort to discredit science in the public's mind — to sow doubt and uncertainty … to make it look like scientists are corrupt when it's just the people [Trump] put in place who are corrupt.” For the future, worries Gleick, “it poses the risk of making people distrust science more.”

The news media, social media platforms and other institutions will need to rebuild public trust, says Rauch of Brookings. Historically, societies of editors have done that in the past, he says, establishing professional standards of integrity after 19th-century journalism became a “cesspool” of fake news.

Rauch says he sees some encouraging signs: “Journalists have wised up about disinformation,” there is more “willingness to call a falsehood a falsehood” and the media is seeing a healthy rise in fact-checking and citing sources online.

“We used to think we were immune in America” to disinformation, Rauch says. “We had three TV networks that weren't going to report this rubbish. We learned that can be circumvented. So now we have to start all over again: We have to build new standards and institutions, but the good news is we have done that before.”

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Pro/Con

Is there a credibility crisis in science?

Pro Jon A. Krosnick Professor of Political Science, Communication and Psychology, Stanford University. Written for CQ Researcher, March 2021 Has the public's trust in science declined sharply recently? One answer to this question is “no,” because national surveys have shown no decline since 1970 in the percentage of Americans expressing a great deal of confidence in scientists. But another answer is “yes,” because that proportion has never reached even 50 percent. The absence of a recent decline might seem surprising in light of numerous highly publicized failures of science. For example, drug companies Amgen, Bayer and AstraZenica announced that they were unable to replicate findings reported in numerous prestigious publications in natural science. Stanford scholar John Ioannidis made headlines when he announced that most research findings in medicine were false. The front page of The New York Times splashed the headline “Psychology's Fears Confirmed: Rechecked Studies Don't Hold Up” to trumpet psychologist Brian Nosek's findings that most social psychological study results could not be reproduced. But there is an obvious explanation for the lack of a sharp decline in confidence: Recent failures are nothing new. For example, in 1981, The New York Times announced “Study Links Coffee Use to Pancreas Cancer.” But later, the accumulated evidence showed just the opposite: More coffee consumption was associated with less risk of pancreatic cancer. In 1991, The Times highlighted Dr. David Baltimore's resignation from Rockefeller University after he was accused of fabricating data. So if members of the public were to be asked why recent news has not compromised their confidence in science, they might reply: “because we already knew this kind of stuff.” Sadly, skepticism about science was reinforced very visibly by recent pre-election surveys. Polls predicted that Joe Biden would win the presidency in 2020 by a much larger margin than he did in many states. And in 2016, Hillary Clinton was predicted to win the presidency when Donald Trump triumphed. Due to these sorts of revelations, the scientific community is working hard to revise its practices to enhance the replicability of its visible findings. And many practitioners are optimistic that recent reforms are already paying off. But in fact, we do not yet know. More importantly, even if those measures do improve the efficiency of science in getting to the truth, public confidence in science will rise only if members of the public see first-hand evidence convincing them that scientific findings are truly becoming more reliable. So far, that's not true for highly visible pre-election polls. I hope the public does see such evidence, and soon. In the meantime, we at Stanford will track progress and do our best to help.

Con Daniele Fanelli Fellow, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Written for CQ Researcher, March 2021 The best and most recent evidence that we have just doesn't support suggestions that most published research findings are false, irreproducible or invalid. Nor is there evidence that problems have increased. There undoubtedly have been recent spectacular cases of scientific failures. However, the only systematic evidence comes from studies that took samples of published studies and repeated the experiments. Estimates vary depending on the literature sampled and the metrics used but are generally well above 50 percent (for example, social psychology 77 percent, cognitive and social psychology 36-68 percent, experimental economics 61 percent and cancer biology 64-79 percent). These rates are a concern only if one assumes that published studies should replicate almost all the time, equally in all fields. This is an unrealistic expectation, because it overlooks how scientific fields vary enormously in their ability to separate signal from noise, encode regularities and thus make progress. A field's complexity is a key factor too often omitted in this discussion. As we move from the physical to the biological and social sciences, the number of variables and relations that characterize the phenomena studied increases, while our ability to formulate and test strong theories, to codify robust methods and to perfectly repeat experimental conditions decreases. Hence, all else being equal, we would not expect all studies to replicate exactly, even if all hypotheses tested in a field were correct — which they are not and are not expected to be. There is also no clear evidence that standards of research quality and integrity have declined. The often-cited rise in retractions to scientific publications is provably explained by the parallel diffusion of bodies to investigate research misconduct, journal retraction policies and training and awareness in research integrity. Multiple studies have failed to document increases in errors or questionable research practices in the literature. This is not to deny that we have a lot of work to do to boost research quality and progress. However, the main reason is not that our science is less credible or declining, but that it is getting more complex. As the low-hanging fruits inevitably run out, scientists endeavor to measure and explain phenomena of increasing subtlety and particularity, using ever more sophisticated analytical methods and working in larger teams of diverse nationality and expertise. As a result, ensuring fast and reliable advancement at the frontier becomes harder, and research practices need innovation to meet these new, exciting challenges.

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Short Features

Discredited Doctor Still Inspires Anti-Vaxxers

Why does Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a disgraced anti-vaccination crusader, still command a loyal following?

In 1998, the British gastroenterologist published a widely publicized study claiming — falsely — a link between autism and the childhood vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR). The Lancet, the academic journal that published the paper, retracted it 12 years later, and Wakefield was stripped of his medical license for unethical behavior, including fraud, in 2010.1

Yet Wakefield continues to be a surprisingly popular figure — a kind of martyr among parents convinced that the vaccine caused their children's autism and others worried that it might. Signs of autism, a developmental condition in children that impairs their ability to communicate and interact with others, typically appear around the same age as the MMR vaccine is given. (The first dose is recommended at 12 to 15 months of age and the second dose at 4 to 6 years. Signs of autism typically appear before the age of 3.)2

The story Wakefield continues to tell shares “his own estrangement from the scientific community with parents who feel that they, too, are not listened to,” wrote Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, in her 2020 book Stuck. 3

Dr. Andrew Wakefield, shown here in London in 2010, said his campaign against vaccination was intended to help parents and children. Critics strenuously disagree, and Wakefield lost his medical license. (Getty Images/PA Images/Anthony Devlin)

In 2010, Wakefield published a book, Callous Disregard, defending himself as a victim of the way “‘the system’ deals with dissent among its doctors and scientists.” He described his story as a struggle against “compromise in medicine” and “corruption of science.”4

“I was discredited in the eyes of those who wanted to see me discredited. In other words, those who had an interest in maintaining the status quo,” he told The Independent in 2018. “What I represent is the parents and the children who have been damaged.”5

Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the assassinated presidential candidate, continues to defend Wakefield and last year invited him to speak at a forum on the supposed dangers of COVID-19 vaccines, which Wakefield claimed in January “could go horribly wrong.”6

In the years following the publication of Wakefield's discredited study, immunization rates in several countries dropped sharply. In England, measles vaccination rates fell from more than 90 percent to a low of 79 percent in 2003; it took 15 years for rates to return to their level before Wakefield's publication. (Measles require a 95 percent rate to reach herd immunity, the point at which enough people become immune to a disease to make its spread unlikely.)7

In 2015, a measles outbreak at Disneyland theme parks in Southern California spread across the United States and as far away as Canada, Mexico and the Philippines. Measles outbreaks across Europe — more than 20,000 cases and 25 deaths in 2017 — triggered new vaccine requirement mandates in Italy and France.8

In response to the Disneyland outbreak, California passed legislation in 2016 removing parents' ability to opt out of their child's school vaccination based on “personal belief.” Protests against the law and what some parents called “medical tyranny” followed across the country.9

Kindergarteners' vaccination rates in California rose from 93 percent to 95 percent in the first two years after the law's passage. But medical exemptions surged 250 percent in districts where parents had been filing personal belief exemptions before the new law took effect.10

California state Sen. Richard Pan, a Democrat who is a pediatrician, warned that the increase represented “fake medical exemptions.” In response to concerns like these, California passed a 2019 law saying a doctor's letter was no longer sufficient: A medical exemption could be revoked if state health officials deemed it inappropriate. The law was greeted by candlelight vigils for dead babies and signs saying “Welcome to Nazifornia.”11

In Texas, where Wakefield moved after leaving Britain, school vaccine exemptions increased 1,900 percent from the early 2000s, when he arrived. Health officials have linked Wakefield's visit to a Somali American community in Minnesota with a dramatic drop in vaccinations and a measles outbreak there in 2017. In May 2019, during a major measles outbreak in Rockland County, New York, Wakefield appeared via Skype dismissing the risks from measles.12

Wakefield has continued his campaign with “almost evangelical zeal,” Larson wrote. He recruited Hollywood celebrities and met with Donald Trump during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Trump mentioned the purported vaccine-autism link in interviews, tweets and debates.13

A Facebook page titled “Dr Wakefield's work must continue” still posts negative information about vaccines, including COVID-19, and has more than 20,000 followers.14

Wakefield's discredited study came out on the eve of the digital revolution, Larson notes. Facebook launched in 2004; YouTube in 2005; Twitter in 2006; and Instagram in 2010. Internet groups have sprung up to support Wakefield's work and finance his court cases; he appeals to a growing constituency of holistic, alternative-health audiences.15

The measles vaccine is not alone in rousing unfounded suspicions. One recurring rumor globally is that vaccines against diseases ranging from polio to COVID-19 will cause infertility. Yet the MMR-autism link “is one of the most contagious rumors” globally, Larson wrote, building new constituencies by using social media and “appealing to parents' eagerness for a clear answer to their child's autism.”16

In 2019, the World Health Organization labeled vaccine hesitancy one of the top 10 risks to global health, noting that measles cases have risen 30 percent worldwide.17

Larson said much vaccine resistance stems from parents' and patients' feelings that medical professionals are dismissing their health concerns as ignorant: “Among the driving sentiments behind the current waves of vaccine questioning and dissent are a sense of lost dignity and distrust.”18

— Sarah Glazer

[1] Andrew Jeremy Wakefield, “Determination on Serious Professional Misconduct (SPM) and sanction,” General Medical Council (U.K.), May 24, 2010, https://tinyurl.com/wn94e62f; “A timeline of the Wakefield retraction,” Nature Medicine, March 2010, https://tinyurl.com/1gtojgbi.

[2] “Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) Vaccination: What Everyone Should Know,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), https://tinyurl.com/84lotxk0; “Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD): Signs and Symptoms,” CDC, https://tinyurl.com/1iahuexs.

[3] Heidi J. Larson, Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start — and Why They Don't Go Away (2020), p. xxxvi.

[4] Andrew J. Wakefield, Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines — The Truth Behind a Tragedy (2010).

[5] Andrew Buncombe, “Andrew Wakefield: How a disgraced UK doctor has remade himself in anti-vaxxer Trump's America,” The Independent, May 4, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/ytbf6o8l.

[6] “The Truth about Vaccines,” Children's Health Defense, May 14, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/9ve59glw; Andrew Wakefield video, Facebook, Jan. 23, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2g99c7cw

[7] David Robert Grimes, “How to take on Covid conspiracy theories,” Financial Times, Feb. 5, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3me7jj9v.

[8] Larson, op. cit., pp. 48, 55.

[9] Isaac Chotiner, “The Influence of the Anti-Vaccine Movement,” The New Yorker, Dec. 18, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/1tx2p6wx.

[10] Larson, op. cit., pp. 49-51, 138.

[11] Ibid., p. 53. Also see Katherine Drabiak, “California law to restrict medical vaccine exemptions raises questions over control,” U.S. News & World Report, Sept. 24, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/2842jwfn.

[12] Larson, ibid., p. 32; Jessica Glenza, “Disgraced anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield aims to advance his agenda in Texas,” The Guardian, Feb. 26, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/2cul8sh7; Buncombe, op. cit.; and Brian Deer, The Doctor Who Fooled the World (2020), p. 377.

[13] Zack Kopplin, “Trump met with prominent anti-vaccine activists during campaign,” Science, Nov. 18, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/285glgkg.

[14] “Dr Wakefield's work must continue,” Facebook, https://tinyurl.com/m2ucun3k.

[15] Larson, op. cit., p. 10.

[16] Ibid., p. 10.

[17] “Ten Threats to Global Health in 2019,” World Health Organization, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/zt4vs8uh.

[18] Larson, op. cit., p. xxxv.

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Homegrown Disinformation a Growing, Evolving Threat

A flood of messages on social media last summer claiming that Democrats would steal the election had an odd ring: Many of the tweets used identical language.

A youth group backing President Donald Trump had recruited Arizona teenagers to copy an online document for pay, then post the message multiple times, often from fake accounts on Twitter or Facebook, The Washington Post reported.19 The teens were instructed to vary the messages slightly.

“But some were lazy, so that's how they got caught. We found many messages were just copied and pasted,” says Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science, who directs the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, Bloomington. The accounts on Twitter posted 4,401 tweets with identical content, researchers at Indiana found.20

Researchers such as Menczer use sophisticated tools to trace these fake grass-roots campaigns, which he and others dub “astroturfing,” back to their origins, whether to automated “bots” or to “trolls” — humans, like the Arizona teens, who misrepresent their identities.

A study of 1.8 million tweets between 2014 and 2017 found that Russian bots and trolls spread both pro- and anti-vaccine messages, consistent with a “strategy of promoting political discord.”21

That strategy is reminiscent of the online disinformation campaign waged in 2016 by the Kremlin-backed troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which aimed to sow discord on both sides of that year's presidential campaign.22

However, researchers say the Russians do not seem to be playing as big a part these days. In 2016, the IRA accounts were easy to spot because they made grammatical mistakes in English, and platforms took them down. “I don't think there's been much evidence of Russian influence in the last couple of years,” Menczer says, although “it's possible they've just gotten better at not getting detected.”

Kate Starbird, associate professor in human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington, said homegrown “participatory disinformation” — the two-way spread of false information between influencers such as Trump and the followers he inspired — is now playing a more significant role.23

The university's Center for an Informed Public identified Trump as among the top five Twitter influencers spreading false information about the 2020 election, Starbird says.

“He set the stage” in the summer by predicting a rigged election, Starbird says, and “people kept gathering what they thought was evidence to fit these narratives.” She cites the unfounded “Sharpiegate” conspiracy, which falsely claimed that Sharpie pens distributed to mark ballots in Arizona and New York supposedly bled through to select a candidate the voter did not want. “It's not as simple as people consciously spreading disinformation,” she says. “A lot of them felt they experienced disenfranchisement.”

A new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that Republicans who relied on Trump for news were more likely than other Republicans to see voter fraud as a significant threat to election integrity, more likely to think the COVID-19 pandemic had been overblown and more likely to “render a harsh verdict on the media.”24

Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow Inc., who helped promote conspiracies about voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election, spoke at a March 2020 White House briefing on the novel coronavirus as President Donald Trump looked on. (AFP/Getty Images/Mandel Ngan)

Claire Wardle, U.S. director of First Draft, which tracks misinformation online, agrees that “a relatively small number of people are actively creating falsehoods. But a lot more people get seduced by those narratives and then become vectors.”

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she says, “we saw a lot of the conspiracy theories” about vaccines “moving into run-of-the-mill groups — yoga groups, mums' groups — that wouldn't normally share that type of content.” When people have had their lives turned upside down, they are seeking a simple explanation, Wardle says. “There are people telling you, ‘I'll tell you why your world's been turned upside down: There's a secret cabal controlling everything.’ It's a simple powerful narrative, which as humans we're drawn towards.”

“You're seeing a lot of the same conspiracies and myths echoed across the world,” says Melissa Fleming, the United Nations undersecretary-general for global communications. Two examples are “COVID-19 is spread by 5G” telecommunications technology and philanthropist Bill Gates “wants to implant microchips into you if you get a vaccine.”

In February, Facebook announced it was prohibiting vaccine misinformation and that Instagram, which it owns, would ban the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is a prominent anti-vaccine activist with a large following.25

But many experts think the platforms need to do more to counter false information. Wardle says she would like to see an audit required of the platforms' algorithms to see whether they are encouraging extreme content. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Feb. 10 that Twitter might offer an app marketplace where Twitter users get the chance to choose the algorithms filtering their content.26

Menczer proposes something like Wikipedia's group editing to ensure consensus about basic facts. Facebook's new independent Oversight Board may be a step in this direction. The 40 outside members have the authority to decide whether Facebook or Instagram should remove specific pieces of content.27

In late February, the board was considering whether Facebook was justified in indefinitely suspending Trump from the platform in the wake of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot. However, two directors at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University said the board may be a “fig leaf” for Facebook's real failures in this case — shunting users into echo chambers filled with election misinformation via algorithms that insulated them from counterarguments.28

Most controversially, some members of Congress would like to remove some or all of the platforms' immunity from legal liability for the information they carry. The power of lawsuits to curb misinformation was on view in February, when two voting machine companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, filed billion-dollar lawsuits against right-wing broadcasters Newsmax and Fox News for accusing the companies of voting fraud. After the suits were filed, Newsmax cut off an interview with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell as he attacked Dominion, and Fox News canceled the show of Lou Dobbs, who was named as a defendant in the Smartmatic suit.29

“Fox joined the conspiracy to defame and disparage Smartmatic and its election technology and software,” Smartmatic asserted in its complaint. “The story turned neighbor against neighbor…. The story led a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.”30

— Sarah Glazer

[19] Isaac Stanley-Becker, “Pro-Trump youth group enlists teens in secretive campaign likened to a ‘troll farm,’” The Washington Post, Sept. 15, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/1x71inuh.

[20] Ibid.

[21] David A. Broniatowski et al., “Weaponized Health Communication,” American Journal of Public Health, October 2018, https://tinyurl.com/x5ea8ysk.

[22] Davey Alba, “How Russia's Troll Farm is Changing Tactics before the Fall Election,” The New York Times, March 29, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/11gpmtoa.

[23] Kate Starbird, Twitter thread, Dec. 1, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/246mlzyd.

[24] “How Americans Navigated the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review,” Pew Research Center, Feb. 22, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3ngskcqx.

[25] Sheera Frenkel, “Instagram barred Robert F. Kennedy's account,” The New York Times, Feb. 11, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/1pc743xz.

[26] Jill Goldsmith, “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Section 230, Transparency, Appeals and Twitter Turning 5,” Deadline, Feb. 10, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/1sfivzpb.

[27] Oversight Board, Facebook, https://tinyurl.com/1kl6zkcr.

[28] Jameel Jaffer and Katy Glenn Bass, “Facebook's ‘Supreme Court’ Faces Its First Major Test,” The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/128h7jq7.

[29] Giovanni Russonello, “Trump Isn't the Only One on Trial. The Conservative Media Is, Too,” The New York Times, Feb. 8, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/c58k7ueg.

[30] Jonah E. Bromwich and Ben Smith, “Fox News Is Sued by Election Technology for Over $2.7 Billion,” The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y2wdmggv.

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Bibliography

Books

Eyal, Gil, The Crisis of Expertise, Polity, 2019. A professor of sociology at Columbia University argues that there is a perpetual tension in the United States between dependence on technological expertise and a mistrust of experts when it comes to controversial areas involving science policy.

Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Vintage, 2012. This landmark work by a Columbia University historian, first published in 1963, traced the origins of American hostility to experts back to the country's settlement by people rebelling against European civilization.

Nichols, Tom, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Oxford University Press, 2017. A professor in national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College declares that “we now live in an age where misinformation pushes aside knowledge,” placing blame on the internet and American romanticism about the wisdom of the common person.

Oreskes, Naomi, Why Trust Science? Princeton University Press, 2019. A historian of science at Harvard University argues that the basis for trusting science lies in its process for reaching consensus through such means as peer review.

Zuckerman, Ethan, Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them, W.W. Norton, 2021. An associate professor of public policy, information, and communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, writes that mistrust in government and other institutions has led to positive social movements, including civil rights, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

Articles

Douthat, Ross, “When You Can't Just ‘Trust the Science,’” The New York Times, Dec. 19, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/qwqyj46k. A New York Times opinion columnist criticizes Democrats for presenting decisions about pandemic-related shutdowns and vaccines as purely scientific when they are in reality political decisions “that we are all qualified to argue over.”

Motta, Matthew, “The Dynamics and Political Implications of Anti-Intellectualism in America,” America Politics Research, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/y5x4bpnf. An assistant professor of political science at Oklahoma State University describes the development of hostility on the ideological right to scientists and experts.

O'Brien, Timothy L., and Shiri Noy, “Political Identity and Confidence in Science and Religion,” Sociology of Religion, June 29, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/54wc86r3. An associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, (O'Brien) and an assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Denison University (Noy) discuss the reversal in Democrats' and Republicans' trust in science versus religion over the past 50 years.

Thomas, Benjamin, and Monique Smith, “How to Reassure Black Americans That the Vaccine is Safe,” The New York Times, Dec. 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/4vddhjl5. Two Black emergency physicians point to historical and recent examples of racism in medicine that they say are making African Americans wary of taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

Reports and Studies

“American Public Opinion on Global Warming,” Political Psychology Research Group, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/1lap79ea. In its latest survey, a research group at Stanford University finds that majorities of Americans in both parties continue to believe that global warming is caused by human activity and that they can trust what scientists say about the environment.

“Attacks on Science,” Union of Concerned Scientists, updated Dec. 16, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ivfrhmky. A national group of scientists, which advocates for science-based government policies, details how the Trump administration ignored science and dismantled health and safety regulations.

“KFF COVID-19 Monitor: January 2021,” Kaiser Family Foundation, Jan. 22, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/5bypzb3v. This survey by a nonprofit focusing on national health issues found that a growing share of the American public is open to getting a COVID-19 vaccine but that many Americans, especially in Black and rural communities, remain hesitant.

“The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election,” Election Integrity Partnership, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/vxsm7a8v. This report by a coalition of experts who track social media at Stanford, the University of Washington and other organizations found that former President Donald Trump and his family were among the top repeat spreaders of “false and misleading narratives” about the 2020 presidential election.

Green, Jon, et al., “A 50-State COVID-19 Survey Report #35: Public Attitudes towards COVID-19 Vaccines,” COVID States Project, January 2021, https://tinyurl.com/1bjh4cco. A university consortium's survey of more than 25,000 individuals in 50 states found only 33 percent would get the COVID vaccine as soon as possible but that beliefs in conspiratorial misinformation were low.

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The Next Step

Biden Administration

Banco, Erin, “Biden Let His Scientists Speak. The Results Were … Messy,” Daily Beast, Feb. 23, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2awvfaws. Some Biden administration health officials have spoken about COVID-19 issues, including vaccines and school re-openings, before coordinating with the White House communications team, leading to muddled messages.

Feur, Will, “Scientists push Biden administration to require N95 masks in high-risk workplaces,” CNBC, Feb. 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/n8t4szv2. More than a dozen scientists, including former Biden advisers, are pushing the administration to mandate N95 masks in high-risk workplaces, such as prisons and meatpacking plants.

Shear, Michael D., “The Words That Are In and Out With the Biden Administration,” The New York Times, Feb. 24, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4fj5dj7r. The Biden administration has re-introduced the phrase “climate change” on government websites and official documents, a term that was rarely used during the Trump administration.

Climate Science

Calma, Justine, “Facebook will add a new label to some climate change posts in the UK,” The Verge, Feb. 18, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/9ypejxhh. To combat myths about the climate crisis, Facebook will start labeling posts about climate change in the United Kingdom with a banner that directs people to a page with reliable information about the topic.

Pilon, Mary, “Big Oil Gets to Teach Climate Science in American Classrooms,” Bloomberg, Feb. 6, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4vfur8m9. Fossil fuel companies are promoting lessons to K-12 students with positive messages about natural gas and oil, but some science teachers and climate scientists are pushing back.

Relman, Eliza, “3 Republican senators grilling Biden's Interior Secretary nominee Deb Haaland deny climate science,” Business Insider, Feb. 24, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/8da7duzj. A group of Republican senators on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee have made statements denying climate science but insist their party is pro-science.

Social Media

Heilwell, Rebecca, “How the Covid-19 pandemic broke Nextdoor,” Vox, Feb. 9, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2853r679. As local newspapers shutter, apps such as Nextdoor have become crowdsourced hubs of misleading information about COVID-19.

Kinetz, Erika, “Takeaways: AP investigation of China COVID-19 disinformation,” The Associated Press, Feb. 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/39y9h9zr. China undertook a global disinformation campaign on social media accusing the United States of developing the coronavirus as a bioweapon, after similar rumors about China creating the virus circulated on U.S. social media.

Kroll, Andy, “The Disinformation Vaccine: Is There a Cure for Conspiracy Theories?” Rolling Stone, Feb. 24, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3y585vmm. A social psychologist believes inoculating people against misinformation may require “pre-bunking” conspiracy theories before internet users encounter them online.

Vaccines

Allen, Jonathan, “Liberal groups launch ‘Latino Anti-Disinformation Lab’ to combat Covid, election messaging,” NBC News, Feb. 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4px3d27c. A new liberal political group focused on Latino voters will monitor television, radio and internet forums to create responses to misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccines and right-wing conspiracy theories.

McCullough, Marie, “The COVID-19 vaccine does not cause infertility, as social media myths are claiming,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 1, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/xukcwdk3. Medical professionals rebut multiple myths about the COVID-19 vaccine.

Stobbe, Mike, “Ad campaign launches to build public trust in COVID-19 shots,” The Associated Press, Feb. 24, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2h3atkxy. An Ad Council campaign will use TV, billboards, social media and publications to persuade Americans who are hesitant to take the COVID-19 vaccine that the shots are safe.

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Contacts

Accountable Tech
info@accountabletech.org
accountabletech.org
An advocacy group focused on accountability in social media.

Black Coalition Against COVID-19
blackcoalitionagainstcovid.org
Coalition of Black doctors and community leaders based in Washington that conducts virtual town halls about COVID-19 and vaccines.

Center for an Informed Public
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
uwcip@uw.edu
cip.uw.edu
Research center that tracks misinformation online and translates research about misinformation into policy.

COVID States Project
covidstates.org
A university consortium, including Harvard, Rutgers and Northwestern, that publishes surveys on public attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

First Draft
+(44) 20 8075 8001
info@firstdraftnews.com
firstdraftnews.org
A London-based group that tracks misinformation on the internet and trains journalists and others how to recognize problematic online content. The U.S. subsidiary is located at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Indiana University Observatory on Social Media
Indiana University, 107 S. Indiana Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405-7000
osome.iu@gmail.com
osome.iuni.iu.edu
University group that brings together data scientists and journalists to study and curb the spread of online misinformation and social media manipulation.

Kaiser Family Foundation
185 Berry St., Suite 2000, San Francisco, CA 94107
650-854-9400
kff.org
Nonprofit that focuses on national health issues; has been issuing regular surveys on public attitudes toward the COVID vaccine.

NewsGuard
25 W. 52nd St., 15th Floor, New York, NY 10019
media@newsguardtech.com
newsguardtech.com
A company that rates more than 6,000 websites for reliability; also produces reports on misinformation on the Web.

Union of Concerned Scientists
2 Brattle Square, Cambridge, MA 02138-3780
617-547-5552
ucsusa.org
National nonprofit founded by scientists that advocates for science-based government policies.

Vaccine Confidence Project
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT, UK
vaccineconfidence.org
Research project directed by anthropologist Heidi Larson that monitors public confidence in vaccination globally and provides guidance to public health officials on how to engage the public in vaccination campaigns.

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Footnotes

[1] Julie Wernau and Paul Overberg, “Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Presents Challenge for Herd Immunity Push,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 3, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/yfhdtmmb; Matthew Motta, “The Dynamics and Political Implications of Anti-Intellectualism in the United States,” American Politics Research, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/3z8jj59r.

[2] Lois Beckett, “Facts Won't Fix This,” The Guardian, Jan. 1, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/ms5p33us.

[3] Davey Alba and Sheera Frenkel, “From Voter Fraud to Vaccine Lies: Misinformation Peddlers Shift Gears,” The New York Times, Dec. 16, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/4hrk2m7u.

[4] David Robert Grimes, “How to Take on Covid Conspiracy Theories,” Financial Times, Feb. 5, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/56acnrv4.

[5] Gordon Gauchat, “Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010,” American Sociological Review, 2012, pp. 167-87, https://tinyurl.com/6pue4t5y.

[6] See “#TeamHalo,” Team Halo, https://tinyurl.com/1hwvrl3v; “Verified,” United Nations, https://tinyurl.com/jsy28j9t.

[7] Jon A. Krosnick, “Comments on the Present and Future of Science, Inspired by Naomi Oreskes,” in Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? (2019).

[8] Ibid., pp. 235-36.

[9] Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (2011).

[10] Oreskes, Why Trust Science? op. cit., p. 68.

[11] Cary Funk and Brian Kennedy, “Public confidence in scientists has remained stable for decades,” Pew Research Center, Aug. 27, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/53hhkazm; Cary Funk, Brian Kennedy and Courtney Johnson, “Trust in Medical Scientists Has Grown in U.S., but Mainly Among Democrats,” Pew Research Center, May 21, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/4tya7w7d.

[12] Jonathan Kennedy, “Populist politics and vaccine hesitancy in Western Europe: an analysis of national-level data,” European Journal of Public Health, June 2019, https://tinyurl.com/5af8k4v7.

[13] Will Wilkinson, “The Control Group of What Not to Do,” Niskanen Center, Dec. 7, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/5ezenkuz.

[14] Gil Eyal, The Crisis of Expertise (2019), pp. 48-49.

[15] Timothy L. O'Brien and Shiri Noy, “Political Identity and Confidence in Science and Religion,” Sociology of Religion, June 29, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/y436tsme.

[16] Matthew Motta, “The Dynamics and Political Implications of Anti-Intellectualism in American,” American Politics Research, 2018, pp. 464-98, https://tinyurl.com/cfzxn59s; “The State of U.S. Science and Engineering, 2020,” National Science Board, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/5s9rycpd.

[17] O'Brien and Noy, op. cit.

[18] “American Public Opinion on Global Warming,” Political Psychology Research Group, Stanford University, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/52ykzk2b; Jeremy Schulman, “Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said about Global Warming,” Mother Jones, Dec. 12, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/2pbsk6en.

[19] Gauchat, op. cit., pp. 167-87.

[20] Fenit Nirappil, “Time to double or upgrade masks as coronavirus variants emerge, experts say,” The Washington Post, Jan. 28, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/dt8u6xa8.

[21] Eyal, op. cit., p. 54.

[22] Andrew Guess et al., “Avoiding the Echo Chamber About Echo Chambers,” Knight Foundation, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/7byuz9w5.

[23] Amy Mitchell et al., “How Americans Navigated the News in 2020: A Tumultuous Year in Review,” Pew Research Center, Feb. 22, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/yb8d7hyy.

[24] Guess et al., op. cit., p. 13.

[25] Ibid., p. 8. For updated statistics on social media use, see Elisa Shearer and Amy Mitchell, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms in 2020,” Pew Research Center, Jan. 12, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3c2jpbta.

[26] Mitchell et al., op. cit., chp. 4.

[27] Richard Harris, “The Presidency and the Press,” The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 1973, https://tinyurl.com/e7xfxzra.

[28] Guess et al., op. cit.

[29] See Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (2017).

[30] Eyal, op. cit., p. 145.

[31] Ross Douthat, “When You Can't Just ‘Trust the Science,’” The New York Times, Dec. 19, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2mm7r8np.

[32] Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), p. 49.

[33] Ibid., p. 49.

[34] Ibid., pp. 49, 52.

[35] Ibid., p. 299.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., pp. 299-302.

[38] Eyal, op. cit., pp. 14-16.

[39] Ibid.

[40] “McCarthyism and the Red Scare,” Miller Center, University of Virginia, https://tinyurl.com/5fcr2bth.

[41] Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (2012), pp. 16, 64–65.

[42] Oreskes, Why Trust Science? op. cit., p. 66.

[43] Graham Readfearn, “Doubt over climate science is a product with an industry behind it,” The Guardian, March 5, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/5e233csj.

[44] O'Brien and Noy, op. cit.

[45] Scott Waldman, “Political appointees once kept a scientist ‘hit list,’” E&E News, May 14, 2018, https://tinyurl.com/bneam9kw.

[46] Eyal, op. cit., p. 18. Also see “The Frye Standard,” Expert Institute, https://tinyurl.com/8ewfmxbx.

[47] Eyal, ibid.

[48] Peter Andrey Smith, “Where Science Enters the Courtroom, the Daubert Name Looms Large,” Undark, Feb. 17, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/4uhhzdrt.

[49] “Scientists' advice shunted aside under Bush,” Nieman Watchdog, March 14, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/5aa5a2h2; “Timeline of Major Events in Stem Cell Research Policy,” Research America, https://tinyurl.com/a8ewf6m3.

[50] Jacob Carter et al., “The Trump Administration Has Attacked Science 100 Times … and Counting,” Scientific American, May 29, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/35stzsf5.

[51] “President Discusses Stem Cell Research,” The White House, Aug. 9, 2001, https://tinyurl.com/49868nkd.

[52] Richard Monastersky, “Obama's science legacy: Uneven progress on scientific integrity,” Nature, Aug. 23, 2016, https://tinyurl.com/9dkfmh98; Daniel Nasaw, “U.S. scientists relieved as Obama lifts ban on stem cell research,” The Guardian, March 9, 2009, https://tinyurl.com/ttm5y4ah.

[53] Ari Natter and Will Wade, “Trump Made a Promise to Save Coal in 2016. He Couldn't Keep It,” Bloomberg Green, Sept. 3, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/5n58amrh.

[54] Lindzi Wessel, “Trump catalyzed the March for Science. Where is it now?” Science, Oct. 20, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/tc7k8dhj.

[55] Brendan Nyhan, “How Marching for Science Risks Politicizing It,” The New York Times, May 2, 2017, https://tinyurl.com/5nrnrvmj.

[56] Carter et al., op. cit.

[57] “Attacks on Science,” Union of Concerned Scientists, Dec. 16, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/kx9wtw3r; “First Travel-related Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Detected in United States,” press release, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Jan. 21, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yrt4hv58.

[58] Christian Paz, “All the President's Lies about the Coronavirus,” The Atlantic, Nov. 2, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/btzsackd.

[59] “Attacks on Science,” op. cit.

[60] “Coronavirus: Outcry after Trump suggests injecting disinfectant as a treatment,” BBC, https://tinyurl.com/48hc3u8n.

[61] Douglas Main, “Outgoing administration's last-minute changes to wildlife protections draw criticism,” National Geographic, Jan. 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/yp8xm3cf; Nadja Popovich et al., “The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. Here's the full list,” The New York Times, Jan. 20, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/kthx59pd.

[62] Sarah Kaplan, “Biden will elevate White House science office to cabinet level,” The Washington Post, Jan. 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3pwdf6v8.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Aishvarya Kavi, “Biden's 17 executive orders and other directives in detail,” The New York Times, Jan. 20, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/fwc9kcs8.

[65] Ibid.

[66] Nick Clegg, “Referring Former President Trump's Suspension from Facebook to the Oversight Board,” Facebook, Jan. 21, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2267benk; Hannah Denham, “These are the platforms that have banned Trump and his allies,” The Washington Post, Jan. 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2jpw435d.

[67] “Zuckerberg: Platforms likely to censor more to avoid legal risks,” CNBC, YouTube, Oct. 28, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/5cw8bvna; “Tech CEOs Questioned over Sec. 230 Liability Shield,” Yahoo Finance, YouTube, Oct. 28, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/rddtj4fe; and Adi Robertson, “Mark Zuckerberg just told Congress to upend the internet,” The Verge, Oct. 29, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/yz29cuwx.

[68] Gilad Edelman, “Republicans Make an Unlikely Closing Pitch: Amend Section 230,” Wired, Oct. 27, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/wwym5tv5.

[69] Cecilia Kang, “Democratic Congress Prepares to Take on Big Tech,” The New York Times, Jan. 21, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/yefp25ma; Adi Robertson, “Social justice groups warn Biden against throwing out Section 230,” The Verge, Jan. 27, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3ndhc4u5; Makena Kelly, “Biden's Commerce nominee backs changes to Section 230,” The Verge, Jan. 26, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/pxckvjen; and Makena Kelly, “Joe Biden wants to revoke Section 230,” The Verge, Jan. 17, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/dkvsk82d.

[70] “Reps. Malinowski and Eshoo introduce bill to hold tech platforms liable for algorithmic promotion of extremism,” press release, Rep. Tom Malinowski, Oct. 20, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/nse4zvpv.

[71] Carl Szabo, “NetChoice Announces Opposition to the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act,” NetChoice, June 25, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/6ne4fazw; “Rep. Malinowski Releases 1st Term Recap, 2nd Term Priorities,” press release, Rep. Tom Malinowski, Jan. 5, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/u3p9jwrt.

[72] Christopher Mims, “How Congress Might Upend Section 230, the Law Big Tech is Built On,” The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 13, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2hj2efdt.

[73] “Twitter Inc. (TWTR) Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript,” Motley Fool, Feb. 9, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/wff5k36v.

[74] Liz Hamel et al., “KFF COVID-19 Monitor: January 2021,” Kaiser Family Foundation, Jan. 22, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/n2z3674k.

[75] Ibid.

[76] Deborah Furr-Holden, “What's not being said about why African Americans need to take the COVID-19 vaccine,” The Conversation, Dec. 23, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/jz99hhmd; Hamel et al., op. cit.

[77] Benjamin Thomas and Monique Smith, “How to Reassure Black Americans That the Vaccine Is Safe,” The New York Times, Dec. 30, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/2ehddfv3.

[78] “40 Years of Human Experimentation in America: the Tuskeegee Study,” McGill University, Jan. 15, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vb2re7b2.

[79] Thomas and Smith, op. cit.

[80] John Eligon, “Black Doctor Dies After Complaining of Racist Treatment,” The New York Times, Dec. 25, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y49pm745.

[81] Vinay Prasad, “Why Did Fauci Move the Herd Immunity Goal Posts?” MedPage Today, Dec. 29, 2020, https://tinyurl.com/b2h2da6t.

[82] Hamel et al., op. cit.

[83] Lisa Friedman and Christopher Flavelle, “A Late Burst of Climate Denial Extends the Era of Trump Disinformation,” The New York Times, Jan. 12, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2vmp947z.

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About the Author

Sarah Glazer is a New York-based freelancer who contributes regularly to CQ Researcher. Her articles on health, education and social-policy issues also have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her recent CQ Researcher reports include “Zoonotic Diseases” and “Global Migration.” She graduated from the University of Chicago with a B.A. in American history.

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