Today's News: America is shooting the messenger

Coming soon to a university hospital in America:  

"Maybe us barbers have been wrong all these years to rely on ideas which have failed us. Maybe we should study the human body intently and make our observations on fact, not superstition. Perhaps this scientific method could extend to other disciplines, such as architecture, engineering, navigation. We may discover a bright new age... a Renaissance, if you will.

...NAAAH!"

I guess the Trump administration basically doesn't want to get any bad news from science ever again -- like Covid, like bird flu, like measles outbreaks, like climate change, like racism and sexism and gender roles -- so they've decided not to finance uncomfortable scientific research anymore. 

Easy peasy!

When Scientific American endorsed Harris, many scientists and science-friendly people were supportive and grateful, but some said: stick to science, science isn’t political, etc. But reality-denying right-wing fanatics will absolutely come for the scientists www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025...

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— Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 1:47 PM

Here is a gift link to that Washington Post article

🚨THEY’RE CUTTING BILLIONS IN SCIENCE & DISEASE FUNDING🚨 “I think it’s going to destroy research universities in the short term, and I don’t know after that,” “dismantle the biomedical research system, stifle the development of new cures for disease, and rip treatments away from patients in need.”

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— Ben Ewen-Campen (@benforward3.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 9:00 PM

The proposed cuts to the US National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and NOAA would decimate American science. Perhaps naturally, a “post truth” movement, powered by bullshit, is going to be “post science” as well.

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— Kate Starbird (@katestarbird.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 8:19 AM

This is terrible news for the United States -- it will be a generational loss of scientists, researchers, writers, graduate students, post-docs, lab techs, research administrators and librarians.

 

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%. I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters. grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

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— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) February 7, 2025 at 6:18 PM

2. While NSF and NIH indeed have a mission to fund specific research innovations via grantmaking, they do a lot more than that. Their principal role is support a scientific ecosystem in the United States, that includes everything from education and training to infrastructure and communication.

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) February 7, 2025 at 6:18 PM

...

8. It is difficult to overstate what a catastrophe this will be for the US research and education systems, particular in biomedical fields. It is deliberate and wanton devastation entirely out of scale with any concern about DEI activities on campuses. The goal is destroy US universities.

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) February 7, 2025 at 6:46 PM

Context from STAT. www.statnews.com/2025/02/07/n...

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— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) February 7, 2025 at 7:33 PM

Other comments: 

Elizabeth Marnick / From the Science Classroom by Science Whiz Liz

Biomedical Research Under Threat: Urge Congress to Act Now!

A Friday evening plea from a concerned scientist

...today the NIH suddenly announced they are cutting all grant indirects to a set 15% regardless of the agreed upon rate.

For those unaware indirect costs may sound wasteful, in fact I am sure the administration will tell you they are, but they're not.

They help employ support staff, pay health insurance fees and other fringe benefits of the people on the project, pay for building maintenance, lab maintenance, electricity and more. ...They say this is effective immediately for current and future grants - even though they agreed to something else and institutions have budgeted that amount.

This will cause an immediate huge budget shortfall at every institution that receives NIH funds. I don't think I can stress enough how devastating this will be if it stays. This will severely hinder all scientific progress in the USA, and as a consequence will also greatly impact the USA economy....

Paul Krugman

RFK Jr. and the MAGA Death Trip

The war on science is turning deadly

... for much of the 20th century America led the world both in medical research and in the application of that research to public policy. This one-two punch of knowledge and knowledge-based action led to an incredible decline in the rate of death from infectious disease... But that was the America that was.

Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who rejects vaccines in particular and medical science in general, is on track to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The National Institutes of Health have effectively been shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have stopped releasing crucial data. If you go to CDC’s website, there’s a banner across the top reading “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” which mainly means purging anything that hints at concern over social inequality.

I don’t know this for sure, but my prediction is that the current purge of language will eventually turn into a purge of people, with the administration firing anyone suspected of being more loyal to science than they are to Donald Trump.

And all of this is highly likely to lead to many preventable deaths — hundreds of thousands, maybe millions.

How did this happen? Gradually, then suddenly.

What many people don’t understand about science is that it isn’t a set of Truths handed down from above. It is, instead, an attitude and a method. The attitude is that the world should be understood through observation and evidence, interpreted via hard thinking. The method involves formulating hypotheses and testing them against the facts...

Because it’s a method rather than a set of declarations from on high, you can’t consume it a la carte, rejecting scientific results you dislike for political, cultural or religious reasons. Reject evolution, and you undermine the basis for much of biology, and hence medical science. Reject the case for climate change, and you undermine the physics and chemistry that underly that case.

And Republican politicians have been rejecting science they don’t like for a long time. ...

... The political scientist John Sides, drawing on work by Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, argues that the deepest divide in America isn’t between left and right, it’s between “rationalists” who focus on facts and reason, on one side, and “intuitionists,” who rely on their feelings, on the other.

This divide has always been there, although I suspect that the internet, which makes it easy to find people telling you what you want to hear, has increased the reach of intuitionism. What is relatively new is that these two kinds of people have sorted themselves along partisan lines. Oliver and Wood write that

Intuitionists have become the dominant force in the conservative movement and Republican Party politics.

And RFK Jr., although he holds some views at odds with conventional conservatism, fits right in.

What comes next? As far as I know, there are no examples of modern nations turning their backs on medical science. But there’s every reason to expect the consequences to be ghastly. We can expect to see a resurgence of infectious diseases like measles and polio that had almost been eliminated. When — not if — the next pandemic strikes, we can expect the federal response to be even worse than it was when Trump confronted Covid.

The thing is, not all Republican senators are stupid. Some of them have to know that putting a crank like RFK Jr. in charge of public health will effectively condemn many of their fellow citizens to unnecessary death. Yet they’ll vote to confirm him anyway, out of sheer personal cowardice. And when they do, they’ll have blood on their hands.

Meanwhile, this is happening:

We have bird flu outbreaks happening all over the country damaging our economy and our health, but the CDC comms freeze continues.

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— Alt CDC (they/them) (@altcdc.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 2:05 PM

At CDC studies on the H5N1 bird flu, scheduled for release on Jan. 23, remain withheld despite the spreading outbreak.

— Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 2:40 PM

NEW: A measles outbreak is growing in a Texas county with dangerously low vaccination rates. In late January, two school-age children in Gaines County were hospitalized with measles. As of Feb. 7, there were 14 confirmed & six probable cases, with officials investigating more potential infections.

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— Republicans Against Trumpism (@rpsagainsttrump.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 10:03 PM

Other nations are, I hope, going to step up, including Canada:

Has Justin Trudeau offered any easy way to get Canadian citizenship for medical ,science and coders yet ? If I was him I'd be targeting a brain drain.

— Jake (@my2bits4u.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 10:49 AM

Foreign countries will snap up experts in government and affected science and medicine and green tech fields. Will be an incredible, self-inflicted brain drain.

— Clara Jeffery (@clarajeffery.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 9:50 AM

But Trump is keeping his eye squarely on the ball, of course -- tonight he announced he is appointing himself as chair of the Kennedy Centre Honors!

Kennedy Center renamed to Marilyn Monroe Center. Seriously— he’s a Dementia patient bred with an incel. And, people voted for this rot-gut POS. www.axios.com/2025/02/08/t...

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— Denver Riggleman (@denverr.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 8:43 PM