Attacks on Science and Scientists Intensify

Taylor Greene learned her approach from Donald Trump. 

Last week MAGA members of Congress demonized the nation’s foremost public health expert and continued to spew disinformation that has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives. 

In a hearing purportedly on the source of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be imprisoned for "crimes against humanity." She refused to address him as doctor and called for his medical license to be revoked. His purported crime? According to Taylor Greene, “making up guidelines, like six-feet distancing and masking of children.” She referred to these practices as “abuse” and asked whether “the American people deserve to be abused like that.”

Dr. Fauci, who served for decades as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, is considered by many to be the most distinguished public health professional in the United States. Throughout 2020, he tried to counter the disinformation President Donald Trump and his allies spread. Trump persistently denounced Fauci, who received multiple death threats from Trump supporters and needed – and continues to need – a robust security detail to keep him and his family safe. 

In my new book, The Trump Contagion: How Incompetence, Dishonesty, and Neglect Led to the Worst Handled Crisis in American History, I cover Trump's and MAGAs' attacks on science and scientists, including Dr. Fauci. I also note the deadly consequences of these attacks: Trump's followers' refusal to follow basic health and safety precautions, especially wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Specifically, I explore how these attacks on scientists and on science set the conditions for massive escalation of Americans dying from COVID-19 at rates that surpassed every other industrialized nation.

On the last day of June 2020, Dr. Fauci testified before a Senate Committee. He warned that the nation was going in the wrong direction. He said, “Clearly we are not in total control… I’m very concerned because this could get very bad.” On the day he testified, 131,818 Americans had died of COVID-19. Another 30,000 Americans would die of COVID-19 the following month. 

For months starting in mid-2020 advisors to the president had floated the idea of “herd immunity,” allowing people to get sick on purpose to create natural immunity in the population. The danger, of course, is that as more people get sick, more and more die. On October 15, Forbes warned, “Trump Administration Goes All In on Herd Immunity.”  

The piece noted that even as HHS Secretary Alex Azar said that herd immunity is not an explicit strategy, “… frequently the Trump Administration’s rhetoric tells a different story; for example, Trump’s statement last month that ‘herd mentality,’ presumably referencing herd immunity, would protect against the coronavirus.”

That same day Dr. Fauci went on ABC Good Morning America and said the herd immunity idea embraced by the White House was “ridiculous” and “total nonsense.” 

He told George Stephanopoulos: “And if you talk to anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases, they will tell you that that is risky and you’ll wind up with many more infections of vulnerable people, which will lead to hospitalizations and deaths. So I think that we just got to look that square in the eye and say it’s nonsense.”

Several days later, Trump attacked Dr. Fauci. On a call with campaign staff that reporters could listen to, Trump called Dr. Fauci “a disaster” and said that people were “tired” of hearing about the virus and wanted to be left alone: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong… Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. This guy’s a disaster.”

In the final two months of Trump’s presidency, vaccines were approved and distributed to the individual states. But Trump did not take the opportunity to promote vaccinations and encourage people to protect themselves and each other. Rather, he was six weeks into scheming 24/7 about how to remain president. 

The first vaccination was administered on Monday, December 14, 2020, on the same day that the U.S. fatality count crossed 300,000. But Trump was no-where to be seen – on an occasion that could have been a victory lap for him. This was also the same day as the electoral college vote, and Trump and his team were consumed with certifying fake elector slates in eight states.

Even as the vaccines became available, there was no public education campaign to help citizens understand the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, or to promote the civic duty to get vaccinated in order to stop the spread. And even though the vaccines were developed and delivered on Trump’s watch, he did not model getting vaccinated. As far as his followers were concerned, Trump did not get vaccinated.

U.S. Army four-star general Gus Perna, who managed Operation Warp Speed (OWS), which developed and delivered vaccines in record time, notes that this failure gave an opening for disinformation and misinformation to flourish: “Where was the long-term strategy for getting people ready to start taking the vaccine?... That was not part of the [Operation Warp Speed] portfolio. It’s a personal choice to get the vaccine or not. But where was the presentation to inform everybody, so that they could make the best decision? Where was the responsibility to not let this get politicized?... It just didn’t exist.”

In that information vacuum, vaccine deniers, and later political actors opposed to President Joe Biden, spread vaccine disinformation and misinformation that continues to the present day. This vaccine disinformation led not only to vaccine hesitancy, but to anti-vaccination aggression. And the disproportionate number of fatalities were those who believed and acted on the disinformation. 

In May 2022, the nation passed a grim milestone: more than 1 million Americans had died of COVID-19. The vast majority of those deaths were preventable.

At the same time, the head of the Food and Drug Administration declared that misinformation had become the leading cause of death in the U.S.

Even after his presidency, Trump’s followers continued to attack the science and the scientists. Some even made and continue to make death threats against experts.

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine and an expert on vaccinations, published a book in late 2023 about the attack on science and scientists by Trump and his followers. He notes that the United States, uniquely among high-income nations, saw a peculiar trajectory of COVID-19 deaths: “Whereas a majority of the deaths in western European nations and Canada occurred before the arrival of COVID vaccines, deaths in America continued to climb precipitously even after vaccines were made widely available to the public…. In the United States approximately 40% of the deaths occurred after vaccines were fully distributed. This includes 245,000 Americans who lost their lives between May 1 and December 31, 2021…Across multiple regions of the United States, the deaths continued to accelerate throughout the last half of 2021 and into the following year.”

Dr. Hotez noted that during the Delta variant surge in the second half of 2021, unvaccinated Americans were dying at 16.3 times the rate of those who had been vaccinated.

The tone was set by Trump at the beginning of the pandemic, and then perpetuated by his followers and supporters. Dr. Hotez concludes:“For almost the entire pandemic, the United States has been ground zero for COVID deaths. Not only has its death toll from the virus now exceeded one million, but the country has also suffered more deaths per capita than any other large-population, high-income nation.”

And the threats against scientists continue. After the hearing at which Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green said Dr. Fauci had committed crimes against humanity, Dr. Fauci told CNN that such rhetoric puts his and others’  lives at risk: “So that’s the reason why I’m still getting death threats. When you have performances like that unusual performance by Marjorie Taylor Greene in today’s hearing, those are the kinds of things that drive up the death threats because there are a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense.”

It’s not just Marjorie Taylor Green and it’s not just Dr. Fauci. This is a concerted effort by Trump and his followers to discredit science and scientists, and anyone who disagrees with Trump.