Via Tim Harris in comments, Paul Krugman in conversation with a couple of scientists, a few snippets thereof.
Peter Hotez, who has done yeoman work defending vaccines, and Michael Mann, a hero of the climate change wars, have a new book about the assault on science. I spoke with them and emerged both enlightened and frightened. Transcript follows…
I felt like maybe we climate scientists had something to offer in terms of experience and insight, into how to deal with a sort of coordinated, orchestrated anti-science of the sort that Peter and Tony Fauci and others in the vaccine world were dealing with.
Like I said, we climate scientists were being vilified and attacked decades ago, before it became fashionable
Hotez: I think it was also when there was that big pile on in 2023 from Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk, pressuring me to debate Kennedy to kind of elevate his stature. And they dangled $100,000 or something like that and I was saying, “what the heck is going on here?”
As a pediatric vaccine scientist, that’s not the kind of thing you expect. It was Michael who really helped me connect the dots and say, “hey, this is what you’re going through, Peter. And welcome to the club.” You’ve been attacked now for a number of years. “This is what, as climate scientists, we’ve been dealing with now for at least a decade prior to that, and here’s some of the places where it’s coming from.” And in time, we compared notes and noticed that if you think of the attacks on climate science and the attacks on vaccines and biomedical science as two circles of the Venn diagram, they don’t completely overlap. But there’s a lot of overlap. And the more we talked, the more we realized in many cases, they were coming from the same sources. And that’s when we decided to do this.
Team Republican has been anti-science in a broad sense for decades, so in that sense this is nothing new, but sometimes more is so much more that it becomes a new thing under the sun.
Krugman: Yeah, it’s been quite something. Although I suspect neither of you had any idea that RFK was going to be dismantling America’s health system.
Hotez: Well I knew he wanted to, that’s how I got involved in getting into this in the first place. I’m a vaccine scientist and I’ve developed new vaccines for parasitic and neglected diseases. But I also have four adult kids, including Rachel who has autism and intellectual disabilities. And years ago, the NIH asked me to have long discussions with Mr. Kennedy and explain to him why vaccines don’t cause autism.
And so I had a year of discussions with him by phone and then online and mediated by a third individual. And I saw how deeply conspiratorial and dug in he was and equally how uninterested he was in the actual science. He couldn’t care less about the science of autism. And so I saw how dangerous he could become if he were ever put in a position of power, which unfortunately, he is right now.
Naturally. Much of the point of Trumpism is to do whatever pisses off the Libs no matter how broadly destructive to everyone that “whatever” is. Trump is the kind of guy who would enjoy watching a shark eat one of his grandchildren if it upset someone he hates.
Mann: Yeah and more than a decade ago, I would do interviews with him. He was a host of a radio program. And he was a fierce advocate for climate action and the environment. He was an environmental lawyer for NRDC for a number of years. And so the sort of Bond villain arc here is pretty remarkable.
Maybe The Devil got to him.
Hotez: Which is actually a recurring pattern. Someone will target a specific area of climate science or biomedicine and gain a reputation, get their foot in the door on that. Then they quickly pivot to targeting everything climate science and mainstream biomedical science because they get reinforcement from the libertarians, from the far right, from the health and wellness industry, and so it becomes a thing. So, once they sign up for one aspect of promoting anti-science, then they buy the whole farm. And that’s been a recurring story.
Mann: It’s the same funders behind these things. The Koch brothers funded the early sort of anti-lockdown rhetoric that ultimately became the anti-vax movement as well with Covid-19. And obviously, they have funded and promoted much of this sort of climate denial infrastructure for decades.
…
Hotez: Before we go to the five categories, I’ll say at least from the vaccine side, and I think a lot of it is the climate side, as there are both political and financial drivers. The political driver initially began around vaccines with assertions that vaccines cause autism. That’s how I got involved to counter that. But then it pivoted to this concept of health freedom, medical freedom: “You can’t tell us what to do about our kids.”
Yes but there’s a catch to that. If we can’t tell you what to do about your kids we can’t tell anyone what to do about anyone’s kids and that means that your kids will be vulnerable to a slew of horrible diseases. Going all freedom freedom freedom on the vax issue means you too can bury your children before they hit puberty just as people did in the 19th century.
As a scientist, we don’t like to talk about politics. We want to be politically neutral. But the reality was, the anti-vaccine activist groups were getting PAC money from the Texas Tea Party, as it was called at that time, to lobby for candidates to run on anti-vaccine platforms and to file anti-vaccine legislation. They came off the rails during Covid when 40,000 to 50,000 Texans needlessly died because they refused Covid vaccines during the Delta and BA1 wave in 2021, 2022. It was a targeted health disinformation campaign, and we document the role Fox News and the Murdoch media empire took in promoting that every night. Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity…
Mann: Elon Musk.
I still wonder how they sleep at night.
Mann: The lockdowns were a real threat to the fossil fuel industry, to Koch Industries, because it meant decreased transportation, decreased energy usage. It was going to hurt them. That is when they stepped in, they realized that the lockdowns and the social distancing that was necessary to deal with the pandemic was a threat to their bottom line.
Krugman: Sorry I’m interrupting. But I had a simple story that I told ten years ago which was, fossil fuel interests want to deny climate change because they want us to keep burning fossil fuels as long as possible, and that everything else flowed from that.
I think it was Naomi Oreskes who did the study, “What proportion of scientific climate denial articles are financed by the fossil fuel industry?” And the answer is 100%. But I didn’t expect it.
Again the sublime indifference to the futures of their children and grandchildren.
Mann: There’s something else going on here that I think is really important. For decades, the fossil fuel industry’s playbook was literally what the tobacco industry had used. And so we see the continued use of this playbook and the modus operandi is to discredit scientists and to discredit science.
It’s part of a larger effort to discredit expert opinion, to discredit experts, and we see that now. That’s metastasized into what we’re seeing in the United States right now where expertise itself—science—is a threat to the conservative movement, to the MAGA movement.
And so it makes sense that you would see this sort of libertarianism intersect with this rejection of intelligentsia, rejection of science, rejection of authority. It’s all come together in this perfect storm that we’re dealing with now.
Libertarianism plus greed.
Hotez: In fact, we look at historical precedents in the book. And that brings us right to what Stalin did in the 1930s and 40s, where he threw the Mendelian geneticist Vavilov in the Gulag where he ultimately perished, one of the leading geneticists of his day, in favor of Trofim Lysenko, who promoted these phony baloney, vernalization Lamarckian theories that you sow the Russian wheat in snow and then you toughen it up and all of this nonsense.
It didn’t matter if 2 million Soviet peasants died from famine. It was a way of authoritarian control. Stalin would go after the theory of relativity and physicists. And then you start reading the works of people like Anne Applebaum or Ruth Ben-Ghiat or even going back to Hannah Arendt, this is what authoritarianism or totalitarianism is all about. As Michael says, you target the intelligentsia, but you begin first with the scientists because they are the top threat.
Trump is the Stalin of the 21st century. There’s glory for you.
