Bush's Wacky World of Science

[Guest guest]

Bush's Wacky World of Science

 

By Howard Dean, . Posted July 6, 2004.

 

Posted on July 6, 2004,

http://www.alternet.org/story/19157/

 

I write this week's column as a physician.

 

The Bush administration has declared war on science.

In the Orwellian world of 21st century America, two

plus two no longer equals four where public policy is

concerned, and science is no exception. When a

right-wing theory is contradicted by an inconvenient

scientific fact, the science is not refuted; it is

simply discarded or ignored.

 

Egregious examples abound. Over-the-counter

morning-after contraceptive sales are banned, despite

the recommendation for approval by an independent

panel of the Food and Drug Administration review

board.

 

The health risks of mercury were discounted by a White

House staffer who simply crossed out the word

" confirmed " from a phrase describing mercury as a

" confirmed public health risk. "

 

A National Cancer Institute fact sheet was doctored to

suggest that abortion increases breast-cancer risk,

even though the American Cancer Society concluded that

the best study discounts that.

 

Reports on the status of minority health and the

importance of breast feeding are similarly watered

down to appease right-wing ideologies.

 

What about global warming? After withdrawing from the

Kyoto Treaty, the Bush administration distanced itself

from a climate report the Environmental Protection

Agency wrote, because it affirmed the potential

worldwide harm of global warming, the existence of

which Bush had denied. The global-warming section of

the 2003 EPA report on the environment was extensively

rewritten, then dropped entirely.

 

Fighting HIV? Bush's initiative to help fund HIV

efforts in Africa was trumpeted by the press, while

the National Institutes of Health and Centers for

Disease Control quietly removed information on the

benefits of condoms and safe sex education from

domestic HIV Web sites.

 

Presidential scientific commissions have long enjoyed

relative immunity from politics. Presidents of both

parties have depended on impartial, rational advice

from such groups for decades. Yet under the Bush

administration, there has been a concerted effort, led

by Karl Rove and other political ideologues based in

the White House, to stack these commissions with

Republican loyalists, especially those who espouse

fundamentalist views on scientific issues.

 

Recently, a scientist and a bioethics professor were

dismissed from the blue-ribbon Council on Bioethics

after they disagreed with the Bush administration's

proposed ban on new stem-cell line development to cure

a variety of diseases. In a similar vein and an

unusual move, the nominations of public health experts

to a CDC lead paint advisory panel were rejected by

Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson,

and replaced with researchers with financial ties to

the lead industry. The Union of Concerned Scientists,

with 20 Nobel laureates and several former scientific

advisers to Republican presidents, has issued its

scathing Report on Scientific Integrity condemning

these practices.

 

Is it any wonder that these outrages have been

perpetrated on an unsuspecting public and an enfeebled

press? Not when you consider that this is an

administration that has put forth deliberately

misleading proposals like the Healthy Forests

Initiative, which removes barriers to clear-cutting;

and the Clear Skies Initiative, which weakens existing

safeguards on mercury, sulfur dioxide and other

pollutants spewed into the air by power plants. When

the oil industry writes national energy policy and the

HMOs and drug companies draft our Medicare

legislation, who is looking out for truth, scientific

integrity and the public interest?

 

Will it be long before a prominent panel of

fundamentalist theologians, conservative columnists

and a few token scientists take up the question of

whether the theory of evolution should be banned from

the nation's classrooms? Stay tuned. In George Bush's

America, ignorance is strength.

 

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