On 9 November 2016, the world awoke to an unexpected result: Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States.There is the heart of the gripe -- a bunch of non-Americans complaining that the American President puts America first.This journal did not hide its disappointment. ...
Trump claims to put ‘America First’.
Getting to more specific gripes:
In the pandemic’s earliest days, Trump chose not to craft a comprehensive national strategy to increase testing and contact tracing, and to bolster public-health facilities. Instead, he flouted and publicly derided the science-based health guidelines set by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for the use of face masks and social distancing.No, the CDC told us repeatedly that face masks were useless, and not to wear them.
With the nation’s death toll now exceeding 215,000, the coronavirus has killed more people in the United States than anywhere else.The coronavirus is listed as the cause of death in only 6% of these. The rest had other comorbidities.
No president in recent history has tried to politicize government agencies and purge them of scientific expertise on the scale undertaken by this one.Not even one example of a scientist fired.
Trump has also promoted nationalism, isolationism and xenophobia — including tacitly supporting white-supremacist groups. ...Now we are getting to the real gripes.The United States’ reputation as an open and welcoming country to the world’s students and researchers has suffered.
Joe Biden, by contrast, has a history in the Senate as a politician who has reached across to his political opponents and worked with them to achieve bipartisan support for legislationHis best-known examples are the Crime Bill, which he now disavows, and the Iraq War, which no one wants to talk about.
He has pledged that decisions on the pandemic response will be made by public-health professionals and not by politicians; and he is rightly committing to restoring the ability of these professionals to communicate directly with the public.Trump regularly put Fauci and other "public-health professionals" on TV. But yes, the decisions were made by elected officials.
It is sad how these scientific journals have been politicized. I am not sure I will ever trust them again.
It would be one thing if the President said things which were scientifically false, or fired scientists and replaced them with astrologers, or somehow sabotaged scientific works. But nothing like that is even alleged. He has funded the most worthy scientific projects, and promoted science. In his handling of COVID-19, he was open, transparent, and following the advice of the best experts. No one can explain how he could have done any better.
This is all political, and it has very little to do with science. Trump is hated for other reasons.
Update: Other Nature articles are political, such this recent obituary of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It is not clear why a science journal would publish an obituary of a judge in another country. The only specific opinion of hers mentioned was her very-partisan dissent in favor of recounts that were thought to favor Gore in the 2000 election.
"This journal did not hide its disappointment..."
ReplyDeleteOh, so entire scientific 'journals' now have unanimous political positions about foreign leaders? How...progressive of them, they've assimilated into a Borg Collective!
Perhaps the editors should take some time out of their terribly busy pontificating schedule to research the 'slight' differences between how representative and technocratic forms of government operate.