Regular readers may recall that I was in ACT UP back in the eighties and nineties. In those days, we had plenty of criticisms of the leadership of federal health agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (as well as political leaders, of course). Once or twice, we even called for specific leaders to resign or be fired.
But eventually, after making sufficient noise, a few activists who had both the knowledge and the inclination (definitely not including me back then) managed to establish a dialogue with some of those leaders and made some real progress. Research methods became more adaptable to the needs of people with AIDS and access to promising experimental treatments improved. Progress, though never perfect, did indeed happen.
Could that happen with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the people that he and President Donald Trump have installed at federal health agencies now?
In a word, no, and it’s important to understand why.
Science, at its core, is not a set of facts, it’s a method of analyzing reality and trying to understand what is true. It recognizes that humans, by our very nature, are not impartial or objective. We’re simply not wired to be. We tend to see what we want to see and to discount things that are jarring or contradict our expectations.
There’s a word for this: “confirmation bias,” described in one authoritative research review as “a ubiquitous phenomenon… the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand.” We all do it, almost entirely unconsciously. To correct for this, the scientific method has built-in safeguards designed to protect against confirmation bias as much as possible.
When studying a new vaccine or treatment, for example, both researchers and patients will naturally both hope and expect that the new product will help. To keep those expectations from distorting the results, the standard procedure is for studies to be “double-blind:” Neither researchers nor subjects know who is getting active drug and who is getting an inert placebo until the study is completed, the numbers are crunched and the results unblinded for analysis by statisticians. While no system devised by humans is perfect, this does a pretty good job of keeping human bias from warping the analysis of most clinical trials.
What RFK Jr. and his ilk do lives in a different realm entirely. Kennedy is notorious for scouring the medical literature and cherry-picking little, out-of-context scraps that seem to back his arguments—for example, that vaccines cause autism or other serious problems—and simply ignoring the much more massive accumulation of data saying otherwise.
Apparently, Kennedy has already started doing it again. Still clinging to his repeatedly debunked claims of a link between vaccines autism, Kennedy decided in mid-March to commission a new study—a move quickly slammed by real scientists. But wait, it gets worse: The man reportedly hired to do this new analysis is David Geier, described by Ars Techicna as “a discredited anti-vaccine advocate who has no medical background and who has been disciplined for practicing medicine without a license.” Some of the papers he has authored or co-authored, generally in obscure journals, have been retracted.
No confirmation bias will be at work here, I’m sure.
And then there’s Kennedy’s approach to the ongoing measles outbreak in the Southwest. Kevin Griffis, recently resigned director of the CDC’s office of communications, just wrote about it for the Washington Post (non-paywalled archive link for those who don’t want to give clicks to Jeff Bezos):
Instead of seeking guidance about how to combat the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico from the world-leading epidemiologists and virologists he oversees, Kennedy is listening to fringe voices who reinforce his personal beliefs. Kennedy has promoted unproven treatments for measles, such as the antibiotic clarithromycin — a drug that has no effect on viral infections. He also suggested distributing vitamin A, which does not prevent measles.
Meanwhile, in my final weeks at the CDC, I watched as career infectious-disease experts were tasked with spending precious hours searching medical literature in vain for data to support Kennedy’s preferred treatments.
While vitamin A can help the tiny percentage of Americans with measles who have an actual vitamin A deficiency, too much of it can do serious harm, and at least one Texas hospital has reported seeing kids with liver damage induced by excess vitamin A, whose parents followed RFK Jr’s advice.
As frightening as that is, the bigger issue here is how Kennedy chooses to approach this: Instead of following the scientific method, he scours the literature for anything that reinforces what he already believes. Apparently convinced that he possesses The Truth that’s being hidden by the Deep State or The Illuminati or George Soros or the Trilateral Commission or someone, he hunts desperately for anything that reinforces his existing belief system.
This isn’t how scientists think. It’s how religious fundamentalists think. It’s how cult members think.
Have you ever tried to argue with a creationist? You can’t. Whatever evidence you bring up, they will find a way to dismiss it. If you cite the fossil record, they’ll find some tiny, miniscule flaw that their preacher told them invalidates fossils. If you show them why that tiny flaw is irrelevant, they’ll eventually fall back on, “God put fossils there to test our faith.” You cannot win an argument with faith.
That is the mentality now running the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and cancelling research grants by the hundreds at the National Institutes of Health. We are in deep, deep trouble.
