I woke up this morning in the Land of Oz and I can’t find my ruby slippers. While I dreamed the night away, Donald Trump’s Truth Social account posted — without comment — an AI created news report in which the president of the United States appears to be announcing the launch of “MedBed cards” for every American.
What?
Medbeds are a technology — perhaps brought to earth by aliens — that conspiracy theorists say is being kept from you by liberals in the government. Better than anything you could find in the sickbay of the USS Enterprise, a medbed supposedly can cure all that ails you in mere minutes. “Designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength,” says the video. Cancer? Parkinson’s?
Without comment, there was no way to tell why the president’s account posted this fake video — or why it abruptly vanished. Was it a late night joke? Does the president want me to think that “genuine” medbeds exist? That this is the latest science he is bringing the American people along with his theories about autism and acetaminophen?
I can’t say because I am a scientist. I don’t make assertions I can’t support with data.
The president claims to be an expert in all things scientific because his uncle was a professor at MIT. “I have a natural instinct for science,” he declared in a 2018 AP interview.
I trained to be a scientist by earning my doctorate in chemistry. It took a decade of hard work to earn that degree, and I’ve spent the last 40 years committed to digging deeper still. While I know a lot about how molecules work, I would never claim to be an expert in geology or evolutionary biology or many other fields.
Science is the art of the real, not the art of the deal.
Over the course of his presidencies, Donald Trump has made himself out to be a meteorologist, able to do with a Sharpie what hours of sophisticated weather modeling backed by years of research could not. He was an epidemiologist, wishfully thinking that COVID-19 was less deadly than the flu. Though he can’t pronounce the common name of the drug he blames for “very increased cause of autism,” he believes himself an expert in human neurodevelopment and pharmacology, able to make blanket recommendations for pregnant women and their babies.
In May, the president signed an executive order promising to restore “gold standard science” and now the administration is proposing an ideological test for funding scientific research.
Over the course of my career I worked with three different Nobel Prize winners, so I have seen and done “gold standard science.” It is not proposing that vaccines with a long history of safety and efficacy need to be tested against placebos, nor is it proposing that leucovorin can go straight to market without the usual FDA safeguards.
Science is the art of the real, not the art of the deal.
Science takes a long hard look at data and observations, gradually building a bridge over the chasm of what we do not know. It is not about gut feelings, but about hard work and a commitment to follow the data even when we don’t like what it is telling us.
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The current administration has mocked the work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It has relentlessly sought to strip the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health of the staff and funding needed to build a healthier, stronger country and world. In place of hard-working, well-trained scientists and their hard won data, we get Trump and his “natural instinct.”
Americans deserve real healthcare backed by actual gold standard science, not middle of the night teases about medbeds and presidential endorsements of as yet untested supplements.
I’ve seen this movie before, where the great and powerful wizard is not a wizard at all, but Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, a grifter who hides behind a curtain with a loud megaphone demanding all Oz cater to his whims.
It will take more than clicking the heels of my ruby slippers twice to pull back the curtain on what is passing for science in the White House. In the meantime, you might try thinking twice before you believe anything coming from the self-proclaimed Wizard of Washington.