For the past several years, my friends in public health and science have expressed astonishment and professional disorientation at the behavior and messaging of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The scientific journals are part of this.
They simply couldn’t believe the brazen manipulation of science for political purposes. They couldn’t believe that so many people within these agencies and journals went along with it for reasons of career protection. They’ve been appalled that science and public health have been deployed in this way.
They worry about the future with this level of corruption. And they’ve been quite passionate in decrying it, while paying a professional price for not going along.
Implicit in this reaction is a history in which they implicitly trusted these institutions, their data, their reporting, and their sincerity with regard to public health. They presumed that these agencies weren’t capable of manipulating science for political reasons. They certainly would never have believed that they would preside over the worst public health calamity of our lifetime.
When they set out to decry this, correct the error, and alert the public to the truth, it wasn’t because they hated the NIH and the CDC. Indeed, it was the opposite. They wanted them to be good. They wanted their integrity restored. They wanted to trust again.
In other words, what motivated them is piety in their professions and the agencies that preside over them. In this, the real haters get it all wrong. My friends aren’t disinformation spreaders, they’re spreaders of facts in the interest of public well-being. They believed strongly that the system isn’t broken fundamentally and could be improved.
They decided that they didn’t want to practice their craft in an environment of lies. They wanted restoration of truth.