Trump lashes out at scientists whose findings contradict him

As president Donald Trump pushes to reopen the united states despite warnings from doctors about the results of moving prematurely through the coronavirus crisis, he has been lashing out at scientists whose conclusions he doesn’t like.

Twice this week, Trump hasn't only dismissed the findings of studies, but suggested - without evidence - that their authors were motivated by politics and out to undermine his efforts to roll back coronavirus restrictions.

First, it was a study funded in part by his own government’s National Institutes of Health that raised alarms about the utilization of hydroxychloroquine, finding higher overall mortality in coronavirus patients who took the drug while in Veterans Administration hospitals.

Trump and several of his allies had been trumpeting the drug as a miracle cure and Trump this week revealed that he has been taking it to attempt to defend against the virus - despite an FDA warning last month that it will only be utilized in hospital settings or clinical trials as a result of the risk of serious unwanted effects, including life-threatening heart disease.

“If you look at the one survey, the only bad survey, these were giving it to people that were in very bad shape. These were very old, almost dead,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “It was a Trump enemy statement.”

He offered similar pushback Thursday to a fresh study from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. It found that a lot more than 61% of COVID-19 infections and 55% of reported deaths - nearly 36,000 persons - might have been prevented had social distancing measures been set up one week sooner. Trump has repeatedly defended his administration’s handling of the virus when confronted with persistent criticism that he acted too slowly.

”Columbia’s an institution that’s very liberal,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “I believe it’s only a political hit job, you wish to know the truth.”

Trump has long been sceptical of mainstream science - dismissing man-made climate change as a “hoax,” suggesting that noise from wind generators causes cancer, and claiming that exercise can deplete a body’s finite amount of energy. It’s part of a more substantial scepticism of expertise and backlash against “elites” that has been ever more popular among Trump’s conservative base.

But undermining Americans’ rely upon the integrity and objectivity of scientists is especially dangerous throughout a pandemic when the general public is counting on its leaders to build up policies based on the very best available information, said Larry Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor who's an expert in public areas health.

“If the president is politicizing science, if he’s discounting health experts, then your public will likely be fearful and confused,” Gostin said, calling it “dismaying.”

The White House rejected that thinking, noting that Trump has followed his administration’s public health officials’ tips through a lot of the crisis.

“Any suggestion that the president will not value scientific data or the important work of scientists is patently false as evidenced by the countless data-driven decision he has designed to address the COVID-19 pandemic, including cutting off travel early from highly-infected populations, expediting vaccine development, issuing the 15-day and later 30-day guidance to ‘slow the spread,’ and providing governors with a clear, safe road map to checking America again,” said White House spokesman Judd Deere.

Yet Trump has clarified that, at least in terms of hydroxychloroquine, he has prioritized anecdotal evidence, including a letter he told reporters he’d received from a health care provider in Westchester, New York, claiming success with the drug.

Asked this week what evidence he previously that the drug was effective in protecting against COVID-19, Trump responded: “Are you set? Here’s my evidence: I get yourself a lot of positive calls about any of it.”

That veterans study, funded by grants from the NIH and the University of Virginia, had not been a rigorous experiment, but a retrospective analysis by researchers at several universities looking at the impact of hydroxychloroquine in patients at veterans’ hospitals over the nation. It found no benefit and more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care alone. The task was posted online for researchers and is not reviewed by other scientists.

The Columbia study, in draft form, also hasn’t yet been published or reviewed by other experts. The researchers ran numbers through a mathematical model, making assumptions about how precisely quickly the coronavirus spreads and how people behave in hypothetical circumstances.

Trump’s criticism of the studies also comes as his allies have already been wanting to counter-messaging from public health specialists who say Trump is putting lives at risk by pushing states to quickly reopen in an election year. Republican political operatives have already been recruiting pro-Trump doctors to be on television set to advocate for reviving the U.S. economy as fast as possible, without waiting to meet up federal safety benchmarks.

Gostin said Trump should leave it to his public health agencies to determine emerging data and the worthiness of various studies.

“I believe there are real dangers,” he said, “for the president to play scientist and doctor on TV.”