The Politicizing of Scientific Discoveries is Inhibiting Human Progress and Creating Crises

February 17, 2019 – Whether we are talking about climate change, measles and vaccinations, genetically modified crops, and fluoridation. You can name others and sure enough, someone with an axe to grind, will have politicized it and endangered humanity’s present and future.

Feelings About Climate Change

Take the subject of climate change with the overwhelming consensus from scientists pointing to our culpability, and with a concerted call for action now. Yet right now three different Canadian provincial governments are in court to try and stop action by the federal government to implement a market-based strategy of putting a price on carbon. Although these premiers profess to believe that the changing climate is human-influenced, they are counting on a groundswell of support from those in industry and the public who do not, the so-called climate skeptics.

South of the Canadian border we have an America let by the chief climate change skeptic of the age, the man who announced that the U.S. was pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. So what are American public perceptions about anthropogenic climate change?

The latest research poll from UC – Santa Barbara shows a clear divide in the nation based on politics. Democratic and Republican Party supporters are on opposite sides of the question. The results (see maps below) show that between 80 and 95% of registered Democrats “feel” global warming is real. On the Republican side, between 30 and 60% express similar “feelings.” That means between 40 and 60% of those who are Republicans question the human influence on climate despite the voluminous amounts of data coming from climatologists and related scientific fields that show a distinct correlation.

I have highlighted the words “feel” and “feelings” in the above text because when talking about scientific evidence, one usually puts feelings aside and looks at facts. But then again I have to remind myself that when Darwin presented his research on natural selection back in the 1850s, describing how species differentiate over time in response to external forces, that the overwhelming objections were about feelings and beliefs, not the research and conclusions represented. Even today, more than 150 years after Darwin first shared his evidence of natural selection, some American states make evolution and creationism (the Judaeo-Christian biblical account of how the world was formed and all of life on it) co-equal in the classroom.

Disease and Vaccines

Another of this week’s headline points to the damage the politicizing of basic science can do to a vulnerable population. Madagascar, an island nation that lies off Africa’s southeastern coast, is being decimated by an outbreak of measles, a disease for which medical science developed a vaccines back in 1963, and a multiple disease immunization protocol known as the MMR since 1980. MMR stands for measles, mumps, and rubella, all diseases that are highly contagious and of particular threat to children under the age of five.

So how can one explain how 50,000 people could be infected with measles in Madagascar since October 2018, with hundreds of children already dead, and estimates that the number will soon top 1,000? In Madagascar less than 50% of the people are immunized even though the MMR vaccine is readily available. This tragedy is being repeated in other African countries as well where vaccine availability is present but there is such a lack of political leadership to educate the public about the need for immunization and deal with the anti-vaxxer propaganda.

Madagascar and Africa may be the worst hit, but if you type “measles” into your search engine the links that come up show 2018 to be the year of measles all around the world. When you consider that back in 2000, the year the Center for Disease Control (CDC) announced the disease was eliminated in the United States and elsewhere, one would never have expected to read about new and growing outbreaks in 21 states, 64,000 affected in the European Union, and 301,702 globally, a 31% rise from 2017. The estimated number of deaths from measles last year reached 110,000, with most being children.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called out the governments of the world pointing out that this shouldn’t be happening with a totally preventable disease. In its information pages on measles it describes the low vaccination totals as being caused by disinformation campaigns and rumours presented to the public, fueled by a growing anti-vaxxer, anti-science movements that use discredited research, and celebrity shills to spread their lies. Last year 110,000 paid the price.

The Anti Gene Modification Movement

It seems at times that no scientific breakthrough has been more maligned than that of the development of genetically modified (GM) crops. Between the organic farming movement and anti-GMO groups like Friends of the Earth, the Center for Food Safety, Greenpeace, and the Pesticide Action Network, a barrage of attacks have been made on genetic engineering and tools such as CRISPR. Yet GM crops like golden rice developed as a means of ending childhood blindness in South Asia, and GM crops that are drought, fungal and insect-pest resistant are universally condemned by those with no evidence to support their feelings that their safety is at risk.

In 2012, a joint communique by 110 Nobel laureates stated, “scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production.” The American Association for the Advancement of Science, in a 2015 Pew survey, found that 88% concluded based on the science, that GM crops were safe, almost as strong a consensus as the community of scientists in their assessment of anthropogenic climate change.

The anti-GMO groups even include high profile celebrity scientists like Canadian zoologist, David Suzuki, a strong environmentalist, who on most subjects bases his judgment on the science. But it seems that Suzuki, who headed up a genetics laboratory at University of British Columbia, treats GM crops as alchemy describing that the products of biotechnology “are being rammed into our food, onto our fields…without any public participation…and with the complicity…the active support and funding of governments.” The public is in agreement more with Suzuki than the large majority of scientists. That same Pew survey that showed 88% of scientists stating that GM crops were safe also showed only 37% of the public believed that to be true, and only 28% felt that food grown with the use of pesticides was safe.

I’ve often described the anti-GMO movement on this blog site as being more anti-Monsanto than anything else. The company which is now wholly-owned by Bayer, had a heavy-handed reputation in the licensing of its GM seeds, ending up in court with farmers who found seeded by nature GM crops in their fields. Monsanto was suing the farmers for what wind had wrought. And Monsanto created GM crops that were designed specifically to not be affected by its own chemical pesticides giving the company twice the dollars when selling to farmers.

Compare the Monsanto approach to that of golden rice, developed by university researchers who made the seed available to growers for free. Or to universities working with agriculturalists in Africa to develop crops resistant to Army Worm, and other infestations that often destroy half of what is grown in fields. Or to the work being done to modify the fruits of the harvest so that they remain fresh longer and don’t get thrown away to become a source of greenhouse gas emissions from waste dump sites.

Chemicals in the Water

The idea of adding a chemical into drinking water is one that causes conspiracy theorists to pop out of the woodwork. The current anti-fluoride movement is a case in point.

The science behind fluoride dates back to its discovery by accident when a 1901 dental graduate named Frederick McKay set up a practice in a Colorado town and discovered fluoride in the water after trying to understand why some of his patients had badly stained teeth. He traced the stains back to drinking water sources, collected water samples from neighbouring towns, and isolated fluoride as the suspect stainer in chief. At the time he didn’t realize that the chemical was also hardening his patients’ brown-stained teeth making them more decay resistant. It was later researchers who determined that and came up with the right concentrations of fluoride to produce hardening without stains.

The first community test occurred in 1945 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. An eleven-year study showed that children born after fluoride was added to the town water had 60% less tooth decay than those prior to 1945. It was deemed by dentists to be a scientific breakthrough.

Then the politics of fear got in the way. What else were politicians and scientists concocting to put in drinking water, or in our food? In the post-war world where Communism was the ever-present evil, fluoride in the drinking water was seen by some to be the first act of a Red invasion.

A more sophisticated anti-fluoride lobby has emerged in recent times with a wide range of claims about fluoride unsupported by any scientific evidence. They claim fluoride in the water causes health risks without identifying what those risks are. They call it an industrial chemical to make it sound like pollution. They have fallback positions that state the benefits to healthy teeth are highly exaggerated, or that fluoride in toothpaste makes it no longer a requirement in drinking water. Some even state that the combination of the toothpaste and water treated with fluoride leads to overexposure. I doubt if any are aware of the brown-stained teeth of those Colorado residents which led to the discovery of fluoride’s value in preventing tooth decay.

The anti-fluoride activists are less about science than about badgering town councils anytime water is on the agenda. And politicians have succumbed bowing to the pressure of their lobby in 30 Canadian communities since 2005 whose elected officials voted to end putting fluoride in their communities’ drinking water. Today, as a result, only 32.5% of Canadian communities mandate fluoride. The story is not too dissimilar in the United States. The science loses out to loud voices spreading nonscience nonsense as facts.

Anti-climate change, anti-vaxxers, anti-GM crops, and anti-fluoride activists are largely cut from the same cloth. They feed us alarmist rhetoric. They fuel their arguments with feelings and fear. And much of the time they get their way with damaging results such as what the people of Madagascar are currently experiencing.