Get Scientists Back to Science and Out of Politics

Science and politics are becoming so intertwined that no one is able to trust either science or politics anymore — not that anyone much trusted politics before.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced late last week that it was giving emergency use authorization (EUA) to deliver COVID vaccines to children as young as five.

Emergency use authorization? So what’s the emergency?

First of all, children are far less susceptible to the disease, according to Priya Soni, MD, a Cedars-Sinai Pediatric Infectious Disease specialist.

"Not only are fewer children testing positive for COVID-19," said Soni, "but those who do test positive are likely to have milder cases."

Also, children are more likely to die from influenza than they are COVID-19.

And as far as that goes, children in at least one state are more likely to die from abuse than they are from COVID and the flu combined.

Given this data, what’s the FDA’s emergency?

The agency’s decision came about four weeks after California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he was imposing a vaccine mandate for children attending public or even private schools.

But it wouldn’t go into effect until after the FDA approved the vaccine for kids.

The tail seems to be wagging the dog.

But the FDA isn’t the only organization confusing science with politics. The American Medical Association (AMA) announced in June that governments should remove a child’s sex from his birth certificate in order to achieve "gender equity."

"We need to recognize gender is not a binary but a spectrum," AMA California delegate Sarah Mae Smith, MD, claimed. "Obligating our patients to jump through numerous administrative hoops to identify as who they are based on a sex assigned at birth primarily on genitalia is not only unnecessary but actively deleterious to their health."

Everyone who took 9th grade science knows this is balderdash. And just in case they failed to understand it then, it was drummed into them again in 10th grade biology class.

Author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza thought it evidence that the AMA could no longer be trusted.

"And with this the American Medical Association (AMA) destroys its own credibility," he tweeted. "We can no longer trust these people. Biology has evidently been completely subordinated to ideology."

But the AMA was just getting started.

Last week the organization released a document, "Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts," which inserted far-left politics into almost every plain statement of scientific fact.

For example, the document explains in Table 5 that using "conventional thinking," someone might state that "Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States."

However, the AMA would revise that to "People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States."

Of course this nonsense didn’t start in the scientific community — it started with the far-left making excuses for some groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter  (BLM), while overstating wrongs done by others such as Trump supporters.

Liberal comedian and HBO "Real Time" host Bill Maher addressed this problem Friday night, suggesting a new rule: "instead of putting a Bible in hotel rooms, we should start putting a dictionary in there because apparently nobody knows what words mean anymore."

He recalled that "George Carlin famously had the seven words you can’t say on TV. Well, here’s my eight words people need to stop redefining: hate, victim, hero, shame, violence, survivor, phobic, and white supremacy." But problems really develop when politics enters into the thinking of the scientific community.

We saw that earlier this year when the American Federation of Teachers actually suggested language revisions for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on school reopening guidelines. It was another case of the tail wagging the dog.

As a result children were kept from in-person learning for more than a year. Because of political influence kids in many jurisdictions are forced to wear masks that are proven to do little to prevent the transmission of disease, and may in fact do more harm than good..

Nowadays we might expect to see political correctness and similar nonsense played out in a demonstration, a political debate or a university classroom. But we don’t want to see it in a medical laboratory or our doctor’s office.

Scientists have to get back into the business of practicing science, and out of the business of politics.

We need at least one segment of society with a firm grasp on reality, to hopefully direct the rest of society out of the abyss.

Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to BizPac Review and Liberty Unyielding. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and an enthusiastic Second Amendment supporter, who can often be found honing his skills at the range. Read Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.