7 - Science of the Pandemic

Summary

Chapter 7 tracks Trump’s anti-science bias, and its effect on the administration’s management/mismanagement of the pandemic. The chapter begins by putting science in America in an historical perspective. It swiftly proceeds to put the discussion in a contemporaneous context, with a special focus on the antipathy between the president and the scientific community – that part of the scientific community that was outside as opposed to inside the administration. What is made clear nearly throughout the book is that experts – scientists and doctors – who were inside the administration were caught in a vise. A vise that obliged them to choose – between their profession and the president. Almost without exception they opted to support the latter at the expense of the former. The White House Coronavirus Task Force was, for example, not much more than a sham, even though members of the Task Force included the likes of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.