Surely the long-standing bias by both the medical establishment and government regulators against natural remedies of any kind is at work here. But beyond that, I see the campaign against Brownstein and others as yet another sign of the ever-more-toxic mix of science and politics that has accompanied the pandemic. For much of February and into mid-March, the president waved off the dangers of the pandemic, predicting "it's going to disappear". He has promoted an extremely aggressive campaign, "Operation Warp Speed", to develop a vaccine against COVID-19, way faster than any previous vaccine. And apparently because of fears about "bad numbers", the administration continues to hinder efforts to expand testing for the coronavirus; most recently, the FDA put the kibosh on a Seattle-area project funded in large measure by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to expand testing. Was that because many Trump supporters see him as part of a pro-vaccine conspiracy? Who knows. Members of the administration are said to own medical companies in line to benefit from federal spending on COVID-19 vaccines.
Here is how an analysis on Stat, a highly respected online science publication, put it today: "The Trump administration has systematically dismantled the executive branch's science infrastructure and rejected the role of science to inform policy, essentially reversing both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations since World War II, when Vannevar Bush, an engineer, advised Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
"President Trump's pursuit of anti-science policy has been so effective that as the first cases of COVID-19 were breaking out in Wuhan, China, no meaningful science policy infrastructure was in place to advise him. As a consequence, America is suffering from a pandemic without a plan. Our responses are ineffectual and inconsistent. We are increasingly divided by misinformation and invidious messaging. And it's not even over."
And among the "collateral damage" in this toxic mixture of science and politics will be ordinary people unable to access potentially useful information of the type offered by Dr. Brownstein.
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