5 days ago
6
By Pat Sheil
September 10, 2025 — 12.00pm
SCIENCE
Science Under Siege
Michael Mann & Peter Hotez
Scribe, $36.99
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s controversial health supremo, recently cancelled $US500 million dollars ($765 million) of grants for research into mRNA vaccines. In any alternate universe, such a hare-brained decision by the fellow in charge of American medical research would be inconceivable.
But not in our universe. In Science Under Siege, co-authors Michael Mann and Peter Hotez, leading researchers and advocates in their respective fields of environmental science and immunology, warn that science itself, as a credible and trusted method of establishing truth, is in crisis.
The editorial in the August 15 edition of science journal Nature in response to Kennedy’s decision, was outraged. “Shock and disbelief does not even begin to describe the reaction from mRNA and public-health researchers.”
The situation has deteriorated further since then. Virtually the entire senior staff of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (which exists at Kennedy’s whim as Secretary of Health and Human Services) have either been fired or have resigned in protest. This renowned institution, responsible for protecting America – and through sharing knowledge – much of the world from contagion, is falling to bits.
Centres for Disease Control and Prevention staff and supporters protest in Atlanta, Georgia, last month,Credit: Bloomberg
But according to Mann and Hotez, the outrage of scientists at the denigration and defunding of crucial research at the CDC, and across universities and government, is not enough to counter an all-out assault on the scientific endeavour. Not even close to enough.
The pair outline, in horrifying detail, the various methods used to vilify scientists by right-wing media, “influencers” flogging snake-oil remedies for everything from COVID to cancer, and a cowering Republican Party in the US Congress. American scientists are howled down by a Trumpian chorus of fury and ignorance. Critical medical and environmental research is trashed by rubber-stamping the appointment of oblivious and dangerous demagogues to positions responsible for making life-and-death decisions.
Both authors have received death threats, been stalked, and relentlessly abused on social media, far-right podcasts and the Murdoch-controlled press and Fox News.
Their crime? To rail against mindless conspiracy theories, to plead for parents to vaccinate their children against preventable diseases, and to point out – until it seems almost Sisyphean – that COVID is a deadly virus, not a ghastly plot to take away Americans’ guns, Bibles and family values.
This important book does more than simply enumerate and excoriate the forces railing against science and scientists, but offers hope for civilised solutions, from gentle persuasion and rational debate to being heard in the media and at the ballot box.
Since Mann and Hotez finished Science Under Siege in March, the situation in the US has become even worse.Credit: iStock
Nonetheless, the situation they describe seems to have spun beyond rectification through common sense. The overwhelming impression is of a screaming throng waving pitchforks and flaming torches, smashing down the doors to the laboratories.
For every wacky conspiracy theory behind the anti-science tsunami, Mann and Hotez offer counter-conspiracies that are far more frightening than anti-vaxxers burning down 5G transmission towers (a panic that vanished once most anti-vaxxers fell in love with their 5G phones).
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From the absurd – petrochemical corporations convincing Trump to ban paper straws because, as he put it, “they explode, and plastic straws won’t bother sharks as they chomp their way through the ocean”, to the sinister – the so-called “health freedom” lobbyists who, encouraged by Kennedy, attacked co-author Hotez for having vaccinated his own daughter, who later was diagnosed as autistic.
That Kennedy and his tribe still cling to the long-debunked claim of a link between vaccination and autism should be a laughable, but Hotez was labelled a public enemy by the anti-vaccine lobby, many of whom were flogging COVID “cures” that were toxic, and in some cases, lethal.
Since Mann and Hotez wrote the final words of Science Under Siege in March this year, the situation has become worse, and it seems clear that under this administration, the best hope for American scientists working outside the defence industry is emigration.
Trump knows nothing about science, and seems to care even less. His science policy is controlled by far-right libertarian ideologues, such as Kennedy and Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin, who in July announced the repeal of the “endangerment finding” which declares greenhouse gases to be a public health threat, giving the US government legal authority to act on climate change.
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American science, an inspiration for more than a century, is rapidly declining into tragic farce, a nightmare which only the voters there can fix.
The rest of us will just have to get along without it for now, and remind sceptics – as Mann and Hotez do – of the words of French scientist Marie Curie.
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we can fear less.”
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