Make Science Great Again
Why I’m done with priesthoods in lab coats and pitchforks in Patagonia vests
Recently a friend posted on Facebook about trying to get her COVID booster this year. She’s high-risk — the kind of person who could end up in the ICU if she catches it without immunity. In past years, it was a ten-minute errand: schedule online, roll up a sleeve, walk out with a Band-Aid and a $5 coupon.
This year? First she had to check boxes proving she “qualified.” Then she got to the scheduling screen and… nothing. No appointments. No vaccine. Not at that pharmacy. Not in that state.
What state? Georgia. Home of the CDC — the supposed vaccine capital of the free world.
Her only options: pay out of pocket for a primary-care appointment and pray they have it, or hop a plane to Maryland.
That’s not just broken logistics. That’s us — our politics, our institutions, our culture — breaking science.
We Built a Moonshot… and Then Torched the Launchpad
Say the quiet part: Operation Warp Speed was one of the most audacious scientific wins of our lifetimes. Under Trump. Under Pence. In one year, with a novel virus we didn’t understand, we stood up multiple safe, wildly effective mRNA vaccines, scaled manufacturing, and got shots in arms. That’s not partisan spin — that’s fact.
mRNA isn’t just about COVID. It’s a platform — for cancer treatments, personalized medicine, and things we haven’t named yet. It’s a pivot point in human history.
And then? We decided to hate it.
The Left Turned Science into a Priesthood
Remember the early pandemic pressers? Certainty was the brand. Furrowed brows, PowerPoints, “Do this and you’ll be safe.” Then: “Actually, do this other thing.” And instead of saying, “We’re learning in real time,” they performed omniscience. We literally enshrined Fauci in the Smithsonian like he was St. Anthony of Herd Immunity.
The sin wasn’t being wrong — it was pretending they never were.
And yes, mask theater was real. N95s? Lifesavers. Those stretched-out cloth masks from the grocery store clearance bin? Mostly a team jersey. Mine matched my sneakers. It did nothing else. “Trust the Science” became the blue-zip-code WWJD bracelet. Fine if you want to signal your tribe — but when signaling turned into shaming, mandates with no nuance, and kicking kids off playgrounds, we didn’t produce safety. We produced backlash.
Science is not a priest in a lab coat handing down tablets. It’s a process — with error bars, blind alleys, replication, and humility. When leaders cosplay as priests, the public eventually burns the church down.
The Right Answered a Bad Costume with a Worse Bonfire
And boy, did they burn it down. Ban vaccines in pharmacies. Defund research. Turn GLP-1 meds into a “pharma psyop.” Share YouTube rants about mRNA rewriting your DNA.
That’s not skepticism. That’s vandalism dressed as virtue. You don’t fix a bad priesthood by banning libraries.
My Body Is Exhibit A for Why Science Matters
I was a morbidly obese kid. Not because I lived on Cheetos, but because I lived on the flight line of an Air Force base. My asthma was brutal, my doctors put me on life-saving steroids, and my hormones went haywire.
The weight came. The shame followed.
“Diet and exercise.”
“Personal responsibility.”
As if lectures burn calories.
I finally had bariatric surgery — quietly, because the shame of admitting I needed help was worse than the surgery itself. It worked. Then COVID lockdowns hit, habits slipped, age happened, weight crept back.
Enter GLP-1s. Hunger turned down, life turned up. Not because I became a better person, but because my hormones shifted back. The same way steroids once shifted them the other way. You can moralize that or you can accept reality: obesity is deeply biological, and science is finally giving us levers.
If you think shame burns fat, congratulations — you’ve discovered the most inefficient weight-loss plan in history.
The grotesque part? Insurance still refuses to cover GLP-1s for “weight loss,” even though obesity wrecks nearly every health outcome and costs the system billions. Higher-SES friends are quietly getting the meds. Lower-SES folks are still carrying the sermon I once carried: if you were disciplined, you wouldn’t need help.
If you say “personal responsibility” while blocking the tools that make change possible, that’s not morality. That’s performative cruelty.
Pharma Isn’t Perfect — But It Isn’t the Devil
Yes, Big Pharma has screwed us before. Hard.
OxyContin got an FDA label claiming it wasn’t addictive. (It was. It still is. We’re living with that fallout every single day in the opioid crisis.)
Food dyes with questionable effects? Approved.
Psychedelics with massive promise for PTSD? Banned for fifty years.
So yes, we should question corporate capture of the FDA. We should demand better review processes, better post-market data, and better accountability when they get it wrong.
But “tear it all down” isn’t an answer. Without pharma, there is no GLP-1 revolution. Without pharma, there is no mRNA technology. Without pharma, my childhood asthma might have killed me.
The answer isn’t less science. It’s more curiosity. More transparency. More honesty about what we know, what we don’t, and what we’re still figuring out.
SpaceX Is the Metaphor We Forgot
We love pretending science is a straight line. It’s not. It’s the Starship exploding on the pad, then the second one flying higher, then the third one sticking the landing. Iterate. Instrument. Learn. Repeat. SpaceX didn’t become SpaceX by issuing a press release and declaring certainty; they failed loudly in public and got better fast.
Warp Speed worked because we funded parallel bets, cut dumb red tape, published data, and admitted trade-offs. That’s the template. We should be doing Warp Speed for obesity, mental health, clean energy, antibiotic resistance. Not because we worship risk, but because the status quo is risk.
Government: Both Villain and Hero
This is the paradox: government can unlock science — or smother it.
Operation Warp Speed? Government win.
SpaceX? Private industry win — but one made possible by NASA partnerships, government contracts, and decades of public research into rocketry.
But when it comes to nuclear energy, government has been the anchor dragging behind the boat.
For 40+ years we’ve had the tech, the know-how, and the need — and we’ve done almost nothing.
The left freaked out about meltdowns and waste storage. The right kept funneling money to oil and gas donors. Result? R&D stalled, regulations turned into a Kafka novel, and public perception stayed stuck in 1979.
Imagine if we’d done a “Warp Speed” for nuclear — poured billions into next-gen reactors, micro-grids, safer waste handling, and public education. Instead, we let our grid age into oblivion and left ourselves burning coal like it’s 1890.
Government can unlock science — or it can smother it. It’s up to us to demand the first one.
The New Scientific Manifesto
Science isn’t a priesthood. It’s a notebook with scribbles, arrows, and a coffee ring on the corner.
Real science:
Admits when it’s wrong.
Encourages doubt, curiosity and replication.
Funds research that challenges orthodoxy.
Tells the truth, even when the truth is unpopular.
We need to stop worshipping science like a god and start practicing it like a discipline.
This isn’t left or right. It’s grown-up.
Science Should Make Us Uncomfortable
Both tribes are addicted to a feeling: the left to the warm bath of certainty, the right to the cold shower of grievance. Neither one gets us healthier.
Certainty without curiosity is propaganda.
Skepticism without solutions is vandalism.
If you want a north star, here it is: more life, less dogma.
Give the high-risk woman in Georgia her shot.
Give the obese kid the tools that work.
Give the cancer patient a pipeline that iterates fast.
Give the country Warp Speed energy on the problems that are quietly killing us.
We don’t need “Trust the Science.”
We need to do the science — publicly, iteratively, with humility and error bars.
Because the alternative isn’t caution. It’s superstition in a lab coat.
And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather live in a country that blows up a few rockets on the way to Mars than one that pats itself on the back for taping off the launchpad.
—David
Damn. This really got me thinking this morning! I totally agree with you on so much of this. And, I've been thinking about the backlash you mention a lot, as I see the University I work at devastated by research funding cuts.
I think a huge, huge part of both the "burn it down" mob and the "trust the science" dogma in response, is rooted in our education system. The average American has a pretty loose grasp on basic science, and no working knowledge of the academic research process. Most people who aren't directly involved in the hard sciences don't really know how any of it works. I mean, plenty of people think that "peer review" means your friends or coworkers proofread your work ...and that makes it trustworthy? It's seemingly unverifiable and utterly elitist. Especially against the backdrop of astronomical amounts of money at play in pharma and health care. Ditto for climate science. So, you either have to choose to just trust "the experts", or not. And unless you are actually in it, your choice is mostly about signaling (as you say).
It's a failure of education, we haven't given ourselves the tools to know what makes any scientific work trustworthy or not, or how to even begin to parse the partisan conversation about what "the science" says or doesn't. Science literacy and media literacy have to be the next frontiers of a basic k-12 education.
And... "If you say “personal responsibility” while blocking the tools that make change possible, that’s not morality. That’s performative cruelty." I know that was in a specific context, but I gotta tell you, that hit hard. It articulated exactly how I feel about much of what we're seeing in our country right now. From personal finance to immigration to education--performative cruelty masquerading behind morality.