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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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When I was young, conservatives and liberals had equally high levels of trust in science. And it was high. Only progressives thought science was not a force for public good.
America is one of the most religiously, racially and ethnically diverse countries in the world, but that doesn't mean Latinos, Asians or Blacks believe that Democrats and Republicans want them as anything more than reliable voting blocs.

A new analysis finds that though voting eligible Asians were up 35 percent between 2010 and 2020, Latinos increased 23 percent and the Black population increased by 6 percent even as Whites decreased 2 percent, minorities didn't vote in numbers similar to their eligible voter population.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, government health officials went to Congress to ask for more funding to help with Ebola. Prior to that they asked for more funding to help stop Teen Vaping. Prior to that they asked for more funding to stop the Prediabetes Epidemic.

After the pandemic they created regulations to keep landlords from evicting deadbeat tenants. They created regulations to force COVID-19 vaccines on everyone...except fellow government union employees. 
Republicans joined the anti-vaccine movement in 2021 but you might not know it xisted prior to that. Academics and allied journalists would roll out surveys showing that the anti-vaccine movement was similar on both sides to rationalize the behavior of their tribe - while ignoring actual data.

Data like that that coast of California had more vaccine exemptions for school kids than the rest of the US combined. Some coastal schools had vaccine rates of just 26%. Fortunately, we had physicians like Dr. Richard Pan on our side, willing to defy his political party to save kids. We pressured the Governor to sign a law banning arbitrary exemptions and now California is nearly as high as Mississippi and Alabama in vaccine uptake.
Like some soldiers become conscientious objectors if they end up in an actual military situation, or when over 300 armed government union employees suddenly forgot they had guns while kids were being murdered in Uvalde, healthcare workers, 18.8 million strong just in the US, were more likely to exit the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike the first two, healthcare workers were right to be afraid. 
In 1845, two ships under the command Captain John Franklin, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, left England on a voyage to chart the top of North America and a Northwest Passage that would connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. 

Like the interior of Africa and finding the source of the Nile, Great Britain was using some its imperial wealth to explore the unknown and a veteran skipper like Franklin wanted to be first to make the breakthrough across the north pole.

Their ships were state-of-the-art; interior heating and storage enough preserved food to last the 100-plus men for months at a time plus chicken, pigs, and even for the early parts.