In Issues&Insights, I note that that activist groups are demanding the administration replace evidence-based research with activist-backed junk science. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), among others, is demanding a ban on 11 critical pesticides that farmers have relied on to feed the public during the COVID-19 pandemic.
These are all products that have been thoroughly evaluated by career scientists - not political appointees - at U.S. regulatory agencies numerous times, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. They are safe. And they are essential to keeping food affordable.
But if you use bizarre methodologies - like having volunteers drive around neighborhoods and count how many bugs splatter on the license plate - you can claim anything is science. You can even weirdly declare that it is due to those pesticides, rather than there being fewer bugs due to so many more houses built there.
Politicians will always pay off political favors. There is a reason President Biden is encouraging Amazon workers to unionize, and it is not because he hates that poor people can afford products, it is that politics requires handouts to the people who mobilized votes for you. But he has always been a union supporter, and only now claims to be on Team Science. If that is true, he can show the science community by pushing back against urban lawyers who get rich suing farmers and food companies. And manufacture pseudoscience claims to try and rush a quick settlement.
Do We Want President Biden To Be Scientist-In-Chief Or Let Junk Science Promoted By Political Allies Dictate Policy?
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