In 2015 I began to wonder when CDC, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had lost its way. Since I am neither Republican or Democrat, I had to wonder if the Obama administration was the problem, the same way Democrats insist Trump is the problem now.

But where does that end? Did the CDC that mishandled H1N1 in 2009 do so because of Obama? Was SARS 2003 botched because of Bush?  Of course not, the issue is bureaucracy creep due to career government employees inside CDC itself, not temporary political appointees like Dr. Robert Redfield, who has become a political pincushion for Democrats despite three decades of HIV research. Meanwhile, Republicans are claiming liberal media is exaggerating coronavirus to hurt Trump this fall.

Do you want to believe a mom with no credentials who opposes modern agriculture can keep your baby from getting autism?  Do you want to believe fracking will set your tap water on fire or that COVID-19 was caused by 5G cell phone service in Wuhan?

There are prominent Facebook pages for all of those. An osteopath named Joe Mercola will even sell you supplements to prevent getting coronavirus, and he makes $100 million a year leveraging social media to latch onto to anything people are willing to believe.

A new paper tries to "suggest" that a silent killer may be among us - particulate matter so tiny you need an electron microscope to detect it, left behind on furniture by smokers who sat there at some point in the past. Even movie theater seats. And then vapers may be doing the same thing, with nicotine.

This particulate matter, inference goes, jumps from their bodies onto seats, where it waits for you to perch, then leaps onto your body, worms its way through your skin, enters your organs, bioaccumulates, and causes cancer.

There could be a lot more COVID-19 cases than the 164 instances CDC lists, even up to 9,000 in the U.S., but even that would not be reason for alarm.

A new paper reports again about the successful cultivation of red romaine lettuce, Lactuca sativa cv ‘Outredgeous’ plants from surface-sterilized seeds grown in Vegetable Production Systems growth chambers on the International Space Station during the years 2014 to 2016.

Unlike what you'll get in Chipotle, this lettuce is free of disease-causing microbes and safe to eat. 

While 2020 looked to be another year when corporate media journalists would provide the same old Product X "linked to" Disease Y "a new study finds" articles as they have for the entire century, the latest coronavirus, COV-19, has saved us from all that.

While in the past people were willing to pretend concern about what diseases the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences was willing to correlate to useful products on a spreadsheet, those days are gone. Chemophobia is a luxury for the idle rich, much like organic food or the anti-vaccine movement.

When people do have something to be concerned over, data dredging goes by the wayside. Reality sets in. Science is back to being a force for good.