TODAY WE NEED THE HONEST SCIENTISTS, NOT A REALITY TV PERSONALITY

…Dr. Anthony Fauci at a daily Task Force press briefing.

The drug, Remdesivi, Dr. Fauci reported, “demonstrated significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.”

It is amazing that the president doesn’t understand that just because he repeats a lie over and over again, that doesn’t make it true.  Yet, for this president that has told well over 10,000 false or misleading statements.  In doing so, he has become the most dishonest president of the United States…….. ever!

It was great that Dr. Anthony Fauci , the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, showed the president what it’s like to be a person that everyone respects what he says.  This doctor has a number of times spoken truth-to-power, after the president has tried to feed a bunch of nonsense to the public.

As one writer for The Washington Post wrote, “There was no hype when Anthony Fauci relayed the outcomes of a study on a potential treatment for covid-19. He didn’t promise a “game-changer” or that it would be “available almost immediately.” He didn’t tell us a story about a man taking the drug on his deathbed and miraculously feeling better within hours.  But as he sat in the Oval Office discussing a recent trial for the drug Remdesivir with all the fervor of ‘Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher’, Fauci did what President Trump has failed to do, despite weeks of hawking unproven treatments: to offer Americans a real sense of hope.”

This is really quite important,” Fauci said, before going on to discuss the study’s statistical significance “for the scientists who are listening." The drug, he reported, demonstrated “clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.”

I agree that it really felt good to hear the truth.  No, the drug is certainly not a magic bullet. The study Fauci was referencing was not the blockbuster Americans are looking for as the official coronavirus death toll blows past 60,000. The study showed no statistically significant effect on deaths, and it only demonstrated a “modest” benefit to those suffering from covid-19, reducing average recovery time from 15 to 11 days, compared with those that were given a placebo drug.  Other studies have found less dramatic effects, so much further research is needed.

On top of the president falsehoods, the Fox News organization’s misinformation campaign is having some real negative consequences.  “Speculation by Fox News about Covid-19 cures is making it more difficult for real health officials to do their job,” this from the media critic, Erik Wemple.

What Dr. Fauci offered was proper, science-based, authentic optimism.  He communicated that this drug is a solid step in the right direction, while tempering his message with the appropriate news that we’ve come to forget, after three years under the Trump administration.

Who knew you could get so much satisfaction from such truthful phrases as “the data needs to be further analyzed” and “this will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal”?

Shortened recovery times, Fauci told us, could mean reducing how long people spend in the hospital, possibly alleviating the disease’s severe stress on our health-care system. It could set a new “standard of care” for treatment, as he put it and help direct further research.

Yes, we still have a long way to go, but we can applaud that the scientific method is still trudging along.

As we’ve seen with this president, he doesn’t have any patience for this kind of process.  He saw a glimmer of good news, some evidence that hydroxychloroquine might be an effective drug to treat Covid-19. But then he became frustrated when others demanded that we wait for the scientists to verify it.  This may be somewhat understandable, given that thousands of people are dying by the day.  But the president’s hope is totally detached from the science, and that was proven to be a dangerous and deadly false conclusion.  As the hydroxychloroquine’s promoters have discovered, with the premature deaths of some Americans that consumed the drug.

A scientific method is not an obstacle, as the president obviously believes, but it is instead a solution. The purpose of science is only to answer questions, and there are many questions to be answered about Covid-19. That doesn’t mean getting caught up in academic bureaucracy.  We should instead be looking for speeding up our regulatory process whenever it is appropriate, and given the urgency of the crisis.

But in the end, the scientific method itself has no corners to be cut. The reason Fauci’s optimism is so effective is because it is grounded in science. It is the only way forward,  even if it is imperfect.

If The president could stop lying to the American public, he might actually learn something from all this.

He doesn’t need a miracle treatment to help Americans. He could actually inspire the public simply by acting as a cheerleader for research.  But that’s not in this president’s play-book.

The scientific world is currently focused on this disease, and that accumulated power alone should comfort us.  Dr. Fauci, given his decades of government service, knows when to turn to the cameras and tell the public that we have found something.

But just as important, compared to the president, he knows when not to talk and how to be honest with small successes.

Public health, it turns out, is as much art, as it is a science.

In the age of Trump, let’s be thankful that the honest scientist is what this world needs today, not a reality TV personality.

Copyright G. Ater 2020