Saturday, March 7, 2020

Trump’s coronavirus musings put scientists on edge


 President Donald Trump is using his metaphorical black Sharpie to draw his own mental map of the spiraling coronavirus crisis — vastly complicating the work of public health officials scrambling to contain the spread of the deadly disease.

Trump himself has regularly dismissed scientific experts and once boasted to an interviewer he had “a natural instinct for science,” pointing out his uncle was an MIT professor. His own statements suggest otherwise: He’s blamed California wildfires on inadequate raking of forests, claimed noisy windmills cause cancer and enthusiastically described a stealth fighter jet as “invisible."
Perhaps more alarming to scientists, still, are the ways they say Trump’s administration has distorted or smothered their work, particularly on energy and climate change. For instance, his administration tried to relax car emissions rules using botched data that purported to show that pollution saves lives. It's also refused to publicize dozens of government-funded studies on how climate change could hurt crops and create new health risks.

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