Explaining Trump’s anti-science moves

Science-denying US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr (Wikimedia commons)

Academic science is currently going through a huge upheaval in the United States under Donald Trump.

Recently, the main US medical research funding body, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), advised scientists applying for grants to remove references to mRNA vaccine technology in their proposals.

This was the technology that helped accelerate the production of a vaccine during the Covid pandemic. This advice is linked to the current US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr making negative statements about the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

Meanwhile Elon Musk, who heads the new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), wants to limit the amount allowed in NIH grants for indirect costs to 15 percent.

Some believe this could threaten the ability of the US to maintain its global lead in medical research. The move is partly inspired by some US universities taking as much as 69 percent of grants for general university facilities, infrastructure and administrative costs.

This is partly a consequence of other aspects of higher education in the US being underfunded. Therefore universities seek to cover costs in other ways, but it is a misuse of funds.

The question arises about whether the Trump government’s right wing populism represents a major shift away from scientific rationality. To answer this question, we need to look more closely at the relationship between science and society.

Science and technology has always played a key role in maintaining class society. Yet a major shift occurred in this relationship with the birth of capitalism. In previous class societies growth had been limited by the appetites of their ruling classes.

But the profit drive within capitalism leads to a constant pressure to innovate. It is this that underlies the development of recent advances in gene editing that could, for instance, revolutionise cancer therapy.

Yet capitalism is also not so different from past class societies. Over half of all research funding in the world is currently devoted to developing new ways to kill people.

Capitalism relies on the continual development of better ways to understand and manipulate the natural world, and this requires rational scientific methods.

But, capitalism is also currently in a deep state of crisis. This has created an environment for right wing populists such as Trump to gain office by misdirecting anger about current state of affairs towards imaginary social threats.

But another potentially fertile area for right wing movements is to encourage conspiracy theories. The anti-vaccination movement is motivated by the idea that unsafe vaccines are being foisted on us by “big pharma”, not because they work, but to make a profit.

Similarly, a primary motivation behind Doge is the idea that ordinary people’s hard-earned tax dollars are being squandered by inefficient, corrupt government institutions.

There is an element of truth in both these claims. Vaccines are one of the most effective and safest forms of medicine, but it is also true that pharmaceutical companies develop them to make a profit.

Of course the irony is that Trump and Musk are just as much part of the capitalist ruling class as those they claim to oppose, and their actions will never benefit ordinary people.

So how should socialists respond to recent developments? We should point out that the misuse of medical research grants by US universities is a consequence of the marketisation of higher education.

Instead, university education should be available free for everyone, funded by a tax on the rich.

Socialists value evidence-based medicine, including vaccines and fight for more investment in them. This means investment in vaccines against diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis—which have been neglected because these diseases mainly affect people in the Global South.

Ultimately, we are for a very different society. One where resources currently used to develop new ways of killing and maiming people, are instead used to develop medicines, nor for profit, but for the benefit of all.