Health, Science, and Wingnuts

I was going to post on this story but hesitated, simply because discussions of health care too easily devolve into cherry-picking quotes and statistics (asd does any examination of any question these days), although I could very easily make a strong post.

Then I ran across this post by Liz Mair at Andrew Sullivan, which put the whole question in a different context. Mair builds her argument on this:

So Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee are creationists. Does it matter? What influence does the President have when it comes to specific educational curricula (what tends to inspire the most concern among evolutionists for creationists being in elected office)?

As is so often the case, she's asking the wrong question. I hinted at some of the problems attendant on a president who doesn't believe in the value of science -- who, in fact, sees science as an enemy -- in this post, and I think that's really the key factor. One has to see belief in creationism as an indicator of an attitude toward science in general, and, in fact, an attitude toward the rational basis of decision-making: a creationist is, by extension, not willing to accord scientific findings based on evidence any real weight in making decisions. It all devolves into questions of Biblical correctness. (Have I coined a new phrase? Perhaps, although I seem to have run across that one before, somewhere.)

So, the question in instituting a vaccination regime against HPV, for example, becomes not an issue of whether the vaccine is effective (it is, almost 100%), but an issue of adhering to the somewhat primitive sexual morality constructed from the Christian Bible, based on the rather off-base idea that removing the penalties from having sex will encourage people, and especially young people, to do it more. There's really no evidence that it will, actually, since abstinence-only sex education has proven to be such a resounding flop in that area and there is little difference, according to the evidence, between the numbers of young people who "experiment," whether they've been exposed to abstinence-only or real sex education.

To have a president who is making decisions based on this kind of thinking rather than on the results of scientific findings is scary. We've already seen the results of having NOAA, the FDA, and the CDC hampered by theistic policy hacks at critical points in the information flow. How much worse would it be with a president who doesn't even pay lip service to science?

Well, I think you can kiss any serious attempt to raise the standard of health in America good-bye, for starters. In a nation beset by obesity and its attendant ills, for example, can you imagine the CDC coming out with a recommendation that we pray away the fat? Under a president like Tancredo or Huckabee, I don't think that's so far-fetched.