Science under threat: the politics of institutionalised disinformation | 91TV
Transcript
- Thank you very much, Mark. It's a great pleasure, and indeed an honour, to be the recipient of the
- Michael Faraday Prize. I see in the audience many good friends and colleagues of many years. I see
- Charlotte is here, [?Jonan 0:00:18.4], and I have some fellow South Africans in our midst as well,
- Alex, I have one of my mentees who I've been guiding since he was a first-year medical
- student who's now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. So it's a great pleasure for me to be here. However,
- I'm here in the midst of difficult times, and those difficult times are bombarding us with
- so many events as they are unfolding. Almost every day there's some new headline. They describe it as
- that the Trump administration is consuming all the oxygen. There's none left for anyone else. They
- they're just moving ahead so fast and occupy every 24-hour news cycle, but sometimes it's helpful
- just to step back and to just think about it. So I'm going to talk about science under
- threat. I'm going to talk specifically about institutionalised disinformation. So let's start
- with this statement. 'The AIDS virus was made by US scientists, hidden in a polio vaccine and
- injected into people in West Africa, creating the AIDS pandemic.' So this comes from a book
- published in 1999 called The River - A Journey to the Source of HIV by Edward Hooper. So the
- question it begs, is this the statement true or false? Of course, whether it will come to us in a
- newspaper article or in a book or in social media, the question is, is it true or false? Well, how
- will we know the truth? That's quite a difficult question to answer, but science does provide us
- with the best clues to what the truth might be. Here I'm just drawing on a superb analysis done by
- two friends, Paul Sharp and Beatrice Hahn, who show us how understanding the evolution of the
- viral genetic sequence all the way from monkeys and into humans, and all the changes that go,
- provide us with a logical sequence that explains the origins of HIV, and that provides us with
- some degree of confidence. For one, it's rational, logical and it's data-based. It's using evidence,
- and that evidence is being tested repeatedly because people continue to sequence the virus and
- relate it back to the original viruses. So if you had to take a family feud - and my depiction here
- is a somewhat concerning one that I've used as my picture here - and if you were to take a pandemic,
- and if you had to take a dictatorship, what do they have in common? Well, truth becomes
- a casualty in every one of those very early on, whether we're dealing with differences of
- opinion within a family, whether we're dealing with a new pandemic or whether we're dealing
- with a dictator, the truth becomes a casualty. In becoming a casualty, it lays the foundation
- for disinformation. It lays the foundation for information that is not correct. To deliberately
- deceive. So what I want to do in my time in this presentation is, I want to talk about
- the changing nature of disinformation. I want to try and capture some of the… Well, at least the
- three big eras of disinformation. I'm going to talk about disinformation as a political weapon
- of state capture. I'm going to talk about how state capture requires an attack on truth sayers,
- and particularly the attack on science. I'll end off with just some thoughts and suggestions about
- what we might want to do about it. So, that's what I'm going to cover. So let's start with one
- of the earliest documented uses of disinformation. This information is probably as old as humankind,
- or misinformation and disinformation. This particular instance was a very organised
- effort to deliberately deceive by spreading incorrect information. The KGB set up a specific
- office, and that office was called the Special Disinformation Office if you are to translate the
- Russian into English. The word disinformation is also repeatedly articulated in Russian,
- and in this particular example the Russians were trying to use disinformation to try and create
- confusion about the origins of HIV, arguing that it was created in a US laboratory. They talk about
- that the USA is the evil that brought about this pandemic. So HIV in a way provides us with one
- of the earliest examples of how disinformation was used in an official capacity by government,
- but we've had our fair share in South Africa. Our own President Mbeki, with his questioning of
- the causation of AIDS, arguing that HIV was not the cause of AIDS and deliberately withholding
- antiretroviral treatment, led to the death of around 330000 South Africans, it's estimated.
- Of course, we saw in COVID-19 the spreading of misinformation where personal opinion
- and speculation, especially in social media, masqueraded as fact. I borrow from Zapiro's
- cartoon because I thought it was so appropriate. Meet Denzil. Until recently he was in marketing,
- but now he has a PhD in epidemiology from the University of WhatsApp. Or meet Thandi,
- previously in cosmetic sales, who now has an MSc in microbial genetics from the University
- of Google. Or the best one, meet Karen, who has a PhD in immunology and professor of everything at
- the University of Facebook. So just highlighting for us the challenge we're facing where people
- who have no specific expertise are conveying their views and opinions, and those are being
- interpreted by the recipient as fact. What are the consequences of that? That
- has huge repercussions. This kind of secrecy and disinformation creates the opportunity for
- corruption. We saw how the corruption floodgates opened. Here I'm drawing on the experiences in
- the UK, but don't worry. Even if one fifth of your contracts were probably, possibly,
- corrupt, you're not alone. In South Africa it was frightening. There were billions that
- were being siphoned off. For me, the US of course has to do everything in the biggest way possible,
- and that is that the corruption in COVID went into the billions of dollars. It even included
- the purchase of a private island, giving you some idea of the extent to which corruption
- was riding on the back of disinformation. One of the most important effects that we have
- seen repeatedly, and this was used by companies like Bain to influence elections, we have seen
- Cambridge Analytica using information like this and spreading disinformation,
- and they did that in South Africa as well, they created a concept called white monopoly capital as
- a way to stoke racial hatred. So the whole notion of using disinformation in a very strategic way,
- which you can do now because you've got social media channels that can spread the information
- very rapidly, that leads to polarisation in society. It creates a them and us situation,
- and that foments hatred. It creates a whole new dynamic in a society. It undermines social
- cohesion. Now, governments have generally fought disinformation, and that's certainly true in the
- US. It's true in many other countries. In fact, until recently disinformation
- in democratic societies were somewhat targeted, focused and were relatively simpler to challenge
- and contain because they were often fringe. They were conspiracy theorists. They were really ideas
- that were quite far out there, from extremist groups or spy agencies, and the institutions of
- government had a greater level of acceptability, authority, and were acknowledged to be providing
- accurate and reliable information. So they could debunk these falsehoods. They could try and stem
- the impact that the falsehoods would have. In the US they even give alerts when they
- think that there's going to be a flood of disinformation, as you see here from the
- New York Times headline about concerns about election interference from Russia and Iran.
- But Trump 1.0, his first term, changed some of the dynamics in disinformation,
- in that what he did was that the government itself became a major source of disinformation. So now
- the government's information that is putting out was no longer reliable. How unreliable it was?
- Well, The New York Times was fact checking the speeches that he was giving and he was averaging,
- I think, one lie roughly every two minutes at one stage. This challenge where the state now becomes
- the source of the disinformation, your bearings as to where to get the truth is now a challenge.
- So what happened in Trump 1.0 is that when disinformation was being portrayed,
- many US federal agencies amplified it. Instead of containing it, they were amplifying it. If
- they didn't, they were being attacked by Trump for not picking up and spreading
- the information that he was providing. So this study I'm quoting you was done by
- researchers from Cornell University, where they analysed about 38 million English articles focused
- principally on COVID-19. They found that 1.1 million of those had misinformation. Now,
- that's quite a high percentage. I mean, you would expect some level of misinformation,
- but at that rate what was most interesting is that most of the misinformation came from one source.
- That was quite concerning, that that particular source happened to be the president. Of course,
- that misinformation related to how COVID-19 was being downplayed. 'Oh, it's just like flu.
- It's going to go away,' and promoting unproven treatments like bleach, like hydroxychloroquine,
- and deliberately on television defying mask-wearing. Through all of this, he was
- pressurising institutions that were promoting standards to change to fit his narrative,
- rather than him trying to adjust to what they were defining as science-based policies.
- Trump 2.0 has taken this to a new level. It has now entrenched institutionalised disinformation.
- It's used social media for amplification. So now when an incorrect statement is being put forward,
- it is spread very rapidly, particularly through X but also through Signal, through a whole range of
- different platforms, in gaining traction. You can see here from this analysis done by The Economist
- how Trump 2.0 has almost increased by about 50 per cent the amount of traction and amount of
- information that was being disseminated. So this becomes a challenge, because now what you're doing
- is that the institutions of the state who you have to depend on for the truth are now the ones not
- giving you the truth, and they're amplifying it, and they can use social media because anything
- goes, from both individual people and from bots. What counts is the number of people viewing it.
- You go on the basis that some proportion of them will be taken in and spread it further. In other
- words, they just keep retweeting or sending it out to a range of new contacts. So they're just
- spreading it out without actually fact checking it. There's no editorial content, so there's no
- way in which that information is being checked and fact-checked, and you can target certain groups.
- You can even use this as an opportunity to grind axes. You have no idea whether the person saying
- something is getting paid to say it, is putting it forward because they have some purpose and agenda.
- That becomes a big challenge, that you've now got institutional disinformation and you've got
- a mechanism to spread it very rapidly. In fact, it goes so fast that when the truth comes, it's
- limping far behind. It can't catch up with the rate at which the disinformation is spreading.
- In COVID-19, what we saw was a deluge of disinformation. If you just look at
- the vaccine misinformation on social media, in an analysis again done by The New York Times,
- they had a group of researchers look at all of the disinformation on vaccines,
- and what they showed was that there were 12 prominent anti-vaccine accounts that were the
- source of vaccine misinformation. Interestingly, the number one source was the Children's Health
- Defense, and of course that's Robert F Kennedy's organisation. It accounts for about 40 per cent of
- all the disinformation on COVID-19 vaccines. So you got one source driving a huge amount
- of disinformation and is directly influencing what the narrative is. People are getting taken in that
- RNA vaccines are bad for you. They're unsafe. They are interfering with your DNA,
- and whole range of different arguments, different bits of misinformation that were being spread.
- So let's talk now about state capture, and locate disinformation in the context of state capture. So
- what is state capture? State capture is when the apparatus of the state is put under the control of
- a small group who have narrow interests, so that instead of the state benefiting the entire public,
- it's benefiting principally these narrow interests. You can call it a coup through
- elections if you like. Now, why am I even talking about state capture? It's because
- we've just come out of state capture in South Africa, and the term state capture was repeatedly
- used. There's a three-volume report of over 10000 pages that documents how the state was
- captured in South Africa and in essence, one individual in the form of Jacob Zuma captured
- the political party, the ANC. When he captured the political party he then became its leader,
- and when he became its leader and it won the elections, he became the president.
- What he did was, he appointed loyalists to the cabinet. He ensured that there was a compliant
- parliament that just accepted everything he put forward. So when he used state funding to
- renovate his home with an enormous amount of money in South African terms - you could build something
- like about 300 houses with that amount of money, 215 million rands - it included a swimming pool.
- It included a whole lot of things he built. It's a whole complex that he built, all with state money.
- So when he was asked, 'How can you do this? Why are you building a pool?' he had to get the
- Defence Force to come and explain that the pool is actually as a fire pool. It's the source of
- water in case there's a fire. So he said, 'Okay, so you need to build a pool to create… Not just
- a tank somewhere that will give you water.' That's the level to which they were lying to
- protect the corruption that was being engaged. So what he did was he appointed sycophants into
- many of the senior positions in the civil service so he could control those, and importantly,
- he appointed his own people to the boards of state-owned companies. That's how they started
- siphoning off the money. They stole billions, billions. In fact, South Africa is still trying
- to recover from that. We were fortunate in that there was a strong pushback, and that
- pushback came from the opposition parties. It came from the judiciary. In fact, the Constitutional
- Court put him in jail after he stepped down. Of course, for us, very importantly, the free press,
- and finally the public. The public protested. They were not going to be bought on this issue.
- In the US the playbook was exactly the same for the first five points, except that it
- went further. I have to give credit that this is just so much better-planned for state capture than
- the South African version, in that one of the critical things done in Trump 1.0 was to sort
- out the Supreme Court. To make those appointments was critical, because that's your biggest pushback
- in the US. So to have a conservative majority, to capture the Supreme Court with a six-three split,
- so even if one or two of the conservative members, as we've seen occasionally,
- have decided to side with the liberal group, it still carries the majority. We also saw how in the
- US the opposition is in total disarray. They don't even have a motto about how to fight Trump. They
- just have no idea about how to deal with this. We saw the way in which, in partnership with Musk,
- they've captured X and they use it as a mechanism to get their information out. Finally,
- they have also mastered the art of creating fear that leads to self-censorship. That is one of the
- most difficult things to deal with. So what we're seeing in the US is a form of state capture where
- the apparatus of the state, so no matter what Trump decides, Congress and Senate simply go along
- because he's captured. If they even try to take an opposition position to him, they live in fear,
- as we saw some of the senators outlining. So what are the five elements in capturing the
- state in the US? What are the five elements that define Trump 2.0 policies? This is just trying to
- give it some kind of structure and overview into looking at all the things that have been done.
- So the first thing, vengeance. His penchant for vengeance is key. It drives a lot of what he does.
- His vengeance against Biden, his vengeance against Fauci. He is even investigating Comey at the
- moment and firing almost every prosecutor involved even tangentially in cases against him from Trump
- 1.0. The second is the Great Replacement Theory in the US, and this features very strongly in
- project 2025. The Great Replacement Theory in the US is a conspiracy theory that white Americans
- are being systematically replaced by non-white immigrants, often for political reasons. If you
- look at election voting patterns the majority of white individuals, both men and women,
- but principally men, vote Republican. If you look at black voters, they vote predominantly
- Democrat. So there's this theory in the US that the Democrats are deliberately bringing
- in immigrants in order to shift the demography in the US so that whites become a minority in the US,
- and so there's a huge push to undo that. That's what you saw in these mass deportations,
- the Muslim travel ban, ending birthright citizenship. All these things are all part
- of trying to fix this problem that they see in this Great Replacement Theory. The third is
- this philosophy of survival of the fittest, that there's really no need for the state to intervene
- to create a level playing ground. It should simply be the strongest survive. The biggest
- bully in the playground gets everybody's lunch. That's it, and there's no room for intervention
- in that to create some kind of global equity or even within communities. So that's why you see the
- anti-diversity initiatives, the Anti-affirmative action initiatives, cutting social services. The
- fourth is the America First, which is his big slogan, but the America First is actually quite
- an odd piece peace of things that he's been doing to try and give shape to that. Tariffs is probably
- the biggest mechanism he's using, trying to undermine China, reducing foreign students.
- All of those are part of the America First. Finally, and probably most importantly,
- is the accumulation of wealth and power. So let me talk a little bit about the accumulation of wealth
- and power. So why capture the state? You capture the state for two things. The first is wealth.
- You want to steal the money and you're going to figure out what's the best way to steal the
- money. There are different strategies that can be used. The one is of course to just directly
- steal it as they did in Angola. There you got the daughter of the president, who they refer to as
- a princess. So this headline in Forbes, 'How an African princess banked $3 billion in a country
- living on $2 per day per person.' So that's just plain theft. Just steal the money. The second is
- just to enable corrupt activities. Make sure your buddies get all the contracts. There's
- kickbacks. The third is to use your position of influence and power to remove government obstacles
- to the businesses you have an interest in. So let's look at how they are doing that. Well,
- both Trump and Musk are using their positions to accumulate wealth despite accusations of
- conflict and corruption. We see this in the Trump cryptocurrency, even to the extent where last
- week or about ten days ago he held a big dinner where he invited all the people who bought his
- cryptocurrency to come and have dinner with him, and The New York Times, I think said it probably
- best. It says, 'Someone's actually winning in this trade war. It's Musk and Trump and Starlink.' So
- you're seeing the way in which the mechanisms of the state are being manipulated, and it becomes
- clearer here that Musk, who is openly sceptical of regulation, describes the referee role of agencies
- in the government as obstacles to innovation. In this article in The Los Angeles Times they listed,
- I think, about 26 different investigations that are being undertaken by government agencies
- in different departments, different areas. Those government agencies are investigating
- different Trump companies and different Musk companies and different activities of these
- companies. Whether it's the EPA or the FDA, all of these agencies have opened investigations into
- one or more of Musk's companies. Of course, what we see is that Elon Musk's regulatory troubles
- have begun to melt away in Trump's second term because, as the head of DOGE, he's gone in and
- he has eviscerated those bodies that are the ones who are doing these investigations. It stems from
- just how much and how far he's willing to go to portray himself in a way that's not strictly true.
- So this is a question posed in The Economic Times about, 'Was Elon Musk really a Tesla co-founder,
- and how did he become synonymous with the brand?' He lists himself as Tesla co-founder.
- Well, it turns out he actually was not a co-founder - the company was founded by Martin
- Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning - and that in the course of the company that they had established,
- he came in as an investor and he became critical to taking the company forward. One of the things
- was that he then had a lawsuit against him, and in the lawsuit and the settlement of the lawsuit he
- got the original co-founders to acknowledge that… One of the things that they had to do was
- acknowledge that he is a co-founder. So he has a legal basis on which to call himself a co-founder,
- even though he didn't co-found the company. It's all about misrepresentation. It's about
- taking facts, setting them aside, pushing forward a narrative that you prefer. So
- I've given you some idea about state capture and the accumulation of wealth. Let's look
- at state capture and the accumulation of power. There are many different ways in which you would
- want to capture this power, whether it's for self-aggrandisement, which we see with Erdogan,
- who is now changing the constitution to give himself more terms, to loot some more,
- and to use your position of power and authority to loot from even new avenues, but importantly,
- and it's really important you do this if you want to capture the state, is that you have
- to eviscerate the state institutions that are going to hold you accountable, which means you've
- got to sort out the IRS. The revenue service, the tax man is going to come after you because
- you've got all this new assets and all this new money, and the investigation authorities,
- the FBI, and the national prosecuting authorities. You have to tackle all three.
- In South Africa it was amazing. When Jacob Zuma captured the state and became president,
- the three most important things he did right at the beginning was he changed the head of the tax
- service. He put a yes man in there. He changed the national prosecutor to Shaun Abrahams, who
- basically allowed Zuma to do whatever he wanted, and he changed the head of the Hawks, our main
- police investigation unit, so that he would now be protected. He can do whatever he wants without
- having to worry about these state institutions. So what we have seen here in the current Trump 2.0 is
- that many of the things that require legislation, they are changes in policy. They have to be done
- in terms of separation of powers through a legislative process. In other words, they have
- to come through a law from Congress to Senate for approval, and then to the president for signing.
- Trump 2.0 is skipping the first two steps. He's simply writing those things out and he's signing
- them straight away, making them executive orders. Now of course it can be overturned readily by the
- next president, but some of the things he's doing, the damage is so severe that you can't Even if you
- undid it, the damage is done. For example, in the middle of the slide, this executive order,
- it's entitled Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa, in which he claims that
- the South African government is stealing the land of whites. Well, firstly, you can't do that in
- South Africa. We're a constitutional democracy, and so land can't be stolen. It has to be bought
- or it has to be negotiated. He created in this a whole new narrative that there are these Afrikaner
- whites, who were previously the people who held political power under apartheid. They
- were the party in power under apartheid, so they have all of the privileges of apartheid,
- that somehow they need to be brought to the US as refugees to protect them from this bad state.
- Again, the narrative of, 'The poor whites are being oppressed and they need to be protected.'
- We've seen executive power in very different ways you will not see in many other places. For
- example, Amazon announced - or was debating, they didn't announce it - they were debating whether
- they should show the tariffs in their prices. So, 'Here's the original price. Here's what
- the tariff is that we have to pay. This is the tax. This is the final price,' so that everybody
- making a purchase can see the actual effect of the tariff. As soon as Trump heard about this,
- oh my goodness. Can you see Levitt putting a picture of Bezos there, calling him out
- for doing this? Trump announced and said that Amazon must not show the prices of the tariffs,
- and must absorb all these tariff increases and they must not change their prices. A president
- dictating at that level is quite stunning. The Justice Department, which has a whole
- section that deals with corruption, that department has basically been eviscerated,
- and DOGE took care of that. For me, it's the way in which the state is openly transactional, both
- for wealth and for power, and it's unconcerned about the morality of personal benefit or
- conflicts of interest while in public office. This is no more clearer than what we saw this week,
- where Trump pardoned a tax cheat after his mother attended a $1 million dinner. You get some idea of
- her association, both in terms of providing wealth and political power because of her association
- with the attacks on the Biden administration, became the basis for him to then pardon her
- son. So when you have state capture, you've got to attack the truth sayers. To accumulate wealth
- and power you have to hide the truth, because if the truth comes out, everyone gets to see you've
- accumulated all this wealth and all this power. So in captured state, the truth is more than
- inconvenient. It's harmful to your cause of state capture, and there are three prime targets. There
- are three prime truth sayers that are seen as enemies in state capture. We saw this state
- capture in South Africa, and we're seeing it in the US now as well. For those of us
- in South Africa it's a playbook going on repeat. So the first is the media, the second is the legal
- system, and the third are the intellectuals and the scientists. So let's briefly just mention the
- way in which he's attacking and undermining the free press. So he's created the conditions where
- he has used legal tools to scare the media into not attacking him overtly. So what we are seeing
- is an increasing amount of self-censorship. You saw that, for example, with The LA Times
- and you saw this with The Washington Post, that The Washington Post, for example, did not do its
- very traditional thing, which is to announce a candidate that it prefers for the election.
- Of course, he's dismantling Voice of America. He's dismantling NPR, and what he's been doing
- is supporting friendly media. Let me show you this through changes in the white House briefings that
- The New York Times provided brilliantly. So in the white House there is the media press
- briefing room, and the seats are organised and the Editors Forum is responsible for assigning who
- sits where. That assignment occurs annually, and these organisations sit in those positions. Now,
- you also have other media who don't have these chairs assigned because there are too many of
- them, and they just stand on the sides. So this is the traditional media that occupy the front
- row. You can see CNN, Reuters, ABC, AP, CBS, Fox and NBC. So that's the front row normally,
- and they would be the ones and the people who are seated normally get the bulk of the questions.
- What we've seen now is a change. That change is occurring because now on average Levitt is
- asking those on the sides about one quarter of the questions. These are now mainly pro-Trump media
- that are now standing along the perimeter. They're not the mainstream media in the normal seated
- positions. Levitt has created a new position, and this new position is called… It's a new chair for
- new media. Usually these are influencers, and they get the first question. So she wants to
- start off by getting a friendly question. She doesn't want to start off with an attacking
- question. This is just showing you how they are trying to change the narrative in the media.
- So the second thing is to tip the scales for favourable legal outcomes. Here what we see
- is the judiciary, and I've already outlined the Supreme Court situation, the push that he has
- been making to get attorneys general who are unfavourable, usually Democratic appointees,
- he's trying to get them to resign. As you know, several senior members of the attorney general's
- office in New York resigned because the DOJ insisted that they must drop charges against
- Eric Adams, even though it was patently obvious that the man was corrupt, and they just chose to
- resign instead of following DOJ's orders. Then the third, which for me was an amazing tactic,
- which is to pass executive orders threatening law firms. That sets a new bar. The way in which they
- did this, they went after the weak law firms first so they acquiesced, and they gave the
- Trump administration free hours of work that they will do for the Trump administration.
- Then came the pushback, and now we're seeing law firm after law firm taking the executive orders
- to court and winning. So far no law firm that's taken the Trump administration to court has lost,
- and it's because of its arbitrary nature that they have been winning those. The idea is not just
- that you want to get them to submit. You want to scare them. So now if they do something, they know
- there's another executive order possible because they now know the power that can be wielded in
- this way. So let me get to the main item I wanted to go before wrapping up, which is the
- attack on science. So how do we know scientists matter? In the midst of all this state capture,
- in the midst of trying to create the secrecy and to change the narrative in a way and which the
- state is trying to protect itself from the truth coming out, how do we know scientists matter?
- Well, Trump himself basically tells us that scientists matter. He could never leave Anthony
- Fauci alone. He devoted so many things that he did to try and get at Anthony Fauci in different ways,
- and he always felt that Fauci made him look stupid, that Fauci undermined his
- positions on the coronavirus. So he went after him systematically, systematically, and that just
- gives you an idea that one scientist matters. So as scientists we matter. There are five elements
- to Trump's attack on science. The first is that he has annihilated government science.
- So he's fired the government scientists, whether they're working on climate change or environment.
- Doesn't matter what they're working on. He's just systematically… This is through DOGE and
- Musk. They've just gone systematically, taking all the scientists and getting rid of them.
- They're getting rid of them because they don't want the scientists to now start releasing reports
- that go counter to the positions that they are taking. The second is they are instructing that
- data should not be collected anymore. I mean, imagine not collecting data on climate and on
- weather and so on. They're just stopping. They're stopping collecting that data. When
- a report is produced that's inconvenient they alter it. As you would have seen last week,
- a report showed that these Venezuelan gangs that are being deported actually have nothing to do
- with anything that they are being accused of. It became inconvenient to have that,
- because the whole push for deportation is built on this idea that there's these gangs of immigrants
- that are causing chaos. They are pillaging and raping and need to be deported, without any
- recourse to the law. So that report was altered. So what we're seeing is a complete disruption
- and breaking down government science. The second is hobbling the science agencies,
- and the way he's doing that is firing the leadership. So Anthony Fauci's successor,
- Jeanne Marrazzo at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an amazing
- scientist in the field of vaginal dysbiosis and highly respected, basically, she got a letter
- saying she must report tomorrow morning at the Indian Health Services to see patients in Alaska,
- because he can't fire her. So, just redeploy her, knowing that she won't take that job and then
- resign. So they're all being put on administrative leave, but basically getting rid of the leadership
- so that they can come in and do the gutting that's required to meet the reduced budgets.
- The third is university. So the third and fourth are two things that they've done to universities.
- The first is, they've coerced universities to suppress protests. This was also part of project
- 2025, that all the anti-Israel protests should be suppressed. They were concerned that that would
- then lead to those protests spiralling out and becoming anti-Trump protests,
- so we had to deal with… Anyone wanting to protest at a university knows the consequences,
- and universities will now take on the job of suppressing those protests and, of course,
- dissent from academics, and that universities will now self-censor. They will censor themselves. They
- used their funding government funding to force them to be compliant. Of course, we've seen in
- the last month the letters that went out to the scientific journals, including the New England
- Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Chest and so on, threatening all of them, accusing them of bias.
- So what we're seeing is, the science system is now being broken down systematically,
- and it's going to be really hard to rebuild it. It's been well covered in many articles,
- including this article in Nature where they outline it very clearly. So what we've seen is,
- for example, in the FDA, the top official in charge of vaccines resigns because he's being
- pushed to do things that are anti-science. It goes against everything he stands for. Instead of doing
- that, he has to resign. So he resigns and makes it known what the consequences of that are. The
- same in Trump 1.0 with COVID-19. You're seeing how the budgets are being gutted. The NIH budget is
- down $18 billion. That's a cut. That's almost a third of the budget is being cut in the new
- national budget. NASA, NOAA, all of them are being cut. So we're seeing big cuts.
- What science has become, it's become politicised, that it's now part of a political agenda to cut
- these science agencies. They are deliberately attacking medical science, in that DOGE has been
- going through the titles of each grant, and they use artificial intelligence to identify grants
- that might have something to do with DEI or with LGBT, and they're going around terminating those
- grants. AIDS is one of the biggest losers in this. You see that it's now 28.7 per cent of
- all AIDS grants from the NIH have been terminated, and they've been terminated really on that basis.
- We're seeing trans health, also COVID-19-related, and a few climate-related grants as well.
- Of course, it's not limited to the US. When there are cuts in the US it has global repercussions,
- including my own research unit where I've lost now half my budget because it came from the NIH.
- What we've been seeing in the universities, I just thought I would give you this contrast.
- Columbia University decided up front it was going to acquiesce. It was going to agree to
- everything Trump wanted. So that's what they did. They agreed to everything because Trump
- withheld $400 million. In agreeing, what they actually did is they compromised academic freedom,
- in that they agreed to adopt a new definition of anti-Semitism, which doesn't make sense. They have
- taken disciplinary action as they're now doing the job of the government to suppress protest.
- And importantly for me, one of the things I found very difficult to accept is they
- placed the School of Middle East and African Studies under government receivership. I mean,
- how do you give the government control? What's next. They're going to take the School of Public
- Health and they're going to say, 'Don't ever teach about vaccines. Remove any reference to
- vaccines,' in a school of public health. Columbia is just having now to deal with
- the consequences of those actions. Of course, Harvard has chosen to stand firm, and is now
- paying quite a high price for that. The journals are under attack. So let me just end off with,
- 'What should we do?' Now there are many things we can do. I have five ideas that I'm putting on the
- table here. The first is we have to recognise and understand the problem. If we don't understand the
- problem… Because it just bombards you with so much going on that you can't see the sense of it all.
- It becomes such a bombardment of differing ideas that you're trying to wonder what is it you're
- actually tackling here. The thing is that we've got to appreciate the role of scientists as truth
- sayers who need to ensure that the truth holds supreme. They've got to be the trusted voices.
- When the government is not the trusted voice, the scientists have to be the trusted voice,
- in that we've got to continually fact check official government communications. We've got
- to support the independent media. There's is no freedom without a free press. The fourth is we've
- got to rebuild trust in science because it's been undermined, it's been attacked, and we've got to
- effectively communicate science. We've got to promote the public understanding of science,
- and we've got to stand up for science, and that every bit of resistance helps. Every bit. Now when
- we were fighting against apartheid, everything we were doing to fight against apartheid,
- we never, ever thought apartheid would disappear in our lifetimes. Never. Never,
- because apartheid looked like an edifice. It couldn't be moved. It was too powerful. It
- controlled everything. We still mounted resistance in little ways, very little things that we did.
- I can tell you every little thing counts, no matter… You say, 'Why am I doing this? I can't
- influence Trump. He's not going to change.' You're not trying to change Trump. You're
- not trying to change Kennedy. You're trying to push one small hole in the overall narrative,
- and every small hole at the end counts, no matter how insignificant it might seem. So
- every one of us needs to become an ambassador of science. Thank you.
- Thank you very much indeed, Salim. Come and grab a seat. That was fantastic. So thank you very
- much indeed, it was extremely stimulating talk. We've not got a lot of time for questions. I've
- got a few on Slido, but I thought maybe I would start. I mean, in some senses this isn't that new.
- If you go back to the Soviet Union and Lysenko, there was similar abuse of science. I was quite
- stimulated by your bringing out the origins of HIV story at the beginning. I mean,
- it actually took… It was obvious, as it were, the sort of ridiculous spurious origins,
- but it actually took quite a long time to sort out the origins of HIV. Do you think the
- scientific community got it right when it came to COVID-19? Could that have been handled better?
- I think the big problem with COVID-19 is that it fed into an existing tension between the US
- and China, so it became immediately a political issue rather than a scientific issue. The science
- in a way was a casualty, because in trying to determine the origins of any new virus, it
- always takes a very long time. When HIV, when AIDS was first described, the virus was only isolated
- three years later. By the time we understood the whole phylogeny and all of that it was nearly 20
- years later. So it takes a long time. The public doesn't have that kind of time frame. They want
- to know an answer. When you when you waver, you know, 'I don't know,' then of course that's the
- territory of conspiracy theories. It didn't help that China didn't let the WHO committee into the
- Wuhan Institute of Virology because that just fed… I mean, if you want to do a wrong thing,
- that was the wrong thing to do because then it just fed all of the conspiracy theories.
- We ended up with quite a fight amongst fairly respectable
- communities of scientists over this.
- of uncertainty and in the nature of science, the findings are incremental. They're little
- pieces. You know, this is a 1000-piece jigsaw, and each study is putting one
- little piece. Right now you can't even see the whole picture. You don't know what the whole
- picture looks like because you've got so many missing pieces. But I think what we have seen,
- particularly with the studies that Worobey has done, I think more or less now the scientific
- community is coalescing around the idea that the principal initial spread came from the Wuhan
- seafood market. I think that's pretty compelling. The evidence is compelling. What is not clear,
- how did it get to the Wuhan seafood market? There the two views are one that somebody from
- the Wuhan Institute of Virology brought it to the Wuhan seafood market. Why they would want to do
- that deliberately makes no sense. They might have done it accidentally. That's possible, I guess.
- Well, anything's possible if you want to make that argument. So I think, because it's going to take
- a long time before we sort that out, before we get to a bat virus that looks so similar to COVID that
- we can understand the phylogenetic changes that will help us understand this. I think that's the
- basic problem. So there is room for legitimate scientific debate, but that legitimate scientific
- debate is clouded by the political overtones.
- minutes ago. How does social media have to be changed to amplify truth and make people mobilise
- around existential problems, e.g. climate change? It's a good question. Is there an answer?
- I don't know if I have an answer to that. I think in science we accept that
- the knowledge we have is provisional, but it's the knowledge we have and so we work with it,
- and if somebody changes it later because of some new discovery then we'll change what we understand
- to be the truth. For now this is the truth that we have. This is what we work with. I think that
- climate change became a big issue, a challenging issue, principally because it became a battle,
- not between… Not whether the climate is actually changing, but the argument was about whether
- we should simply accept that the climate's going to change in the interests of economic
- development. That it was more important to have coal mines and to have all these
- industries that are going to destroy the environment, give us more global warming.
- To sustain that argument, you have to also question whether global warming actually exists,
- whether it's being caused by mankind or humankind, or whether it's just something
- that occurs naturally. That's all the arguments that you will hear being made. Ultimately,
- they are opinions rather than data-based. The UN reports are probably the best data we have,
- and those reports are quite clear. The climate is changing. The world's getting
- hotter. There are more extreme events in weather, and that humans can change that.
- All of those points are made very clearly in those reports, and it's based on mountains of data. But
- somebody walks in and says, 'Oh, I don't believe this. My view is this,' with no data, no evidence,
- just making a point because that's the opinion.
- which is that the role of science is to provide the evidence as to explain events, be they
- environmental or discoveries about the cosmos. The decision about what to do about them is,
- however, a political decision. Do you think part of the issues with science is that occasionally
- the scientist oversteps their role and tells the politicians what their policies should be? I mean,
- our job is clearly to say, 'This is the evidence. We live in democratic societies. It is up to you
- as to whether you care about future generations or not.' There is something about how scientists
- should behave as well, isn't there?
- advice to several leaders - I am a special advisor to the Director General of WHO,
- I was special advisor to the Executive Director of UNAIDS - when you're put into those positions,
- it's very easy to overstep the mark, to move away from providing the data, the evidence and
- the options, to leading into what you think is the action that should be done. That's a very
- fine line, and I've seen it crossed repeatedly, and that's very unfortunate. I think part of it
- is that we're not training people in this kind of scientific advice process. There's no formal
- way in which you get to be a science advisor. You get to be a science advisor because somebody makes
- you a science advisor and gives you the title. I think that we've got to professionalise that,
- and help people understand that, because I don't think they see what they're doing.
- They're doing it often not because they want to but because they can't help themselves. I've seen
- it have quite dangerous consequences. Actually, I saw in COVID very dangerous consequences when
- individuals are trying to push policymakers to make decisions in one direction. I remember
- when the President of South Africa asked me to give advice about what to do about the closure of
- the churches. The churches had been closed for two weeks and church leaders had been saying,
- 'You've got to open the churches. People are dying. They need the solace and they need to
- come and pray,' but it was a risk. So how do you deal with this? So I said to him, 'Well,
- we are now in the peak of a wave. If you open the churches now, right now, it's not
- the best time. You need to do it when you have a better opportunity, but here's what your options
- are and here's how you might deal with it.' I gave him about four or five different options,
- but there were other constituencies that had a different set of agendas involved. Eventually
- the decision he made had nothing to do with what I had suggested or what evidence I provided. These
- constituencies were powerful, and their views had to be the dominant one because decision-making
- is a political process. Evidence just provides a rationale to explain the decision you make at the
- end, but ultimately it's a political process.
- two more questions from quite a lot that have come in on Slido, and it's fair to say there's
- quite a diversity of questions coming in. So one question was, 'What's the Democrats'
- role in misinformation, in creating a political environment that allows it?' Is this a is this
- a unique property of any particular government? I mean, clearly some use it more than others.
- I mean, I think governments all over use misinformation or disinformation in different
- ways, but usually it's not part of state capture. It's not for the benefit of some minority or some
- particular interest, not for corruption purposes. They're doing it for a range of other political
- issues, in that, 'It's inconvenient if the truth comes out now because we have a by-election in
- this constituency. We can't be embarrassed at this time. It's okay if we're embarrassed in three
- months from now, but right now, not a good time.' So they will spin it. They'll do what's referred
- to by the Russians as propaganda. Basically, you create a different narrative that takes you away
- from the actual issue so that the problem doesn't become one that dominates the discourse. You can
- do that in a range of different ways. You can put something that's actually true and is sensational,
- and you make that the dominant narrative. For example, at a critical time when there
- was a big investigation into corruption or one of the ministers the big story that was leaked was
- about a woman who had ten babies, and it ran as a headline. It displaced the corruption, because
- any woman getting ten babies, everybody wants to know now, right? Are these babies alive? I mean,
- to have ten babies all at once, and it ran as the front story. Then the other newspapers and
- the television also ran it because independent newspapers carried it, and they all did it saying,
- 'The source is independent newspapers.' It turns out there was no such thing.
- I mean, in a sense, conspiracy theories have been present in newspapers going back to the
- origin of newspapers. There is nothing new in this. It's the volume that's different. I'm
- very conscious of the time because we have run over. I'll ask you one last question, which is
- a suggestion of a possible solution, but I'm not sure. What role can social
- psychologists play in immunising a population against institutionalised disinformation?
- I think we don't understand well enough the psyche of what's happening when people
- are being bombarded by social media that's taking them in ways that don't make sense,
- or in ways that help them understand the world and create a different reality. I think we just
- don't… Social media is so new that we don't fully grasp it, and we need a lot more research about
- understanding what moves the needle in terms of public opinion. What moves the needle in
- terms of how people are looking at the world, whether they look at it positively, whether
- they look at it negatively. How do people look at a particular subgroup based on a short-term
- change in the narrative? All of those issues are not really understood. That's, I think the
- area in which we need to understand a lot more. Now, companies like Cambridge Analytica already
- clearly have a better understanding of this than we do. They can manipulate elections
- with that. So, we've got to figure this out. I think as researchers we've got to better
- understand what's driving public opinion and how it's influencing public action.
Join us for the Michael Faraday Prize Lecture given by 2024 winner Professor Salim Abdool Karim.
The role of science in its relentless search for the truth is a key pillar in society that protects and promotes democracy, transparency and rationality as the basis of actions of the state.
In his Michael Faraday Prize Lecture, Professor Abdool Karim will analyse the threats to science globally, with a focus on the USA, where he argues disinformation has become institutionalised in the corridors of power. As those in power use the levers of the state to accumulate wealth and yet more power, truth becomes a major obstacle and science, as the rational approach to seeking the truth, becomes the casualty and as custodians of science universities come under attack. In this situation, effective science communication is more important than ever.
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