“Do your own research.”
It has become the catchphrase of a particular breed of skeptic, particularly in the years since the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s a challenge typically issued to those of us who are more-or-less content to accept scientific consensus, usually on the subject of vaccine efficacy. (And as I noted in the Star more than a decade ago, vaccine efficacy is about as settled as any science). Think vaccines are “good” because they “prevent illness”? You’re a sheep blindly accepting conclusions drawn by vast majority of experts in the field. And you need to do your own research.
The phrase was repeated recently by one of the most outspoken vaccine pessimists, Donald Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., during a recent televised interview with with celebrity psychologist “Dr.” Phil McGraw. Amid measles breakouts, and ongoing suspicion regarding vaccines, Kennedy (who is no kind of doctor, by the way) told an audience member: “We live in a democracy, and part of the responsibility of being a parent is to do your own research.”
Look: I’m all about fact-finding. It’s something of a hobby. I’m currently car-shopping, and collating all manner of data about safety ratings and mileage comparisons and whatnot. I am a member of a Reddit community where people discuss the pros and cons of different pieces of luggage. But I draw the line somewhere short of pharmacology. I am, quite simply, not going to do my own research. And neither should you.
I write a little bit about science, and psychopharmacology specifically. So I have a rough idea of how difficult it can be for a layperson without institutional access to medical journals to even access — let alone make sense of — serious scientific studies. Nobody reasonably expects the average schmo to pore over this stuff. The “Do your own research crowd” merely expects people to listen to other non-experts, who have pretended to pore over it themselves: Alex Jones, Aaron Rodgers, Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and other prominent voices in the ever-widening crankosphere.
Kennedy’s comments are completely insincere. Like anyone else encouraging other people to do their own research, he isn’t actually encouraging them to do their own research. It’s not a serious call to set up a double-blind study, conduct a series of controlled experiments with a range of test subjects, human and non-human, and then submit that data for peer review, in order to make an informed determination regarding whether vaccines stop the spread of measles (which they do). Rather, “Do your own research” means, basically, “Google it.”
Certainly, if you do Google it, you’ll find all manner of pseudoscientific, conspiratorial counterfactuals. In the crackpot mind, such notions are valued by mere virtue of their exclusion from mainstream scientific discourse. In a world where every politician, doctor, and Rite Aid employee is out to swindle you, only the radical ideas escaping their containment can be truly trusted. It’s a bizarre form of inverted logic, where marginalized ideas gain credence precisely because of their marginalization.
Beyond being (wilfully) ignorant of how most people engage with science, Kennedy’s comments also exhibit a weird understanding of democracy. In such a system, we should not be expected to have to “do our own research.” In a truly egalitarian and meritocratic society, such decisions would be trusted to officials we elect by simple majority (or some first-past-the-post equivalent), or else appointed by those trusted officials. In a democracy, I don’t review tenders to determine which company is going to repave my street. The city does that, with my tax money. We subcontract all manner of decisions to people who are better at them than we are. It’s a pretty good system!
Then again, distrust in democracy may well be the point. At the risk of coming off a little conspiratorial myself, this may be the ultimate goal of Kennedy and so many other loyalty hires in Trump’s inner circle: destabilizing a basic public faith in political and civic institutions. To wit: under RFK Jr., America has seen one of the biggest outbreaks of a preventable disease in a quarter century. So, in that way, he seem to be doing a pretty good job. Not of making anyone healthier. But if sowing the widespread distrust of officials, institutions and democracy itself.
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