Anti-Science America in a Demon Haunted World

1. WSJ article today:
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Ousted Vaccine Chief Says RFK Jr.’s Team Sought Data to Justify
Anti-Science Stance
Dr. Peter Marks says the new health secretary’s team wants to show
vaccines aren’t safe while promoting dangerous and unproven treatments
By Liz Essley Whyte
April 4, 2025 2:02 pm ET
The top vaccine regulator ousted by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the
health secretary’s team has sought nonexistent data to justify
antivaccine narratives and pushed to water down regulation of unproven
stem-cell treatments.
“I can never give allegiance to anyone else other than to follow the
science as we see it,” said Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug
Administration official. “That does not mean that I can just roll over
and take conspiracy theories and justify them.”
..
The outgoing official said he was speaking out to encourage parents to
vaccinate their children against measles, as cases mount in Texas and
New Mexico. ...
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2. A prescient Carl Sagan wrote 30 years ago in "The Demon-Haunted
World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,"
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I
have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s
time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when
nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other
countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very
few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the
issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas
or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our
crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties
in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s
true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and
darkness.”