Designate a Committee

Everybody accuses Donald Trump of not being a politician, and being a real-estate tycoon instead. Nevertheless, it can’t be denied that the president of the United States has been learning some strategies of professional politics used since the times of Machiavelli and beyond. We have just discovered the most recent example: If the best scientists contradict you, appoint your own committee of experts. In Spain we learned this kind of move in the previous decade, when the best science available suggested the government to authorize research with the remaining fetal cells of embryos used for in vitro fertilization. The Spanish government, at the time closer to the ideas of the religious right, selected scientists that were opposed to the research of the scientific committee that made those recommendations. The buffalo in the White House has copied this subtle and revered strategy. And still, he will be accused of not being a politician …

At the root of this issue are the anti-COVID-19 vaccines currently being developed with fetal cells, derived from voluntary abortions donated by women. Of the 200 projects investigated in the world, half a dozen are based on fetal cells. In reality they have been used since the 1970s for similar purposes. From this type of research, vaccines against diseases like hepatitis A, chicken pox, rubella or herpes have appeared. But Trump is as permeable to the argument as a waxed iceberg lettuce is to oil. Last summer, before the pandemic, he yielded to public pressure and announced a new committee of experts on fetal cell research. There was some apprehension about the composition of this body of experts and our worst fears have been confirmed.

Of the 15 members of the National Institutes of Health Human Fetal Tissue Research Ethics Advisory Board, 10 are openly anti-abortion advocates, and several of them have publicly expressed their opposition to vaccines based on cell tissue from abortions. The other five don’t really matter, according to Meredith Wadman and Jocelyn Kaiser, from Science magazine, because the decisions of the committee don’t require unanimity. If five of the experts were free of any bias, it would still change nothing. The judgment of this advisory board, biased with religious criteria, will affect in a crucial manner any investigation with fetal cells, from Alzheimer’s disease to AIDS. There is already at least one research project about COVID-19 that has been shut down due to restrictions on the access to this kind of biological material.

There is a general tendency among the population, and even between some political analysts, to consider science as a monolithic bloc of established, immutable, universal and geological knowledge. This prejudice is based on a profound ignorance of science exhibited by politicians and the vast majority of educated people, not to mention anti-vaxxers and other anti-science movements. If you have power and the will to create an advisory board of 15 flat-Earth advocate experts, you won’t have the least problem doing it. There are millions of experts in the world; you will be able to find an ample selection of the mediocre, biased and fanatical among them just by doing a Google search. That’s why supporting a political decision “on science” is a trap. We, the citizens, should know who is doing the science.