For instance, President Trump claimed that the Food and Drug Administration was intentionally delaying COVID-19 drug trials to hurt his reelection: “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics”. Most notably, politicians and media can fuel these perceptions by i) presenting partial or misleading accounts of scientific methods and findings to legitimize political agendas and ii) discrediting scientists with accusations of collusion with political interests (e.g., “Big Pharma”). Public perceptions that scientific research is politically motivated emanates from several sources. Despite this standard, scholarship shows that the American public is increasingly concerned about the objectivity of scientific research, reflecting and reinforcing growing anti-science sentiment. The belief that scientific research is politically motivated: Origins and impactsĪ fundamental role of scientific research is to provide objective evidence that can be used to inform policy debates. Using survey data collected from a nationally representative sample of US residents, we find that i) a large portion of the population believes that politics drive the manner in which scientific studies are conducted, and ii) holding such a belief has a strong, negative association with COVID-19 risk assessments. In this article, we examine how one specific factor impacts COVID-19 risk assessments: the belief that political motives drive the manner in which scientists conduct their research. Despite these efforts, many Americans assert that the risks associated with COVID-19 have been largely exaggerated––a sentiment associated with resistance to adopting preventative health measures. Scientists and public health experts have repeatedly informed the public of the dangers posed by COVID-19 and advocated for the adoption of evidence-based practices (e.g., social distancing, facemasks, etc.) designed to reduce transmission rates. More than a year after the Centers for Disease Control confirmed the first US COVID-19 case, the novel coronavirus continues to exact a devastating toll. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All data can be accessed through the Harvard Dataverse ( ).įunding: RS, JMM NSF: Award Abstract #2034367 National Science Foundation. Received: JanuAccepted: MaPublished: April 21, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 McLaughlin et al. PLoS ONE 16(4):Įditor: Anat Gesser-Edelsburg, University of Haifa, ISRAEL Citation: McLaughlin DM, Mewhirter J, Sanders R (2021) The belief that politics drive scientific research & its impact on COVID-19 risk assessment.
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