I will admit to a deep bias in favor of expertise. I once thought that holding such a view was not so much a specific point of view, but rather simply the proper way to understand the pathway to good and proper outcomes. If you want a nice piece of furniture built, for example, you hire a carpenter. Further, there is a strong correlation between the skills, knowledge, and experience (you know, the ingredients of expertise) and the quality of the product produced.
I will confess to being the kind of weirdo who thinks that humanity’s achievements, including the fact that I have all my teeth, I can trust the general safety of my food and water, and I am typing this out on a device the size of a notebook and that you are reading it in some far-flung place that isn’t standing over my shoulder in my home office to all be the results of expertise.
But, you know, what do I know? I’m not the President of the United States, who seems more than a bit unfazed by the need for genuine expertise. After all, who needs experts when so many people are saying so many things?
Take, for example, as per Lisa Needham at Public Notice, Lindsey Halligan’s bad bad week. The whole piece is worth reading in full. The short version is that Halligan, a former insurance lawyer appointed to be a US Attorney because the real ones wouldn’t pursue the Comey indictment (see here), is making a hash of the case. The linked piece details several rather important ways in which she botched the grand jury process and probably has done irrevocable harm to the prosecution.
Now, given that it is clearly the case that Trump is going after Comey for revenge and not justice, the fact that Halligan doesn’t know what she is doing is good news. Moreover, I take some solace in this particular bit of incompetence as a more competent authoritarian-wannabe would have appointed a more competent person to be the prosecutor and would have found a better way to attack his enemies. Trump, who is definitely engaging in an authoritarian abuse of power by ordering the prosecution of his enemies, thankfully does not understand how best to accomplish his goals.
So while I find his intentions and goals to be excrable, I find some level of hope in his utter incompetence in achieving them, since his lack of respect for expertise is working to democracy’s and justice’s advantage in his case.
Unfortunately, giving power to the inexpert, if not the simply delusional, has real negative consequences. To wit, via Reuters: US CDC adopts Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views on recast website.
The U.S. public health agency’s website was changed to say, “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
This is, of course, mumbo-jumbo. As a former CDC official noted this morning on NPR, studies haven’t ruled out that umbrellas cause cancer either.
Scientists took issue with statements on the website that studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism, arguing that it is “exploiting a quirk of logic.”
“You can’t prove something never happens,” Jake Scott, a professor at Stanford Medical School, wrote on Substack. “Scientists can’t prove vaccines never cause autism because proving a universal negative is logically impossible.”
But I guess magic is at play, since no one seems to know how the website was changed.
The website change happened without the consultation of CDC staff who were studying autism, said one CDC scientist who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for HHS, defended the change and did not address questions on who had ordered it.
Kennedy cleared the way for CDC policy changes in August, when he fired Director Susan Monarez over vaccine policy. The agency is now led by acting director and deputy HHS Secretary Jim O’Neill, who is not a scientist.
I mean, why would you want a scientist in charge of the CDC? The gut knows what the gut knows, amiright?
Here we have a cause in which appointing someone without expertise is going to have long-term damage to the country. Kennedy is actively destroying the actual capacities of the HHS and is utterly undermining public trust. More people are going to forgo vaccinating their children because of all of this. This will literally lead to unnecessary deaths.
So while I sincerely take some solace from the utter incompetence (to the point of farce) of people like Halligan and what it says about the capacity of Trump to engage in a real authoritarian deepening, I mourn the destruction of state capacity represented by people like RFK, Jr.
