Ignorance and Bliss: On The Control, Review, and Erasure of Data & Information
Attacks on information and on the ability of scientists to share data represent a path towards an entirely different kind of ‘science’.
Testing and COVID-19, Allentown, PA, May 2020
As the number COVID-19 fatalities in the US surged to nearly 2,000 per day, Pres. Donald Trump spoke in Allentown, PA on May 14, 2020 and decried the use of testing:
“When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”
By testing, the rationale goes, we find things we don’t like. And that makes us look bad. And Pres. Trump did not want to look bad.
The act of testing is imperfect. For certain invasive tests, the act of testing can come with a risk. This risk should be weighed against the likelihood and benefits of early detection. Likewise, even for accurate but not perfectly sensitive tests, a negative test result can represent a false-negative, conveying a false sense of security and avoidance of follow-up steps that could lead to a diagnosis, treatment, and a return to good health.
The act of testing is also an opportunity.
Tests need not be perfect to provide data to accelerate diagnosis, characterize the health status of a population, and prevent new transmission. Early detection of cancer improves survival outcomes. Early detection of HIV accelerates initiation of antiretroviral therapy that reduces HIV-associated mortality and morbidity and reduces the risk of transmission to others.
It turns out if one uses test data strategically, then a new paradigm is possible.
The more you test, the more cases you can prevent.
In an ideal world, greater testing and surveillance can be a form of mitigation rather than an indicator of failure – an issue I explore at length on my recent book on asymptomatic infections and the COVID-19 pandemic. Sufficiently accurate testing provides information. And information has value.
Which is precisely why there is increasing interest in screening or even removing expertly sourced information from government websites.
Erasing Information – 2025
The attacks on scientific institutions run in parallel to attacks on other parts of government – including the Department of Education and Department of State. Increasingly these attacks involve a common feature: the control, review, and potential erasure of information from scientific journals and/or publicly available websites. Here are 3 examples of many:
All research submitted for publication by researchers working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was ordered withdrawn from consideration until further review. This means that teams of researchers may have worked years to get to the point where they had data ready to be considered for expert peer-review and wide distribution only to the learn that the project had been put on pause. This type of post-submission withdrawal is unprecedented.
Again, in the world of the CDC, the Trump administration halted publication of the Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report, aka ‘The Voice of CDC’, which had been published continuously every week for 60 years through administrations of all kinds… until now. As of writing this post on Feb 5, the MMWR has missed multiple weeks and the website as a note “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders”.
The National Science Foundation has been ordered to review all grants for use of keywords – dozens and dozens of words. Irony can be pretty ironic. The administration, which railed against cancel culture, is in the process of canceling research studies for political reasons. The implementation is also absurd, e.g., the word ‘female’ but not ‘male’ appears in leaked lists. Although the intent may be to undermine research on differences across biological sex and gender, it would also sweep up projects that care to examine female mice (but not male mice) and female crabs (but not male crabs).
But there is another piece of information which deserves our attention.
Data on the Keeling Curve was temporarily removed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website. The curves depict the intraannual and interannual variability in atmospheric CO2 as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. You can find the curve at the top of this post, or here:
https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
The website is back up and running, for now (note: there is some disagreement as to whether this outage was planned or linked to ongoing website reviews on other government sites - this is an important note with respect to this particular website, but the larger point remains given the apparent interest in NOAA from the DOGE group).
Like George Carlin’s seven dirty words, it appears that this administration doesn’t have a sense of humor and has come up with hundreds of dirty words and even data that it simply cannot stand. And yes, there are many things to worry about now – so why care about this?
Why Care? Because Data Helps to Tell Stories of What is Really Happening in the Real World
The Keeling Curve tells a story of the systematic increase in atmospheric CO2. The story links human activities – and especially the use of fossil fuels – to climate change. We can see the imprint in this dataset – a testament to the commitment of scientists to monitor, study, report, and even predict shifts in the Earth system. Greater use of fossil fuels leads to the release of CO2 into the air which then, through the greenhouse gas effect, accelerates global warming.
Like Trump’s speech in Allentown, it is possible to interpret this data through a political lens: the more we measure the worse we find out we are doing. So why not go further: stop measuring or even erase the data from public view. There is no way to do so here, copies of this data exist in many place, from university servers to web archives. In fact, even you have it! It is also possible to interpret this data as a clarion call for action, building of norms, and evaluation of technologies and shifts in energy use that could stem the upward trend.
Instead, attacks on information and on the ability of scientists to share data represent a path towards an entirely different kind of ‘science’: one in which political expediency rather than the scientific method determines what can and cannot be shared.
That path leads to junk science, misinformation, snake oil cures, and true peril.
Without experts, expertise, and vetted information, then individuals will be told to ‘do their own research’. As it turns out, this doesn’t lead to the outcomes we hope.
In one behavioural study, people who did online searches to evaluate fake news stories or misinformation ended up reading and finding support for fake news or misinformation on low-quality sources… and end up believing the misinformation more so than before they searched!
If the current administration is successful, then they may end up transforming both the content of what should be expertly resourced data across a broad range of federal websites or removing expert information entirely so that more people end up in an information desert and find themselves online, sinking deeper into wells of fake news and misinformation.
This path may lead to ignorance (or worse). But it will not lead to bliss when our health, security, economic prosperity, well-being, even our lives, depend on information that is ever harder to find or has already been erased.