THE SOAPBOX

I am often asked by friends and family to check the validity of things seen on the internet, mostly through social media. I truly honestly do not mind. In fact, I encourage it. Please, ask away! If I don’t know the answer to the question, I know how to research and find the answer to the question. It is a civic duty to lessen the spread of misinformation. It takes me seconds to figure out that the guy in some reel, promoting some conspiracy falsehood, is not legit particularly when the guy doesn’t use an actual name or list any kind of credentials. Trust me. People with PhDs worked their asses off to get those PhDs and they are not hiding that credential under any kind of bush. While it is very true that there are people claiming to have PhDs, it is also very easy to find out how real that PhDs is.

This most recent trend I’ve noticed in the spread of conspiracy theories is that cures for diseases are being suppressed. This is a difficult one because they aren’t entirely wrong. The budget cuts to the NIH and the CDC, not to mention any research in regards to women’s health, people of color’s health and anything LGBTQ related, have greatly stalled progress in discoveries of disease prevention and cures. Forty percent of research being done on fibromyalgia has come to a halt thanks to those budget cuts. That’s a disease that, according to the Arthritis National Research Foundation, affects around 4 million adults. Chances are, the every day human is not paying attention to the impacts of not supporting science research. People outside the science community just see that there is no progress being made in curing whatever ailment they are suffering from. This is where the conspiracy comes in. Those conspiracy theorists have started to spin this into the idea that scientists are purposefully suppressing cures.

People who fall for this conspiracy have never met a research scientist.

We love talking about our research. Scientist in basic research are not making bank. It is not a lucrative career or an easy one. Those people who choose that path have a great passion for their area of research and that passion can be infectious in a lab. It leads them to work long hours and repeat experiments over and over and over to verify and validate. And if someone asks them about their project, they are over the moon with willingness and joy to share the information they have learned through their repeated experiments. The last thing any of us want to do is suppress our discoveries, but discoveries can’t be made with out financial support. Reagents, consumables like pipet tips and gloves and tubes, and vital equipment for making discoveries is expensive. So when funding is slashed, discoveries come to a stand still.

This country, when they elected this president and the current administration, made a choice. I have often heard “I voted my values.” This says to me that those who voted for this president with their values in mind, do not value the support of scientific research. They decided that money was better spent on pointless White House Remodels, costly wars in Iran, Memorial arches, and the president’s golf habit. They decided that legislation to tax the rich and holding corporations accountable for caring for their employees was unnecessary. We have very different idea of ‘values’. It is interesting to me that a lot of those same people are the ones falling for those conspiracy theories. Maybe it’s easier for them to do so because it helps to validate their choice. It is easier to put the blame elsewhere and it is not always easy to admit being wrong. We are a society that tends to scoff and make fun of those who ask questions deemed by others to be dumb.

I too struggle with admitting when I’m wrong. That’s one of the reasons I am so intent on digging out a conspiracy to find the truth. I have always been the one in the room raising her hand to ask “Is that true?” Some of that is my general curious nature. Some of that comes from an exposure to a patriarchal system that lies to women. Physically, it is unsafe for any woman to take anything they hear at face value and without question. But while it might feel like eating bad fruit, I will straight up admit when I’m wrong about something. I always follow it up with “how can we find the right answer to this?” with an emphasis on the ‘we’. Let’s work together and learn from each other in the process. I will never scoff or make fun of a question. But answers are often complicated, as noted above. Cures for diseases kind of are being suppressed, just not for the reasons he’s preaching.

We have to be willing to look all sides of the answer.