Book Review: A Call to Arms About the Threat of Anti-Science

[douglas9]

While Sagan was primarily concerned with the rise of pseudoscience, Mann and Hotez fear that we’re now in the midst of an anti-science boom, led by people, corporations, and governments who intentionally spread false or misleading information. “Anti-science has already caused serious illness and mass casualties in the near term,” they write. “Unmitigated, it will in the long term take millions more lives, produce misguided national policies, and have long-lasting catastrophic consequences, including potentially, the destabilization of our civilization.”

Mann and Hotez are not merely observers, but scientists who have found themselves on the front lines of the ongoing attacks on science. Mann is a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. Hotez is a pediatrician and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development. In 2022, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on a patent-free Covid-19 vaccine.

While attacks on science have taken many forms, the authors highlight the current pushback against vaccines and skepticism over climate science as two of the most urgent issues. Mann and Hotez describe the resistance to climate science and vaccines as a one-two punch, but add that there is a third punch as well, in the form of mis- and disinformation. The authors point to the devastating consequences of resistance to public health measures, especially vaccines, which came to the fore during the Covid-19 pandemic, the death toll from which currently stands at 1.2 million Americans, according to the World Health Organization.


https://undark.org/2025/10/03/book-review-science-under-siege/

[sop]

1. Broscience...

[erronis]

2. Thanks for this book review. Sounds like a good read. Another excerpt:

Then there’s the climate crisis. The world is warming, global wind patterns and ocean currents are shifting, ocean levels are rising, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. Mann and Hotez call out many sources of climate misinformation, including “petrostates” — nations whose revenues are largely derived from fossil fuels. (The petrostates are one of the five “powerful forces” referenced in the book’s subtitle, the others being plutocrats, propagandists, the press, and pros — referring to scholars who use their credentials to promote unsupported or contrarian views.) Of the petrostates, Russia tops the authors’ list. Citing Russia’s dependence on fossil fuels and its authoritarian leadership, including what they see as a desire to destabilize Western democracy, they write: “These factors combine in a perfect storm of consequences for the global spread of civilization-threatening antiscience.”

They describe how Russia-backed operators used social media to spread misinformation about Hillary Clinton’s climate policies in 2016, to Russia’s advantage. They also see Russia as being behind 2009’s so-called Climategate affair, in which climate data was stolen from a U.K. university.

And it’s not just Russia. The authors take issue with what they see as Saudi Arabia’s oversized influence on U.S. media, and also point to Texas (Hotez’s home state), where they argue that people linked to the fossil fuel industry have a long track record of political clout.