The Doctors Who Cry ‘Science’

The AMA aligns itself with the left on abortion, climate, transgenderism and affirmative action.

Third Way, an organization that describes itself as championing “moderate” ideas on the “center left,” posted a memo Friday titled “Was It Something I Said?” It advised Democrats to avoid such terms as “housing insecurity,” “triggering,” “pregnant people” and “minoritized communities.” Such language makes Democrats sound “superior, haughty and arrogant.”

Perhaps because they are. In Third Way’s view, Democrats’ problem isn’t that they think they’re more enlightened than ordinary Americans and want to force their ideology on those who disagree. It’s that they’re too obvious about it. Such condescension isn’t confined to cultural issues. It’s pervasive in the scientific realm

Liberals and medical advocacy organizations often use such imperious terms as “pro-science,” “science says” or “consensus shows” when the science is murky or conflicted at best. What they are really saying is: We believe this, and therefore it is so.

Experts squandered public trust during the pandemic by falsely claiming that lockdowns and school closures were guided by science. As Anthony Fauci later admitted, the 6-foot rule for social distancing “sort of just appeared” and “wasn’t based on data.” The same is true of many public-health pronunciations.

While the pandemic ended long ago, the medical establishment has continued to erode its credibility by asserting that flimsy and flawed “science” supports its liberal views.

After the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, the American Medical Association’s then-President Jack Resneck Jr. asserted that states that restricted abortion would be “risking devastating consequences, including patients’ lives.” Why? Because “evidence and experience show us conclusively that the risk of death during or after childbirth is approximately 14 times greater than the risk of death from abortion-related complications.”

Comparing the risk of giving birth with that of terminating a pregnancy is morally dubious. His categorical statement about the “evidence” is also scientifically dubious, based on cherry-picked data. He appealed to scientific authority to defend a moral and political position.

The AMA also supported the Biden administration’s climate regulations, including its electric-vehicle mandate and efforts to restrict greenhouse-gas emissions across the economy, under the false flag of protecting public health. A friend-of-court brief by the AMA and other medical organizations in West Virginia v. EPA (2022) declares that “volumes of peer-reviewed science on such health effects reinforce the conclusion that climate pollutants warrant action from EPA.”

Greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels may contribute to rising temperatures, but they don’t harm public health, unlike pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. Carbon dioxide is harmless to humans and vital to plants.

The AMA and other physician groups also argued in a friend-of-the-court brief in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) that racial preferences in college and medical-school admissions are a “medical imperative” bolstered by an “overwhelming body of scientific research” that shows minorities get better medical care from doctors of the same race. Such evidence is conflicting, and studies that the groups cite in their brief are poorly designed.

Also dubious is their claim that hormone treatments for minors with gender dysphoria are based on a scientific consensus. In U.S. v. Skrmetti (2025), the AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other physician groups argued that such treatments are “grounded in science and endorsed by the medical community.” “Denying such evidence-based medical care to adolescents who meet the requisite medical criteria puts them at risk of significant harm,” the brief says.

The U.K. last year permanently banned the use of puberty-blocking hormones for most minors after a comprehensive review found thin evidence they improved the mental well-being of kids and that they carried safety risks including permanent bodily damage, infertility, blood clots and bone loss. The AMA brief elides such risks.

Any wonder that more Americans are growing skeptical of vaccines? Even when the AMA and its friends make valid scientific points and criticisms of the Trump administration, Americans may be inclined to discount them because so much of their advocacy is rooted in partisanship.

Consider AMA President Bobby Mukkamala’s letter to the editor in the Washington Post last week that criticized the administration’s cancellation of mRNA-related vaccine contracts. Dr. Mukkamala lambasted the administration for abandoning the government’s “role in establishing pro-science public consensus” and accused it of contributing to “the erosion of public trust.”

“Encouraging Americans to disregard science and their physicians is a step in the wrong direction,” he wrote. That’s true as far as it goes. The administration’s safety justifications for scrapping federally funded mRNA vaccine research were dubious. But invoking a “pro-science public consensus” to criticize the administration is a red flag with many Americans.

The AMA and the rest of the medical establishment have cried science so many times to support their progressive views that many Americans no longer believe them on anything. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has merely harvested the distrust that the medical establishment has sown.

If the medical establishment wants to restore trust in science, then it should stop politicizing it.