The Trump administration has prohibited the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using the phrases, “science-based” and “evidence-based,” from its lexicon, a decision that can hardly help the agency carry out its mission to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and domestic. The CDC needs to ignore the ill-advised, politically-motivated instruction and continue its critical messaging to the public.
It’s daunting enough as it is to cut through the flood of information available to people today — a good deal of which can be inaccurate, unverifiable or intentionally false. So, to get its message heard, the CDC can use help from academics to reach over political and ideological divides to do just that. To advance critical vaccination programs, for example, the public needs access to the objective, evidence-based science that supports them.