Charles Rotter
Nature ran a Comment on November 3 by the seven members of the European Commission’s Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, Martin Kahanec, Naomi Ellemers, Adam Izdebski, Rafal M. Łukasik, Dimitra Simeonidou, Rémy Slama and Mangala Srinivas, headlined “How democracy depends on science — and must protect it.” The standfirst sets the terms:
Verified information from trusted experts is crucial to help the public and governments navigate rapid changes and increasing complexity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03510-4
The advisers are worried that the public has stopped listening:
But for science to strengthen democracy, researchers must be trusted, too. Moreover, the legitimacy of expertise has become increasingly contested over the past few years in Europe and elsewhere.
Scientific advice is subjected to politicization in many countries, with consensual insights and clear evidence (such as on climate change) being dismissed as ‘just another opinion’ or as being driven by a political agenda. Public trust in expertise has become polarized along political lines.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03510-4
In their telling the politicization is something done to science by outsiders, with a little help from “a small number of powerful technology companies,” and by people whose doubts spread “through networks of people connected by identity, grievance or distrust.” It doesn’t seem to occur to seven chief scientific advisers that the distrust was earned, or that the institutions they speak for did a good share of the polarizing themselves. They come close to saying it in one paragraph:
Expertise strengthens democratic legitimacy when it is transparent, diverse, independent and open to scrutiny — as prescribed by the rules of science. But it weakens legitimacy when it is perceived as opaque, unclear, politicized, elitist or disconnected from people’s lived experiences.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03510-4
“Perceived” is doing the heavy lifting there. The record of the last six years shows scientific institutions being opaque, politicized and elitist in plain view, in their own emails and their own journals, and the public noticed.
Start with lockdowns. On October 4, 2020, Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta published the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for focused protection of the elderly instead of blanket lockdowns. Four days later the director of the NIH, Francis Collins, wrote to Anthony Fauci, in an email Bhattacharya later put before Congress:
This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?
Collins wanted a takedown rather than a debate, and he was the man who controlled most of the biomedical research money in the United States, aiming it at professors from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford. Bhattacharya now runs the NIH, which is one way to settle an argument about who was fringe.
The advisers write that “the opinion of a single scientist might result in partial understanding” or “reliance on a dissenting voice that differs from the majority view,” and that high-level expert groups do better. The highest-level expert opinion of early 2020 on where the virus came from was a five-author paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine, a Nature journal, on March 17, 2020. It said “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” The authors’ private Slack messages, released in 2023, say something else. Kristian Andersen, on February 1, 2020:
I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.
https://www.public.news/p/top-scientists-misled-congress-about
The channel was named “project-wuhan_engineering” until February 6, when it became “project-wuhan_pangolin.” The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, in its December 2024 final report, found that the virus “Likely Emerged Because of a Laboratory or Research Related Accident” and that Proximal Origin was “‘Prompted’ by Dr. Anthony Fauci to ‘Disprove’ the Lab Leak Theory.” The subcommittee’s Democrats disputed the Fauci finding. The FBI (moderate confidence) and the Department of Energy (low confidence) lean toward a lab origin, and in January 2025 the CIA joined them, with low confidence. The origin is officially still unproven either way, which is exactly the point, since the paper that called the lab scenario implausible has never been retracted, despite the reams of evidence against it, and the journal that published it is the one now lecturing about “communicating disagreement” and “quantifying uncertainties.”
Then came the mRNA vaccines. In March 2021 CDC director Rochelle Walensky told MSNBC that vaccinated people “do not carry the virus,” and the CDC had to walk it back. Pfizer’s trial was never designed to measure transmission, which Pfizer executive Janine Small confirmed to the European Parliament in October 2022, while mandates and vaccine passports across Europe had been sold on the duty to protect others. In 2025 the FDA required stronger myocarditis warnings on the mRNA vaccines, with the highest risk in males aged 16 to 25, a group whose own risk from COVID was low and who were being told to get boosted to keep their jobs and their places at university.
Then there’s the Lancet. In July 2024 it published a three-author correspondence, not a peer-reviewed study, that took the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s count of direct deaths, applied a rule of thumb of four indirect deaths for every direct one, and floated a figure of up to 186,000. The number went around the world under the Lancet’s name. The statistician Mike Spagat, who has spent decades studying war mortality, took the method apart, and the Lancet later ran a letter of concern about it. Whatever one thinks of the war, a medical journal lending its name to a multiplier applied to figures from one of the combatants is not the “verified information from trusted experts” the advisers have in mind.
On climate, the advisers’ example of a consensual insight being unfairly dismissed is climate change itself. Their reference for the dismissing is Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook, and their reference for the doubt-manufacturing is Oreskes and Conway’s Merchants of Doubt, which tells you which side of the argument the European Commission’s science advice listens to. For a decade the most extreme emissions scenario, RCP8.5, was described in papers and press releases as “business as usual,” until Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters wrote in Nature itself in 2020 that the “business as usual” story is misleading. I’ve written about that at length. In 2023 Patrick Brown, a co-author of a Nature paper on wildfire, wrote in The Free Press that he had left out the non-climate drivers of fire because he believed a paper focused on climate change was what high-profile journals wanted. Nature disputed his account, but nobody disputed that he knew which story would sell.
Gender medicine is where the “majority view” of the expert bodies held up worst. In August 2023 the American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed its 2018 policy on puberty blockers and hormones for minors while commissioning, after the fact, a systematic review of the evidence for it. The Cass Review for NHS England, published in April 2024 after commissioned systematic reviews from the University of York, called the evidence base “remarkably weak.” Court documents reported by the BMJ and others show that WPATH, the professional body whose standards of care the American societies relied on, commissioned evidence reviews from Johns Hopkins and then claimed approval rights over what could be published. WPATH denies it prohibited publication. The children and their families were owed the evidence, whatever it said, and the people who were supposed to produce it treated it as a communications problem.
And then the journals decided to campaign. In October 2020 Nature published “Why Nature supports Joe Biden for US president.” Scientific American, which had never endorsed a candidate in its first 175 years, endorsed Biden the same year and Kamala Harris in 2024. Nature even measured what its endorsement did, in a preregistered experiment by Floyd Jiuyun Zhang published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2023:
The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered. The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. The estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust in Nature and scientists were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant. I found little evidence that the endorsement changed views about Biden and Trump.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01537-5
The endorsement changed nobody’s vote and cost Nature, and scientists in general, the trust of half the American electorate. Pew found that 87% of Americans had at least a fair amount of confidence in scientists in April 2020 and 76% in 2024, and among Republicans the share fell from 85% to 66%. That is the polarization “along political lines” the advisers complain about, and Nature’s own journal published the experiment showing how a Nature editorial helped cause it.
The advisers’ remedy is more of what produced the problem. They want “high-level expert groups, which engage directly with senior decision makers,” protection from the “dissenting voice that differs from the majority view,” and “independent monitoring and assurance of algorithmic systems,” which in the European Commission’s vocabulary means someone deciding which information reaches the public. Every episode above was a high-level majority view, and in most of them the dissenting voices, the ones the “trusted institutions” set out to suppress and even censor, were the ones that turned out closer to right.
The authors, shamelessly circling the wagons of their failing institutions, of course declare no competing interests.
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Quotes from Kahanec et al., “How democracy depends on science — and must protect it,” Nature, November 3, 2026, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03510-4.
