Joe Biden has benefited from the popular wisdom that he is a consensus builder, promoter of national unity, and an empathetic, straight-talking, working class guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

By all accounts, these are notions that should already have evaporated less than three months into his presidency. Bipartisanship has been nonexistent; his political stance has shifted far to the left; and his commission to study Supreme Court "reforms" appears to be a prelude to packing the court, a brazen power-grab. Nevertheless, the presidential speechwriters, flacks, and apparatchiks have obviously been instructed to emphasize Biden's supposed kinder, gentler, collaborative, truthful qualities at every opportunity.

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Anyone active on social media is aware that there is a great deal of passionate but ill-founded opposition to vaccination, including to the new COVID-19 vaccines. How could that be? Physicians and the public health establishment are constantly promoting vaccination, especially as we try to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic.

It turns out that the anti-vaccine sentiment is the product of what can only be described as an industry whose principal protagonists are an organized group of professional propagandists. As recently reported in the science journal Nature, they are people "running multi-million-dollar organizations, incorporated mainly in the USA, with as many as 60 staff each."

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Citing "an abundance of caution," the FDA on Tuesday recommended a "pause" in the administration of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine. The essence of that decision is that, as usual, federal regulators have put covering their derrieres above public health. Let me explain.

The decision was precipitated by six cases in the U.S. of a "rare and severe type of blood clot" in women between the ages of 18 and 48 who had received the vaccine. Almost seven million shots of the one-dose vaccine have been administered in the U.S., according to the FDA.

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For more than a century, National Geographic has produced a high-quality magazine that is well-grounded in science, history and culture. Lately, however, the editors have allowed agenda-driven articles based on flawed research to slip in between the covers.

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I've been a science nerd almost all my life. In graduate school, I was the co-discoverer of a bacterial enzyme essential to DNA replication and of a key enzyme in the influenza virus. I have written more than a thousand articles concerned with science and science policy. I'm convinced that America's prosperity is based on post-WWII preeminence in science and technology, much of it financed by federal funding.

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