When President Trump announced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was selected to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, declaring that the appointment marked a return to “gold standard scientific research” in America.
Trump signs “Restoring Gold Standard Science” in May 2025 executive Order. Agencies including NASA and the Department of Energy filed reports How their science met the official White House “gold standard.” Administration figures heated up public comments, publications And social media post With the phrase.
On paper, the administration’s nine-point definition for “gold standard science” reads like a list of fundamental research integrity principles that any scientist would support: science that is reproducible, transparent, forward-looking, collaborative, skeptical, based on error and uncertainty. false hypothesesunbiased peer review, accepting negative consequences And free from conflict of interest.
In practice, critics say, the phrase has become shorthand for science in which preferred results outweigh inconvenient evidence.
Jules Barbati-Desches, an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit advocacy group, said, “This use of ‘gold standard science’ is misleading. It sounds really nice at first glance. It’s advocating for things that are standard in the scientific community.”
Barbati-Dajes pointed out that the same executive order that turned the term into a policy rolled back all scientific integrity policies established during the Biden administration, making it harder to pursue and publish scientific findings without the threat of political interference.
“It undermines all the values and standards and principles that were already being prioritized and implemented across federal agencies,” Barbati-Desches said.
executive Order Describes the decline in public trust in science that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. It cites examples in which government agencies “used or disseminated scientific information in a grossly misleading manner”, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s school-reopening guidelines, a controversial count of the North Atlantic right whale population by the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the use by multiple government agencies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. warming model The executive order has been described as “highly unlikely.”
“The Trump administration is ensuring that political agendas and ideologies never again corrupt policymaking, which should be guided only by gold standard science,” White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in response to questions from The Times. “So-called ‘scientists’ who are now only concerned that politics are being prioritized over evidence after remaining silent during the pandemic are either delusional or partisan ploys.”
Reliable, trustworthy, and unbiased evidence is the goal of legitimate science. But “the term ‘gold standard science’ is being used preferentially, depending on the context,” said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who resigned as director of CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases in August over concerns that its new leadership was not taking an “evidence-based approach to things.” said at that time.
Jernigan cited Kennedy’s changes to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC on vaccinations. The committee had long followed a set of guidelines called Evidence of recommendations frameworkWhich establishes clear rules for how different types of evidence should be weighed and evaluated when making decisions.
Kennedy replaced the entire 17-member committee with a hand-picked group highly sensitive to vaccine skepticism. “Public trust is gone” Kennedy said In those days. “Only through fundamental transparency and gold standard science will we earn it back.”
The reorganized group largely abandoned the framework, allowing the committee to judge evidence of questionable quality alongside larger randomized controlled trials.
Its first meeting consisted of a faulty presentation From a vaccine skeptic on the preservative thimerosal, who focused only on the few reports of the shot harming individuals, but omitted the many studies that have shown it safety in large populations. The committee ultimately voted not to recommend other vaccines containing thimerosal, which had already removed from childhood vaccines in 2001.
Meanwhile, Jernigan said, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health and acting CDC director, continues to delay the release of the study that found COVID-19 vaccines reduced the number of virus-related hospitalizations by 55%.
according to media reportThe study used hospital patients’ vaccination status to calculate the success of the season’s vaccine, a method that has long been used to determine the effectiveness of flu vaccines. Bhattacharya Allegedly I wanted to wait for a randomized clinical trial – a method that scientists often cite “Gold Standard” To determine the effectiveness of an intervention, but it is expensive and too time-consuming to evaluate the success of a seasonal flu or COVID-19 shot.
Jernigan said accepting a lower standard of evidence for harms from vaccines than their clear benefits “is not a good way to practice science: Your ideology, your judgment about how things should be, dictates what your evidence is.”
The Trump administration didn’t coin the term “gold standard science” that’s floating around for at least half a century As a label for top-quality research methods. over the decades, Critics have pointed out This is not as bright a metaphor as it sounds.
In finance, the gold standard sets the value of a currency against a specific quantity of a specific good. But nothing is certain in science. Old conclusions and assumptions are constantly being overwritten as new evidence emerges.
“The gold standard science in 1990 will be malpractice in some cases in 2026, and five years from now the gold standard may change again because we are constantly innovating,” said David Blumenthal, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the book. “Whiplash: From the fight over Obamacare to the war on science.”
He said, “Science is dynamic and methods are constantly being improved, and the people who are most familiar with the possibilities and realities of those methods are the ones doing the work at any given time.” “And if they’re not included in it, it’s not the gold standard.”
