To the Editor:

As a physician, I’ve dedicated my life to scientific integrity on behalf of the health of my patients. I cannot remain silent as the Trump administration carries on its campaign of misinformation. Evidence-based medicine, once the foundation of public health, is now under siege. The casualties of this war on medicine are ordinary Americans: children, parents, neighbors, grandparents.

When political leaders bereft of any scientific expertise distort data, sneer at experts, and spread deliberate falsehoods, the consequences will be measured in infections, in hospitalizations, in morbidity and mortality. This administration has trivialized, mocked, and politicized science, and in doing so, abandoned the very people it was elected to serve. And they have done so with complicit bystanders, feckless and unwilling to serve as a check on unleashed power.

Science is not partisan. A virus or a cancer does not check your voter registration before it infects or metastasizes.

Physicians are taught to look our patients in the eye and speak with honesty, however difficult. Breaking life-changing news is both ethically imperative, but also emotionally harrowing. In other words, we sometimes must tell our patients not what they wish to hear, but what they need to know. I urge our leaders to do the same.

We see this same distortion most recently in the administration’s endless, misguided drive to find a “root cause” of autism — a search fueled not by compassion but by disdain for people with autism. This obsession not only tacitly revives the old, cruel, unwarranted narrative that mothers are somehow at fault for neurodivergence but also diverts collective energy and financial resources away from what truly matters: building support, dignity, and opportunities for people with autism across their lifespans.

When you obfuscate data with dogma and evidence with ego, there are long-term enduring consequences to the trust in public health. It is incumbent upon all of us, “we the people,” to be loud purveyors of “good trouble” to mitigate these consequences.

Rebecca Butterfield, M.D.

Guilderland

Editor’s note: Rebecca Butterfield serves on the Guilderland School board but is not writing in that capacity.