Why You Can’t Trust in Science Anymore: Andrew Follett on the Collapse of Scientific Integrity

Public trust in science has fallen off a cliff over the past decade — and according to geologist and former Congressional science staffer Andrew Follett, it’s because science itself has become less trustworthy. In a candid conversation with Dr. Randy Bock, Follett breaks down how ideology, funding incentives, and institutional cowardice have quietly corrupted the scientific process, from climate modeling to COVID-19 policy to addiction medicine.

How Politicized Funding Undermines Trust in Science

Follett points to federal science funding as ground zero for the problem. He cites the National Science Foundation’s support for ideologically-driven research projects as evidence that grant money increasingly flows toward politically convenient conclusions rather than rigorous inquiry. Unlike pharmaceutical-funded studies — which must disclose conflicts of interest — government-funded research faces no equivalent transparency requirement, even though the government is, in Follett’s words, “just like corporations” when it comes to funder bias.

The Parapsychology “Control Group”

One of Follett’s sharpest illustrations involves parapsychology. Researchers who personally believe in psychic phenomena reliably produce statistically significant evidence for it, while skeptical researchers find nothing. The takeaway: research design and confirmation bias — not necessarily outright fraud — can be enough to manufacture whatever result a scientist wants to find.

The Replication Crisis and the “File Drawer Effect”

Follett explains how statistical confidence intervals are misused across social science and increasingly hard science. Running the same experiment repeatedly will eventually produce a “significant” result by chance alone — and those are the results that get published, while null or inconvenient findings are quietly shelved. This replication crisis is compounded by peer-reviewed journals maintaining explicit editorial positions on politically charged topics, undermining their claim to neutrality.

COVID-19: A Case Study in Scientific Failure

The conversation turns to COVID-19 policy as the clearest recent example of science subordinated to politics. Follett argues that lockdown decisions were rarely weighed against their true costs — lost schooling, deaths of despair, substance abuse, and delayed dating and family formation among young people. He and Dr. Bock compare state-level outcomes, noting that policy divergence between states like Florida and New York was covered by media in starkly partisan terms rather than evaluated on data.

The Politicization of Public Health Institutions

Follett recounts an incident involving a Biden administration science-integrity official allegedly citing a paper edited by her own brother-in-law before Congress — a claim he presents as a symptom of a broader culture where scientific authority is deployed selectively to support predetermined political outcomes.

Medical Free Speech and Institutional Retaliation

Dr. Bock shares his own experience losing his medical license in 2014 after treating narcotic addiction as a trauma-driven condition rather than strictly a disease — a professional and philosophical position that put him at odds with prevailing medical board orthodoxy. Both men describe a broader pattern: dissenting experts, from doctors to scientists to commentators like Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, are frequently pushed out of mainstream institutions once their views diverge from consensus.

What Would Restore Trust in Science?

Follett points to roughly 1870 as a “golden age” of scientific inquiry, when researchers had to persuade skeptical peers through evidence rather than institutional authority. He argues that reintroducing adversarial scrutiny — similar to how courtrooms function — and requiring funding transparency across all sources, public and private, would go further toward restoring credibility than any messaging campaign urging people to “trust the science.”

Final Thoughts

This conversation makes clear that trust in science won’t be rebuilt through appeals to authority or credentials alone. Follett and Dr. Bock argue that transparency, open debate, and a willingness to admit error — the actual foundation of the scientific method — are what’s been lost, and what must be restored.

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