When ideology cancels competence in work and science

A freelancer quit on me. Not because of money. Not because of hours. Because of ideology.

“I don’t feel comfortable promoting anti-vax content and anti-DEI content,” he wrote.

This was for a small backstage job on Upwork. Editing video. No one would ever know his name. But he still bowed out. Fortunately, he self-identified his lack of professionalism and excessive ideology.

When I hire a car mechanic, I don’t check his voting record. I check if he can fix the car.

The word “anti-vax” has become a brick thrown by the dull-witted. I’ve given thousands of vaccines as a physician and taken many myself. But not every shot fits every person. A yellow fever vaccine makes sense in West Africa, not in Nebraska—context matters. Tailoring vaccines to individual risk isn’t anti-vaccine any more than refusing a ski parka at the beach is anti-clothing.

This wasn’t the first time ideology trumped competence in my path. Years ago, a science writer, Andrea Graves, walked away midstream. She had helped me shape an article on Zika, but when she saw it published in American Greatness, she quit. “My strong suspicion is that whatever is next will end up on a website like American Greatness or American Thinker,” she told me.

Then she added, “I’ll always be worried and on edge that what seems to me like an enjoyable intellectual exploration will be attached to right-wing policy. I do not want to be part of that.”

She wasn’t rejecting the science. She was rejecting the venue. The irony is that hundreds of millions of women in the tropics still live in fear that a single mosquito bite could deform their unborn child. That fear is false. Overturning it matters. But ideology blocked her from helping.

The same wall rose higher up. In early 2020, I had a Zoom call with JAMA’s editors. They admitted the science behind Zika-microcephaly was weak. They liked my work. Then they backed away. “This is not the right time. Your work might sow doubt in the authority of the public health establishment (with COVID-19 on the horizon).”

So much for medicine. So much for truth. I told them, “Admitting mistakes strengthens trust; hiding them corrodes it.” They chose to hide.

Both editors later lost their own positions, sacrificed in the George Floyd struggle session era. They had tried to appease the ideological tide. It devoured them anyway.

Donald McNeil at the New York Times had already pushed the Zika panic into headlines. His defense was blunt: “Brazilian neonatal ICU clinicians aren’t idiots.” That, to him, was science. Later, after reading my manuscript Overturning Zika, he wrote: “I read enough to see that your Zika theories, which I consider false, have not changed… I am repulsed.”

Again, not a rejection of data. A rejection of politics.

The same reflex surfaced beyond medicine. In New Hampshire, a wealthy transplant needed her driveway plowed. She found a contractor. Efficient. Inexpensive. Well-regarded. Then she discovered he had once “liked” a pro-Trump post on Facebook. Suddenly, he was untouchable.

During the COVID pandemic, progressives fled New York for the countryside. They sneered at Trump signs. Then a snowstorm hit. Their conservative neighbors plowed the driveway, unasked. One of them wrote: “How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?”

Competence canceled. Kindness distrusted. Truth suppressed.

This is not a “both sides” problem. Conservatives don’t cancel service providers over ideology. Progressives do. Academia, publishing, and media substitute politics for professionalism.

But reality does not care. Zika never caused microcephaly. The facts stand. Women need not fear. The truth towers over the fragile sensibilities of editors, freelancers, and neighbors who prefer purity tests.

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