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The President suffered a post-packsle of it rebound, testing positive again after several negative tests.

The surge in COVID cases resulting from BA-5 appears to have slowed over the past few weeks.

The Biden administration pushes pause on another round of boosters for those under 50 holding out for an updated booster in the fall.

This is America Dissected. I'm your host, Dr. Abdul-Lal Sayyam.

Trust the science. You'd hear it all the time during the height of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020.

It became one of liberal America's favorite catchphrases, but that phrase always made me wince just a little bit when I'd hear it.

First, as I've discussed a bunch of times on the show, it's implicit in science to be mistrusted. Science moves because people don't trust it.

You replicate experiments to verify them and then test alternative hypotheses.

But that's not the main reason that phrase always got to me. Because science isn't just a process, or even the outcomes of a process,

it's whether we like to admit it or not, a whole set of institutions, institutions are collections of people.

And as much as scientists wish they were totally objective, evidence-driven characters we aspire to be, we are part and parcel of a culture, and we are susceptible to the same biases.

We're still in thinking that we are objective. Scientists are sometimes the most blind to the ways our biases shape us.

It's not that science isn't the incredible tool for understanding the world around us. It is. Make no mistake about that.

It's just that we as scientists are imperfect, sometimes terribly so.

Terrible things have been done in the name of science, and one of the worst is the subject of our discussion today.

When I served the city of Detroit, which is 85% black, we often struggle to get parents to vaccinate their children.

We struggle to get parents to test their children for lead. We struggled to engage families on a number of issues we try to tackle.

Well-meaning folks from outside the city, usually white, would say things like, I can't understand why these people won't just take care of themselves.

I'd wince even more, just like trust the science.

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