Scientific American was first published in New York on Aug. 28, 1845. Articles included one on the properties of zinc, another on improving railroad cars to make them both safer and more comfortable, and one was on a horse that navigated to the city to find its own way to a blacksmith. That was in the early days of the James Polk administration. Since then, the publishers of Scientific American have not felt compelled to make an endorsement in any election, including those involving a candidate named “Lincoln.” But after 175 years, the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States has decided that there’s an existential threat to both parts of its title; a threat to “America” and “science” great enough to take a step into politics.
For the just released October issue, Scientific American has endorsed Joe Biden for president of the United States, and they don’t hold back on explaining why.
The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September.
Trump’s handling of the pandemic is spectacularly bad. How bad? If Trump had achieved the same rate of infections and deaths as Justin Trudeau in Canada, the death toll in the United States would be 80,000 instead of 200,000. Had Trump tackled things as well as Angela Merkel did, with overrun France and Italy on her borders, the U.S. toll would have been 37,000. And had Trump genuinely taken to heart the lessons that South Korea learned when fighting COVID-19 weeks earlier and done things as well as Moon Jae-in, the number of dead would have been just 2,300. Nothing was going to stop COVID-19 from entering the United States, but Trump really could have prevented it from being a national disaster. He didn’t. On purpose. Continue reading.