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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses how misinformation, distrust in science, and extremist rhetoric are fueling a deadly resurgence of preventable diseases in the United States—and urges clear and responsible leadership to protect public health.
He’s then joined by Alan Bernstein, the director of global health at the University of Oxford, to examine the long-term consequences of the right’s war on science and vaccine research.
Finally, David answers listener questions on creating laws to counter Trump’s norm violations, on David’s confidence in the future of free and fair elections, and how to teach civics to high schoolers in the Trump era.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to Episode 4 of The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Thank you for all who watched and listened to the first three episodes. All of us at The Atlantic and at The David Frum Show are so gratified by the extraordinary response to our first three episodes, and we hope to continue to meet your expectations in this and future episodes.
My guest today is Alan Bernstein, director of global health at Oxford University. Alan Bernstein coordinates all the health and medical research across the vast domain of Oxford University and tries to ensure that scientists talk to each other and talk to the public in ways that benefit the safety of the whole planet. Before that, Alan served as the founder and president of the Canadian Institutes [of] Health Research, a coordinating body for health research across all of Canada, much like the Centers for Disease Control in the United States. And before that, he rose to fame and eminence as one of the world’s leading researchers in cancer and virology. So I’m very glad to be joined today by Alan Bernstein.
And first, some preliminary remarks on the subjects we’ll be talking about in today’s discussion.
[Music]
Frum: As I record this episode in late April 2025, the United States is gripped by an outbreak of measles. More than 800 cases have been diagnosed in 24 states. Three people are dead: two of them, unvaccinated school-aged children; one of them, an unvaccinated adult.
We are only about one-third of the way through the year 2025, and yet the United States has suffered nearly triple the number of cases of measles in 2025 as it did in all of 2024. Measles is caused, of course, by a pathogen, but it is enabled by human ignorance and human neglect. Rising numbers of children are going unvaccinated. About a third of American children fail to get the full suite of vaccines that the CDCs—Centers for Disease Control—recommends. And about 7 percent of American children go unvaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella.
These are invitations to human harm and human suffering, and they come about because of a rise in American attitudes of ignorance and unawareness about the causes of disease and how diseases are prevented. Let me read you a recent statement from the Kaiser Family Foundation, an important source of health and medical-research information.
Here’s Kaiser:
When it comes to false claims that the [MMR] vaccines have been proven to cause autism, that vitamin A can prevent the measles infections, or that getting the measles vaccine is more dangerous than becoming infected with measles, less than 5 percent of adults say they think these claims are “definitely true,” and much larger shares say they are “definitely false.”
That’s the good news. Returning to Kaiser:
However, at least half of adults are uncertain about whether these claims are true or false, falling in the “malleable middle” and saying each claim is either “probably true” or “probably false.” While at least half of adults express some level of uncertainty, partisans differ in the shares who say each of these false claims is definitely or probably true, with Republicans and independents at least twice as likely as Democrats to believe or lean towards believing each false claim about measles. One-third of Republicans and a quarter of independents say it is “definitely” or “probably true” that the MMR vaccines have been proven to cause autism, compared to one in 10 Democrats; three in 10 Republicans and independents say it is “definitely” or “probably true” that vitamin A can prevent measles compared to 14 percent of Democrats; and one in five Republicans and independents believe or lean toward believing that the measles vaccine is more dangerous than measles infections compared to about one in 10 Democrats.
Republicans are believing things that are putting their own children at risk. We see again here how the MAGA cult is becoming a death cult that consumes the lives of its believers. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died preventably from the COVID virus.
Your chance of dying from COVID was about the same whether you were a Republican or a Democrat. The disease did not discriminate by political affiliation. But after vaccines became available, the disease began to discriminate. Suddenly, people in blue towns and blue states began to survive the disease at much higher rates than people in red towns and red states. Those deaths were overwhelmingly concentrated in areas where people were loyal to Republican ideas and listened to Republican influencers. The price of believing your favorite right-of-center influencer could have been your own life.
What kind of political movement sacrifices its own people in that way—to make some point, to make money, or to score a political jab against an opponent? It’s a little hard to explain exactly what they thought they were doing—it’s not hard to explain it. It’s a little unpleasant to contemplate the explanation of what they thought they were doing. But we can measure the effect of what they were doing in lost lives. And now with the spread of measles and the shrinkage of measles vaccines according to political affiliation, we can see this same horrible process of death by political partisanship reoccurring in the middle 2020s as at the beginning of the 2020s.
Against this spread of weaponized ignorance, what is needed is the clearest possible messages from everyone in positions of authority—whether public or private—that it is your duty as a parent to see that your child is vaccinated against preventable disease, and if your children are unvaccinated, you have failed in your duty as a parent. And that is a message that needs to be spread by everyone who’s in a position to spread a message. And the authorities should also say that in the hard cases where it can be shown that a child died because of an intentional failure by the parent to vaccinate the child, that parent should be held to account—in much the same way as, in my opinion, if the child died because of an unsecured firearm in the child’s home left there by a parent, the parent should be held to account. Protecting your child is your most important duty as a parent. Put the gun in a safe, and make sure the child is vaccinated.
And yet, instead, we are seeing people put into positions of high authority who are not only hesitant to spread that message, but in fact are the leading hoaxsters and fraudsters against the vaccines. At the head of the Department of Health and Human Services is the most notorious proponent of letting people suffer measles death—of spreading false claims, outrageous claims, debunked claims, exploded claims against the vaccines—and by the way, demeaning and insulting people who struggle with autism. People with autism can live meaningful lives, yet according to our present secretary, they’re no better than wasted lives and useless people who need to be counted in some kind of registry so we can keep tab of their numbers—for what sinister purpose, who can barely begin to imagine? But clearly not for a purpose of respect and dignity.
And because of this outrageous and cruel lack of regard for people who are on the autism spectrum—many of which scans a lot of cases, both worst cases and less-bad cases—he is urging Americans, or he has, over his lifetime, urged Americans to leave their children unvaccinated. And his secretary of Health and Human Services is staffing his agency with people who are mealy mouthed or worse in the fight against this preventable, unnecessary cause of death.
The anti-vax ideology comes from some strange places. It comes, I think, in the first place from a myth of a benign nature. That’s, I think, one of the reasons why it tended to, maybe before the Trump era, be so prevalent on certain parts of, like, the vegetarian left. If you believe that nature is kind and good and benign and only human—and the only wickedness is human—and if you are unaware of how massively human lives were at risk from disease before the modern era, it may seem like, Why am I intruding into my beautiful child’s body this sharp needle then that makes them squawk for a moment, and introducing these foreign substances? Why would I do that when nature wants us all to live and rejoice?
Well, nature doesn’t want you to live and rejoice. Nature is utterly indifferent to your hopes and wishes. (Laughs.) And if it were up to nature, half your children would be dead. You’d be dead, too, by age 50, at the latest. Nature is not our friend. Nature is a resource that we must protect and steward, but it is not our friend. It does not wish us well. It doesn’t have wishes at all.
I think some of the anti-vax cult also comes from another myth: the myth of malign government—not just that government is inefficient, as it often is, and clumsy, as it often is, but that actually there’s some kind of secret conspiracy up there of people who, for some bizarre and nefarious purpose, want to prevent Americans from enjoying the beneficent benignity of nature, and instead want to inject them with all of these artificial products like seatbelts. I think this is the part of the myth that has gained the upper hand most recently, this myth of conspiracy and government and other high places.
But the truth: Nature’s not benign, and government is not malign. But there are a lot of fraudsters out there. That’s the truth. And they have more ways of reaching people than ever before. And the cost of these frauds is becoming ever more terrible in lost human lives.
So as you listen to my talk today about Alan Bernstein—we’re going to talk about many of these issues. I think we’re going to try to talk as dispassionately as possible, but as I talk about them, I’m really angry about this. I’m really angry about this. It should be one of those things that, just as there are no Republican and Democrat ways to sweep the streets or shovel the snow, there should be no Republican or Democrat way, disagreement about protecting our children from preventable diseases.
All of us should salute vaccination. It’s one of the most magnificent achievements of human civilization. One of the ways that marks us off from all the sad eras that went before us, when parents had to grieve half their children before their third birthday or before their 20th birthday. We have an opportunity to live better, healthier lives than ever before in history. How could we refuse such a thing? And how much should we condemn and revile those people who deceive their fellow citizens into refusing this magnificent gift of science and technology?
So we’re going to speak dispassionately with Alan Bernstein. I’m not dispassionate about this. I hope you won’t be dispassionate either.
But first, a quick break.
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Frum: Alan Bernstein, welcome to The David Frum Show. Thank you for joining us.
You have spent your career as a practitioner of science, as a director of science, as an advisor to governments about science. It looks to those of us who are not scientists, like the government of the United States is engaged in a campaign against science of almost unprecedented historic proportions. As you and I speak, there is a measles outbreak in the United States—actually, there are 10 separate outbreaks, 800 cases, three dead as of the time we speak. There are dramatic firings and cuts to government agencies—the National Institutes [of] Health, the vaccine program. Progress toward cures for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s is supposed to have been slowed or maybe halted altogether. And, of course, there are these extraordinary pressures on medical and scientific research at universities.
So if you would offer your assessment, how much has been done to science in the United States in these past weeks?
Alan Bernstein: So first, David, it’s a pleasure to be on the show with you. First of all, backing up a little bit and just saying how important science has been to America’s success. I think people don’t quite appreciate that. But it goes back to, actually, World War II. And Harry Truman, when he was president, realized that in one way, science kind of won the war. It wasn’t just the atomic bomb: It was penicillin. It was radar. It was sonar.
And so he asked a guy called Vannevar Bush—I don’t think it’s a relation to the other Bushes—to make some recommendations about what America should do. And [Bush] wrote what’s a famous book in scientific circles called Science, the Endless Frontier. And in that book, Bush recommended that America invest heavily in science—and particularly in American universities—because it would lead to economic well-being. It would lead to power in the world. It would lead to security for America.
And I don’t know that anybody at that time appreciated just how right he was. Because if you look at the growth of the American economy and the growth of American well-being and health outcomes—anything you want to measure—the numbers are anywhere between 20 to 40 to 50 percent of America’s well-being, if you will, and growth in GDP and all those things, was due to science and innovation.
Today, as we’re witnessing kind of the destruction of the institutions behind American science, it’s hard to believe. It’s hard to believe that any administration would do this.
Frum: All right, well, destruction is a dramatic word. How severe is the damage?
Bernstein: I think it’s very severe, and it’s not just my own personal view. I was talking to a close friend at Stanford, actually, and she was talking: Even though Stanford has not been hit by one of the sort of things that Columbia or NYU—the East Coast so-called elite universities—have been hit by, they no longer are guaranteeing salaries for Ph.D. students who enter into the graduate program at Stanford. Stanford is a wealthy university, so they’re kind of circling the wagons and harvesting—you know, harboring—their funds in case that the Trump administration goes after them. So I think it’s hard to overstate how serious this is.
I think the thing we should all keep in mind is: By going after the institutions of science—so I would say there’s several categories, the funders of science. So the NIH—the National Institutes of Health—is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. By cutting its budget, by severely cutting its staff, it’s crippling the world’s major funder of biomedical research, never mind America’s major funder of biomedical research. By going after the top research universities in the United States—the Columbias, the Johns Hopkins, the Harvards, the Yales—it’s also crippling the major institutions that are supporting researchers in the U.S. That’s, first of all, unprecedented, of course, but it’s also crippling for the institutions that support science in the U.S., not just the individuals. So it’s hard to overstate how serious this is.
Frum: From my lay understanding, there are four main categories of scientific institutions that have come under a different kind of pressure.
There are the direct practitioners of science within the United States government: organizations like NASA, the aeronautics agency; NOIA, the oceanographic and atmospheric agency. The direct practitioners of science inside the government are under pressure. There’s also the government-funding institutions—as you said, the National Institutes [of] Health. These don’t do the work themselves. They make grants to others. They’re under pressure. There’s the kind of sword and shield of technological application at the Department of Defense—agencies in the Department of Defense that do cyber warfare, cybersecurity, cyber innovation. They’ve come under pressure. And finally, fourth—so first, direct science inside the government; second, funding; third, swords and shields—and fourth and last, the universities that get government grants but where government doesn’t direct how the money will be spent.
Is that the lay of the land? Have I got that correct?
Bernstein: You do, actually. That’s the sort of the etymology of American funding institutions.
And there are some that cover at least two. So the NIH, for example, has a very large so-called intramural program that funds research within government, in Bethesda, Maryland. And then there’s also institutions that actually fund—the NIH also funds science at American universities. So it does both.
You also left off in that list a very important one: the Department of Energy. It funds about $1 billion worth of research, both in-house and in American universities. And as you’d imagine, the Department of Energy traditionally has been one of the leading research institutions for funding research on climate change and renewable energy.
Frum: So there are budget cuts. There are personnel cuts. There’s also this immigration squeeze because the United States has often worked by attracting talent from all over the world, setting them to work in American universities. Many of those people then stay for the rest of their lives. Or, science being so global, there are many people in the scientific world who have spouses or partners who come from other countries, and their spouses or partners are under pressure, causing those scientists to reconsider their own careers. Tell me a little bit about the way the immigration pressures affect science.
Bernstein: Well, again, historically, America has been a magnet for scientific talent for almost the entire 20th century. It started with a flood during World War II when many émigrés from Germany, Austria, France, came to the U.S. And they set an important precedent. The success in building the atomic bomb under Oppenheimer was in large part due to those émigrés. The one person that jumps out to me is Enrico Fermi, who had the Fermilabs at the University of Chicago. He was an émigré from Italy.
And there are many, many others. And that tradition has continued. Young people from around the world want to come to America to do science for lots of obvious reasons, I think. One is: The institutions are so strong. They have their resources. They have the energy, the culture of: We can do anything, and if it’s going to be done, it’s going to be done in America. That sort of bravado is so characteristically American, and it’s evaporating before our eyes.
Secondly, of course, having the immigration people descending on some of the immigrants who are here on visas in the United States and either taking them away and imprisoning them, or sending them home at the drop of a hat without any kind of hearing, is sending a clear signal—not an ambiguous one, a clear signal: You are not welcome in the United States anymore. So if I was a young person working in Europe, in Canada, Australia, you name it, I would not go to the United States at the moment to do my postgraduate degree or training. It just wouldn’t happen. And indeed, I think that that pipeline of talent from abroad has probably shut down completely.
Frum: Let’s talk about your special area of expertise, which is infectious diseases. There seems to be a special malice toward innovation and research in that area. Under Robert Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services has announced they’re going to do all these investigations into well-attested vaccines whose safety and efficacy has been proven for dozens of years. Kennedy has promised some kind of big review in September. I don’t know why he’s taking that long. He knows the answer he wants and is going to enforce. He could do it tomorrow. Why the pretense that there’s any real work here? And we are seeing this extraordinary outbreak—or outbreaks—of measles across the United States. How does that connect with government policy? How alarmed should people be about these outbreaks?
Bernstein: You know, what’s particularly frustrating for me—and I’m sure many of my colleagues in America, in science and biomedical research, in particular—is: We are in a golden age in biomedical research. It is such an exciting time to be in this field, including in the vaccine field, because vaccines have been traditionally used against infectious disease. And indeed, it’s hard to estimate the number of lives that have been saved, because you can’t count what hasn’t happened. It’s hard to count that. You can count how many people die, but you can’t count how many people you’ve saved. But it’s of the order of hundreds of millions of people around the world whose lives have been saved because of vaccines.
Smallpox, which was the world’s largest killer over centuries, has been eradicated. There is no smallpox in the world today. It has [been] eliminated completely, largely through American know-how and American perseverance with the WHO, in partnership with the WHO. Ditto with polio and measles. So a young physician today has never seen smallpox, has never seen polio, has never seen measles. And so when it appears, they’re seeing a new disease.
Frum: Hmm.
Bernstein: And these were diseases, certainly when I was growing up—and I suspect, David, when you were growing up—my mother wouldn’t let me go swimming in a common swimming pool, because of polio. We don’t worry about polio anymore today. We shouldn’t, because, you know, children should be vaccinated. And Kennedy’s point that they haven’t been proven to be safe is really a criticism of the FDA. It’s saying that the FDA has not done their job properly. Well, if you look at the FDA, it is the gold standard for approving new drugs and vaccines. It’s very stringent. It really does a superb job, and it always outweighs the risks and the benefits of any drug, including vaccines.
And so it’s hard to imagine a medicine that has not got some risk associated to it. And the thing about vaccines, which makes it hard to sort convince somebody that they really are good and they should be taken—and their children should certainly take them—is when you take a pill when you’re sick and you get better, you go, Oh, that pill made me better. When you take a preventative vaccine, you don’t get ill.
And so there’s no miraculous recovery. There’s the absence of disease, and you could always say, and people do say this, Well, I wouldn’t have got the disease anyways. So it wasn’t the vaccine.
Frum: And sometimes your arm is a little sore, and sometimes you have a reaction to the introduction of the agent in the vaccine. And sometimes—if you are phobic—the vaccination is followed by all kinds of psychosomatic symptoms. And psychosomatic symptoms appear to the receiver of those symptoms just as real as, actually, symptoms caused by organic illnesses in the body. So people have a lot of reasons for attributing the problems in their lives to this disruption, especially if—and I’m surprised to discover how many people have this feeling—they are phobic about having a needle inserted into their body.
But one of the things that bothers me a lot: There’s an intellectual movement right now in the United States very properly to look back at the COVID experience and to learn lessons from it—as, of course, exactly should happen—and there’s a lot of criticism of measures that were taken that maybe overshot, and in particular, the decision to keep schools closed past the fall of 2020. States where schools opened pretty rapidly have done much better by children than states where schools were kept closed for long periods of time.
But this is essentially a politically right-coded movement, or when it’s done by more liberal people, there are people who are speaking to right-coded audiences. And I just read an important book published by a university press, by two liberal-leaning academics, and went through all the things that were done wrong, and many of which I agree with—keeping the schools closed too long. The book was called [In COVID’s Wake:] How [Our] Politics Failed Us. And they have one paragraph about vaccine resistance because they say, Well, that’s inherent in the population. Politics didn’t cause that.
Of course, politics killed those people. There’s a lot of research. They’re not randomly distributed. They are concentrated in red states and red counties. If you lived in a red state or red county, your leaders—political and cultural—the people you looked up to, risked your life and got many of your co-adherents killed in order to score political points. I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s shocking. It’s a crime. And we’ve accepted it as a normal part of politics.
Bernstein: So there’s a couple of interesting facts about all this. I think if we were talking about this 500 years from now or 300 years from now, and we look back and say, It’s remarkable that whether you wore a mask or not or took a vaccine or not at the height of this pandemic depended on your political party that you belong to, no one would believe you. You know, it’s like, In America? And yeah, it happened, and it happened five years ago. So that’s perplexing.
Now, I think, you know—I think there’s a mea culpa here. I think the scientific community everywhere did not do things perfectly. And I think what the mistake we made—and we need to make sure we don’t do it again—was to, as we talked to the public, say, Here are the facts. Here’s what we know you should do or not do, as opposed to saying, Here’s the facts as we know them today. This might change, and we’ve never encountered this virus before. We don’t know whether lockdowns are good, bad, or indifferent. Here’s the consequences of locking down, not locking down, etcetera. We needed some hubris here, some modesty, some admission that we don’t know everything. Science is based on evidence and facts. How can you have evidence before the fact?
So I think there was a bit of too much black-and-white “this is the way it is” on the part of the scientific community. And so when we first said, You should wear a mask—sorry, sorry—you should wash your hands and wash surfaces, and then weeks later, changed our mind and said, No, no, no. Actually, you should wear a mask because this virus is an aerosol; it’s not on surfaces, I think that caused a lot of lack of confidence amongst the general public about the scientific community.
Frum: I want to take that load of guilt off this. I think when scientists talk to the general public, they assume some basic grade-eight familiarity with science. So it is the most natural thing in the world for scientists to say something, square bracket, [state of knowledge today]. I mean, as you say, I have heard from many people, Well, they said one thing in March. They said a different thing in May. They said a different thing in September. How can we trust them?
I think, This is not religion. That’s how you know you should trust them. If they’d said the same thing all the way through, they’d be priests, not scientists. And the scientists assumed some basic literacy from the public, and they also assumed some good faith in the political system, where it’s not the job of scientists to communicate the science; it’s the job of political leaders. And those political leaders are unused to an atmosphere of such malice and distortion as existed in 2020 and even more in 2021.
I think a lot of what happened during COVID was: There had been a Republican president during 2020—he had mishandled the disease in many important ways. Then there was a Democratic president in 2021—things began to be handled somewhat better. And there was a political imperative to make 2021 a failure.
Bernstein: So, you know, I’m a scientist, so I’ll speak about the science. You know, the great—and you alluded to it, David—the great strength of science is that it’s not ideological. It’s based on the currently available data or evidence. And so when scientists change their mind, the public still—despite the grade-eight education that you refer to—the public still says, You’re changing your mind. That’s not good.
Whereas to the scientific community, that’s what it’s all about. That’s the strength of science, not the weakness of science. It’s not religion. It’s not an ideology, political ideology. And so I think it goes back to how we teach science in schools. We teach it as a series of facts, as opposed to the way to look at the world and to change our minds as the evidence changes.
Frum: Can I ask you about how powerful the stop–start button is for the scientific endeavor? So right now the government is pressing stop on Parkinson’s, stop on Alzheimer’s, stop on many vaccines. Five years from now, if you press start—four years from now, if you press start—how quickly does the start ignition sequence resume after the stop button that has been pressed today?
Bernstein: That’s a great question. And, you know, I think the right answer is: It depends. You know, we don’t know what the Trump administration is going to do tomorrow, never mind five years from now, so I think we all wake up in the morning wondering what the news will bear about what the Trump administration is doing now.
So I think a lot depends on how long these cuts—I’ll just use cuts or attack on universities and size—how long that goes on and how deeply those cuts actually are in the end of the day. And I don’t know the answers to either of those questions, and I don’t think anybody does. I don’t think President Trump does. So I think how quickly things recover will depend on those variables, and we don’t know the answer.
I do think that institutions take longer to recover than individuals. You know, the thing we all need to remember is: Talent can move. You know, I have a publication from Europe that has listed in its latest edition all the things that European countries are now doing to attract American scientists, especially young people who are finding that their careers are cut off or ended because of what’s going on. So talent can move to Europe easily.
And we’ll be watching to see what happens in the United States four years from now. If it doesn’t change, they’ll stay in Europe, just like the émigrés who moved to the United States when the atmosphere changed radically in Nazi Germany, for example, or Fascist Italy.
So what happens will depend on a lot of things, that I don’t pretend to know the future, but I do know that science is going to continue elsewhere, and particularly in the EU; Canada’s going to reinvest, and the new prime minister said he will reinvest in science; and in China. China is investing huge, huge amounts and increasing it by 10, 20 percent a year, over the next few years.
And so if one thinks about the standoffs between these two great superpowers—the United States and China—we have the United States attacking one of its most powerful weapons in the current 21st-century war between countries, and the Chinese investing. Now, which one do you think is right? Well, I go back to what Harry Truman said after World War II: Science played a major role in winning World War II.
The drones that were used—are being used—by Ukraine and in the war on Russia, those drones are largely powered by artificial intelligence. AI didn’t just happen. AI came out of universities. You know, the Nobel Prize in Physics this year went to Geoffrey Hinton, who works at the University of Toronto. So the new weapons of warfare are largely going to come out of universities. I think that’s not a prediction—that’s a safe prediction. And yet Americans are attacking those universities where all this is happening.
Frum: If you were to talk to people in the Trump administration about what they were doing, and if they were to answer you, which they tend not to do, but if they did, I think they would say, Look—we’re not waging a war on science. We’re waging a war on DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’re waging a war—we’re trying to stop all these crazy climate scientists who are bringing us news that either we don’t think is true or that we don’t want to hear. We are cracking down on the people who warn us about Russian disinformation, because we think that harms many of our friends and allies who are spreading Russian disinformation, often for pay. And I think they also have a sense of—there may be some sense of ideology that this research anyway should be done to the private sector, not the public sector. So: We’re not waging a war on science, as such. We have a very specific list of targets.
Do you see any merit to any of that? Is there anything that one could concede to the case that they’re prosecuting? Or is it just dumbassery all the way down?
Bernstein: Look—I don’t think universities are perfect. I think there is a lot of wokeism that probably has gone a bit too far. But having said that, I would quickly add the great strength of universities, and the role of universities and the role of acquiring new knowledge, is to challenge the status quo. You know, if you’re just going to reaffirm the status quo, you don’t need a university to do that.
And that goes back to Galileo, you know, 500 years ago. Galileo challenged the church. Does the Earth go around the sun or vice versa? So political leaders have to allow for this freedom and this openness and small-L liberalism that goes on in universities if they’re going to get the kind of value out of universities that have been going on for a thousand years now, since Oxford was created.
So I think there needs to be an understanding on the base of our political leaders that dissent, looking at different ways of doing things, can be uncomfortable, and that is the role of the universities. No other institution in society does that as well as a university. In fact, no other institution in society, as far as I can think, does that at all.
So I think we need to acknowledge that, and the politicians need to acknowledge that and tolerate it.
Frum: As we end, remind us of what the stakes are here. How close are we to breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other diseases that seem to be yielding to scientific investigation as we speak?
Bernstein: I don’t like predicting the future. And I don’t like—talking as a biomedical scientist, cancer has been my own area—I don’t like saying it’s around the corner, because then people lose interest after a while. But I do think, if I look in the immediate past, how remarkable the progress has been, not just in scientific advances, but in clinical advances. I think back to when my wife had breast cancer—now, as she reminded me, 15 years ago. She would not be alive today if she had had that cancer 25 years ago.
And certainly, when I started in cancer research—I won’t say how many years ago—we knew nothing about the cancer cell. And so the tools that clinicians had at their disposal were crude at best. Crude at best. Today we know the most intimate molecular changes that make a cancer cell behave differently than a normal cell. We know the mutations in the DNA that are causing these changes, and we know the effects on the proteins that those genes code for.
And so now we can design drugs that exploit those changes. And so if you’re a woman with breast cancer, you’re going to be treated if your cells are HER2-positive—I’m sure every woman knows that phrase—you’ll be treated with Herceptin because we know that molecular difference. If you have chronic myelogenous leukemia, you’ll be treated with Gleevec. Or if you have GI stromal cancer, you’ll be treated with Gleevec.
These are all based on information that’s come out over the last dozen years or so. Of course, now the big excitement—and not just in cancer, but in other diseases—is using vaccines to treat disease and to prevent disease. So again, these are advances that have happened recently and are on the horizon to continue to happen.
So I’ll take—in contrast to where cancer research is, which I view as the beachhead disease, if you will—if you think about mental illness, schizophrenia, bipolar disease, we have only very crude tools to treat those very serious diseases. And the reason is: We don’t understand those diseases. But I think every scientist who’s working in the field of biomedical science is optimistic that it is just a matter of time before we will understand really serious diseases like bipolar, depression, Alzheimer’s, dementia.
And from that will come a whole new class of drugs. And when that will happen, I don’t know. But what we have been seeing is an acceleration of new drugs coming on the market because of the advances that have been made at universities and exploited correctly by the pharmaceutical industry. So this is a very exciting time. And so to cut that off would be just a shame. Just a shame.
Frum: Thank you so much for your time today.
Bernstein: My pleasure, David.
[Music]
Frum: Thank you so much to Alan Bernstein. Now some questions from viewers and listeners.
The first comes from Nathan: “In Donald Trump’s first term, there were innumerable norm violations. The administration’s M.O. seemed to be, If there isn’t a law explicitly prohibiting an action, we can take that action. After Trump won, why were there no efforts to codify any of the gray areas or the ones that everyone had previously thought, No president would ever do that? Is it because people wanted to keep the possibility of using those same tactics open to themselves in the future? If so, what do you think that says about the direction of the country and the culture within the government?”
Now, first, I want to stress that there was one very important reform after the Trump administration, and that was the reform of the Electoral Count Act. The law now makes clear—as it mostly made clear before, but now it unmistakably makes clear—that the vice president of the United States does not have the authority to substitute his or her own judgment for the judgment of the people of the states in the electoral-count process. So one of the very worst things that Donald Trump tried to do—use violence to intimidate his vice president into overthrowing the 2020 election—that can’t be done anymore. And so that’s a change.
But for the most part, I think that’s right. I think we have been reluctant to. And part of it, I think, is just: It’s hard for Americans to take on board the magnitude of the criminality in the first Trump term. We, maybe, have made a serious mistake about that, as we see the even greater magnitude of criminality in the second Trump term.
But I would also caution there is a problem with trying to write things into law. The American culture and the American mentality are very legalistic. Americans tend to assume that the law is the divide, and they will often say, If something’s not illegal, that means it’s okay for me to do. But in life, there are lots of things that are not literally illegal but that you still shouldn’t do. And in a free society, we don’t write down everything that could be an offense and try to turn it into law. We have to rely to some degree on the public spirit and decency of people, and that needs to be especially true with people in the highest reaches of the land.
We talked about this last week with Peter Keisler, the former [acting] attorney general under George W. Bush. To some degree, democracy is going to have to be the answer here. We cannot write laws for everything. We can’t anticipate every contingency. What we can say, instead, is with the famous prayer of John Adams that is carved into the lintel, or into the mantelpiece, of the East Room, “Let none but honest and wise men”—update that to men and women. “Let none but honest and wise men and women rule under this roof.” We have seen what happens when there is an abuser, and we may have outrun the limits of law.
From K.C.: “It seems to me that there is an argument that Trump and Republican legislators are acting as if there will never be another Democratic majority or administration that might hold investigations or hearings into their behavior. This leads me to believe that the ’26 and ’28 elections won’t be rigged. Rather, I’m beginning to believe that Trump will look for ways—a national emergency, perhaps—not to hold them at all. Your thoughts? Am I worrying needlessly?”
No one is worrying needlessly when they worry about the integrity of the 2026 and 2028 elections. I worry about it all the time. But we need to focus what it is exactly we’re worried about. For Donald Trump to try to turn off the elections altogether by declaring a national emergency and calling out the Army and using powers leftover from the Cold War and World War II, that’s a constitutional crisis. In the end, that is the kind of scenario that is met by people in the streets and is met by officers of the Army refusing to obey illegal orders from the president.
I think that case is so intense that we can’t plan for it. What we can plan for are the things that we can see that are already underway, and those are attempts to sabotage vote counts, to make it difficult for the Democrats to fundraise—or any opponent of Donald Trump to fundraise—and to concentrate sabotaging efforts in the states that are most likely to swing one way or another; the Wisconsins, the North Carolinas, the Georgias. It’s a state-level problem.
So where I think your energy needs to go is in focusing attention on your state governors, state legislators, and state courts to make sure that they will uphold honest, free, and fair elections in the respective states. We have seen the enormous pressure in the state of North Carolina to prepare a false outcome in 2026. Citizen vigilance has been mobilized, and citizen vigilance needs to stay mobilized. Again, it’s a democratic problem, and your attention is the best answer. So if there’s something you want to do between now and 2026, make sure that the vote will be honest in the states where the vote is most in doubt.
Last, from Josh: “I’m a high-school government teacher, so much of my teaching is centered on hope and optimism about our civic system and our citizenry. Hope and optimism felt like a lie in the Trump era. Is there a hopeful and optimistic message that properly addresses the current climate that I can give to my students?”
Now, as I’m sure Josh well understands, it’s not the place of a teacher to tell students, particularly near voters like those in high school, what they should think or who they should support. Many students will have many different views, and that’s as it should be. And all of the points of view should, of course, be treated with attention and respect in the classroom. But I think a message that a teacher can communicate is to say to the students, This is a moment where their country really needs them. And it’s an honor and a privilege to be alive at a time when your country needs you, and without telling them the exact nature of that need, and without, in any way, presuming to direct their actions, to make them feel like their vote matters and their actions matter.
You know, as we’ve discussed today, a lot of the secret weapon of Trumpism is cynicism and despair, and a feeling like, Oh well. Things are unfolding without me. LOL nothing matters. But everything matters. Your students matter. Teach them that, and watch them be better citizens.
Thank you so much for the questions. Please send next week’s to [email protected]. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Remember, please: It matters a lot to the algorithm gods that you rate and review and like and subscribe, whether you listen on an audible podcast or whether you view us on YouTube. Thanks for your comments on YouTube. Those also really matter, and I try to read as many of them as I can. I don’t always respond, but I see so many of them, and I’m so grateful for them and so often touched by their warmth.
Thank you for watching this episode. See you again next week. I’m David Frum.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
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