Dr. Céline Goundermedical correspondent, CBS News · physician, epidemiologist, medical journalist

It's Not Anti-Science. People Think Science Doesn't Work for Them. | celinegounder.com

Name: It's Not Anti-Science. People Think Science Doesn't Work for Them. | celinegounder.com
Uploaded: 2026-05-17T05:12:43+00:00
Duration: 51 s
Channel: Dr. Céline Gounder
Description: Dr. Céline Gounder argues that people aren't rejecting science itself, but feel it doesn't work for them. U.S. taxpayers fund NIH research that gets…

17 May 2026 · 1 min

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Dr. Céline Gounder argues that people aren't rejecting science itself, but feel it doesn't work for them. U.S. taxpayers fund NIH research that gets commercialized into treatments too expensive to afford. During Ebola outbreaks, communities saw scientific interventions as distant and irrelevant to their actual needs.

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And the thing that I keep coming back to is people keep saying to me, we have this anti-science phenomenon. It's all about anti-science and global anti-science. And I'm like, maybe that's not it. When I talk to people, it's not that they don't think science doesn't work. They think that it doesn't work for them. For them. For them. And I think about my parents here in the US, and I think about them being like, 'Who cares about the NIH? I pay a bunch of money in taxes, and then a bunch of research gets done at a university, and then they sell these really fancy things from the NIH to these companies that make a bunch of money off of it, charge me a bunch of money that I can't pay.' And it becomes this weird distant abstraction. So it's not necessarily anti-science, it's that disbelief that science doesn't work for them. And I think we've seen that over and over again, particularly in Ebola outbreaks, and I suspect we'll probably see some version of that here soon.