Scientists relieved as Joe Biden wins tight US presidential election

[lapucelle]

Scientists relieved as Joe Biden wins tight US presidential election

The new president has the opportunity to reverse four years of anti-science policies — but he has a hard road ahead as he inherits a nation divided.

... “Our long national nightmare is over,” says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin Law School, quoting president Gerald Ford’s famous 1974 remarks about his predecessor Richard Nixon’s scandal-ridden term. “I couldn’t say it any better than that.”

Despite votes still being counted and legal challenges from Trump and his team in some states, major media outlets in the United States declared Biden the victor on 7 November, after confirming that he won Pennsylvania and captured enough electoral college votes to claim victory. Once Biden takes office on 20 January, he will have an opportunity to reverse many policies introduced by the Trump administration that were damaging to science and public health. This includes actions on climate change, immigration and the COVID-19 pandemic, which could claim more than a quarter of a million lives in the United States before Trump leaves office in January.

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Top priorities
One of Biden’s first orders of business will be to put a more aggressive pandemic response plan in place. On 6 November, the United States saw more than 130,000 new coronavirus infections recorded in a single day — the highest number reported anywhere across the globe since the outbreak began.

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Another top priority for Biden will be to reverse many of the policies impacting climate, the environment and public health put into place under Trump.

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Although Biden’s election represents an imminent end to a presidency that often disregarded truth, science and evidence, many scientists fear that the movement launched by Trump will continue to haunt the United States well after he has left office.

“The political defeat of Trump is enormously important. But this is not a repudiation of this larger assault on democratic civility in the United States,” says Zia Mian, a physicist and co-director of the Program in Science and Global Security at Princeton University in New Jersey. Trump has undermined core values of truth and equality, Mian says, and without those, “democratic debate is not possible”.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03158-8?fbclid=IwAR0rNaZYvJj0J3FKnez6lou0C62a9n7jdfThom7t4r3E_N8YXvmeqh-Oj54&utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=c8f313644b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-c8f313644b-394789169

[Dream Girl]

1. They ain't the only ones to be relieved.

[lapucelle]

2. It's telling that an esteemed science journal like Nature

is even weighing in so strongly on a political matter.

[LizBeth]

3. Was it tight thought? I think we need to call that. Because so many voted mail in and took longer,

doesn't mean it was tight. That is one of the reasons it needed to be called, people were defining the race as tight and as of now Biden is over 4 million, almost 5 of the votes. And well over EV picking up states lost before.