Of course, since 2017 America has been governed by a White House that, with some help from Capitol Hill, hates science as much as it loves nukes. It’s not even clear why the Trump administration dismantled the National Security Administration’s task force that dealt with pandemics, or why the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had to cut two-thirds of its staff in China in the two years before the coronavirus, or why Trump’s budgets repeatedly called for cuts in CDC spending while the Pentagon got its blank check. Maybe it’s because taking science seriously would mean acknowledging the other invisible enemy — climate change — or maybe just because Trump’s disdain for eggheads with stethoscopes is equal to his man-crush on men in uniform. All I know is that the nation with the world’s largest defense budget has been rendered utter defenseless.