Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, has focussed much of her career on examining distrust of science in the United States. In 2010, she and the historian Erik M. Conway published “Merchants of Doubt,” which examined the ways in which politics and big business have helped sow doubt about the scientific consensus. Her most recent book, “Why Trust Science?,” examines how our idea of the scientific method has changed over time, and how different societies went about verifying its accuracy. Her work often addresses climate change and why Americans have rejected climate-change science more than people in other countries have.

I recently spoke with Oreskes by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the Trump Administration’s slow response to the pandemic, the Republican Party’s antiscientific propaganda, and strategies for convincing Americans that the threat of the coronavirus is real.

When you see the way people have responded to the new coronavirus, both in government and average people, do you think the response reflects what you’ve studied regarding the distrust of science?

There’s been a lot of loose talk about distrust in science. The reality is that, if we look at careful public-opinion polls, what we see is that most people do trust science on most things, and most people trust experts on most things. People trust their dentists. People trust their car mechanics. In general, people use experts all the time, and most of us don’t spend a lot of time second-guessing experts on most issues. There are some definite exceptions to that. If we have reason to believe that people are dishonest or incompetent, then we may be skeptical. But, when it comes to science, the big exception has to do with what I’ve written about, which is implicatory denial. That is to say, we reject scientific findings because we don’t like their implications.

All of the major areas where we see resistance to scientific findings in contemporary life fall into this category. So if you ask yourself, Why do people reject the evidence of evolution? It’s not because evolutionary theory is a bad theory, or a weak theory scientifically, or that we don’t have good evidence for it. It’s because some people think that it implies that there’s no God, or that it implies that life is meaningless and has no purpose, or that it’s all just random and nihilistic. If we think about vaccinations, it’s a similar sort of thing. It’s not that the science of immunology is a bad science or a weak science. It’s not that the people who reject immunization really understand immunology and have an intellectual critique. It’s a matter of, if their children are autistic, they feel upset that their children have a quite devastating disease and modern medical science doesn’t have an explanation for it. So they feel upset and they want an explanation, and so they turn to something like vaccinations, and they say, “Well, that’s the cause.” And so on and so forth with climate change, et cetera.

This is important because it means that you don’t persuade these people by giving them more scientific facts. But, in some cases, you can persuade them by, in the case of evolution, saying, “Well, actually, evolutionary theory doesn’t really disprove the existence of God, and it doesn’t mean that life is meaningless.” And it’s through engagement in that kind of conversation that sometimes you can actually make some progress.

This idea that we reject science because it clashes with our beliefs or experience—how does that explain why people in Miami, whose homes are going to be flooded, reject global-warming science? Is it partisanship?

The phrase I used was implicatory denial. What we found in “Merchants of Doubt” was that the original merchants of doubt, the people who started the whole thing, way back in the late nineteen-eighties, didn’t want to accept the implication that capitalism, as we know it, had failed—that climate change was a huge market failure and that there was a need for some kind of significant government intervention in the marketplace to address it. So, rather than accept that implication, they questioned the science. Now these things get complicated. People are complicated. One of the things that’s happened with climate change over the last thirty years is that, because climate-change denial got picked up by the Republican Party as a political platform, it became polarized according to partisan politics, which is different than, say, vaccination rejection.

And so then it became a talking point for Republicans, and then it became tribal. So now you have this deeply polarized situation in the United States where your views on climate change align very, very strongly with your party affiliation. And now we see a cognitive dissonance. Let’s say you live in Florida, and you’re now seeing flooding on a rather regular basis. This is completely consistent with the scientific evidence, but you don’t accept it as proof of the science. You say, “Oh, well, we’ve always had flooding, or maybe it’s a natural variable.” You come up with excuses not to accept the thing that you don’t want to accept.

Let’s turn to the coronavirus. The Administration’s response was extremely slow, which could be explained by your theory, by the fact that the Administration didn’t want to see this for political reasons or just didn’t want to deal with it. Do you agree with that?

I do agree. And when you think about the position that Republican Administrations have taken over the last thirty years, it not only makes total sense—it’s completely predictable that this Administration did exactly what it did. They didn’t want to acknowledge the severity of the issue, because this is a textbook example of why we need a federal government. In fact, I’ve noticed that, just in the last week or so, increasingly I’m seeing people writing things like “Coronavirus proves the need for big government.” Because it’s really difficult to control a pandemic on the state or local level. The C.D.C. is a federal agency. The National Institutes of Health is a federal agency. All of the organizations we have that are set up to deal with a crisis of this type are federal agencies.

And so for the Trump Administration to have acted briskly and promptly and in line with the scientific evidence on this would have been for it to embrace the role of the federal government and say, “This is exactly why we have a powerful federal government. This is exactly why we have federal agencies of this sort.” So I think that it would have been much easier for any Democrat to have responded to this issue than for any Republican to have responded. And then you add on to it Donald Trump’s particular—how should I put this politely?—reflex to be hostile to science and hostile to experts. Add that into the mix and I think that’s exactly what you’d expect.

Right. I don’t think Trump’s response and skepticism about its seriousness was motivated by some deep, small-“C” conservative concern about the size of the federal government.

Right, exactly. You add them both together and there’s a pretty dangerous combination. That’s why it makes sense that we saw what was essentially a two-month delay in having the kind of response that we should have had on this issue.