After blasting "ideology" in science, the US drinks trade is silent on Trump's public-health purge

A week before Donald Trump officially returned to the White House, a coalition of nearly 100 trade groups in and around the United States’ beverage-alcohol industry issued a press release condemning a major report on drinking as “the product of a flawed, opaque and unprecedented process, rife with bias and conflicts of interest.”

On its website, the group, Science Over Bias, extrapolated broader, more existential consequences should the federal public-health establishment rely on the supposedly shoddy science, published in mid-January by a committee within the Department of Health and Human Services: “A biased review process will undermine government programs and trust in government recommendations.”

That sounds like public-health advocacy. But a month and a half later, with the Trump administration purging public-health agencies of vital data and thousands of employees and installing under-qualified, ideological MAGA operatives to run them, neither Science Over Bias nor its biggest members have anything to say about it.

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