The Pro-Science Left Is More Pro-Left Than Pro-Science

By Noah Rothman

Monday, August 10, 2026

 

An organization “promoting science” is dragging Senator Mark Kelly into the 2028 presidential race, according to Axios’s Holly Otterbein.

 

The “liberal group” 314 Action Fund has taken Kelly under its wing as part of its effort to promote “candidates with STEM backgrounds who’ve pitched themselves as a bulwark against public health cuts and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”

 

In the reporter’s estimation, the most controversial thing about the outfit is that it had “received funding” from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. Rather, the most scandalizing aspect about the organization is that it is associated with “science” at all.

 

314 Action’s boosters contend that its goal is to “depoliticize science and restore evidence to a central place in the policymaking process” by electing “more scientists as lawmakers.” For the most part, the organization has attacked the Trump administration — specifically, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and what they allege are his contributions to America’s declining childhood vaccination rates.

 

It’s not so much what the organization is against that raises suspicions about their commitment to science. Rather, it’s what the outfit is for that deserves scrutiny.

 

Take, for example, a 30-second spot attacking the Democratic Party’s last-minute substitution in Maine’s U.S. Senate election, Troy Jackson, whom 314 Action attacked during his run for governorship based on his “extreme anti-abortion” views.

 

Troy insisted that the ad misrepresented his views, which is possible insofar as “views” were all that were on offer in this advertisement. As attack ads go, there’s nothing illegitimate about putting Jackson’s evolving outlook on abortion before voters, but nor were voters presented with the “evidence and facts” about the practice that 314 Action exists to promote.

 

What the organization was doing was boosting their preferred candidate in Maine’s gubernatorial election, former Maine CDC director Dr. Nirav Shah. Mainers remember Shah as a calming presence during the pandemic, primarily because he was “ubiquitous.” Yet, the pro-science community has refused to grapple with his more questionable pandemic-era edicts.

 

Among them, universal masking for children in the state’s schools until as late as March 2022. “Why is it too dangerous for my kids to go to school masked, but I can walk into any bar in the state right now mask-less and have a good time?” one distressed Mainer asked at the time. She’s not yet received an answer, and the pro-science crowd doesn’t seem curious enough to ask for one.

 

Pine Tree State public health officials were similarly unable to explain the state’s bizarre and hopelessly porous quarantining policies for out-of-state visitors. “‘Science’ has helped [Governor Janet Mills] to determine that the people of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut are so uncontaminated with the virus that they can enter Maine without following her decree of a 14-day quarantine or submitting to a test within two days of entering the state,” read a reader’s note to the Portland Press Herald in the summer of 2020. “People from Massachusetts, however, are contaminated and cannot.”

 

Inconsistencies like these were common throughout the pandemic, but those invested in “promoting science” seem reluctant to scrutinize them. That is not to say, however, that outfits like 314 Action are wholly allergic to retrospection on the pandemic. They’re only averse to reflections on that era that might reflect poorly on left-of-center policymakers.

 

“While Donald Trump and RFK Jr. gut health care, cherry-pick data, and put corporate interests ahead of working people,” 314 Action’s executive director, Erik Polyak, said in May, Georgia lawmaker Jasmine Clark has been “calling out misinformation.” There is some truth to that.

 

Clark was one of several Democratic elected officials who identified what Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s administration later called a “processing error” that incorrectly showed a decline in the number of new Covid cases in the spring of 2020. Georgia’s Department of Public Health attributed the mistake to serologic testing, which was not as effective at identifying exposure to Covid as nasal swab tests. “We apologize for the error and the confusion,” the Department added.

 

That did not satisfy Clark, who accused the Kemp administration of “falsifying data” — a “prime example of malfeasance.” That’s an odd thing to hear from those who are consistently asking the public to forgive the pandemic’s excesses by citing the novelty of our circumstances. It was a time of experimentation and great uncertainty, we were told. Presumably, the forbearance they ask us to observe when evaluating their performance does not extend to Republicans.

 

Otterbein was right to describe 314 Action as a “liberal group” first, an outfit devoted to electing “scientists to public office” second. It seems what they’re more after are candidates who lend superficial scientific authority to whatever Democratic orthodoxy happens to be at any given moment.