Thought experiment: Imagine you’re waiting in the exam room for your annual physical to begin when your doctor walks in with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. As he begins to review your chart, he sees that you’re also a smoker and proceeds to lecture you about the dangers of cigarettes—in between drags of his Marlboro. When you point out his rank hypocrisy, he tells you to shut up and insists that he’s the expert. Then he abruptly moves on to his next appointment.
Would you trust this doctor to take care of you? Obviously not. No sensible person would accept such absurd treatment from a health care provider. And while the example above is fictional, it accurately illustrates the degree of hypocrisy Americans are expected to tolerate when it comes to erroneous medical advice. The very public health experts and organizations that demand our trust and urge us to avoid “misinformation” routinely spread obvious nonsense when it suits their ideological goals.
We could discuss any number of cases, though I want to focus on one of the most egregious, courtesy of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). As it wildly exaggerates the risks of pesticide exposure to children, the APP supports the use of dangerous puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to transition minors to the “right” gender.
This sort of hypocrisy is rapidly eroding the public’s faith in medicine. If we want to solve the “misinformation” crisis, we need scientists and doctors to stop passing off absolute insanity as sensible public health guidance.
AAP misleads parents about pesticides
In December 2023, AAP released a clinical report summarizing the alleged health risks linked to pesticides used with genetically engineered crops, primarily the weedkiller glyphosate (Roundup). We and several other outlets responded last fall by noting that glyphosate poses little risk to human health, a conclusion endorsed by 17 regulatory and scientific agencies globally and many independent studies besides.
Relying on cherry-picked, critically flawed research, AAP flouted this consensus, concluding that glyphosate may cause cancer and could be “a sex-specific endocrine disruptor” that alters hormone production. As a result, the authors recommended that pediatricians “emphasize the benefits of many minimally processed, affordable foods that are not bioengineered.”
The report was blasted by a team of expert critics, including AAP member Dr. Nicole Keller. After urging the organization for eight months to correct the article’s many flaws, she published her five-page letter to the editor-in-chief of AAP’s journal Pediatrics. Keller was especially alarmed by AAP’s willingness to undermine trust in the same public health agencies it otherwise considers authoritative:
“Unfortunately, in the end, the overall tone of this report and the accompanying parental piece give impressions that agricultural technologies (genetic engineering and pesticides) haven’t been thoroughly researched and that our foods aren’t monitored for safety - albeit by the same government agencies the AAP trusts to ensure vaccine and medication safety … It would have been refreshing to see the AAP take this opportunity to quell food fears by discussing the full breadth of evidence.”
AAP allowed Keller to publish a short comment below the clinical report; however, the article itself has not been retracted or even corrected. When Keller and her colleagues submitted an extensive critique of the clinical report to Pediatrics, the reviewers rejected it as irrelevant to the journal’s audience.
Gender-affirming endocrine disruption
AAP’s scaremongering about agriculture is bad enough on its own, but it’s made worse by the organization’s stance on so-called “gender-affirming care” for children. AAP maintains–again, despite fierce criticism from its own membership–that transgender youth should “have access to comprehensive, gender-affirming, and developmentally appropriate health care that is provided in a safe and inclusive clinical space.”
In practice that often means giving healthy children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, drugs that disrupt the natural production of testosterone and estrogen and carry serious side effects, including an elevated risk of infertility and sexual dysfunction. Critically, these treatments have not been extensively studied for use in gender-affirming care.
Recent systematic reviews of both interventions (see here and here) found “a lack of high-quality research” that they are safe and effective in this context. Previously, researchers have argued that transgender medicine has “a penchant for exaggerating what is known about the benefits of [transitioning children], while downplaying the serious health risks and uncertainties.” The AAP is well aware of these conclusions but refuses to modify its stance on the issue, even as medical experts around the world grow increasingly skeptical of gender-affirming care.
In other words, AAP endorses the use of experimental endocrine-disrupting chemicals in children if it serves a politically fashionable purpose. Yet AAP warns parents and pediatricians that a thoroughly tested and tightly regulated weedkiller poses a risk to kids because it‘s—an endocrine disruptor. In a blog post published after the clinical report appeared, two of its authors asserted that:
“Measurable amounts of glyphosate can be found in GMO foods. Babies can absorb GMOs through their parent's system even before they're born. GMO exposure has been linked with higher risks for premature [“birth” presumably], disrupted hormone systems and abnormalities of the reproductive organs.”
Like AAP’s other claims about glyphosate, these allegations are also groundless. Nobody, not the EPA, the National Toxicology Program nor any group of independent researchers, has uncovered sound evidence that the weedkiller causes any of these effects.
Hypocrisy kills trust in science
The AAP is either unintentionally promoting misinformation about gender-affirming care and pesticides, or it’s simply lying about the evidence to promote its ideological goals—spreading disinformation. I’ll leave it to the reader to judge the organization’s intentions. What’s undeniable is that neither behavior is acceptable from such a prestigious institution, especially since the AAP lectures everybody else about the dangers of spreading mis- and disinformation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, AAP partnered with the federal government on multiple occasions to combat anti-vaccine messaging. Quoting surgeon general Vivek Murthy, the AAP rather shamelessly warned that:
“Health misinformation is a serious threat to public health. It can cause confusion, sow mistrust, harm people’s health, and undermine public health efforts. Limiting the spread of health misinformation is a moral and civic imperative that will require a whole-of-society effort.”
That much is true. We have a critical problem on our hands with more than a quarter of Americans (27%) declaring they have “not too much or no confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests,” Pew reported in December 2023. What few people in the science community will acknowledge is that they, by endorsing all sorts of fashionable nonsense, are partly to blame for their dwindling credibility with the public. AAP’s chicanery is only the latest example in this disturbing trend.
Elon Musk didn’t declare that men can breastfeed; that shameful pronouncement came from the CDC. Alex Jones didn’t originate the spurious vaccine-autism link; a leading medical journal did. Donald Trump’s Department of Education didn’t promote creation myths alongside science; that was the American Museum of Natural History. And the examples go on.
I do agree with the AAP on one thing: we should launch a “whole-of-society effort” to battle misinformation. But it needs to start with our expert class, the people who have absolutely no excuse for spreading harmful propaganda.
Cameron English
Director of Bioscience
Cameron English is a writer, editor and co-host of the Science Facts and Fallacies Podcast. Before joining ACSH, he was managing editor at the Genetic Literacy Project.
