When President Trump announced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his pick for Health and Human Services secretary, he declared that the appointment marked the return of “Gold Standard Scientific Research” in the U.S.

In May 2025 Trump signed the “Restoring Gold Standard Science” executive order. Agencies including NASA and the Department of Energy filed reports on how their science met the official White House “gold standard.” Administration figures peppered public remarks, publications and social media posts with the phrase.

On paper, the administration’s nine-point definition for “gold standard science” reads like a list of fundamental research integrity principles that any scientist would endorse: science that is reproducible, transparent, forthcoming on error and uncertainty, collaborative, skeptical, built on falsifiable hypotheses, impartially peer reviewed, accepting of negative results and free of conflicts of interest.

In practice, critics say, the phrase has become shorthand for science in which preferred outcomes outweigh inconvenient evidence.

“This use of ‘gold standard science’ is deceptive. It sounds really good on its face. It’s advocating for things that are normative in the scientific community,” said Jules Barbati-Dajches, an analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group.

The same executive order that turned the term into a policy rolled back all scientific integrity policies established during the Biden administration, Barbati-Dajches pointed out, making it harder to pursue and publish scientific findings without threat of political interference.

“It undercuts all of the values and standards and principles that were already being prioritized and implemented in federal agencies,” Barbati-Dajches said.

The executive order describes a decline in public trust in science that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. It cites examples in which government agencies “used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner,” such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s school-reopening guidelines, a contentious count of the North Atlantic right whale population by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the use by several government agencies of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warming model that the executive order describes as “highly unlikely.”

“The Trump administration is ensuring that political agendas and ideologies never again corrupt policymaking that should be guided only by Gold Standard Science,” White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in response to questions from The Times. “So-called ‘scientists’ who are only now concerned that politics are being prioritized over evidence after having stayed silent during the pandemic era are either delusional or partisan hacks.”

Credible, reliable and impartial evidence is the goal of legitimate science. But “the use of the term ‘gold standard science’ is being preferentially used based on the context,” said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who resigned as director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases in August over concerns that its new leadership was not taking an “evidence-based approach to things,” he said at the time.

Jernigan cited Kennedy’s changes to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC on vaccinations. The committee had long followed a set of guidelines known as the Evidence to Recommendations framework, which establishes clear rules for how different types of evidence must be weighed and evaluated when making decisions.

Kennedy replaced the entire 17-member committee with a handpicked group heavily weighted toward vaccine skepticism. “Public trust has eroded,” Kennedy said at the time. “Only through radical transparency and gold standard science, will we earn it back.”

The reconstituted group largely abandoned the framework, allowing the committee to judge evidence of dubious quality alongside large randomized controlled trials.

Its first meeting included an error-filled presentation from a vaccine skeptic on the preservative thimerosal that focused only on a few reports of the shot harming individuals, but left out the many studies that have shown its safety across large populations. The committee ultimately voted not to recommend further vaccines containing thimerosal, which was already removed from childhood vaccines in 2001.

Meanwhile, Jernigan noted, National Institutes of Health director and acting CDC director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya has continued to delay the release of a study that found COVID-19 vaccines reduced hospitalizations related to the virus by 55%.

According to media reports, the study used hospital patients’ vaccination status to calculate the success of the season’s vaccine, a method long used to determine flu vaccine effectiveness. Bhattacharya reportedly wanted to wait for a randomized clinical trial — a method that scientists frequently cite as the “gold standard” for determining an intervention’s effectiveness, but one that is expensive and too time-consuming to evaluate the success of a seasonal flu or COVID-19 shot.

Accepting a lower standard of evidence for vaccines’ reported harms than for their apparent benefits “is not a good way to practice science: that your ideology, your decision about how things should be, determines what your evidence is,” Jernigan said.

The Trump administration didn’t coin the term “gold standard science,” which has been floating around for at least half a century as a label for top-quality research methods. Over the decades, critics have pointed out that it’s not as shiny a metaphor as it seems.

In finance, the gold standard fixes a currency’s value against a specific quantity of a specific object. But in science, nothing is fixed. Old conclusions and beliefs are constantly being overwritten as new evidence comes to light.

“Gold standard science in 1990 would be malpractice in some respects in 2026, and five years from now the gold standard may have changed again, because we’re constantly innovating,” said David Blumenthal, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the book “Whiplash: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science.”

“Science is changeable and the methods improve constantly, and the people who are most familiar with the possibilities and realities of those methods are the people doing the work at any given time,” he said. “And if they’re not involved, then it’s not gold standard.”

Animals traded through global wildlife markets are far more likely to carry diseases that can infect humans, and the risk grows the longer those species remain in circulation, according to a new study.

The analysis, published Thursday in Science, examined decades of global wildlife trade data and found that 41% of traded mammal species share at least one pathogen with humans, compared with just 6.4% of species not involved in trade.

The researchers also found that the number of pathogens shared between animals and humans increases over time. On average, a species acquires one additional human-infecting pathogen for every decade it is present in the global wildlife trade.

The findings suggest that wildlife trade does not simply expose humans to existing disease risks, but may actively amplify them over time.

“Our study is the strongest evidence to date that reducing wildlife trade will reduce pandemic risk,” said Colin Carlson, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health and a co-author of the study.

Scientists have already long linked wildlife trade to specific outbreaks such as HIV, Ebola and COVID-19. The new research, which draws on 40 years of global trade records and pathogen data, attempts to measure the relationship on a larger scale.

The results point to a broader pattern. Repeated and prolonged contact between humans and wild animals creates more opportunities for pathogens to move between species.

“What stands out most is how clearly the findings reinforce something many of us in disease ecology have been concerned about for years: it’s not just the presence of wildlife trade, but the intensity and duration of contact that elevates risk,” said Thomas Gillespie, a professor of environmental sciences and environmental health at Emory University, who was not involved in the study.

Wildlife trade, as defined in this study, includes a wide range of activities, from hunting and breeding to transport, storage and sale. At each stage, animals are handled, confined and often brought into close proximity with both humans and other animal species. These conditions can facilitate the spread of viruses, bacteria and parasites.

Over time, those repeated interactions create more opportunities for pathogens to circulate, adapt and potentially spill over into human populations.

Carlson said one of the most striking findings was how strongly time in trade predicted pathogen sharing.

“That time-in-trade effect is the smoking gun,” he said. “We wouldn’t see that unless pathogens were jumping from animals to humans.”

He added that the findings suggest wildlife trade should be considered one of the major drivers of disease emergence, alongside deforestation, agriculture and climate change.

The study also found that certain forms of trade may carry higher risks. Species sold in live-animal markets were more likely to share pathogens with humans than those sold as meat or animal products. Illegally traded species also were more likely to be the cause of disease, though researchers emphasized that risk is not limited to illicit markets.

“Focusing on illegal wildlife trade is not enough,” said Meredith Gore, a conservation criminologist at the University of Maryland and a co-author of the study. “Pathogen transmission is a consequence of general and diverse uses of wildlife by people. This includes illegal and legal trade.”

Most international frameworks governing wildlife trade, including the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, were designed primarily to protect species from overexploitation, according to Gore.

“There are clear and currently unmet opportunities for more directly including zoonotic disease risk consideration into current regulations,” Gore said.

In particular, the global nature of the trade complicates efforts to manage risk.

“Animals and pathogens do not care about political borders,” said Jérôme Gippet, a biologist at the University of Fribourg and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the study’s lead author. “Without globally coordinated efforts, I do not see how we can limit these risks efficiently.”

The researchers say their findings underscore the need for a more coordinated approach that bridges conservation, public health and trade policy and treats wildlife trade as a central driver of global health risk. The study’s findings also highlight gaps in disease surveillance systems, which often fail to detect pathogens circulating in wildlife before they reach humans.

“Risk is accumulating in a way that current surveillance isn’t capturing,” said Evan Eskew, a disease ecologist at the University of Idaho and a co-author of the study.

Few countries, he said, systematically track which species are being traded across their borders, and even fewer conduct routine pathogen screening in those animals. As a result, potential threats can go undetected until they spill over into human populations.

Eskew said expanding surveillance, particularly for species already known to carry zoonotic pathogens, could help identify risks earlier and prevent outbreaks from spreading.

“We need to be looking for the next pandemic virus on fur farms, in hunting communities, and even at border checkpoints where wildlife are imported,” Carlson said. “Right now, we’re flying blind, especially in places where we’ve criminalized wildlife trade and driven it underground.”