At a roundtable at Louisiana State University on Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence paused to make what he clearly felt was a vital point.

To be very clear, he said, we dont want CDC guidance to be a reason why people dont reopen their schools.

In other words, schools and universities, which the Trump administration is pushing to rapidly reopen despite surging coronavirus infections in many states, need not heed the advice of scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nations premier public health agency, as they reopen amid an ongoing pandemic that has killed more than 136,000 people in the U.S.

Suggesting that schools ignore expert advice meant to keep kids, parents and school staff safe would, in a different administration, be shocking. But in recent weeks, President Donald Trump and his team have led a brazen attack on COVID-19 science and scientists in a desperate effort to deny away a deadly pandemic that the administrations incompetence has made far worse. That effort has included downplaying the ongoing threat, diverting crucial hospital data from the CDC, smearing infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, and casting blame on China, the World Health Organization and Americans from Northern states.

The COVID response is part of the Trump administrations long war on all forms of science and expertise. The administration has cast out or discredited science that does not align with Trumps fossil fuel-centric energy dominance agenda, his reelection campaign or, in some cases, that contradicts what the president said on Twitter.

The president himself has repeatedly denied climate change, questioned the science of vaccinations and invented weather forecasts for a hurricane. When hundreds of researchers from more than a dozen federal agencies warned in a November 2018 report that the world is barreling toward catastrophic climate change, Trump simply said of the findings: I dont believe it. His anti-science beliefs have been made into policy by the ex-industry lobbyists appointed to run environmental and scientific agencies across his administration.