The Trump administration is by its own account devoted to stamping out obesity, cancer, and many other chronic diseases in America. But its public-health officials are also attuned to a very different sort of threat: a faulty cast of mind. “Groupthink is the fundamental problem,” said National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya in May. The nation’s scientific institutions have become hidebound.

According to Bhattacharya, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and other top figures in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, the pandemic brought this problem to the point of crisis. A small group of elite scientists settled upon the use of masks and lockdowns to fight the coronavirus. They closed ranks around their strategies and expelled dissenters. All of this was classic groupthink, the MAHA crowd has argued: a psychological phenomenon that occurs when people’s tendency to go along with the crowd prevents them from considering other courses of action. As a result, in their view, the public-health response to the coronavirus turned into catastrophe. Kids fell behind in school. Drug-overdose numbers exploded. Poor nations starved from supply-chain disruptions.

Read: Revenge of the COVID contrarians

Now the government is out to quash this plague of poor decision making. In June, when Kennedy sacked all 17 members of the nation’s top vaccine-advisory panel, a Health Department spokesperson said that it was a remedy for “vaccine groupthink.” Upcoming changes to the U.S. dietary guidelines have been cast as a way of fighting groupthink too. Both Bhattacharya and the MAHA leader Calley Means have decried the groupthink infestation in our scientific institutions. And two months before his nomination to be FDA commissioner, Marty Makary published an entire book about the perils of medical groupthink. Health Department Press Secretary Emily Hilliard told me via email that Kennedy is “confronting groupthink by rebuilding a culture where scientists can question, debate, and follow evidence freely so that truth—not conformity—drives public health decisions.” The epidemi