As this column is set to appear on the very last day of the year 2021, I suppose I should try to be both profound and reflective about the year just past – a year that so many of us found unsettling and, all too often, gloomy.

It would be lovely if the year 2021 was remembered as a happy time, with remarkable and happy stories dominating the news coverage. After all, it was in 2021 that we got what hopefully is the final word on cheese, and that it is not bad for us. I like cheese. And China managed to finally eliminate malaria, which is a good thing for that country and for the rest of the world. And if you are a flower fancier, you were likely happy to learn that a particular species of orchid, long thought extinct, was found happily growing on the roof of an investment bank in the UK.

But while those, and many more, are nice stories about 2021, I think we all know what 2021 will actually be remembered for – the great year the University of Michigan football team had.

Well, that, and COVID.

For many years, I was honored and happy to be part of running a remarkable organization, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Mr. Randi, who died in 2020 after a long life, was a dear friend and a powerful mentor for me. In his younger years, he was a world-famous magician, but the bulk of his later years were spent in trying to uncover and bring to light the frauds that claimed to have various psychic abilities, from reading minds to dowsing for various buried items.

His work earned him a MacArthur “genius grant” award winner, and for a number of years held an annual “skeptics” conference, which I had the honor to emcee most years. Mr. Randi was well-known for offering a $1 million prize for anyone who could display an actual psychic or paranormal power under proper conditions (which often meant with a magician watching, who knows the tricks used to fool people about spoon bending and such).

These claimants essentially denied science, claiming psychic skills that were beyond the ken of humankind.

The money was never won, unsurprisingly.

I bring this up because I worry that the most important news story of 2021 will prove, in coming years, to have been the denial of science in the United States – mostly about COVID but also about other issues.

At one of our annual JREF conferences (which were called “The Amazing Meeting” after Randi’s showbiz appellation as “the Amazing Randi”), after a weekend of talks and workshops, we held a public test for the million-dollar prize for a woman who claimed the psychic ability to stare into the bodies of people and actually “see” their internal organs, and, dangerously, diagnose illnesses or give clean bills of health.

We had several volunteers in chairs on stage, with their backs to the alleged body viewer. I was person No. 5, and she stared at us, one at a time, for about a half hour. Why was I there? You see, I am a mutant, in that I was born with only one kidney. It is a strong and robust left kidney (I am a liberal after all) and not surprisingly, when the conditions of the test prevented any cheating, the lady’s ability to figure out which person was not like the others disappeared completely.

The US has not generally been known as a nation that denies science. Heck, I was born nearly 64 years ago during the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower. Under Ike, the US launched a massive effort to explore scientific questions, to expand the economy (the interstate highway system, for example) and other optimistic and laudatory goals. We saw the first steps into outer space with the International Geophysical Year in 1957, and soon after we saw humans orbiting the Earth and ultimately walking on the Moon. We loved scientists like Jonas Salk (at the University of Michigan, I mention in passing) who in 1955 rolled out the first vaccine that prevented polio, a terrifying disease that killed or sickened children across the nation, including my older brother. The Salk vaccine was a game changer and vanquished a deadly virus that frightened the nation every summer when the mosquitoes started to fly, carrying the virus in their bites.

How far we seem to have fallen in 2021.

When a global pandemic hit, we had a president who delayed actions, spouted misinformation, and accused any who disagreed of being un-American. Happily, he didn’t stand in the way of developing a new and revolutionary type of vaccine, and he should get some credit for that. But we are now in an America where his supporters are all-too-often marching in protests, demanding that they not have their “freedom” restricted by being forced to wear a mask. We see a state representative (who is running for congress up in Wyoming, to unseat the “traitor” Lynn Cheney) actually calling for the arrest, conviction, and (seriously) the execution of Dr. Fauci. Science denial is becoming more and more of an epidemic of its own.

Here’s the key thing: the COVID virus just doesn’t care about your beliefs, your “freedom,” or whether you think there is a tracking microchip in the vaccine (spoiler – there isn’t, but there most definitely is in that phone you are carrying). The virus isn’t capable of thought or malice. It only seeks to reproduce. And if you choose to demonstrate your “freedom” by essentially volunteering to be a host that spreads the virus, you may well kill other people, especially those who are old (as I apparently am becoming, shucks) or immune-challenged. We need only look to a recent Colorado Politics story to know that we here in the Centennial state are still directly and critically involved in this pandemic.

If the virus only made the host sick, I’d be OK with you asserting your right to be a victim, but sadly, the virus can be spread (especially, it seems, the Omicron variant) by the selfish and science-denying actions of those who see a stolen election (spoiler: it wasn’t) and “patriots” storming the US Capitol.

Look, I admit that my Michigan football fervor may well disappear if we lose, but my personal sports opinions do no harm to others. But delusions about an oft deadly contagion carry a far greater risk.

I hope, but am not optimistic, that 2022 will be a year in which science is again respected.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.