April 3, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
WASHINGTON – Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump, earned $13,000 as a consultant for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the groups behind the upcoming March for Science in Washington, D.C. later this month, according to financial disclosures made public by the White House.
Stat News reported that Conway earned the fee in 2015 when she helmed her business, the Polling Company/WomanTrend. During that time, she worked for the science group, Conway’s company sent out questionnaires about “perceptions of science among religious communities,” Stat reported. The questionnaire was part of the association’s “Dialogue on Science, Ethics and Religion,” which was part of an effort to understand how religious communities view science.
While Conway’s company earned many fees conducting similar work for other organizations, this particular job has garnered attention due to the perceived view that the Trump administration, as well as the Republican-majority Congress, has a bias against the sciences. Earlier this year, a group called 500 Women Scientists penned an open letter to the president as part of a step against “anti-science and anti-knowledge sentiments” from the White House. One of the grievances included a decision by the new administration to remove a web page dealing with climate change from the White House website. Last month, Trump’s proposed budget plan slashed billions of dollars for the National Institutes of Health that would likely hinder medical research.
“The anti-knowledge and anti-science sentiments expressed repeatedly during the U.S. presidential election threaten the very foundations of our society… We fear that the scientific progress and momentum in tackling our biggest challenges, including staving off the worst impacts of climate change, will be severely hindered under this next U.S. administration. Our planet cannot afford to lose any time,” the group said in the open letter.
The AAAS signed on as a supporter for the March for Science last month. The March for Science will be held on April 22, Earth Day, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. In addition to the primary march in the nation’s capital, there are additional science supporting marches planned across the country.
In addition to her work for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Conway also earned more than $5,000 from the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a trade group representing over-the-counter medicines and dietary supplements, Stat said.
Financial disclosures also showed that another Trump associate, economic advisor Gary Cohn, is an investor in the privately-held Samumed, a company valued at about $12 billion despite the fact that it does not yet have an approved drug on the market. Cohn has made two investments into California-based Samumed each valued at more than $1 million, Stat reported, citing an earlier report by Forbes.
