Kill a Scientist for Christ?

Given the tolerance expressed in the New Testament, this is hardly a “yes” to the question of “What would Jesus do.” But it is a powerful vector underlining the MAGA movement (i.e., the entire reconfigured Republican Party), backed by a substantial evangelical base, and a parallel explosion of false narratives generated by accompanying conspiracy theories. Medical professionals, experienced PhDs, scientists who have devoted their lives to empirical research and scientific method – all subjects that have created massive jobs and opportunity in this country – are relegated to back-bench marginalization subordinate to those who proselytize horse medicine to treat COVID and ignore the disasters around them to deny climate change.

Strange that those who foment such anti-science, anti-vax rhetoric – from the entire reporting staff at Fox News to political candidates like Yale/Harvard-educated Ron DeSantis – have long since been vaccinated with the very “dangerous” COVID preventative that they now discredit. But being someone with a clear STEM education and profession, living among conspiracy theorists who are often prone to violence to force their ideology on others, is not exactly the revered life we once attributed to such experts… now derided as “out of touch elites” willing to lie with statistics to advance their “left-wing” agenda. Should we shoot or imprison such experts, the way the Soviet Union once did, or redefine the values such experts provide for all of us.

Writing an editorial for the September 22nd Los Angeles Times, Peter Hotez, professor and dean at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, explains the plight of the STEM community… and the toll such anti-science believers inflict on society: “Nearly a century ago , when global dominance in scientific research began shifting to the United States from Europe, our nation built an empire firmly grounded in the natural sciences. America’s research universities and institutes flourished and provided the discoveries leading to the Manhattan Project, Silicon Valley’s tech industry, NASA and space exploration, vaccines to fight polio and other global infections, and new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and depression…

“But [today] in the United States, thousands of Americans needlessly perished because they refused a COVID-19 immunization during our awful Delta wave in the summer and fall of 2021 and the BA.1 Omicron wave in the winter of 2022. Analyses by myself and colleagues have found that 200,000 unvaccinated Americans died during this period. Overwhelmingly, those deaths occurred in Republican strongholds, including 40,000 in my state of Texas. A closer examination reveals that the redder the county, the lower the immunization rates and the higher the death rates.

“The dead were victims of what we too often label as ‘misinformation,’ as though these victims succumbed to random junk on the internet. This was not always the case. The unvaccinated were targeted by a well-financed and newly politicized anti-vaccine movement… It accelerated at the CPAC conference of conservatives in Dallas in the summer of 2021, when prominent anti-vaccine activists were featured speakers and one Republican lawmaker from the House Freedom Caucus announced that vaccinations would lead to government confiscations of Bibles and guns.

“Just before CPAC, another prominent Freedom Caucus member had disparaged vaccinators as ‘medical brown shirts,’ meaning Nazis, and she later attacked me and other scientists by name on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Other caucus members regularly made unsupported and spectacular claims about the benefits of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin as COVID treatments, while disparaging COVID-19 vaccinations…

”Now in 2023 the GOP Senate and House have intensified their efforts to promote conspiracies or denigrate science. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) went on Fox News in August claiming the pandemic ‘was all pre-planned by an elite group of people.’… Partisan politics is not the only factor driving vaccine disinformation, but this aspect has become the most intractable and lethal. It is also uncomfortable to discuss. I was taught that science and politics do not mix, and that we scientists need to be neutral at all costs. But what happens when the data overwhelmingly demonstrate that thousands of Americans died from political targeting?

“During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin’s rise to authoritarian control relied on exiling or imprisoning prominent scientists. This had catastrophic consequences for Soviet productivity, especially in agricultural science… Now American biomedical scientists have become targets. A 2021 survey found that 15% of scientists who engage with the news media about COVID-19 have received death threats. Another in 2022 found that almost 40% of COVID-19 scientists report experiencing at least one confrontation either online or in person, including death threats.

“I’ve been singled out regularly by political extremists and Fox News anchors. Such statements reverberate and result in online threats or actual stalking… How can America preserve its hard-earned dominance in science, especially given the volume of recent attacks on biomedicine?”

Targeting the true job creators, those whose life work is to save lives and explore new scientific discoveries that just might continue American dominance in technology? The real job creators? Education is not a negative for society. Just think what a backward nation we would be without all those great minds creating values for us all. Exactly what benefits have those antivaxxers generated? What new jobs have the newfound anti-elites brought to our nation? How have they truly bettered our lives and accelerated America’s economic growth.

I’m Peter Dekom, and next time any of these folks need serious medical attention, will they really invoke “do-it-yourself” surgery or perhaps rely on their barber as people did hundreds of years ago?