On Monday, I watched as Breitbart, an American right-wing media, streamed a speech by a gathering of doctors in Washington D.C. The doctors had travelled to the nation’s capital to dissent against their fellow doctors’ consensus on COVID-19. The event was organised by Republicans who want to push back against the tyranny of science. When this lone black woman among them came on and introduced herself as Dr. Stella Immanuel, and mentioned having studied and practised in Nigeria/West Africa, I sat up to listen. Within a few minutes of talking, she had got shrill. I could not help but imagine this doctor, acting the loud black woman stereotype, would be battered when the video gets on Twitter.
More than her body language, the contents of her speech puzzled. Immanuel claimed that she had successfully treated 350 patients with a cocktail of drug that includes hydroxychloroquine, a controversial treatment the US president, Donald Trump, has promoted with evangelical zeal. Unfortunately, the way Trump has pushed that poor drug has turned it into a casualty of American culture wars. From the way Trump and his supporters talk about that drug, one would think it was the President that developed it in a laboratory, and the rest of the world that refused to be convinced by his discovery was being malicious. The hydroxychloroquine war has raged for months now and has not abated.
Between the twin towers of irreconcilable convictions, the disease has become so politicised that the USA, a whole USA, cannot muster the weight of its capabilities to lift itself from the pandemic. One of the defining realities of our time is distrust. People are too cynical! They have become over-selective of which authority to trust on matters of even specialised knowledge. Some people believe that science has been politicised, and scientists cannot be trusted. Yet, they rest the weight of their belief on matters that concern science on Trump, a politician. The paradox is befuddling.
After Immanuel gave that speech, she went viral just as I expected. Trump and his son retweeted her video, and a lot of right-wingers quickly made her their battleaxe. As it is with the nature of human communication, the person that knows how to talk will come undone by the person that knows how to listen. Quickly, Immanuel’s claims came under serious scrutiny. They asked how she was a paediatrician yet treated nonagenarians? How could she argue against preventing the disease with a mask because there was a cure? What kind of doctor asks people to expose themselves to a disease simply because they could be cured? They questioned her gestures and correlated them with her professional judgment. How come the colleagues that stood behind her managed to maintain their composure, but she was virtually screaming her head off?
By Tuesday morning, Immanuel was trending on social media. Some journalists had dug into her social media accounts and had come up with information about her. She was a paediatrician and a pastor, but that was not all. She was one of those people who pray spiritual warfare prayers. By the time the media turned the weight of their power to scrutinise the apocalyptic visions that she had expressed on social media, she was not looking good. As Africans, we might have been so used to some of the outlandish beliefs in the supernatural that people express around us. However, to outsiders unfamiliar with Immanuel’s ideas about something called “demon sperm,” she looked crazy. This woman claimed that gynaecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are consequences of having sex in dreams with demonic figures. She also claimed alien DNA is used to treat people in hospitals.
For a woman who even believed that humans do not run the government, but demonic forces that are part reptilian aliens do, it was curious that she wrote on her Twitter page that Trump should contact her. Considering how “demon sperm” trended on Twitter all Tuesday, I am not surprised Trump tactfully disowned her in a press conference later that day. She came across a loony. I still wonder how that woman will go back to her paediatric practice now that the whole world knows she believes alien DNA is the cause of Americans’ health problems.
Within a matter of days since she featured, the woman seems to have become popular among Nigerians who have claimed her as their own. They are hailing her, thinking she is a hero speaking truth to power. She is not even a Nigerian, but our country people are so desperate for victory on the global stage that they have adopted her. They think her speech is a demonstration of the boldness and integrity, and that she deserves some applause. What I see here is someone who wants the established rules of determining scientific outcomes to be treated as suggestions. There is nothing heroic about that; scientific processes are not like demon sperm that can be believed without tangible evidence. It was embarrassing watching people agree with Immanuel when she said procedures like “double-blinded study” could be abjured because of the urgency of treating the disease. It seemed we did not learn anything from our recent experience with Madagascar.
Some months ago, Madagascar too claimed a magic cure. Their President, Andry Rajoelina, promoted COVID-Organics based on their country’s record of having no deaths. When he was questioned too hard on the substance of the potion he touted and his certainty that it worked, he whipped out his race card. He told France24 during an interview, “What if this remedy had been discovered by a European country, instead of Madagascar? Would people doubt it so much? I don’t think so.” But the world had a genuine reason to be questioning. Politicians are not supposed to promote drug discovery; scientists have that job. Unlike politicians, they stake everything that legitimates them when they put out a discovery. Politicians, generally, do not have such integrity. Populist politicians like Trump especially have nothing to lose if their claims of a drug cure were found to be a lie. Today, how has Madagascar fared?
As of Tuesday, 93 people had died and their hospitals were overwhelmed from the rapidly growing number of cases. Maybe, it would not have been so bad for them if they had not deluded themselves that they had found a cure. Today, people are still excited about Immanuel. They are alleging conspiracy, and they seem to have forgotten they made similar allegations against the World Health Organisation when it insisted on assessing Madagascar’s herbal potion. They did not care that the WHO had the duty to determine the truth; all they saw was an anti-African bias. They wanted processes abjured, and the potion accepted on the word of Rajoelina. They cried that science has become political. They said it was “big pharma” at work as if the hydroxychloroquine they are now promoting will be produced by “small pharma.” At that time, they were all over the newspapers asking African countries to cut off relationship with the WHO and fly with their own wings. Our people have self-trained to see an elite conspiracy in everything. When they cannot measure up to established standards, they allege bias rather than push themselves.
Even if it were true that Immanuel had treated 350 people and no one died, so what? Is she the only doctor in the US who has not lost a patient? There are 26 countries in the world too that have not recorded any death from the disease. Vietnam has a population of about 96 million people, but not a single death recorded so far. Does that not suggest that there are variables that need to be worked out arithmetically rather than jump into conclusions? Developing societies like ours cannot afford to dismiss scientific processes as a globalist conspiracy against our rising in the world. There is no shortcut to learning, and we will do well to develop the patience necessary for science to work the way to the truth in its slow and methodical way. The other option is to believe in demon sperm.
END
Be the first to comment