History is often the best guide to the future. There is a through line from Galileo Galilei, a 16th-century scientist, to Anthony Fauci, a physician-scientist who responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. It goes well beyond their shared Italian heritage.
It is additional evidence that humans in power will do whatever they can to negate anything threatening their staying in control. Dictators do this, and wannabe dictators, of which there seem to be more every decade, quickly adopt the posture.
A throwaway reference to how fiercely the Catholic Church fought Galileo in the 16th century pointed me to the phenomenon in today’s age of zero political embarrassment for being mean-spirited and stupid while in office.
In the Medieval period, the Catholic Church was the dominant power in Europe, with a near monopoly on education and ideology, especially when explaining how the world worked. They saw everything conforming to dogmatic biblical language, not the least bothered by the fact that multiple translations preceded the Vulgate (common) Latin. In the mid-16th century, to combat the Protestant Reformation, the Church issued numerous clarifications of its position on many things, including sin, sacraments, and the veneration of saints.
What it didn’t do was stop harassing philosophers (what we call scientists today) from demonstrating phenomena that contradict established Church thinking. Galileo got into trouble for heresy for rejecting Copernican explanations of solar system mechanics.
Opposition to Dr. Fauci reflected the right-wing political establishment and President Donald Trump’s reliance on simplistic solutions for everything. His choice between science and “common sense” was always his own everyday sense. Smallpox immunizations and Penicillin made no difference to an ideological position.
For Galileo, his thinking offended the Inquisition, the Church’s conclave to enforce its truths. Although sentenced to a life of imprisonment, he lived primarily in comfortable homes and palaces. However, the intent to prevent his pursuit of scientific insights succeeded. He died 38 years this way until dying at age 77 in 1642.
Incidentally, this was about the same time that English Protestant sects seeking religious freedom came to Massachusetts and then, without irony, set about making other religious beliefs difficult for immigrants to their colony. People forced to leave created Rhode Island and Connecticut.
Independent of scientific reasoning, religious organizations, and right-wing politicians in the 21st century have fought against vaccines and other pandemic mitigation measures before this latest global medical emergency. Millions died globally because of useless advice on how to treat the disease.
Unsurprisingly, the death rate was much higher in Republican-dominated regions tuned into media arguing against immunization in favor of taking miracle cures, including drugs used to treat large farm animals.
This phenomenon has not escaped Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. He helped develop a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine scaled for production in India and Indonesia with almost 100 million doses administered.
Yet, to his and the amazement of many Americans, thousands of friends and family perished because they refused immunization, believing it was a plot to track and ultimately kill them.
In an essay for the Los Angeles Times newspaper, he writes, ”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.”
Suppose anti-science evangelical Christians are America’s Taliban. In that case, Fox News is the nation’s Inquisition, working daily to divide and punish people who disagree with the chosen ideology on everything. The partisan divide on COVID vaccinations was so profound that Liz Hamel of the Kaiser Family Foundation pronounced: “If I wanted to guess if somebody was vaccinated or not and I could only know one thing about them, I would probably ask what their party affiliation is.”
In 2023, some Republicans in the Senate and House have intensified their efforts to promote conspiracies or denigrate science. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), reported to be the dumbest member of Congress (no easy feat), went on Fox News in August claiming the pandemic “was all pre-planned by an elite group of people.”
Holtz writes, ”We must find ways to preserve our achievements in biomedicine and support scientists, even if that means both the scientists and those in positions of power engage political leaders and challenge ideologues to reject their anti-science rhetoric and agenda. Otherwise, almost a century of America’s preeminence in science will soon decline, our democratic values will erode, and our global stature will fall.”
Can we agree that we have entered a period I think of as the Wingnut Inquisition? Battling any form of modernism, they cannot comprehend that every society is always in a state of continual change. The demonization of science and individual rights is the most dangerous consequence of this movement, going beyond the obvious issue of killing people.
By: Kenneth Tiven