Dr Cosmas Odoemena
SIR: After a hard-fought United States Presidential election that took place on November 3, , the Democratic Party’s candidate, Joe Biden defeated the sitting President, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump’s “sins” are many. But to medical scientists like me, perhaps the greatest of all of them is his disdain for science. The number of preventable deaths from COVID-19 in the US can be linked to it. His withdrawal of the US from the World Health Organization (WHO), and stopping its funding, in the middle of a pandemic can be linked to it. Not leaving out his withdrawal from the Paris Agreement to fight the climate problem.
To know how far-flung the negative effect of Trump’s disdain for science is, one young male Trump supporter in Nigeria refused to wear a mask, because he believes Trump is “right about hydroxychloroquine”. Not to mention other delusional thoughts from some Nigerians like, “Trump is from God,” “Trump will fight the Antichrist”, “Trump loves the Igbos, he will help our cause.” One fake prophet even said, “Whatever they do, Trump will win.” But for it to work, “prayers must not stop!” Trump who can’t tell the crucifix from a swastika!
The Trump Administration made going against what the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) experts advise a past-time, especially with policies to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. To control information emanating from the CDC, Trump appointed two government officials and put them in the CDC.
In a similar manner, the job of the head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr Anthony Fauci, was seriously threatened, because of his comments based on scientific evidence.
Had Trump got another four years, the world would have fallen into what astrophysicist, Carl Sagan, referred to as “a demon-haunted world,” a world where, “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
A Trump world is one “where disease is cured by injecting bleach into our bodies and hurricanes are stopped by dropping nuclear bombs on them”.
The most disturbing thing about Trump is that he understands science, but chooses to ignore it. On February 7, he told the Washington Post’s investigative journalist, Bob Woodward, that he knew that COVID-19 was more dangerous than the flu and that it spreads through the air. Yet, on March 9, Trump on Twitter, said, the “common flu” was worse than the novel coronavirus.
During the solar eclipse in 2017, against age-long scientific advice not to watch the solar eclipse without wearing a sun filter, Trump came out onto the balcony of the White House and gazed at the sun, which even a schoolboy knows can destroy the eyes. Trump has an obsessive compulsion to go against scientific rules, even if it’s self-destructive. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of people to lap up his ideology.
With Biden in power, control measures for COVID-19 will be based on hard science, not what the Lancet called, “questionable decisions made by Trump’s administration, such as the endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic and therapeutic option and the licensing of remdesivir for treatment of COVID-19 patients by the Food and Drug Administration, despite lack of efficacy in the Solidarity trial.”
Biden has already promised to put back in place the US’ financial support for the WHO. It’s also hoped that the cordial relationship between the US and the WHO that was strained by Trump, will soon be repaired.
Biden said he will “stop the political theater and willful misinformation that has heightened confusion and discrimination,” and will convene daily briefings which will “put scientists and public health leaders front and center,” and make scientists working for government “not fear retribution or public disparagement for performing their jobs.”
Biden will have his job cut out to change the mindset of many Americans who carry on living Trump’s devil-may-care attitude in the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a tragedy for America — and the world, that in a pandemic of this magnitude it’s Trump that is in power. Make no mistake about it, with Trump there is never going to be a headway with the fight to defeat the virus in the US, vaccine or not. And until the US gets it right, the world will never be free of the virus, and that much-needed closure the world has been hoping for will never come.
- Dr Cosmas Odoemena, Lagos.
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