Accountability for Politicization of Science? Lysenkoism in the U.S.

by Natalka Poltavka*

"Working hard will give you a good farm," USSR collective farming, 1947

It took 97 days from the outbreak of the first Covid-19 case in the U.S. to get to 1 million cases and 44 days to hit 2 million cases. Since summer we have experienced exponential growth in the number of Covid-19 cases, as more and more people seem to ignore simple public health warnings.  In November alone the U.S. added 4 million new cases, going from 10 million on November 9th, to 13 million 18 days later.  And this is before the fallout from Thanksgiving travel is felt.

This is distressing in the extreme, especially in a society where we conduct complex global stock trades, multilateral business meetings, and exchange of technical equipment with the international space station, all using complicated technology. And yet millions are unwilling to engage in life-saving behavior using the simplest techniques -- wearing masks, washing hands and social distancing. And half the population mocks those who do. How did we get here?

I keep returning to something that has been troubling me for a long while and is now disturbingly evident -- the rise of Lysenkoism in American science.  One could argue that there were disturbing signs of this in April as President Trump mocked epidemiologists and public health specialists and started to brush their recommendations aside. Then with the elevation of Dr. Scott Atlas to the WH Coronavirus task force, and kangaroo panels of doctors peddling unproven and even crackpot theories antithetical to proven and established public health practices, the rise of Lysenkoism in public health and to some degree, medical science, became more evident. Yet again I find myself asking, how could this happen here?  Most of the world's public health specialists are enacting proven methodology that many of them learned in the U.S. and U.K to combat Covid-19 and even in the face of global surges, they are having more success than in the US. These experts are bewildered by the undermining of proven public health practices and frightened when the most renowned infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists are mocked, denounced and threatened!

Nikolai Vavilov, 1933

I often think that some of the cruelest tragedies are found in Russian history, and certainly one of the bitterest ironies in recent Russian science history is the fate of Nikolai Vavilov, noted agronomist, and genetic biologist, who died of starvation in a freezing Saratov prison in January 1943.  A scientist who pioneered plant breeding to help Soviet agriculture and created a bank of seeds from around the world to foster research to produce better crop yield to feed more people in the world, starved to death, a martyr to the political takeover of science that denied Mendelian genetics and elevated a peasant "agronomist," T.D. Lysenko, who embraced long-disproven Lamarckism.  Stalin, looking for someone to blame when collectivization failed spectacularly, found Vavilov a convenient scapegoat.  Many experts like Vavilov, along with his students were persecuted, arrested or shot.  Yet they refused to yield to what was politically mandated, some of them undertaking heroic efforts to save the seed bank in Leningrad during the Siege, when starvation was rampant and rats and people were vying for food -- the cats having long ago been eaten. Vavilov's seed bank by that time had grown to over 250,000 samples.  During this purge of expertise and actual science, T.D. Lysenko rose in the institutes and academies and his pseudo-scientific theories prevailed.  This set back Soviet genetics, agronomy and biology for a generation. And yet, Lysenko's popularity in Russia is "currently enjoying a revival in his homeland, where anti-American sentiment runs strong."

And so now here we are with Trump, blaming public health and infectious disease specialists for the damaged economy, yet offering no coherent plan to bring the numbers down and give us a fighting chance. By opening too soon, he ironically prevented the economy from rebounding.  Instead he and his Atlas acolytes undertook and expanded an insidious campaign of disinformation that is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.  While millions eventually died from Stalin's repression of agriculture, biology and science, death took its toll over time, except for the immediate repercussions that Vavilov himself suffered.

Scott Atlas resigns from Trump Coronavirus Taskforce, Dec 1, 2020

The current pandemic and its unfettered surge in the U.S. due to willful denial of science, is having a more immediate effect -- hundreds of thousands have died and thousands more will die of Covid-19 by January 2021.  More despicable is that several of those preaching an anti-Public Health message -- much like Dr. Atlas himself -- are trained doctors, among them Rand Paul (a "self-certified" ophathalmologist).  This is even more damning than the misguided self-aggrandizement of a peasant Ukrainian pseudo-scientist. People are continuing to die needlessly.  And, just like the destructive impact on Soviet Science, the U.S. Public Health field and possibly nursing and medicine itself, will also suffer in the long term.  Already state public health specialists are resigning from their posts, fighting a losing battle against disinformation and increasing death threats to themselves and their families. Doctors and nurses are working around the clock to save lives of Covid victims -- many of whom deny the existence of the disease from which they are dying.

Where is the accountability for this?  For the lives that are being lost, for the grave damage dealt to what was once a crown jewel of U.S. medical expertise -- public health?  When experts like Vavilov paid with the loss of their careers or their lives, where was accountability in the USSR?  Yes, Vavilov was "rehabilitated" by the Soviets, and an institute named after him, but long after he was dead. And after Soviet biology/genetics had to make a long climb back.

When millions fall ill weekly and the death toll approaches half a million by February, and the Public Health field is decimated, will Trump, Atlas or Paul be held accountable? Or will they, like Lysenko, be admonished by scientific publications (Stanford and the Hoover Institute have distanced themselves from Atlas's positions), but serve out their days at their Institute or office or on Fox & Friends?

I thought the rise of Lysenkoism and the tragic fate of Vavilov was something unique to authoritarian regimes ruled by ideology and could not happen here.  Yet it has, with equally tragic consequences. We cannot overlook this.  This isn't a matter of disagreement over two scientific approaches.  One approach is unscientific; it has been disproven, it is wrong. Those responsible for promoting pseudo-science, conspiracy theories, or simply ignoring the worst pandemic in more than 100 years, must be held accountable.  

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'Natalka Poltavka' is a pseudonym for a long-time friend working as a foreign affairs specialist in the U.S. government. She has studied Soviet and then Russian affairs for over 4 decades.

Loren Culp -- Jay Inslee Debate Highlights Culp's Libertarian Ethos on COVID-19

Loren Culp campaigning for Governor of Washington State

  

Loren Culp's candidacy for governor gets a lot of traction here in Eastern Washington, where the libertarian ethos is as strong as cheat grass, and potentially as volatile.

Culp wants "the people" to be free to decide for themselves whether and how to deal with the deadliest pandemic in modern U.S. history. Researchers found the relative increase in mortality during the early period of the COVID-19 epidemic was "substantially greater" than the peak of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

Culp mirrors the approach Donald Trump has taken to controlling COVID-19. Under the Presidents chaotic mismanagement the US continues to regularly report more than 1,000 new coronavirus deaths a day, which is one of the highest daily death rates per capita in the world. Over 212,000 of "the people" have died so far, and cases across the U.S. are once again surging as restrictions are eased.

Washington State has one of the lowest per capita rates of COVID-19 in the U.S., and according to a report from Oxfam America, no state has a better safety net for people impacted by COVID-19. But as restrictions have been eased, cases are again increasing. It's way too soon to ease restrictions, or to get complacent.

Loren Culp will continue to beat the "give me liberty or give me death drum" -- we can only hope that he's not going to lead too many of his followers to the latter outcome, and that those that do follow his lead, stay the heck away from the rest of us.

America's Schools Are Indispensable: Shame On Us

In a July 7, 2020, talk in the White House East Room, President Donald Trump said, “We want to reopen the schools. Everybody wants it. The moms want it, the dads want it, the kids want it. It’s time to do it.”

The President went on to laud the declining COVID-19 death rate. “You know, our mortality rate is, right now, at a level that people don’t talk about, but it’s down tenfold.  Tenfold.”

Over 137,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 to date (7/11/20), and 64,600 new cases were confirmed — about five times more than the entire continent of Europe. Several U.S. states, including Arizona and Florida, currently have more confirmed cases per capita than any country in the world.

Realizing that deaths lag emerging cases, Dr. Fauci cautioned against becoming complacent in light of the decreased death rate. Perhaps he’s visited some of the refrigerator trucks serving as morgues in Arizona and Texas.

Trump went quickly from talking about the coronavirus pandemic to the U.S. economy and a rebound in the Stock Market, likely revealing why he wants schools to open. Parents need to get back to work, and schools need to babysit their kids so they can do so.

Vice President Pence took the podium after the First Lady touted her “Be Best” initiative. Mrs. Trump stressed the importance of recess. Pence pointed out that some 7 million American children suffer from either mental illness or emotional disturbance, and stated that they principally receive care from health and mental services at their school. Might we ask why?

OECD Family database

The sad fact is that when it comes to caring for America’s children, we are all delinquent. Let’s start at the beginning.*

• In America, the infant death rate is twice as high as in similarly wealthy countries.
• In America, for every 100,000 live births, 28 women die in childbirth or shortly thereafter. In Canada, the same figure is 11. Black women in America die having a child at roughly the same rate as women in Mongolia.
• In America, we spend less of our gross domestic product on family benefits than all other OECD countries, save for Mexico and Turkey, whose combined GDP is less than a tenth of ours.
• In America, we do not guarantee impoverished parents welfare. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program provides benefits to fewer than one in four poor families.
• In America, our child poverty rate is higher than in nearly all other OECD countries — two, three, or even four times as high as in nations comparable in terms of per capita income.
• In America, as many as 1.5 million families caring for three million kids live on less than $2 per person, per day, in cash income.
• In America, in any given year there are 2.5 million kids that experience homelessness.
• In America, we profess to support mothers, and encourage them to keep working when they have children, but we have no paid maternity, parental, or home-care leave entitlement. We are the only OECD country for which that is true.
• In America, both Republican and Democratic administrations claim to support early childhood education and care, yet as a percentage of GDP, we are truants, ranking practically at the bottom of the list on spending.
• In America, 10 to 15 percent of children in some states have no form of health insurance, no way to pay for vaccinations, medications, counseling, etc.
• In America, teenagers are 82 times more likely to die from a gun homicide than their peers in other wealthy nations.
• In America, rich kids have better schools than poor kids, largely because we link school funding to property taxes. As a result, the so-called “poverty gap” in standardized test scores is 40% larger today than it was a generation ago. Our kids rank in the bottom third of OECD countries in terms of reading and mathematics, and only three in five American kids are proficient in those subjects by 8th grade.

The area in which America is far and away the leader is in our criminal “justice” system. We have the highest rate of incarceration on Earth, and we lead in putting minors behind bars; fourteen states have no minimum age for when a child can be prosecuted and punished as an adult.

The United States of America is the only country that has not ratified the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Hillary Clinton wrote a best-selling book in 1996 addressing America’s dismal history of educating and caring for its children. It was titled, “It Takes a Village.” Clinton said “I chose that old African proverb… because it offers a timeless reminder that children will thrive only if their families thrive and if the whole of society cares enough to provide for them.”

Mrs. Clinton is well-known as a “policy wonk,” and her book is a study in specific policy fixes for America’s glaring deficits in educating and caring for its children. Critics at both extremes of the political spectrum had plenty to dislike about Clinton’s prescriptions, but Republican reaction was particularly scathing, assailing her vision as paternalistic, anti-religious, and that old reliable Republican bugaboo, socialistic.

What’s missed in all the nitpicking and gnashing of teeth over the book, is the fact that Mrs. Clinton presented a broad vision for dealing with childhood education and care, and an integrated, systematic approach for realizing that vision. How refreshing. This is something sorely lacking in today’s chaotic approach to societal division and disintegration; a situation now exacerbated by an unforgiving contagion equally poorly managed and contained.

The Trump Administration’s insistence that we must reopen schools in the Fall in light of America’s miserable excuse for a childhood education and care system is not just irresponsible, it is indefensible.

Show us you can manage the pandemic, Mr. Trump, then we’ll talk about reopening schools.
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*I have borrowed heavily in this list from the comprehensive article on this subject written by Annie Lowrey for The Atlantic, June 21, 2018. Refer to that article for original sources (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/06/how-america-treats-children/563306/).

No, COVID-19 isn't like the Flu

Anti-Quarantine Protest in Olympia, Washington

“When enough insane people scream in harmony that they really are healthy, they can actually start to believe themselves. Or put even more simply: people with overlapping delusions get along wonderfully.” (Daniel Mackler, Toward Truth, 2010)

From my friend Everett Daniel Maroon, who writes this for anyone who needs to hear it:

1. People dying from the flu over a 7-month period vs. the same number of people dying from COVID-19 over a 6-week period is an important difference.
2. People dying from cancer in hospice or at home vs. people dying in an ICU bed is a big difference in terms of hospital resources.
3. People dying from accidents, gun shot trauma, homicides vs. people dying from a communicable disease is a huge difference in risk to the community.
4. People dying from a communicable disease that we HAVE treatments and cures for vs. people dying from a communicable disease that has no vaccine or curative treatment is a catastrophic difference.
5. People dying from a disease we know about (smallpox, rabies) vs. people dying from a disease we don't yet fully understand is WHY WE TELL PEOPLE TO STAY AT HOME.
6. Acting like these differences don't matter is exactly why governmental leaders around the globe have ordered us to stay home.
7. This is not a Jay Inslee issue. It is not ultimately a Donald Trump issue. Please stop acting like there is nothing different about this novel coronavirus.

First Do No Harm!

PURPOSE

The purpose of this post is to describe the similarities and differences between the symptoms and diagnostics that might be used to distinguish between COVID-19 and pericarditis. I'm interested in this because, as I've described in some detail in a prior post, I've experienced acute pericarditis and still suffer from its effects.

In addition, fatalities associated with COVID-19 are overwhelmingly associated with the elderly and people with existing chronic or temporary medical conditions, such as heart disease, lung disease, asthma, the flu, or other preexisting conditions. Of course, COVID-19 will also target people who may have compromised immune systems, including those compromised by medications they may be taking to treat a preexisting condition, such as patients suffering an acute attack of pericarditis being treated with prednisone, a corticosteroids which, like others, suppresses the immune system.

COVID-19

In 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the cause of a disease outbreak that originated in China.
The virus is now known as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The disease it causes is called coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

The signs and symptoms of COVID-19 compiled by WebMD based on information gathered from researchers in China, included:

• Fever 83%-99%
• Cough 59%-82%
• Fatigue 44%-70%
• Lack of appetite 40%-84%
• Shortness of breath 31%-40%
• Mucus/phlegm 28%-33%
• Body aches 11%-35%

 Symptoms usually begin 2 to 14 days after one comes into contact with the virus.

Other symptoms may include:

• Sore throat
• Headache
• Chills
• Stuffy nose
• Nausea or vomiting
• Diarrhea

Some people have experienced the loss of smell or taste.

PERICARDITIS

The Mayo Clinic describes pericarditis is swelling and irritation of the pericardium, the thin sac-like membrane surrounding the heart. Pericarditis often causes chest pain and sometimes other symptoms. The sharp chest pain associated with pericarditis occurs when the irritated layers of the pericardium rub against each other.

Depending on the type pf pericarditis, its signs and symptoms may include some or all of the following:

• Sharp, piercing chest pain over the center or left side of the chest, which is generally more intense when breathing in
• Shortness of breath, especially when reclining
• Heart palpitations
• Low-grade fever
• An overall sense of weakness, fatigue or feeling unwell
• Cough
• Abdominal or leg/feet swelling

Many of the symptoms of pericarditis are similar to those of other heart and lung conditions, including COVID-19.

COVID-19 or PERICARDITIS?

I am day 11 into COVID-19. I'm in the emergency room with severe chest pain and breathing problems. ER nurse said my heart and lungs may be inflamed. My ECG is "abnormal." My pulse is strong. I can’t get to my regular doctor because of the lock-down here. In the last 2 days since my visit to ER I have felt dizzy and nauseous. I have pain in middle of my chest and a panicky fluttery feeling. Now I have a really sore throat. Is this now pericarditis?

Answering the question of this patient on the basis of this information isn't straight-forward. As the symptoms described in the previous sections show, COVID-19 and acute pericarditis symptoms mirror each other closely. This is further illustrated in Table 1, below.

Research indicates that the most common cause of idiopathic pericarditis "in developed countries" is a virus of unknown specificity, thus the diagnosis "non-specific idiopathic pericarditis." Deriving from the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, COVID-19 may well trigger pericarditis, or in a patient with the pre-existing condition, a pericarditis flare up. On the other hand, patients with pre-existing cardiac conditions, like pericarditis, may be more susceptible to COVID-19 because of a disease-induced depressed immune systems, or because a treatment protocol for their pericarditis depresses their immune system, e.g., prednisone (see Figure 1).

Fig. 1. Complementary relationship between COVID-19 and Pericarditis

One of the key ways humans encode and then retrieve information is by labeling and compartmentalizing it, e.g., this disease manifesting these symptoms is COVID-19. This disease manifesting these symptoms is the flu. This disease manifesting these symptoms is pericarditis.

The lay person gets the sniffles concludes they have a cold, the sniffles evolves to a cough, fever, and achy body and they lament having contracted the flu. But in the midst of a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, they might fear they've come down with COVID-19.

In diagnosing any given patient with the objective of learning and then treating the source of their misery it's imperative that physicians understand (and most do) that the patient is a living history of all that ails them. A patient that presents with flu-like symptoms, is experiencing shortness of breath, and has sharp chest pain, must give a full health history, be examined, and be given a complete laboratory workup to sort out the source of their misery, realizing that it may be generated by a combination of linked factors, i.e., COVID-19 and pericarditis. The course of treatment depends on doing this. Otherwise it might do more harm than good.