Anti-science kills: From Soviet embrace of pseudoscience to accelerated attacks on US biomedicine

The United States witnessed an unprecedented politicization of biomedical science starting in 2015 that has exploded into a complex, multimodal anti-science empire operating through mass media, political elections, legislation, and even health systems. Anti-science activities now pervade the daily lives of many Americans, and threaten to infect other parts of the world. We can attribute the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans from COVID-19, measles, and other vaccine-preventable diseases to anti-science. The acceleration of anti-science activities demands not only new responses and approaches but also international coordination. Vaccines and other biomedical advances will not be sufficient to halt COVID-19 or future potentially catastrophic illnesses, unless we simultaneously counter anti-science aggression.

This Essay argues that COVID-19 exposed how a rising tide of anti-science rhetoric and activities can dramatically exploit society''s vulnerabilities to an infectious disease, suggesting that anti-science extremism has become as big a threat as the virus itself.

“Without science, democracy has no future.”—Maxim Gorky, April 1917

The newest (October 2020) projections from the University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) forecasting team reveal a grim reality. Their estimates indicate that more than 510,000 Americans could lose their lives by February 28, 2021 1], representing more than a doubling of the current estimates of 220,000 deaths (although not all groups agree with these estimates). For most of 2020, the US has been the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading the world in new cases and deaths. This dire situation is a consequence of our government’s failure to launch a coordinated national response and roadmap and refusing to aggressively promote nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), especially face masks, social distancing mandates, school closures, testing, and contact tracing 2]. In its place, and as the cases and deaths mounted, the White House and its coronavirus task force, and famously the President himself, organized a campaign of disinformation 3].Central to White House anti-science promotion efforts were attempts by key officials to downplay the severity of COVID-19 and its long-haul consequences, inflate the curative properties of certain medicines such as hydroxychloroquine, falsely attribute COVID-19 deaths to comorbidities in order to artificially reduce actual disease mortality rates, and make scientifically unsubstantiated claims about herd immunity (or its links to the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued without evidence that restrictions cause more harm than the virus). There were also efforts to discredit the effectiveness of face masks to prevent COVID-19 or to refuse implementing mask mandates, invoking at times new political terms or slogans that gained popularity in recent years such as “health freedom” or “medical freedom” 4]. This is exemplified by a recent October 22 tweet from the Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota 5]:

If folks want to wear a mask, they are free to do so. Those who don’t want to wear a mask shouldn’t be shamed into it, and govt should not mandate it. We need to respect each other’s decisions. In SD, we know a little common courtesy can go a long way.

The open questioning of face masks or refusal to enforce mandates will likely continue to have tragic consequences for the American people. According to the IHME COVID-19 forecasting team, 95% public mask use would save almost 130,000 lives from September 22, 2020, through February 28, 2021 1]. Thus, anti-science disinformation that advocates shunning masks could inflict a mass casualty event in the US. Its occurrence should not surprise us. Instead, our tragic loss of American lives would reflect the handiwork of an evolving anti-science movement that aggressively accelerated in the last 5 years beginning in California and Texas. In this Essay, I argue that to understand how a nation state might seek to attack and dissolve modern biomedicine, it is helpful to revisit a tragic period in 20th century Russia (see Box 1). The relentless attacks on science and scientists during Stalin’s Great Purge and the ascendancy of Lysokenkoism and other pseudoscientific theories provide a useful framework for addressing some stark reminders about the politicization of science occurring now in America, even if they play out at a far lesser scale.Box 1. Lessons from a dark chapter in historyOne of the darkest chapters in the history of the Soviet Union, the Great Purge, or the Great Terror (Большой террор), saw the widespread imprisonment, execution, and persecution of millions considered an enemy of Joseph Stalin’s government. It began following the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, a Soviet leader and revolutionary, before halting in 1938, although significant elements of the purge remained throughout the 1940s. The intelligentsia was a Great Purge target, as were entire fields of science, including astrophysics, which was ultimately deemed as a “political platform” running counter to Marxism 6]. Another was the field of mendelian genetics, then led in the USSR by Nikolai Vavilov in his role as head of the Lenin All Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the scientific branch of the Commissariat of Agriculture. Vavilov was a botanist and a scientific pioneer in using genetic approaches to improve cereal crops for the USSR 6–8]. Ultimately, Vavilov came under attack by Trofim Lysenko, a peasant with no doctoral degree who popularized and laid claims to the concept of “vernalization” 6]. Lysenko and his colleagues proposed moistening and chilling winter wheat and allowing it to germinate in order to sense these conditions in time for the spring when it would supposedly flourish 6]. Through vernalization—which bore some resemblance to Lamarckian evolutionary theories by claiming that acquired traits could be inherited—Lysenko aspired to adapt wheat to the harsh Russian climate. As a sort of proof of concept, he had his father soak his winter wheat in water before burying it in a snowbank to keep it cold prior to spring planting 6].Initially, Vavilov took on a mentoring role for Lysenko, even touting his accomplishments at the Sixth International Congress of Genetics held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in the summer of 1932 8]. See, for example, Vavilov’s praise of Lysenko in a special news “flash,” as it was called by R. C. Cook, the editor of the Journal of Heredity during the 1940s 8]:

The remarkable discovery recently made by T. D. Lysenko of Odessa opens enormous new possibilities to plant breeders and plant geneticists of mastering individual variation.. . .The essence of these methods, which are specific for different plants and different variety groups, consists in the action upon the seeds of definite combinations of darkness (photo-periodism), temperature and humidity. This discovery enables us to utilize in our climate for breeding and genetic work tropical and sub-tropical varieties.... This creates the possibility of widening the scope of breeding. . . to an unprecedented extent, allowing the crossing of varieties requiring entirely different periods of vegetation.

Lysenko’s vernalization technology would theoretically make it possible, argues Simon Ings in his book, Stalin and the Scientists, “to grow alligator pears and Bananas in New York and lemons in New England” 6]. Its extraordinary claims aside, vernalization was seen as a form of Soviet homegrown science and a source of national pride. In contrast, Lysenko was able to convince Stalin that genetics was an evil science, much like relativity. Political expediency became the rationale for promoting pseudoscience even if it meant that millions of rural peasants would die of starvation in the USSR when Lysenko’s cold-resistant crops failed to materialize. Ultimately, Lysenko became the President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science in 1939, whereas Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and rounded up with other intellectuals, including the founder of the Marx-Lenin Institute of World Literature. He was interrogated and sent to a Soviet prison in Saratov where he perished, possibly by starvation in January 1943, despite repeated appeals from international leaders including British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (Fig 1) 6].Open in a separate windowFig 1Photo of the prisoner Nikolai Vavilov.Official photo from the file of the investigation. The People''s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Народный комиссариат внутренних дел), Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (Moscow) (Центральный архив ФСБ РФ (Москва)) Institute of Plant Industry (Всероссийский институт растениеводства имени Н. И. Вавилова), created January 1, 1942. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov#/media/File:Vavilov_in_prison.jpg.Vavilov received a posthumous pardon by Nikita Khrushchev during the 1950s, and in 2008, a book about his life, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin''s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century was published in English 9]. It remains a great irony that Vavilov devoted his scientific career to the humanitarian cause of feeding the population of the Soviet Union only to die by starvation.Following the death of Stalin in 1953, the USSR began reopening to international science, ushering in a new era in vaccine development. Throughout the 1950s, both the US and Soviet Union suffered from severe polio epidemics prompting the 2 nations to embark on an unprecedented scientific collaboration 10]. Dr. Albert Sabin sent his polio strains to the USSR where they were manufactured at large scale to produce a trivalent vaccine. During the “Khrushchev Thaw,” it was tested in tens of millions of Soviet citizens and shown to be both safe and effective at preventing polio. A decade later, the US and USSR collaborated to improve a vaccine leading to the eradication of smallpox 10]. Nonetheless, state oppression of Soviet scientists continued, and Krushchev supported Lysenko’s work. Moreover, the physicist and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, won the Nobel Prize in 1975 advocating for human rights, but was subsequently arrested and exiled to Gorky 11]. The mathematician and chess champion, Natan Sharansky, was arrested on treason charges in 1977 and kept in solitary confinement before he was released through a prisoner exchange, later emigrating to Israel in 1980. The American physicist Robert Oppenheimer also endured persecution during the red scare in the 1950s, though on a lesser scale, having had his national security clearance revoked.