Gabriel Schoenfeld at the Bulwark makes a sharp observation about the impending nomination of RFK Jr. It’s not good:
At a moment when we should be thinking of this nomination in terms of the potential risk to human lives, all this muddled analysis about science and politics calls to mind a grim episode from the last century that is a cautionary tale for today: the career of the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko.
Born in 1898, Lysenko had accomplishments of great consequence to his name. Most of these occurred in the field of agronomy, where he advanced a revolutionary set of ideas—now known as Lysenkoism. His main contentions were that genes did not exist, that acquired traits could be inherited, and that heredity itself could be altered by “educating” plants.
One such form of education was called “vernalization”—the notion that crop yields would dramatically increase if seeds that usually died in harsh frosts were exposed to lower temperatures before sowing. “Insights” like that, derived ultimately from Marxist ideology instead of legitimate empirical research, were put into practice on a large scale, first in the USSR and then in Communist China. Widespread crop failures followed, and then famines in which millions perished.
Lysenko—a crackpot with the power of the Soviet state behind him—was the recipient of numerous awards, including, on eight occasions, the Order of Lenin, and on three occasions, the Stalin Prize. Lysenko died of natural causes in 1976.
This history of massive state-sponsored scientific fraud is pertinent to Trump’s attempt to install Kennedy to the highest-ranking healthcare position in the U.S. government. The secretary of health and human services has oversight of everything from food safety to medical research to private health insurance to epidemiology to Medicare and Medicaid and much, much more.
He points out that RFK Jr. likes to pretend that his views are based in science but like Lysenko, they aren’t. In fact, he explicitly rejects the proven scientific health benefits of things like pasteurization, fluoridation and especially vaccines. As he says, “a person with no medical or scientific training, RFK Jr. is evidently unaware that vaccines are one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments.”
Even if, unexpectedly, RFK Jr. did absolutely nothing to hinder the development and distribution of vaccines, the mere elevation of someone with such views to a position of national authority would undermine public confidence in vaccines and increase vaccine hesitancy, with severely deleterious consequences for public health. If vaccination rates decline sufficiently, diphtheria, measles, yellow fever, shingles, and many other infectious diseases now relatively dormant may roar back into prominence.
He notes that there are other Lysenko-esque figures being nominated, including Dr. Oz, an MD but also an actual snake oil salesman. The abandonment of reason can have serious consequences.
It may be hyperbolic to make any direct comparisons but tell me that this doesn’t at least seem a little bit possible:
The Soviet chiefs began to support Lysenko during the agricultural crisis of the 1930s. On the basis of rather crude and unsubstantiated experiments, Lysenko promised greater, more rapid, and less costly increases in crop yields than other biologists believed possible. Under Stalin, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (1940–65) and president of the then powerful V.I. Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. By 1948, when education and research in standard genetics were virtually outlawed, some geneticists had suffered secret arrest and death of undisclosed causes.
Lysenko’s doctrines and claims varied with the amount of power that he held. Between 1948 and 1953, when he was the total autocrat of Soviet biology, he claimed that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produce seeds of rye, which is equivalent to saying that dogs living in the wild give birth to foxes. His fundamental, continuing argument was that theoretical biology must be fused with Soviet agricultural practice. After Stalin’s death, this principle caused Lysenko some embarrassment, for efforts to improve Soviet agriculture brought the abandonment of measures to which his name and fame were tied. His “grassland” system of crop rotation was abandoned in favor of cultivation with mineral fertilizers, and a hybrid corn program based on the U.S. example was pursued (Lysenko halted the program in the mid-1930s, for he was opposed to the inbreeding with which it must begin).
During Nikita Khrushchev’s premiership, opposition to Lysenko’s programs was tolerated, and Lysenko lost titular control of the Lenin Agricultural Academy. After Khrushchev’s political demise, in 1964, Lysenko’s doctrines were discredited, and intensive efforts made toward the reestablishment of orthodox genetics in the U.S.S.R. Deposed as director of the Institute of Genetics early in 1965, Lysenko seemed to be at the end of his mutable career. He and his followers, however, long retained their degrees, their titles, and their academic positions and remained free to support their aberrant trend in biology.
And …
Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov, whose sentence was commuted to prison. Lysenko’s ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People’s Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.
Obviously, that won’t happen exactly that way here. But allowing a phony like RFK Jr to further degrade people’s beliefs in vaccines and pushing the idea that climate change is a hoax is going to kill a whole lot of people. The right wingers are the Soviets in this new iteration of Lysenkoism.
