When Ideology Overpowers Science

During the summer season of 1854, hundreds of Londoners contracted cholera throughout what the modern epidemiologist John Snow described because the “most terrible outbreak … which ever occurred in this kingdom.” In the densely populated environs round Golden Square, folks have been besieged by the sickness recognized for its continuous bouts of diarrhea and probably deadly dehydration.

Medical authorities of the time attributed the epidemic to noxious vapors hanging in dense clouds across the metropolis, generated by rotting natural matter. For two millennia, the whole lot from typhus to the bubonic plague had been attributed to those “miasmas,” and therapy was prescribed accordingly: purifying the air of smells and eradicating garbage from the streets. Except cholera had nothing to do with the air that Londoners breathed, however somewhat with micro organism within the water which they drank, one thing found by Snow, who traced the outbreak to a contaminated public water pump on Broad Street. By the tip of the summer season 1854 epidemic, 616 Londoners could be useless.

It wasn’t till twenty years later, in 1876, that miasma concept was definitively changed by the germ concept of illness, which holds that microscopic organisms are accountable for inflicting infectious ailments, and could be handed from one individual to the following. This shift was arguably one of the vital consequential in trendy drugs, and it led in flip to vaccines and antibiotics. The end result could be an virtually incalculable variety of lives saved.

Today, the lengthy discredited miasma concept of illness has a wierd new proponent within the type of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who endorses it in his 2021 e book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. As a scholar of public humanities, I discovered it a placing return of such an previous and disproven thought.

The historical past of science is a historical past of discarded concepts. Phlogiston and aether, vortices and humors … miasma.

Kennedy appears to equate the germ concept of illness with large pharma “pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons” and with what he calls, “the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology.” Miasma concept, however, he says, “emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses.” This defective reasoning maybe explains his antagonism towards vaccines, his claims that HIV doesn’t trigger AIDS or unfold from one individual to a different, and his place that preventive healthcare, equivalent to a nutritious diet, train, and an atmosphere freed from dangerous chemical compounds, alone can forestall ailments. These are the core rules of the so-called MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) motion, a slogan coined by Kennedy.

Few within the area of medication would deny that stress, environmental toxins, poor weight-reduction plan, and inactivity can weaken the immune system and make sickness worse. But greater than a century of scientific proof now reveals that microorganisms are the supply of infectious ailments and that vaccines can safely defend folks in opposition to them. And in contrast to the physicians working in Victorian London, Kennedy has entry to this proof, which is why it’s so vital to recollect how, precisely, science operates.

The historical past of science is a historical past of discarded concepts. Phlogiston and aether, vortices and humors … miasma. Philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his influential 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions describes how consensus science is disrupted by consequential “paradigm shifts” in thought based mostly within the development of higher fashions to elucidate new proof.

Epistemologically, “truth” and “facts” function in numerous methods. The former is the realm of inviolate, immutable, and sometimes empirically unprovable suppositions and values, whereas the latter are contingent, relative, and liable to vary based mostly on new proof. Unlike faith or metaphysics—or political ideology—science’s concern is with info somewhat than reality, and info could be organized into complete fashions of actuality that work till they don’t. “Scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense … that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately,” writes Kuhn.

But paradigm shifts are sometimes stalled—and, as with Kennedy, generally the previous, non-functional concepts resurface, because of ideology somewhat than to science, virtually universally to catastrophic ends. We have been right here earlier than.

In 1940, Trofim Lysenko was named by Joseph Stalin the director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was put in command of the usS.R. agronomic coverage the place he advocated for lengthy disproven scientific theories to disastrous penalties. For occasion, earlier than Darwinian pure choice and Gregor Mendel’s genetic analysis had revolutionized an understanding of how evolution operated, many biologists had embraced the considering of the Nineteenth-century French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who famously argued that traits acquired over a lifetime could possibly be handed right down to the following era. Borrowing from Lamarck, Lysenko argued that utilizing manipulations of temperature, crops could possibly be educated to amass sure traits, equivalent to the flexibility to develop in chilly climates, that will be handed to their descendants.

Just as Kennedy’s MAHA motion is interested in miasma concept for causes that don’t have anything to do with the info, so too was Lysenko an advocate for Lamarckism as a result of he thought it was congruent with Marxist-Leninism, even when it wasn’t confirmed by remark or experimentation. Lysenko, and his highly effective Kremlin supporters, believed that the malleability of biology to expertise advised by Lamarckism was in line with communist ideology, which proposed that speedy change was potential by collective motion and social revolutions. But his efforts at “training plants” have been an abject failure, and the result was hundreds of thousands who died in famines.

“Although it’s impossible to say for sure,” notes American journalist and creator Sam Kean in a 2017 article from The Atlantic a few resurgent curiosity in Russia for the geneticist, “Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history.”

When it involves RFK, ought to vaccines, and your complete germ concept of illness, be obscured in a fog of miasma ideology and discouraged from official channels, the outcomes will probably be catastrophic, comparable in irrationality to the identical lethal insanity that inspired the Soviet authorities to embrace Lysenko. History tends to repeat itself.

Lead picture by Tasnuva Elahi; with pictures by fandijki and zulrakif / Shutterstock

• Ed Simon

  Posted on July 28, 2025

  Ed Simon is a workers author at The Millions and the editor-in-chief at Belt Magazine. His most up-to-date books are Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Binding the Ghost: Theology, Transcendence, and the Mystery of Literature. Follow him on X (previously generally known as Twitter) @WithEdSimon.