By Chido Nwakamma
A Houston-based female doctor has earned her 15 minutes of fame addressing a press conference where she claimed to have treated 350 Covid19 patients using a combo of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and an antibiotic. Those three minutes she spent could fetch her notoriety or fame.
As I watched the video, my mind went back to our Dr Jeremiah Abalaka, who similarly trended in the era of HIV-AIDS. The Federal Government banned him from making the claims, but a court granted him relief more than a decade later.
Social media platforms have shut down Dr Stella Immanuel’s video. It is akin to how the British regulator shut down videos that Pastor Chris Oyakhilome trended claiming a causative link between 5G and Coronavirus.
Dr Stella Immanuel claims to have trained in Nigeria, West Africa. Others have confirmed that she trained at our University of Calabar but is not Nigerian. She is from Cameroon. I wonder why she did not make it clear she is from Cameroon but left the impression she is Nigerian.
Dr Stella Immanuel asserts that no one should die from Coronavirus as she claims there is a cure. Her touted remedy is the same as President Donald Trump had advertised earlier but which the medical establishment shut down.
My first reaction noted the following.
At the press conference, Dr Immanuel said she had no data supporting her claim of treating 350 patients. Any doctor with 350 cases of an ailment would not only document but embark on a scientific study and explanation.
Immanuel is a primary care physician (the American term for General Practitioner) in a country where strict regulation applies. She stays in Texas but conveniently addresses a press briefing in Washington.
As soon as she got to Washington, D.C., she drew the attention of Donald Trump on her Twitter handle, stating that she is around and available. She shuns all the protocols for treating Covid19.
She recommends shunning WHO protocols for preventing Covid19, including wearing of masks. Those in the know say she wears masks in her church in Texas.
The point is that on contentious matters such as Covid-19 or HIV-AIDS, anyone stepping forward against the orthodoxy had better clear her bases. Do your homework. Do not step out with so many holes in your case.
Medicine rests on a foundation of science and the deployment of the scientific method. Data is integral to the scientific method. It is strange to hear medic denounce data when even social scientists and humanities professionals are emphasising data in this Information Age.
The matter goes beyond Stella Immanuel. A cocktail of rivalry, suspicion and conspiracy trails the issue of a possible cure for Covid-19. America has politicised the disease and everything around it. When they are not fighting China or the World Health Organisation (WHO), they are engaged in their internal wars over which worldview would prevail.
Donald Trump is in the mix. With Donald Trump comes a noxious brew. There is the political religion of the White Pentecostal movement chanting terms like “globalists” and visions of chip implants. Everything now must go through that analytical lens.
The satellites of American religious ideology in Nigeria have also lined up. At least three of such persons have shared Stella Immanuel’s video with me claiming “God has provided a cure” despite the efforts of the “globalists” and their vaccine. That vaccine will, in their view, commit the sacrilege of forcing a reduction in Africa’s admittedly bloated population.
The world is searching for a cure for Covid-19. I would like to believe that Africa is also involved in that search. Our Presidential Task Force on Covid19, flush with funds, promised to prioritise scientific investigations into Covid-19 and other infectious diseases. After the opening day declaration, we have not heard anything else from them.
Meanwhile, Africa has been throwing up “cures”. The tiny island of Madagascar made a giant claim earlier only to leave itself and believers across Africa with eggs on our faces. Is hydroxychloroquine the cure? Maybe. India produces more than half the global stock. Deaths from Covid-19 are soaring in India. You would expect India to deploy its inventory to treating their Covid-19 cases.
Science deals with paradigms. Paradigms are established patterns or thoughts on a matter. Thomas Kuhn, who made the term popular, said it is “the set of concepts and practices that define a scientific discipline at any particular period.”
Wikipedia reports that Kuhn defines a scientific paradigm as: “universally recognised scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners,[9] i.e.,
• what to observe and scrutinise
• the kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers concerning this subject
• how to structure these questions
• what predictions made by the primary theory within the discipline
• how to interpret the results of scientific investigations
• how to experiment, and what equipment is available to conduct it.
Dr Stella Immanuel has thrown down the gauntlet. She would now have to show the workings of her paradigm. Then and only can those who want to celebrate cite an African medical scientist, not one who makes fanciful claims.
