Date:04/23/2020 Time: 10:40
Barry Shaw is the International Public DiplomacyDirector at the IISS
We saw clearly in Nazi Germany what happens when science gave way to the ideology of racial intolerance.
The first victims were Jews. Jewish scientists were thrown out of their profession as inferior people. Then they were thrown out of their homes. Then they were killed.
Einstein was one of the few lucky ones. He managed to escape and brought his pure science with him to America.
Who would have thought, in today’s virus crisis, we would see a revival of a political racist dogma staining the world of science in America?
Science should be, must me, dispassionate. Neutral. Without that, it can no longer be pure science but instead, a tool to be used for a political end.
Enter Dr. Kissmekia Corbett, a leading NIH immunologist now under investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States. She works at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an important position in today’s virus-ridden world.
Why? Why is a pre-eminent immunologist in the field of viruses under investigation today?
Disturbing displays of black racism began to emerge in February when Dr. Corbett hit out at President Trump in a February 27 tweet suggesting, “the task force is largely people (white men) he appointed to their positions as directors of blah blah institutes. They are indebted to serve him NOT the people.”
Her false claim of white supremacy in action must surely apply to Dr. Anthony Fauci who one assumes Corbett has high regard. Fauci leads the Trump Task Force to fight the pandemic. Nobody can rationally think that this Task Force is a clique of white supremacists, except perhaps for Dr. Kissmekia Corbett.
But Kissmekia Corbett did not finish there.
When US Surgeon-General Jerome Adams, a Black-American, warned members of the black community to pay heed to the instructions of the Task Force to social distance and put themselves, as the general population was doing, into self-isolation because many of them are obese, have heart conditions and diabetes, bad eating and drinking habits, that put them at higher risk, Dr. Corbett refused to agree with his diagnosis and advice. Instead, she retweeted another person’s tweet that said, “Dr. Adams, check your privilege. Stop spreading your harmful fallacies that support white supremacists.”
Kissmekia Corbett is a doctor who thinks that white supremacists that are killing black people in America.
She insists that a system built by white men by definition could not be trusted, even if that system has enabled her and the Surgeon-General to reach their positions of eminence and is doing its best to save black lives.
Despite the fact that she had been promoted based on her obvious scientific merit was, to her, evidence that the system is rigged against her.
When asked if this meant automatically ignoring white men, she tried to explain that “white men are not to be dismissed but the systems that they curated are.”
Corbett lives well by the system that has been curated for her to progress in life.
By April 11, she was tweeting obsessively, “Some have gone as far to call it a genocide. I plead the fifth.”
She was not referring to the tens of thousands of American, or hundreds of thousands of global, dead. She was referring only to the black virus victims in America. She followed up the same day with this bizarre tweet.
“Black people are not dying more because of their behavior. That is just a cop out to adjust accountability.”
These are the rantings of a black racist. Yes, progressives. There are such things as black racists. These are not the postings of an idle blogger. This is a pre-eminent woman running the NIH’s coronavirus vaccine efforts.
While we pray that her professional skills are successful, we should be concerned that this is not how scientists ought to think or behave.
For any scientist to think that merit is prejudice because the system was created by people culturally different to themselves is racist thought.
It is not rational thought. It is an obsessive racial hatred. And we saw where that leads if supported by a political party.
In Nazi Germany the Aryan scientists and their political overlords thought that Jewish scientists were contaminating the National Socialist system in education, science, chemistry, and psychology.
The American NIH cannot continue to be a respected scientific institute if its prominent members go unchecked and unchallenged when expressing such dangerously racist ideas and it is right and proper to hear they will conduct an enquiry into the strange obsessions of one of its top professionals.
However, it is disturbing to this writer, that had a particular political party been in power in America, this investigation would not have taken place and there would be more Doctor Corbetts in positions of power and influence on the national agenda promoting the radical policies of the Politburo in DC.
Just as it was back in Germany eighty years ago.
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