There is an overwhelming condemnation of President Magufuli for ignoring the science on COVID and many people have suggested that this is why he succumbed to the disease. However, I am interested to know which science these people have undertaken in their personal capacity, to determine that John Pombe Magufuli indeed ignored science, contracted COVID and that it is COVID that caused his death?
The problem with people throwing around the word science in relation to COVID is, many renowned medical scientists have come out to say that, to date, there has been no conclusive proof that COVID exists.
They have gone further to qualified their argument by saying that in medical science, Koch Postulates is the accepted standard procedure for determining the existence of a new disease, after scientists have illustrated that the presence of an organism in a diseased host is the cause of the disease.
The procedure is undertaken by:
1. Scientists establishing the presence of an organism in a diseased host, then ensuring that organism is only present in people with the disease but absent in people without the disease.
2. They must then isolate the organism from the diseased person and purify it.
3. From there, the purified sample must be used to infect a new uninfected host and the new host must contract the same disease.
4. Finally, they must once again isolate the organism from the newly infected host and purify it again.
The successful completion of this process in turn proves that the existence of the organism in a host is the cause of the disease.
The problem in the COVID19 case, is according to various peer reviewed research papers, scientists from various leading universities and laboratories across the world, have tried to isolate COVID19 from thousands of samples extracted from patients showing COVID19 symptoms and samples given by US Center of Disease Control (CDC). In this process they failed to isolate, purify, reinfect a new host with COVID19 and reisolate the virus to prove its existence and that it causes the disease.
Having failed to isolate the organism that causes COVID19, the scientists asked the CDC to send them purified extracts of COVID19 and the CDC is reported to have said that they don’t have purified samples of COVID19 or the organism that causes it.
So, according to these scientists, there is currently no scientific evidence that a virus or pathogen is causing COVID 19 or its variants. John Magufuli, a PHD holder in chemistry, likely knew of these various studies, hence he did not accept the existence of COVID19 from a scientific stand point.
We also heard that Tanzania conducted its own experiments, where they collected samples from fruit and goats, which they submitted for COVID tests and they came back positive for the disease. In any legitimate scientific process, these results should have at least put the efficacy of COVID tests and the existence of an organism causing it, to question. This, especially after the man who invented the test kits was clear that the test was not suitable for testing for disease organisms.
Nevertheless, the so called science pundits of our dominant western media, ignored this legitimate scientific discovery process.
What is now puzzling, is Africans without any science training, are now proclaiming that Magufuli ignored science, basing their arguments on faith belief in what western media reports have said about Magufuli over the past weeks.
Without ever enquiring about the science that led Magufuli to his conclusions; Africans have chosen to accept, without question, western media conclusions on his state of mind, incompetence and the cause of his death. All this, without sight of his post mortem results or perusing his scientific rationale.
We seem to have conveniently forgotten that last century began with the same western media [New York Times] being complicit in confining a young Congolese boy by the name of Ota Benga, to a monkey enclosure in New York Zoo and publishing his images as eugenics scientific proof that Africans were subhuman apes.
At the beginning of this century, that same western media convinced us that there was scientific evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The UN accepted these lies and after 6yrs of searching and over a million deaths from US preemptive bombing of Iran, they admitted that there were no WMDs.
When will Africans realize that the west is deceitful and we stop accepting the manufacturing of consent by western media, to drive us to think what they want us to think, so that we behave in the ways they want us to behave.
Have any of us wondered what accepting the narrative that Magufuli was wrong about the science on COVID means for the rest of Africa? It means that we now must just get vaccinated without question. It also means that no African or African government should question COVID or vaccination henceforth. More importantly, it enjoins us not to enquire about why African leaders are the only ones dying from COVID, when leaders from western nations that have a higher disease burden, are not?
We need to stop outsourcing our thinking to the same western world that has engineered our underdevelopment since they enslaved us.
And finally, I hope the case of President Magufuli teaches African leaders the importance of communicating their thinking, rationale and decisions through home grown media and documentation, so as to save us their citizens, the manipulation of the dominant western narrative.
By Rutendo Bereza Matinyarare of ZUAUWS.
