Anti-vaxxers all over the world have capitalized on the temporary hold some European countries have placed on the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine due to some cases of blood clotting. We now know that reports about its risks have been overblown, and after a thorough evaluation, European authorities once again resumed the use of this vaccine.
Yet other countries have also refused to authorize the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine. While concerns about its safety may seem legitimate, there may in fact be political reasons behind this move. Venezuela is a case in point.
Ever since Hugo Chávez’s rise to power in 1999, Venezuela’s socialist government has pursued an anti-Western nationalist agenda—including a stance against Western pharmaceutical corporations. In the past eight years, Venezuela has endured a deep humanitarian crisis and is now desperately in need of international assistance to address COVID-19. Yet Venezuela’s government has insisted that it does not need help from any Western corporation (although they will accept the Russian vaccine Sputnik), and for that very reason the AstraZeneca vaccine has been refused in Venezuela. Instead, the government has announced its own solution to the pandemic: a product known as carvativir.
According to Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, you only need “ten drops [of cartavivir] under the tongue every four hours, and the miracle is done,” meaning that patients with COVID-19 are miraculously cured. Indeed, Maduro marketed the new product as the “miraculous drops of José Gregorio Hernández.”
As it happens, the use of José Gregorio Hernández’s name for marketing purposes is not fortuitous. Hernández was a renowned Venezuelan physician at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the time, the practice of medicine in Venezuela was very rudimentary, and Hernández significantly contributed to its modernization. He studied in Europe and brought back to his native country knowledge and technological equipment to improve Venezuela’s healthcare system.
Hernández was a deeply devout Catholic and never came to accept Darwin’s theory of evolution, though he was always very careful not to allow his personal beliefs to get in the way of his medical practice. Hernández was fully aware that Venezuela needed to modernize its medical system, and he understood that the only way to do so was by embracing scientific principles. Consequently, he never sympathized with religiously inspired alternative medicine.
Hernández was run over by a car in 1919, and his untimely death soon spawned a religious cult. Practitioners of the Maria Lionza cult (a Venezuelan religion that syncretizes Catholicism with traditional indigenous and African animist beliefs) have elevated him to their altars, and he is now considered one of the most important spirits that heal people. As is frequently the case with this type of religious manifestation, there have been no independently verified miraculous cures in the Maria Lionza group.
Though the Catholic Church has never been at ease with this cult, in the past fifty years there has been a push to canonize Hernández as a saint. On June 19, 2020, he was formally beatified by Pope Francis. As is standard in the canonization processes by the Catholic Church, some miracles need to be attributed to the candidate. In this case, Hernández was attributed with miraculously curing Yaxury Solórzano, a ten-year-old girl who suffered a gunshot to her head. The girl underwent surgery, and her prognosis was poor. Her mother prayed to Hernández, and twenty days after the surgery, the girl made an almost complete recovery. Needless to say, this is hardly a legitimate miracle. Overcoming a poor prognosis may be improbable but not physically impossible, and for that very reason, that cannot count as a real miracle. Yet for Catholic standards, this was good enough.
It is well known that many Catholic canonizations have a political dimension, and the case of José Gregorio Hernández is no exception. While Venezuela’s socialist government has not cared much about religion and its relationship with the Catholic clergy has been strained at various points, it showed a particular interest in Hernández’s canonization. Venezuela did not have a Catholic saint, and Venezuela’s government saw it as an opportunity to expand its nationalist ideology. In that regard, the canonization of Hernández was portrayed as some sort of nationalist vindication vis-à-vis the Church’s excessive focus on European saints.
As part of this endeavor, Venezuela’s government pushed the canonization agenda by promoting the alleged miracles attributed to Hernández. For that very reason, when presenting carvativir to the public, Maduro spoke of it as if it were yet another demonstrably miraculous deed by Hernández.
As it happens, there is nothing miraculous about carvativir. It is a very rudimentary solution consisting of the herb thyme. This particular herb has been frequently used in traditional medicine, but no trial has established that it is effective in treating COVID-19, and Facebook has frozen Maduro’s page because of its misinformation regarding carvativir.
However, for Venezuela’s government that matters very little. In fact, under the government’s ideology, clinical trials are not very relevant. Being imbued in far leftist ideology, many Venezuelan officials have repeated the frequent rhetorical point that science ought to be decolonized, and that implies relying less on Western-imposed clinical protocols. It also implies giving more credence to so-called “indigenous ways of knowing” and alternative medicine, in which herbs such as thyme play an important role. In this heavily politicized diatribe, the name of José Gregorio Hernández has been hijacked. Widely respected for his commitment to scientific medicine while he was alive, after his death Hernández has come to represent magical thinking.
Skeptics urgently need to promote critical thinking in Venezuela, so as to assess the real efficacy of carvativir in treating COVID-19 and the real risks of the AstraZeneca vaccine. In so doing, nationalist prejudices must be left aside, and the weight of the evidence must be considered, regardless of its political or religious implications. This is probably what Hernández himself would have done. By promoting critical thinking in Venezuela, skeptics will rescue Hernández from those who have seized upon his image to promote unreason and pseudoscience.