Archbishop Museveni and Uganda's Covid-19 theocracy

By Joseph Kabuleta

As a Christian, I believe many things that do not make logical sense, and they don’t have to.

That’s because Christianity, like most other religions, is built on the conviction that there is a world that transcends this three-dimensional one in which we currently exist and our devotion is premised on faith not logic.

So I don’t have to have seen heaven or hell to know that they exist. I know that by faith. On these streets, “Blessed are those that believe without seeing”. But across the divide, on Science Street, everything has to make logical sense because science is -or is supposed to be- a study of the empirical, where evidence is based on observation.

But what happens when science starts demanding the same unquestioning devotion that is reserved only for religion?

The dividing line between the two has been growing finer every year and vanished altogether with the onset of COVID-19; which I now consider to be a religion.

What happens when Minister of Health Dr Ruth Aceng comes out and ‘prophesies’ that there is going to be a third wave, and she even states the expected time of arrival and how many people are likely to be infected?

Is there a branch of science that capriciously predicts the future or have we crossed the line into religion?

When someone whose exclusive responsibility it is to update us COVID numbers, starts making impetuous prognostications of what those numbers will look like next month, then why should we trust her, since she holds all the aces and it’s in her power to make her predictions come true?

Is she still a scientist or should we call her a prophet and receive her words with pious acquiescence? No wonder COVID Archbishop Yoweri Museveni has insisted on keeping churches and mosques closed; because his religion doesn’t want competition from others.

They want the catwalk all to themselves. They are running a COVID theocracy. What happens when more than 10,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists come up with ‘The Great Barrington Declaration’ which explicitly states that lockdowns, unless they target only the old and severely vulnerable,are not only pointless but also ultimately more harmful, but politicians like Museveni insist on draconian COVID-19 restrictions?

Is it still science or is it political science? What happens when Sweden, which has never closed its schools, says than not a single one of its 1.8m under-16 school kids has died of COVOD-19, yet Ugandan children are holed at home for two years and kindergartens have been totally closed.

What happens when renown epidemiologists question the effectiveness of masks as a means of preventing infection for the simple reason that even the N95 mask (touted as the most effective) has a packaging with a label verbiage indicating protection that can only go down to 0.3 microns, yet the Covid-19 virus particles are about five times smaller.

When those findings became public and couldn’t be denied, Dr Anthony Fauci, the Pontiff of the COVID religion, suggested that we wear two masks. We might as well just wear Halloween costumes to scare off the virus.

What happens when vaccination is being taunted as the only lasting solution to the pandemic yet Seychelles, the world’s most vaccinated nation, has just entered another lockdown following an explosion of cases and fatalities?

The Island nation was praised earlier in the year after a higher proportion of its population received both doses than anywhere else in the world; with 69 percent fully vaccinated and 80 percent partially, surpassing richer nations like the UK and Israel in vaccine coverage.

Those are figures that Uganda with its haphazard vaccine procurement process can only dream of. Yet in May, COVID strict restrictions returned to Seychelles after it was found that 37 percent of new infections were in people who had received both doses of either AstraZeneca’s Covishield (the most prevalent in Uganda) or China’s Sinopharm (also in use here).

The data is even more confounding. NewsAfrica reported that: “What’s unusual about the data coming from Seychelles is that the surge of COVID-19 cases came soon after the COVID vaccines were introduced in January 2021, while deaths were only seen after the vaccine rollout”.

What happens when the WHO, whose biggest funder is the Chinese government, approves Chinese vaccine Sinopharm (efficacy rate 79%) despite concerns raised in the ‘evidence assessment’ document prepared by WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts citing ‘very low confidence’ in the quality of the safety data provided by Sinopharm, specifically in terms of risk of serious adverse events.

And then on June 1, the WHO approved the other Chinese vaccine Sinovac for emergency use, despite an alarmingly low-efficacy rate of just 51 per cent. NewsAfrica reported that: “A possible correlation could be made between the use of these Chinese vaccines and the subsequent Covid-19 outbreaks we’re seeing in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Gabon and Congo.

On March 19, 2021, the Namibian government began the roll out of its vaccination program with Sinopharm vaccines donated by the Chinese government.

If you take a look at Namibia’s new COVID cases, you see cases rose after the rollout, peaking at 3,268 infections on June 30th, around five times its pre-rollout peak of 608 cases on December 31, 2020.

The group Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights threatened to take their government to court if it did not conduct clinical trials before offering the vaccine to the public.

Like Namibia, Zimbabwe had a relatively low number of cases before the vaccines arrived, followed by a sudden surge from June 2021 onwards.

Nick Hudson, founder of the Pandemics, Data & Analytics (PANDA) group of experts, said: ‘The startling surges we’ve seen in so many countries coinciding with the inception of mass vaccination rollouts represents one off the most under-reported features of the pandemic.”

He added: “Mainstream media – quite clearly projecting a controlled narrative – are pretending that the phenomenon does not exist.” How do we react in the face of all these contradictions? I guess that depends on whether you are a convert to the COVID religion or not. Converts will simply repeat the mantra: “believe the science”.

But I can only believe the science to the extent that it makes sense because, unlike religion, science is supposed to be logical and empirically derived. Everything else is just political science.

The author is a former presidential candidate