Every government has a problematic relationship with truth, and more often than not they also have the same problem with science.

There’s something about science that make people in power, government officials and bureaucrats give it a wide berth.

Maybe it’s the rigor, the evidence-based procedures and the time-consuming testing of hypothesis that scare off politicians, people who need to deliver quick solutions, tangible deliverables and barrels of pork to their constituencies and clients.

Or maybe, it is science’s preoccupation with actual, real-world phenomena that spooks people who live in a world where superstition and faith prevail.

Either way, science oftentimes stand in the way of good politics. For politicians, whose fortune could be decided in one election cycle and who need to make good on their campaign promises before the next vote arrives, science is an unwelcome nuisance, a bane to their existence.

So, it should not come as a surprise that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, for a while, backed a method used in cancer therapy to create the Nusantara COVID-19 vaccine, which in our view should be categorized as exotic medicine, if not pseudoscience.

We have been here before and seen this movie before. There’s a long history of politicians falling for a quick fix offered by pseudoscience, which later turns out to be a hoax.

In 2008, then-president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono landed in hot water after being taken in by the so-called “blue energy” solution.

Faced with skyrocketing global oil prices and eager for alternative sources of energy, Yudhoyono agreed to a proposal filed by Joko Suprapto, a resident from the East Java city of Nganjuk, who claimed to have created fuel from water.

Joko managed to secure a meeting with Yudhoyono, who quickly set up a team o kick off a “blue energy” project and named his aide Heru Lelono a special adviser for the enterprise.

Yudhoyono personally ordered the construction of a research center for the project near his private residence in Cikeas, and to put a cherry on top, the blue energy project was exhibited during the UN climate change conference in Bali in December 2007. Yudhoyono personally saw off a convoy of cars to make the drive to Bali using the “blue energy” fuel.

It is, of course, possible to separate hydrogen from oxygen in the water, but technologically it is very difficult, especially for regular folks from Nganjuk with no scientific credentials.

Only five years earlier, Yudhoyono’s predecessor Megawati Soekarnoputri had her own brush with pseudo-science. This time, it involved archaeology.

Megawati’s religious affairs minister, Said Agil Al-Munawar, claimed that, buried underneath the lawn of Batutulis Palace in Bogor was a treasure left by the mythical Sundanese king Siliwangi.

Said Aqil ordered an excavation on the site and claimed the buried treasured could be cashed in to pay for the government’s debt. The prospect of quick cash to help a cash-strapped government is too good to pass up, and excavation work was authorized to begin in August 2002.

Megawati issued a full-throated denial in late 2003 that she had given the go-ahead for the excavation project. Not an ounce of valuable materials was unearthed, and two years later, Said Aqil was named a graft suspect for the alleged misuse of haj funds.

Six years earlier, it was that same desire to find buried treasure that brought in what arguably the biggest scandal of the New Order regime, one that precipitated its downfall in 1998.

By the late 1990s, gold prospecting should have been an exact science, whereby seismic, gravity or magnetics could be used to locate buried streams where gold deposits lie.

Yet, the New Order government gave access to a little-known Canadian company, Bre-X, to start operations in the jungle of Kalimantan after it claimed that it found an estimated 200 million ounces of the precious metal worth some $70 billion, which would have made it the largest gold mine of its kind.

The Soeharto government tried to control a significant chunk of the operation, believing the prospect of striking gold, literally.

The claim was a bust, and the Filipino geologist who worked on the site, Michael de Guzman, died in mysterious circumstances.

The list could go on, and except for the brief stint of BJ Habibie, who happened to hold a doctoral degree in aeronautics, every president had soft spots for pseudo-science (even president Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, who fell for the trick of a masseuse who made off with Rp 35 billion).

All these scandals sure look innocent today. After all, in all these circumstances though, the victims are mostly those who cooked up the scheme and ones who fell for it.

Today, we live in an extraordinary time when a once-in-a-century pandemic is raging, claiming the lives of more than 3 million people and infecting 141 million others while sending hundreds of millions into poverty with its economic repercussions.

With social distancing getting more difficult to enforce and the only hope to stop the pandemic now seen in mass vaccination, the stakes are too high to pin our hopes for a solution to the problem on some pseudo-science.

And now, with vaccine supplies thinning as countries begin hoarding and Western manufacturers refuse to give access to their science, it is the job of the government to devote all resources to producing our own vaccine, one that is scientifically tested and clinically safe.

There could be a way to develop a vaccine from dendritic cells, something the Vaksin Nusantara project is attempting to pull off. It is also possible to separate hydrogen from water and make it a source of fuel, yet no one does this, because the alternatives are easier and much more accessible.

We are racing against time now, and there are already scientifically-proven and cheaper ways for producing vaccines. That should be our choice.

Pseudoscience should have no place even during the best of times. Today is the worst of times.

***

Editor-in-chief of The Jakarta Post

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