Covid was a novel virus they were mostly doing their best wrt public policy. It’s not at all comparable to what’s going on now, reversing decades of proven science progress.

Portugal looks like a beautiful country and I’d love to visit sometime.

But then again, I don’t even know if the ones doing the same now do either.

RFK Jr defintiely does.

yeah i don’t have any official recommendations on Lysenkosim reading, but wikipedia’s article seems to do a good job. He just had terribly wrong ideas about gene transfer, grafting, etc. all based on Lamarckism, which he believed to be more compatible with communist ideology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism#Lysenko’s_claims

Other comment made some good points but it’s a much more direct comparison with the government dictating science rather than science guiding government. Lysenko was a soviet scientist who denied [classical] genetics because he perceived random mutations and natural selection to be “burgeois” and “fascist”; instead he pushed Lamarckism genetics (genetic adaptation and inheritance through struggle) which he thought was more compatible with communist ideology. Because of that ideological agenda he got backing from Stalin.

He went on to design their agricultural system around lots of wrong genetic inheritance ideas. (For example, attempting to mutate crops by exposing them to harsh conditions, or mutating entire plants by grafting two species together.) Soviet scientists pushing back were round up and imprisoned or executed. So not only was their agriculture failing, but they killed off entire generations of biologists which set them back even further.

Other communist countries also took up the idea (including china) and all their agriculture suffered greatly for it. Millions and millions of people died from malnutrition or starvation.

Lysenkoism