She’s a nun, a doctor and inspires conspiracy theorists

MONTSERRAT, Spain – Sister Teresa Forcades became famous years ago for his steadfast liberal views: a catholic nun Without chopping the words whose statements ran counter to most Church positions on issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion.

She has become a regular presence on Spanish television, where she has appeared in her religious habit to defend the independence of her native Catalonia and to debate a number of hot topics, including vaccines. She trained as a doctor, partly in the United States, and argued that a one-day vaccination would be a danger to a free society.

Now, a decade later, when the coronavirus is sweeping the world, he thinks that day has arrived, and warns against the use of coronavirus vaccines even as scientists and political leaders fear anti-vaccine sentiment jeopardizes Europe’s recovery from the pandemic.

“It is always important that criticism is possible, that there are dissenting voices,” he said of his views, which focus on both his doubts about vaccines and his right to question them in public. “The answer can’t be that in times of crisis, society can’t allow criticism, that’s precisely when we need it.”

What she calls criticism, however, is viewed by many in the scientific community as disinformation. From his convent on top of a hill, Sister Teresa now opposes governments, medical experts and even the dad Francisco, who say immunization campaigns are the best way out of a pandemic that has killed more than three million people and devastated global economies.

In the world of vaccine skeptics, Sister Teresa, born in 1966, the daughter of a nurse and sales agent, is difficult to classify. Acknowledges that some vaccines are beneficial, but opposes their being mandatory. His doubts about coronavirus vaccines are largely due to clinical trials, which he sees as rushed.

Her credibility stems from her religious habit and medical background, which make her particularly attractive to conspiracy theorists and far-right groups seeking to undermine public confidence in vaccines by spreading half-truths, sometimes mixed with facts, highly nuanced and spoken by accredited people. which give their voice a certain authority.

José M. Martín-Moreno, a professor of preventive medicine and public health in Spain who criticizes Sister Teresa, said she was covering up her questioning of mainstream scientific wisdom under the guise of scientific debate and her right to criticize.

“I did not doubt his good intention,” said the Dr Martín-Moreno. “But the most dangerous are people who have partial truths, because they can have an element of verisimilitude”.

This fight for public opinion could not come at a more crucial time. The world is in the midst of an unprecedented experience: the rapid development and deployment of Covid-19 vaccines, which have yet to stand the test of time, to a global population. But there have been relatively few serious side effects, and vaccines have been shown to be very effective in preventing serious illness and death. There is also some evidence to suggest that they prevent contagion, thus delaying transmission.

But the detection of rare, even fatal, blood clots in a small number of people who have received AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines has led some governments to suspend or limit both injections, and have raised questions about the vaccines.

In the Spanish capital Madrid, in the days following the government raising the age threshold for AstraZeneca injection, only a third of people showed up for their vaccine appointments, authorities say . The country is at the start of what appears to be a fourth wave of infections.

And Sister Teresa’s message is reaching more and more people all over Spain. A 120,000-member group known for their far-right plots often broadcast their controversial coronavirus treatment advice on the Telegram messaging app. Another popular pandemic denial group recently praised a Facebook video in which they questioned the safety of Covid-19 vaccines.

Sister Teresa Forcades, although fiercely on the left, does not distance herself from her supporters on the right, and describes its mistrust of certain vaccines as a “cross-cutting problem capable of reaching a wide range of people”.

Sitting next to her convent one recent day, she offered a window into her reasoning. He disputes data, often from clinical trials, but often comes to a conclusion that few in the medical world agree: for-profit companies cannot be trusted to deliver safe vaccines.

She says her opinions were forged long before she became a nun, during a medical residency in the United States from 1992 to 1995. She recalled a patient from her hospital in Buffalo, New York, who needed an amputation. . After his limb was removed and he needed a prosthesis, the insurance company refused to pay for it. “It was an example of brutality, because it means the mixture of economic interest and health as a human need,” he said.

In 1997, he returned to Spain and stayed in a room in the convent of Sant Benet. The stone building is set in a pine forest beneath the Montserrat massif, which rises above a valley on the outskirts of Barcelona, ​​in the northeastern part of Catalonia.

There, with time to reflect, she realized that her vocation would be that of a nun in the Benedictine order. He did not devote himself to medicine. He quickly went to work on the fringes of religious scholarship. Helped develop a branch of theology that sought an equal role for women in Christianity and challenged interpretations of the Bible that favored men. But health care was on his mind.

In 2006, he drafted a 45-page manifesto titled “The Crimes of Big Pharma”. He claimed that pharmaceutical companies were enemies of public health, taking as an example a patent dispute between African governments and manufacturers of AIDS drugs.

“I was shocked,” he said in the interview, as he believed pharmaceutical companies were working for the good of mankind. Her distrust of big pharmaceutical companies only worsens as more scandals arise, and she concludes that the search for revenue is irreconcilable with public health.

Then, in 2009, an outbreak of the H1N1 virus called “swine flu” turned into a pandemic. Governments began to debate a mass vaccination campaign and which companies they could collaborate with.

Sister Teresa Forcades spoke out against these efforts in an online video that received 1.2 million views and was translated into eight languages ​​before the Vimeo channel where it was posted was taken down.

On the 55-minute show, she appeared dressed as a nun and introduced herself as a doctor. At first, he echoed the science, saying the virus was less deadly than previous flu outbreaks. Then he turned to the conspiracy theory.

He recounted an incident that year in which health care company Baxter said it mistakenly mixed two strains of the flu in a lab, resulting in the death of test animals. Baxter, who went on to produce a swine flu vaccine, said no one was hurt, but experts noted at the time that they were concerned about the mistake.

But in the nun’s mind, a lab error turned into something more sinister and suspicious: Sister Teresa, in the video, advanced an unsubstantiated theory that Baxter might have been trying to make new viruses in order to benefit from any vaccines, especially if their use becomes compulsory. “How come they are forcing me to accept a vaccine that I don’t want?” He said.

When the coronavirus began to spread around the world last year, Sister Teresa Forcades said she felt history was repeating itself. “They have a series of secret contracts, priced several times higher than they should be getting,” he said of companies that produce Covid-19 vaccines.

Dr Martín-Moreno, who has worked with the World Health Organization, shares your concern about contracts. He said some frustration with AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine trials – the results of which have been widely disputed for using outdated information, among other things – was deserved. But he added that Sister Teresa Forcades has gone too far and her fame has become dangerous.

Sister Teresa believes her position is not a danger and that her vaccine questions, raised long before the current pandemic, were simply ahead of their time. The idea frustrates her sometimes, she said via email. “But then I remember Jesus and some saints I love and I feel well accompanied.”

The New York Times

The New York Times